4 ms·
Read the article! It's a suprisingly balanced, thoughtful take on the job of cs lecturer at Berkeley. In particular, the author mentions important issues like
by fn-mote 4y ago
Read the article! It's a suprisingly balanced, thoughtful take on the job of cs lecturer at Berkeley.
In particular, the author mentions important issues like cheating, "grade grubbing" (and its primary cause), managing the 100 employees, associated with the course, and revising materials (which I was very suprised to find out that an adjunct would be in charge of!).
(In contrast to the discussion here, which when I read it focused solely on the compensation aspect. Look for something else in the piece! There's more there than money.)
- DataJunkie 4y agoThe amount of overhead there is, on top of teaching and preparing materials is exorbitant. Managing TAs can be difficult as they are students and are still developing their technical skills. Cheating and grade grubbing are par for the course, but it seems to increase quadratically in the number of students rather than linearly. I think part of this has to do with misconceptions about curving. Revising materials is more of a milestone. As technology advances, we should be teaching more up-to-date stuff, so we typically revise what we teach and then share that with other instructors. Sometimes that takes considerable work. In some positions, the program strictly restricts what is allowed to be taught. I typically stick to the core content for about 65% of the course, and then add in my own topics for the other 35%.