The TA guide

Teaching assistants hold a course together between lectures: marks get graded, totals get tracked, evaluations get scheduled, and questions get answered. This guide is about doing that work once instead of three times — the workflow patterns that keep a semester calm, written for the way courses actually run.

Set-up week: the 30 minutes that save the semester

The most valuable TA session of the semester is the first one. Create the assessments with their exact names, totals and weightages while the course outline is open in front of you — every downstream total computes itself from this one transcription. Decide the evaluation plan early too: how many slots, where, and whether students can rebook. A five-line announcement that closes with “details are on the portal” replaces fifty replies.

Weekly rhythm: enter, verify, publish

• Enter marks in batches. Small checkers go in by hand; anything that reached a spreadsheet goes through CSV import, which validates every row against the roster before saving. Flagged rows mean typos, not mysteries.
• Verify before publishing. Marks stay invisible to students until you publish. Do the totals read sensibly? Any suspiciously uniform scores? Ten seconds of scepticism per batch outlives ten messages per student.
• Publish, then announce deliberately. One announcement stating what was published and what students should check, instead of the information leaking unevenly through the week.

Evaluations: make the roster build itself

Open the slot grid with a deadline for booking and let the class self-serve. The database enforces one booking per student and prevents collisions, which removes the two failure modes that eat evaluation weeks: double-booked slots and “I asked in the chat first”. On the day, bring the portal’s roster view — who is next, with their booking timestamps — and the session runs on rails.

Corrections and disputes, handled calmly

• Correct through the system. Fix the entry, republish, and everyone downstream sees the corrected version. No errata threads.
• Keep a consistent standard. Apply the rubric (or marking scheme) the same way across the batch; students compare, and consistency is the fairness they can see.
• Route policy questions upward. Attendance rules, extensions, exam eligibility — these belong to the instructor or the institution, not your inbox. A polite redirect protects both your time and the course’s consistency.

End of semester: the quiet payoff

Because the record was structured from week one, the final audits are painless: totals compute themselves, the history of what was published when is already there, and the students who checked the evaluation checklist arrived ready. Compare that to the spreadsheet-and-chat semester — and decide which one to sign up for again. The for TAs page has the workflow overview; this guide is the operating manual.