TAs Shouldn’t be Evaluated by Letter Grades
Where I work, in the UC Irvine School of Social Sciences, it is their policy that you must enroll in a course called “Soc Sci 399: University Teaching,” for a letter grade in every term during which you are employed as a TA. Now, even just my very brief summary of this policy should be ringing alarm bells in your head. Why should TAs, who are employees of the University, be evaluated by a letter grade that will live forever on their academic transcripts? What is the basis for this grade anyway, besides our job performance as TAs?
The University claims that grades for Soc Sci 399 do not actually reflect job performance, and instead reflect student performance in the course itself. But as literally everyone who has taken Soc Sci 399 knows, there is no “course itself.” Soc Sci 399 is a dummy course that exists just to ensure that graduate students can maintain a full-time course load while working as TAs; in that capacity it does serve an important bureaucratic function. But considering its otherwise vacuous nature, assigning a letter grade for Soc Sci 399 is absurd on its face: the University can provide no syllabus, no instructional materials, and no assignments on which a letter grade for Soc Sci 399 could actually be based — because none exist.
A common response to this point among University administrators is that it doesn’t really matter, because — as one of them put it, “it’s well known that everyone just gets an ‘A’ in Soc Sci 399 anyway.” I wish that were true. If it were, I wouldn’t need to write this op-ed. Yet in organizing around this issue, I have heard countless devastating stories from my coworkers who have been directly affected by this unfair policy. Some of them have been brave enough to let me share their stories anonymously.
One of my coworkers — who is currently on the job market looking for high school teaching positions — is one of many who are experiencing direct consequences from this policy after receiving a low grade while working under a toxic and passive-aggressive professor. “[Employers] who look at these transcripts don’t know that this was not a course on teaching methodology for social science instructors, which is exactly what it looks like, and much less that the grade is not actually a grade, but a performance rating.”
Another of us tried for months to rectify an unfairly-low grade they received in Soc Sci 399, but to no avail. “If they decide to give you a bad grade, there is absolutely nothing you can do about it … I do not need a permanent mark on my transcript and GPA to make me do better. I need a detailed and honest evaluation with chances to improve and grow, because TAing is a job, not a class.” This raises an important point that is often used to defend the current policy.
Some argue that letter grades for Soc Sci 399 are the only way for professors to give TAs feedback, so we need to keep them. But this is just not true. A mechanism for employee evaluation that does not rely on letter grades already exists, which can be easily verified by looking at our union contract (Article 10). This contractually-guaranteed evaluation mechanism is being unlawfully circumvented by the University’s current policy of using letter grades to evaluate TA job performance.
A good friend of mine had a similar experience trying to get their grade changed. They described another key difficulty surrounding this issue: the policy abuses our dual status as both students and employees. “I went to the ombudsperson’s office, who didn’t do anything because, in principle, a professor can assign whatever grade they want to a student as part of their academic freedom … [I thought that] I couldn’t go to the union, because it related to grading rather than labor practice.”
Despite Soc Sci 399 being an academic course, we are given grades based on job performance. And despite letter grades for Soc Sci 399 being job performance evaluations, we are prohibited from addressing this issue through our union because they are course grades. We have nevertheless tried to fight this through our union and currently have contract enforcement grievances pending, but the University is dragging its feet.
My coworkers and I have been working hard to get this unjust policy changed. Soc Sci 399 should clearly and obviously be graded on a “Pass/No Pass” basis instead of a letter-grading basis, so that it can no longer be used as a means for the University to retaliate against its employees. We already have an equitable means for providing employee evaluation, guaranteed through our union contract, that does not come in the form of a letter grade. We have been organizing our fellow TAs around this issue, including a petition to change the policy, which has over 200 signatures, and a protest in which over 30 Social Sciences TAs flooded our Dean’s public (Zoom) office hours to demand answers. Together, we have made great strides toward change.
I call on the University to end its recalcitrant shiftiness surrounding this policy, and to change it once and for all. Of all the testimonies I have heard from those affected by this policy, one message pervades them all: “I hope that future graduate students don’t have to face the same thing.” Sign the petition linked above, talk to your friends about this, and get in contact with anyone who you think could help in this fight. We must ensure that future graduate student workers don’t face the same unjust actions from the University that so many of us have already had to endure.
