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I am an undergraduate student and along with some of my peers, we are interested in the possibility of becoming teaching assistants (TAs) for a particular course taught by a professor in the US whom I work with remotely. However, we are unsure about the protocol and appropriateness of expressing this interest directly to the professor.

Is it generally acceptable for students to directly approach a professor to express interest in a non-funded TA position for their course?

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    Why do you want to be a TA for free?
    – Azor Ahai -him-
    Commented Jan 12 at 1:21
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    Are you at the same university at the professor/course?
    – Dawn
    Commented Jan 12 at 2:43
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    I think some of the commenters and answerers may not be familiar with educational undergraduate TA positions. These are very different from graduate student TAs and are designed as learning opportunities for talented students; they are typically enrolled in the same course that they are TAing. Though it's also possible OP isn't familiar with these, either.
    – Bryan Krause ♦
    Commented Jan 12 at 15:01
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    @BryanKrause the OP is not a student at the university of the course in question. They are a student elsewhere.
    – Dawn
    Commented Jan 12 at 15:36
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    I think this is an appropriate question here, so I question the downvotes. I think those are meant to say "bad idea" (which it is). But that should be an answer, not a critique of the question.
    – Ethan Bolker
    Commented Jan 12 at 15:47

4 Answers 4

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This is not a fruitful line of inquiry. The professor would have a very difficult time accepting this proposition for several reasons:

  1. reliably of volunteers is not great
  2. accepting volunteers for positions that really should be paid causes ethical concerns
  3. logistical challenges of having a TA from another university

I would not hire a TA under this circumstance because I think it would take coordination and would be unlikely to improve the course.

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    In addition, at my university, we almost never hire TAs that have not taken the course previously in our department. I like my TAs to have been my students in a previous year. When I look back, my bad TAs are those that took the class from someone else previously.
    – Dawn
    Commented Jan 12 at 15:30
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  • If you're qualified to TA the course you should be paid
  • If you're not qualified to TA the course you are likely to be a burden to the professor, and they are better off to not take you on as an unpaid TA.

In any case, I wouldn't approach them without making explicitly clear why you're interested. Wanting to do it for free could have ulterior motives (e.g. helping another student cheat) and is rather unconventional.

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It is not appropriate.

Reasons:

Anyone involved in handling student information needs to be Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) trained. Having this information released to a foreign entity will raise a shocking amount of red flags.

A foreign volunteer position that takes away opportunities from an American citizen/resident/resident alien, etc... presents many ethical issues.

The sheer amount of headaches involved in getting you on-boarded is not worth it, even if it is somehow possible.

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tl;dr: No, it is immoral.

A "non-funded" TA is like a "non-funded employee": A person volunteering to do work which others, typically junior researchers, do for pay, to make a living. TA wages are typically rather meager, with this part of their work often not being extricable from their research, so that another employment option is not academically useful or logistically viable (or allowed); and with graduate employee unions being either missing, fledgling or weak.

In the struggle to depress junior researcher wages for teaching, universities employ various tactics which I will not go into here; but one of the tactics they use is finding TAs who would work for even less, such as later-year undergraduates. A similar phenomenon occurs with teaching courses proper, i.e. giving lectures and administering a course: Universities sometimes try to put later-year M.Sc./ Ph.D. candidates in those positions instead of untenured researchers or teachers who "just" work for the university and cost more.

Now, if it were the case that such teaching were to be undertaken with an extra-ordinary conferment of relevant status, and full pay and benefits (or perhaps - a little higher in recognition of an exceptional record of the person in question) - that would be... well, fine, I suppose. But what happens in practice is that this is used to "juniorize" teaching more widely, with much reduced pay. And that also means lower teaching quality - on average and speaking in rough terms.

Now, if undergraduate students were to somehow be made willing to teach for free, and the university could get away with that legally (which it might not by the way) - managements would have a field day.

So, please do not undermine graduate teachers/researchers' livelihood. If you're interesting in TAing - inquire about doing it for pay. Otherwise, if consider initiatives such as:

  • Extra-curricular extra-practice sessions, e.g. organized via the student union, if the course is particularly tricky to get through.
  • Investing in creating some video content to help students with some of the tougher concepts in a particular subject
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