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Prep session not taught by the class TAs

November 30, 2009

Re: “Extra help shouldn’t cost more” Nov. 26, 2009

To the editor:

A letter recently appeared in the Gazette asking why the Physics 1028A exam prep session is not free to students. I run this review session, alongside fellow physics PhD student Parisa Hudson. The author raises a valid point — teaching assistants should not be charging students money for extra help in the courses they teach. Parisa and I both currently work as TAs at Western, but we are not TAs for Physics 1028A.

Every year, hundreds of Western students seek the aid of a tutor to help them improve their grades and enrich their learning. The tutors are typically upper-year or graduate students at Western who take on this extra work to help pay their own tuition. Tutors are only allowed to help students in courses they don’t TA for.

A private exam review session is no different. Indeed, external private companies often hire graduate students to teach exam review sessions that are much more expensive than ours. We run our review session by ourselves and we offer a valuable prep service to students who need to improve their marks. It is a focused problem solving and review lecture, and is very different from a tutorial.

It would be impossible for us to offer the review session for free, as we have many expenses: we spend thousands of dollars booking a room, printing and binding our 60-page study guide for each student and paying InfoSource to handle online and in-person registrations. Parisa and I spend many hours preparing material and updating the review session each year. Whatever is left over after expenses helps us pay our own tuition.

Like many other TAs, Parisa and I both spend extra time outside of our regular TA hours to help students in the courses we do TA.

Geron Bindseil,

PhD Candidate, Physics

To the editor:

In Thursday’s Gazette, Jason Brown implies two TAs for Physics 1028 were offering help with the course material for money. If this were true, it would be highly unethical behaviour, and would lead to their dismissal, and possibly expulsion from the university.

It is not true, however. The graduate students in question are not TAs for Physics 1028, while they have taught it in previous years. It is the graduate students’ business what they do in their free time. They pay for the university resources they are using, and pay taxes for all revenues. They are running a private business, even if it’s not called ‘Prep101’.

By allowing Jason to publish this false allegation in print and online without fact checking, he and the Gazette are seriously jeopardizing those students’ careers. It is irresponsible to allow statements like this to be published without checking their correctness.

After all, you wouldn’t simply publish someone’s letter without fact checking if they claimed some professor was offering good grades for sex — while every comparison is inaccurate by definition, this is not too far from the seriousness of this accusation.

If proven not to be a true representation of facts (which it isn’t), I expect Jason to withdraw his claims and apologize, and the Gazette to take the letter offline and to purge it from their archives.

—Wolf Dapp
PhD Astronomy

Ed note: It is the Gazette’s position that the language used and references made in the letter “Extra help shouldn’t cost more” did not suggest who the individuals providing assistance were other than that they were employed by the University. There is no association — implied or otherwise — between the prep course offered and the TAs to any specific course.

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