FROM THE ARTICLE
I find this odd:
In fact, Stinchfield said his professor allowed the students to argue for better grades at one point in the semester to get a "courtroom experience."
"He brought in Bryan, and he was like, 'alright, go at him,'" Stinchfield said. "And he had Bryan stand up. And a few people were on his side because they wanted to keep their high grades... but for the most part, it was like half of a 150-person class just asking these real critical questions."
"It wasn't like yelling or anything, but it was certainly conflict," Stinchfield added.
As a TA, he is learning how to teach from his professors. I question whether bullying behavior, as I would define this, is necessary or useful.
150 students given the opportunity to complain about grading in this way seems very odd to me.
No wonder he declined to put much effort into grading after this experience.
While I think LE has their perp, I think we have to remember context in any discussion of his appearance or behavior in a classroom setting.
JMHO
I've seen it though (entire classes with maybe 1-2 exceptions approach the professor about a TA, or, in my world, the Dean (when the complainers have a professor in their sights).
Odd that the prof immediately took the students' side - but also not unheard of and usually means that TA is completely out of step (grade wise) with the other TA's. It's actually a pretty big deal if 3 TA's all give 30% A's and the 4th gives 0%, Statistically (and the prof will have taken graduate courses in statistics - unlike BCK, who hadn't done that yet) that's a big anomaly. I suspect it was even worse than that. Possibly 50% F's or something (oh my, college administrators hate that - it means either the teacher isn't teaching the subject or they've admitted the worst students in the world into their program - guess which hypothesis is more favored by administrators?)
It is also a red flag for accreditors who look at data called "student success" data at all schools accepting federal financial aid. The very first warning would be to make sure the class in question had strict pre-reqs so that whatever it is that makes 50% of the students failed gets remedied.
In this case, if the other TA's had a 5% F rate and his was 50% or more, yeah, if I were the prof, I'd be all up in his business. I would have already set out rubrics and I would personally take over the grading of the anomalous TA person and then grade HIM using what I found. If, by chance, he somehow got the entire group of terrible students that we find in every class (for me, it's usually only 5-10% who fail outright, but I have my methods of convincing them to drop before they get an F - it takes time and energy, but it is best for the student; I also give specific advice for remediation and preparation to avoid failing the future - I have many students return to retake the class and they do well the second time).
When I was a TA, our profs made us meet weekly to discuss rubrics and grading trends. We varied in our degree of "harshness" about grades, and students could go ask the professor to be reassigned to another TA - but we had to agree to it. There was one guy who was pretty much ridiculously hard on students, we all knew it. There were 8 of us, though. And about 200 students, so it wasn't that hard to "fix" the problem by shifting students around. And yes, this is the same guy who cheated in his program, broke into a filing cabinet to see the GPA's and GRE scores of the rest of us and was the first and only person kicked out of my university for ethical violations that ultimately made national news.
Typically, TA's empathize with students and are often much more kind than the prof. So seeing it go sideways must have impressed this prof.
