Tracking TA Performance

It is important to track the performance of TAs throughout the semester. A good idea is to have a spreadsheet tracking this information for each TA.

Marking Hours

After completing marking, TAs are told to email the course account with their total marking hours. After the marking deadline, go throuhg the emails and note down the hours spent marking for each TA. If a TA has not reported their hours, please email then asking for this information.

Once all TA hours have been noted, calculate a basic statistical summary of the hours (mean, median, min, max). This is helpful for the TAs to understand whether they are spending too much or too little time on marking.

On-time Completions

There are specified deadlines for both spotchecking and final marking submissions. At the deadlines, each ISA should check that their TAs have completed their marking load and note it down in the spreadsheet.

TA Remark Requests

On the course email on Outlook, there are Remark Request folders for each assignment. After the deadline for every assignment remark requests, go through all the emails to determine which students were awarded points for TA mistakes.

The person responsible for inquiries about remark request will be specific in what they say regarding the status of the remark request. If points were awarded back to the student but not because of the TAs fault, then don't do anything.

However, if the TA was at fault, then you need to find out which TA committed the mistake. In every remark request emails, the student's quest id will always be included.

On Markus, navigate to: Assignments > [Pick assignment] > Graders. The left list contains every student's quest id and their respective TA who marked them. It suffices to ctrl+f on your browser, paste the student's quest id, and you should

be able to see which TA was responsible for the student.

Include the number of remark requests that the TA has "committed" on the TA Evaluation Spreadsheet.

Spotchecking Errors

While sending out feedback for TA marking, note down the number of diffferent mistakes the TA made during marking. This includes wrong annotations, missed annotations, incorrect rubric levels, etc. The same mistake in multiple places should be considered as 1 mistake when calcualting the total. Track the total number of mistakes noted for submissions submitted for spotchecking. The goal is to see this number decrease for each assignment as the term goes on.

TA Assignment Performance

We need to send an reminder email to all TAs that have less than 60% of assignments marked.

There is a script here that helps with automatically finding TAs that have less than 60% marked.

On Markus, go to the main dashboard page, select the assignment that you want to view. On the right-hand side, there is a grader distribution list.

Copy all the TAs and then paste the result in the Ta.txt.

Run the script by typing:

python markus.py

The output will indicate all the TAs that have less than 60% marked, and also the number of assignments marked out of the total.

Send an email to all the TAs in the output. There is a sample email in the email.txt file.

Dealing with Problematic TAs

Over the course of the semester, you may find yourself running into some issues with certain TAs. Most of the time, these problems will involve consistently missing deadlines or meetings, high mistake counts across submissions, or a lack of communication. For smaller, less pressing issues, it is suggested to message them initially to let them know about the problem since the TA might not have realized their mistake. If, however, a TA is consistently causing you issues, please let your ISC and any supervisor(s) know immediately. They are here to help you and will take up the issue with the TA.

Of course, unless it is explicitly communicated by a TA, it is impossible to know what is going on behind the scenes that is causing them to fall short of expectations. Remember that many TAs are extremely busy and have many responsibilities to juggle simultaneously. Therefore, always do your best to approach any problematic situation with empathy and respect. Do, however, keep your ISC in the loop, sharing with them the information that you have been made aware of.

If at any point you believe a TA is crossing the line (e.g., rude or inappropriate comments, causing trouble during meetings), again, please let your ISC and any supervisor(s) know immediately.

-- Adam Abdulhamid - 2021-12-13

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