And You Thought Your TA Was Bad?!

When I refer to TA, most of you should now I'm talking about a Teaching Assistant. I know a lot of people complain about their TA's, especially their non-English speaking TA's (I find that kind of complaining incredibly stupid in the first place). All I got to say is that you're just lucky you didn't have me.

Well last week, I had my second opportunity to proctor an exam for some Italian engineering class. A lot of my research cohorts also serve as lecturers and when it comes giving examinations , they usually recruit more people to proctor the exams. Most of the Italians in my group warned me, "Italians cheat like crazy." (except in football of course...forza italia) Yeah, so they weren't kidding. People were talking, trying to share notes, and some even looking over at other people's papers.

This most recent exam was crazy. Well, another Francesco in my research group wrote the exam and put one of those type of questions that was tricky, but easily doable. It was one of those questions that everyone thinks is impossible to do, when in reality they are just missing one key thing. So of course everyone is asking questions and talking to each other saying "this question is impossible". I'm just thinking...."Dude...do your best and hope for partial credit" Anyways, there were so many people asking long questions that Francesco would get stuck on one person. I was telling Francesco that he couldn't spend too much time on one person because a lot of the people were getting really impatient. I felt totally inept at this point as a "TA" with my inability to speak good Italian and help these kids out. I finally thought, screw it, let me try to answer this guy. I quasi could understand the question on the paper, but couldn't understand what the student was asking me about it. I essentially said in Italian "sorry, my Italian sucks and I don't really know this subject matter." The guy, thankfully, was patient and appreciated that I tried. Ha.

One last funny part of this story. When Francesco was grading the papers the next day, Takedah (a Japanese guy in our group) showed him that he found a mini cheat sheet outside the lecture hall. I was able to narrow down the guy who used it based on the obvious unique handwriting. We didn't have to worry too much, because that guy had one of the lowest test grades in the class.