TAs who either teach their own courses or lead lab,studio, discussion, or recitation section are often required by their department to distribute end of quarter evaluation forms. Units such as the College of Biological Sciences also require that TAs conduct early-quarter evaluations of their class. Reports from TAs at this university and nation-wide indicate that formal evaluation of their work, apart from student evaluations, is rare. Since many TAs do not teach their own class or section of a class, it is particularly essential that they are provided with some other form of evaluation. TAs need the evaluative feedback in order to improve their performance and administrators need information for future hiring decisions.
Some departments rely on verbal feedback provided by the supervising faculty member.
A natural extension of evaluating TA work is rewarding good performance. Departments can also use any number of informal strategies to recognize and reward the work of TAs. Use an appropriate form of recognition. This section includes a strategy for using student evaluations to improve teaching, and it also provides information on the TA Awards processes currently used by the College of Biological Sciences and the Department of Chemistry. When a department systematically evaluates the work of its TAs, it is inevitable that occasionally there will be instances of substandard performance.