alt Hacker NewsAgain, 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.
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In some fields (maybe not mathematics) the graduate students could spend more time doing original research, assisted by teams of undergrads. That would likely make for a more productive learning experience than traditional homework assignments.
> grading is a menial task that is below the station of a professor
Isn't there a P != NP element to this? Doing the work is hard. Checking it is not.
If a student honestly attempted a problem and failed, diagnosing the failure may be worth the professor's time, but given the bunchiness of undergrad (and frankly, any junior learning) mistake varieties, chances are the TA can identify the issue as well.
I went to a larger university, and was in the math department for most of my coursework. My math homework was graded by fellow undergraduate students who received a rubric and selected 4 problems per homework set, out of about 8ish (most classes. A few tough classes only assigned 2-3 proofs or so a week) but the TAs would grade the exams and the professors wouldn’t grade anything. Homework was at most 15-20% of one’s grade, exams being the rest. But most of my professors didn’t care about the homework as it was a tool for learning the material that was on the exams.