Graduate Student Teaching Policy
September 1, 2006
The Economics Department at the University of Georgia is strongly committed to training its graduate students to be high quality teachers. This commitment to excellence enhances the job market opportunities of graduate students and ensures that undergraduates receive outstanding instruction. To these ends, the Department provides Ph.D. students who are learning to teach with many opportunities for training and feedback. The primary principle on which the Department's policies are based is that graduate students' teaching responsibilities should be balanced with their progress towards completing the dissertation.
Concerning the use of graduate students as teachers, the Economics Department specifically designates the following:
- During the first two years of their programs all students who receive Graduate Assistantships are assigned to faculty, who utilize their assigned students as research and/or teaching assistants.
- In June of their second year in the program, all funded students are required to take GRSC 7770. Graduate students are ineligible to serve as the instructor of record until they successfully complete this course. By this point in their program, graduate students should have completed all of their required exams and nearly all of their required courses. The faculty member serving as the Graduate Teaching Assistant Coordinator (GTAC), Myra Moore, will teach GRSC 7770. The primary goals of the course are to provide students with information about university teaching policies and resources, to introduce students to effective teaching methods and strategies, to assist students to complete lesson plans for the first 4-5 chapters in the micro and macro principles textbooks, to provide students with opportunities to present, and to evaluate student presentations.
- The Department will generally concentrate graduate student teaching responsibilities in the third year of the program. Because students who receive an assistantship through the Carl Vinson Institute must provide research assistance for three years, these students will typically teach in the summer after their third year and/or in their fourth year of study.
- Unless they have had other teaching experience, graduate students will generally first teach Econ 2105 or Econ 2106.
- All graduate students who serve as instructors of record must adhere to the "Department of Economics Policy on Grade Distribution in Principles Classes," which outlines the acceptable grade point averages for graduate students who teach micro and macro principles classes. The GTAC will monitor the grade distribution of graduate student instructors.
- The GTAC will oversee the teaching activities of funded graduate students.
