BINGO, Bostonian.

That is why we are ignoring all of the hype and ratings and instead focusing on what we KNOW from bitter experience in academia actually translates into authentic differences in instructional quality.

Ergo-- no graduate program. Because if you go somewhere with a PhD program as an undergraduate major, that's who teaches coursework under the 300- level. And, as Karplus notes, the occasional senior undergraduate major. While some of those students are excellent and energetic educators... it's entirely luck of the draw, and the departments who do this absolutely DO NOT care about quality in their teaching assistant corps. Been there, done that. Some of my fellow graduate students were so indifferent that they literally blew off student questions in tutorials and labs, and others were excellent and conscientious. It made no difference to who got hired the following year-- and this was at an institution which actually cared enough about its teaching to bother "training" the T.A.'s as incoming graduate students. Yeah. "Training" there lasted about as long as the HazMat course-- half a day-- and at least the latter had some kind of assessment associated.


On the bright side, every person teaching a chemistry lab at that institution was CPR certified. LOL.





Schrödinger's cat walks into a bar. And doesn't.