TA compensation rewards students for classroom prowess

Teaching assistants at Penn earn more than instructional experience from their jobs. 

Although it varies by department, TAs at Penn earn a decent pay rate for their methods. In most of Penn's schools and programs, students have the opportunity to lead discussions in the classroom and fulfill TA requirements.

Instructors generally begin the search for promising TAs long before the semester begins.

“I start pretty early, because I want to get the TAs that I want … even in October I start reaching out to TAs for spring,” Computer and Information Science professor Chris Murphy said.

When looking for potential TAs, professors seek responsible and driven students to take on courses. It is also important that the student has taken the class before he or she applies to teach it.

When applying to TA a computer science class, students must indicate whether they would like to be a TA, mentor, grader or lab assistant.

According to the CIS website, the pay rate for a grader and mentor are the same at $13 per hour, while the TA salary is $16 per hour.

Murphy explained that such a teaching assistance hierarchy is more common in introductory computer science courses. CIS 110, for example, has head TAs, standard TAs and mentors who have differences in compensation.

“I think it’s up to the instructor to determine the appropriate position to hire a person for," Murphy said. "For instance, for a graduate class, I’ve hired an undergraduate as a grader. Because he didn’t hold office hours, I think he was getting a slightly lower rate.”

Mathematics Undergraduate Chair Tony Pantev said that the Mathematics Department at Penn goes through a very complicated process when choosing TAs. Math TAs are comprised of two groups: doctorate students and undergraduate TAs.

Grading positions in the Mathematics Department are paid on thesame scale as TAs and measured solely on the number of hours a student works per week.

Regarding fair pay, Pantev believes that TAs in the Mathematics Department are paid in conjunction with their responsibility and workload.

“They are in fact paid more than fairly because we have to offer them slightly higher salaries than other departments because our classes are harder and we need to find people who are qualified,” Pantev said. “If we didn’t offer a slightly higher salary we wouldn’t be able to hire people.”

Having worked closely with the TAs and graders, Pantev feels that the TAs are very comfortable with the workload and feels that there are no complaints with regard to salary.

“We’ve never heard anything about the pay because as I said, we pay quite a bit more than say, the Engineering School, or other schools nearby,” Pantev said.

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