Your Responsibilities as a TA

As a TA you will be assigned to a particular course, and will be part of the teaching team led by the instructor of that course. The instructor might be a professor, a sessional instructor, or a senior grad student. For employment purposes, the course instructor is your Supervisor.

Hours of Work

At the beginning of each semester, your supervisor will fill out an Hours of Work form describing the tasks that are expected of you during the semester. The total number of hours projected in this form should not exceed the hours of your contract (usually 130 hours)! Not every course includes the same responsibilities. You might be asked to do any of the tasks described below.

Your TA pay is distributed evenly across the semester, but you might work different hours each week. For example, in Week 1 you might only work a couple of hours attending the lectures, but in a week when students submit an assignment you might have 20 hours of grading to do. You should keep track of how many hours you work each week. If you find that you are regularly exceeding the hours that are described in your Hours of Work form, let your Supervisor know right away so they can help you work more efficiently or reassign some of your work to other TAs.

Attending Lectures

If your Supervisor wants you to attend lectures, this counts within your assigned Hours of Work. If you do attend lectures, make sure to arrive on time and to behave appropriately: the students will probably recognize you as a TA and will take their cues from you. Ask your Supervisor whether they want you to participate in classroom activities or just observe quietly.

Grading

Most TAs are responsible for grading student work and giving feedback. Your Supervisor will provide a rubric or marking guide, and may even do some practice grading with the team to ensure consistency across TAs.

If you are grading student work, you’ll also be responsible for entering and tracking their grades in Avenue.

Ask your Supervisor whether they want you to handle grade inquiries or complaints, or whether students should direct questions about grading to the instructor.

Chapters 10 and 11 of McMaster’s TA Guide contain more advice about giving feedback.

Communicating with Students

You might be expected to answer students’ questions by email or on the course discussion board. If you’re emailing with students, both they and you must use your @mcmaster.ca email account. Do not reply to any student emails that come from their personal addresses.

Sometimes students ask long or complex questions by email. Ask your Supervisor how to handle these cases. It might be more effective to ask them to come to office hours (in person or virtually) rather than trying to hold a complicated discussion over email. And for some questions, it’s best to forward them to the instructor.

Your Supervisor might also ask you to hold Office Hours, either every week or maybe only in the weeks when assignments are due. Office Hours are the chance for students to drop in and consult you one-on-one or in small groups, outside of the classroom. If holding office hours is part of your job, it is your responsibility to communicate the time and location to your students, and to be present at the scheduled time!

For your safety, it’s a good idea to make sure at least one other fellow TA is present in your office during your scheduled office hours. If it’s not possible to have someone else present, you might choose to hold your office hours virtually, for example, in Teams or Zoom. If you choose virtual office hours, make sure your students know how to find you.

Leading Tutorials

Many undergraduate courses are structured with lectures and tutorials. Typically, a class has two hours of lecture per week plus one hour of tutorial. For the lecture hours, the instructor meets with the entire class, which may be as small as 60 students or as large as 600. The large class list is divided into smaller tutorial sections, each led by a TA.

Each tutorial section usually includes about 25 students and meets in a smaller room on campus. Your tutorial may be scheduled at any time during the week: it might not be on the same day as the lectures, and it will probably not be in the same room or even the same building. The instructor does not normally attend tutorials.

Your job as a tutorial leader is to help students learn and understand the course material from that week’s lectures and assigned texts, and to help them prepare to complete their assignments. This means you’ll need to have read or watched the material to be thoroughly prepared. The instructor will probably provide you with suggestions for tutorial activities and discussion prompts, and you get to use your judgment to choose how to implement these activities within your tutorial.

Because the tutorial is a smaller group than the lecture, you may find that students come to you with their questions or concerns, rather than raising them in front of the entire large class. Part of your responsibility is communicating student concerns, questions, points of confusion, etc. back to the instructor.

You can find more advice on leading tutorials in Chapters 4 through 9 of McMaster’s TA Guide.

Maintaining Professional Boundaries

As a TA, you are probably closer in age to the students than the instructor, so students might perceive you as more approachable. This does not mean, however that you are their friend. You are in a position of power relative to your students because you have a role in determining their grades. For this reason, it is important to keep professional boundaries between yourself and your students. Here are some ways to protect your professionalism and students’ trust in you:

• Always use McMaster tools for any written correspondence, such as your @mcmaster.ca email, the Avenue message tool, or messages in Teams.
• Don’t ever give students your phone number, WhatsApp, social media handles, or other personal information.
• If students try to friend you on social media, do not accept their request.
• Don’t socialize with students outside of class. Chatting for a few minutes while you walk across campus is fine, but don’t go to the pub or the coffee shop with them. If you find they’re lingering after class or trying to follow you, walk to the student centre or somewhere with lots of people around.

Sometimes it happens that one of your students is someone that you know from outside of class — for example, they might be a relative, a friend of a friend, someone from your neighbourhood or an association you belong to. If you discover this, inform the instructor right away. It might be fine for the student to stay in your tutorial, but it might also be a good idea for someone else to mark their work, to avoid any conflict of interest. The instructor will advise you on the best course of action.