This document describes and defines the purposes of graduate education and the shared responsibilities of faculty and students in seven principles. It resulted from discussions of faculty and administrators and students at the U of Minnesota. After three years of deliberation by the various constituencies, the executive committee of the Graduate School at Minnesota adopted the document. While the document is not legally binding according to their counsel's office, it provides baseline expectations that set the tone and general guidelines for TA and RA assignments and expectations . The committee recommends that the General Committee create such a document.
Workloads vary greatly by course or assignment.
In making TA assignments, fields need to consider the difficulty of a given assignment and the curricular background of prospective TA's and factor in the time needed for these TA's to learn the material. To make appropriate and equitable TA assignments, DGS's must obtain adequate information from supervising faculty about what TA's will be expected to do in each course. Where there are continuing disparities in the workload requirements from course to course, fields should establish some weighting of courses so that TA assignments known to be heavy might be balanced for individual TA's in other years by assignments known to be relatively lighter. The TA, RA, and GRA assistantships are for 15 work hours for the nine months of the academic year. Teaching experience required by the field must be completed during the first four years of a student's enrollment.