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Commenting Advice for Philosophy TAs, Part 1

January 2014  |  Status: First Draft

I was a philosophy TA for 6 years at Queen’s. I was also a TF at one time, but I think I enjoyed my TAships a lot more than I did my TFship. Babbling for an hour in front of a large class really isn’t my thing, but I love reading papers, giving feedback, and talking about them one-on-one.

Here are some of the things that I learned during those 6 years, the things I keep trying to do better whenever I have someone else’s paper in front of me, and the things that I wish I were told before I walked into my very first TAship. I share them here in the hope that they would be of help to other graduate students, both in philosophy and other fields.

TAs in different fields have different styles, attitudes, and priorities, and different universities and instructors have different expectations of their TAs. So please don’t think of this advice as a list of absolute requirements. Please feel free to adapt them to your circumstances and even disregard them when necessary. But I think the general spirit of what I’m trying to achieve here is applicable to any grading style, and I think they are also in the best interest of the student whose paper you are grading.

1) Your Comments Are the Student’s Only Feedback

When you mark a paper in philosophy and most other fields, in most large universities, you are not simply assigning numbers and/or letter grades to a piece of writing. For the vast majority of students, your hastily scribbled comments are the only feedback they’ll ever get out of the course. These students, of course, will not get the same amount of guidance as the vocal minority who frequents your office or the instructor’s; but that doesn’t mean they don’t need help with their writing and thinking.

Unfortunately, you often can’t tell which students actually read your comments and which students never even pick up their papers. Depending on the class, between 30% and 60% of the comments you write will probably never be read. (Generally, the larger the class, the larger the percentage of unread comments.) However, the other 40% to 70% of the comments will be read, analyzed, and second-guessed to the utmost limit. Students do take your comments seriously, sometimes even too seriously. Think of these voracious readers as you write comments. They are the reason why your comments should be clear, constructive, and comprehensive.

2) A Philosopher Must Justify His Position

Just as a student of philosophy must justify the position that he or she takes, you have an obligation to justify the grade that you give out. The scribbles in the margin and the comments at the end should be able to convince a reasonable student that your evaluation is fair. In other words, you’re not just marking a paper. You’re reviewing it. You’re writing a tiny informal essay on it.

Of course, some students have this ridiculous idea that they’re entitled to an “A” no matter what. It’s going to be impossible to convince them of your fairness. But you’ll know how to recognize and stay clear of them by the time the first assignment is handed back. For the rest of the students, if you give them “C-” with only minimal comments along the lines of “you need to study more”, it would be natural for them to wonder what exactly they didn’t study enough of. (This is especially true in first-year courses at prestigious universities, because most of the students are used to being at the top of their class in high school and thus have a hard time accepting below-average grades.)

Another reason why you should always justify the grade is because you, as a TA, is a sort of authority figure. In this age of democracy, nobody respects authority figures unless they can demonstrate that they know what they’re doing. The best way for you, a philosophy grad student, to demonstrate that you know what you’re doing is to produce convincing arguments, whether in the classroom, the tutorial session, or in the margins of your students’ essays.

What you need to do in order to “justify” the grade depends on the paper and the grade.

Of course, exceptions must be made when a paper so obviously misses the point that you suspect the student never even skimmed the textbook. There’s no point trying to justify your position to someone who is so obviously uninterested in what you have to say. Let them talk to you personally, whether in class or during office hours, if they have a problem with that.

3) Be as Specific as You Can

Just as a student of philosophy is expected to be specific in his or her writing, you must be specific in your comments. Reading a TA’s feedback shouldn’t be an exercise in reading between the lines. Otherwise, you can cause even more confusion in a student who is already confused.

“Actually, the author says that P” is preferable to “This is not what the author says”, especially if P can be expressed in a short sentence. “You seem to misunderstand the author in a couple of places” is not very helpful, especially when the student might not know which places you’re talking about. “This is a misunderstanding; the author says that P is Q, not R” is much better.

Once, a student couldn’t make the office hours of the TA who graded her paper, so she came to me. Her argument had reached a conclusion that was very different from what she set out to say. But the newbie TA’s comment was a somewhat misdirected “Does this mean that you agree with the author or not?” No wonder the student was confused. Just because the assignment asks the student to explain whether or not she agrees with an author doesn’t mean that every error should be characterized as a generic failure to follow the assignment. The student’s error was much more specific. The comment should have been just as specific. C’mon, you’re a grad student in philosophy. You can smell an ignoratio elenchi from five miles away.

If the paper keeps making the same mistake so that your comments also get repetitive, make liberal use of asterisks, numbers, etc. to make references back and forth. The student’s essay should be in prose, but yours need not be! “See ※” is a hundred times better than a vague “wrong again”, if “※” refers to something specific that you wrote in another place. If you’re going to do this often, stick to a convention and be consistent so that students can easily understand your shortcuts.

Continued in Part 2.