> I had the exact opposite problem when I was both a TA and later a professor. I would beg and plead for my students to come to office hours. ... And then I'd get feedback at the end of the semester that I "was never available to help."
My first year of grad school I had this problem and it made me immediately become disillusioned because the reality was so starkly different from what students wrote.
I worked in my office and would be there from 9am/10am till 10pm most days. I had an open door policy along with my scheduled office hours and 2 lab sections. I also frequently responded to emails at or after midnight. I wrote custom mini lectures for the lab sessions based on asking students (in those lab sessions) what were the things they were struggling on (and using what I ended up helping the most on + feedback from the good students that were always the "help sinks" where others would go to them for help). My own office mates complained at the end of the term (but not before. To be fair, I was usually the only one in the office (of 3) and the other two only started showing up more at the end of the term). YET I was student ranked as 2 standard deviations below the median for availability and one below my department.
I literally could not be more available! What's worse, is the department sent an email to me about how I should be more available. -__- What I learned is that these things don't mean anything about my performance. They were low ranked because the course was very hard. This is also a course I caught 2 junior CS students cheating and told the professor and I that they didn't know "GitHub" was on the internet (syllabus had a weird policy about not using the internet, but intended to basically mean don't copy GitHub or SO solutions). I had a hard time trying to not fall over laughing and I saw the prof's brain just break.
(Side note on that last part. We reported it to the department. They didn't care. It is because it makes the department look bad because the uni measures department rates of cheating by how many people are formally disciplined for cheating and so if you don't report it, you don't look like your department has a problem. We gave them a 0 on the assignment and said they'd fail if they did it again. They did anyways)
(I also had two students write that I was the best TA they've ever had and two students write that I was the worst. I learned a lot, that's for sure)
Hey sorry to hear your experience. First to clarify - it varies - the classes (usually required CS classes), usually had overcrowded Office Hours, but there were many classes in math & physics where OH was very available (and I did very well in as a direct consequence, though I was a CS major).
If students complain about availability, but never show up despite everything you did, then that's their problem. What people say and do is, unfortunately, not the same.
And I'm sorry to hear about the strange incentives for not being able to report to the department about cheating.
Initially when I started the app, I was very anti-teacher. But as I learnt more and talked to more teachers, I realized, man teachers also have their fair share of indignations from the system.
> realized, man teachers also have their fair share of indignations from the system.
Oh for sure. I think many would be surprised how political (not in like government terms) a department can be. It can vary dramatically within a school too. My partner's department is very functional while mine seems to be continually shooting themselves in the foot trying to dislodge the previous bullet hole. But when I started, it was very functional. I can certainly say that very few professors are happy with the system and I think it is failing everyone involved. This is why in my main comment I suggested that there is real opportunities to disrupt education in a very traditional sense. Because the truth of the matter is that we started treating academia like a business and the results were probably what anyone could have predicted: metric hacking galore. It's a big part of why students themselves cheat in the first place. Then try being a grad student where you are doing half of your advisor's job, leading other students and writing grants, while trying to also do course work (first few years), TA, publish, and research. It's a lot. Everyone is overworked.
There are plenty of great advisors and departments. But unfortunately these tend to be the exception instead of the norm and appear to becoming rarer. Or maybe I've just gotten more experience. Personally, my PhD has left me with a very bad taste for academia, and I know a lot of others at other schools who have the same feelings. What's also surprising to many outside of academia is that my dream is to spend my days researching. But they cannot understand how academia nor industry provides me a environment to actually do this (fwiw, academics usually to understand).
My first year of grad school I had this problem and it made me immediately become disillusioned because the reality was so starkly different from what students wrote.
I worked in my office and would be there from 9am/10am till 10pm most days. I had an open door policy along with my scheduled office hours and 2 lab sections. I also frequently responded to emails at or after midnight. I wrote custom mini lectures for the lab sessions based on asking students (in those lab sessions) what were the things they were struggling on (and using what I ended up helping the most on + feedback from the good students that were always the "help sinks" where others would go to them for help). My own office mates complained at the end of the term (but not before. To be fair, I was usually the only one in the office (of 3) and the other two only started showing up more at the end of the term). YET I was student ranked as 2 standard deviations below the median for availability and one below my department.
I literally could not be more available! What's worse, is the department sent an email to me about how I should be more available. -__- What I learned is that these things don't mean anything about my performance. They were low ranked because the course was very hard. This is also a course I caught 2 junior CS students cheating and told the professor and I that they didn't know "GitHub" was on the internet (syllabus had a weird policy about not using the internet, but intended to basically mean don't copy GitHub or SO solutions). I had a hard time trying to not fall over laughing and I saw the prof's brain just break.
(Side note on that last part. We reported it to the department. They didn't care. It is because it makes the department look bad because the uni measures department rates of cheating by how many people are formally disciplined for cheating and so if you don't report it, you don't look like your department has a problem. We gave them a 0 on the assignment and said they'd fail if they did it again. They did anyways)
(I also had two students write that I was the best TA they've ever had and two students write that I was the worst. I learned a lot, that's for sure)