A couple years ago, I was an exchange student in the physics PhD program at $UNIVERSITY on the East Coast and ended up working up as a TA in a physics class for

A couple years ago, I was an exchange student in the physics PhD program at $UNIVERSITY on the East Coast and ended up working up as a TA in a physics class for life sciences majors (mostly freshmen), where I was guiding students through their lab experiments and grading their lab reports. Some memories and observations, from a European perspective: - A third to half of all the lab reports I graded every week sounded as if they had been written by grade schoolers, both syntactically and rhetorically. I, as a non-native speaker, frequently had to correct people's English mistakes. - I gave elaborate feedback on every single lab report, announced what things I'd like to see them do and what my scoring rubric looked like. All these remarks were largely ignored by at least half of the people time and again. - The head of the labs, my boss, always urged us, the TAs, to grade fairly and to deduct points where students had clearly messed up. "There must be a difference between the grades of good students and bad students," he said. Unfortunately, his actions spoke louder than his words: He had already assigned each of the lab exercises a certain number of points which left us TAs little room for our own scoring rubric(×). Basically, very easy and low-level exercises (like copying a definition from class) got them already 30-40% of the points and recording measurements correctly gave them another 30-40%. The actual evaluation of the experiments, where the students had to actually do some thinking, was practically optional. - The course material was high school level. I had learned it back in 9th grade. This is clearly not the students' fault but it speaks volumes about the US high school system. - There were many students who I would have given an F, had we been at a European university. But I couldn't, due to (×). One of the aforementioned students actually had the audacity to ask me for an A instead of the already very generous B she was going to get. - I will say that there was a small group of students who were extremely motivated and interested in the stuff I taught, asked questions all the time, took each piece of advise by heart and did extremely well overall. - Side note: I had previous TA experience and had always gotten very good grades by my students. Judging by their comments, I know how to present and explain things well. So I can say with confidence that it wasn't that I was a bad TA. - I supervised the mid-term exam and not only were the exam questions very easy and multiple-choice (with every question having precisely one correct answer), students were also allowed to mark multiple answers: Assuming they managed to at least mark the correct answer, marking two answers would give them 0.75 points instead of 1 full point, marking three would give them 0.5 points and marking three (out of five) would still give them 0.25 points. On top of that, towards the end of the two-hour exam when some few students weren't done yet, the professor extended the deadline multiple times so that they could all finish. In short: The exam was designed so that students could pass it and get good grades. Here's the kicker, though: Towards the end of the semester, I noticed that practically all other TAs were simply giving their students full points for everything. After talking to some of the TAs, I came to learn that that they had realized in previous semesters that the grades us TAs gave didn't matter at all (as they were going to get "rescaled" by the professor anyway), so why bother and put in so much work? At the same time, though, they encouraged me to speak up about it. So I emailed both my boss (the head of the labs) and the professor multiple times about it. They never responded. All students ended up getting an A for the class.