Hello everyone,
I am currently in the middle of a debate with one of the departments at my university, regarding the use of PhD students teaching undergraduate seminars. I am a course rep, which means people tell me about concerns and then I deal with them, this issue seems to keep re-appearing and I myself am rather curious about this one. Some people in the dep. are being less than helpful with this issue so I wanted to compare this situation with others.
I study History and Politics at the University of York, I've just started my second year and this issue was raised last year when we realised virtually all of the History seminars that year were being taught by postgrads. In the end, we found out that they use them in the first year, limit their use in the second year (they have a system where they choose the best of the best to use past 1st year when needed) and basically guarantee a Dr/Prof for at least one of your modules and basically just use Dr/Profs in third year, which seem fair enough and we were happy with this, even though the standard of teaching from some of the postgrads through the year was quite disappointing really.
However, the Politics department seemed fine last year, most people had at least one Dr/Prof through the year, but most teaching was once again done by postgrads but in relatively small groups. We assumed that like History, their use would decrease over the years, which I have since discovered is not the case. For my modules, out of around 8/9 seminar groups, only one is being taught by a Dr and two PhD students are teaching the rest, teaching both modules. The size of the seminar groups have now also gone up, last year the max. was 13, this year some are now at 17, these deps. at York usually guarantees smallish seminar groups in all subjects compared to some other unis.
I know some are fine (some are better than Dr/Profs), but at open days/ in any university literature it fails to mention that postgrads teach so much, as not knowing anybody who went to uni before I went, I didn't even know this happened, I assumed the actual staff who did lectures/were at the uni full time did the teaching and now it seems as though they were keeping it pretty quiet about these PhD students teaching so much!
I was therefore just wondering how many seminars at other unis/on other courses are taught by postgrads, as it seems a quick way of saving money at the moment.
Thank you