alt Hacker News>The irony here is perhaps missed by many. He didn’t grade homework in the first >place. He paid assistants to grade. This is common practice among tenured >professors with grant money to spend and graduate students beholden to them >(I’m not making a moral statement, just noting this is common practice).
Grading is part of what it means to be a TA, and being a TA is not some awful exploitation, it's what gives graduate students living money (I was a TA in the 1990s). It makes no sense (except maybe in a small liberal arts school with no graduate students) to have professors grade.
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> Grading is part of what it means to be a TA,
Checking students' homework is part of what it means to be a TA. Grading is a choice the university makes; it's absence makes one no less of a TA.
> being a TA is not some awful exploitation
It's certainly exploitation. For some TAs, who get overworked and lorded over, and in universities when the pay is low, it's awful exploitation. For most TAs it is 'regular' exploitation of getting a crappy salary for serious highly-skilled work.
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The 90s is 30 years ago. You are out of touch with how things work now.
Again, I’m not making a moral statement. But you yourself basically just said grading is a menial task that is below the station of a professor. (BTW, I teach at a small school and do all my own grading each semester for between 45-80 students depending on the courses I’m teaching that semester)
So if grading is part of the development process for a graduate student, then go ahead and continue. But that’s not the claim in the article. And if grading doesn’t serve a purpose anymore, then stop doing it. You can pay your assistants to do nothing for 20 hrs/week, or you can find literally anything else for them to do.