At Tufts, students’ exposure to undergraduate teaching assistants (TAs) varies greatly by department. Computer science students will be very familiar with office hours held by their fellow undergraduates, while in the math department, all official teaching assistant roles are reserved for Ph.D. students. In the political science department, there has been a sharp turn away from undergraduates TA-ing; when I took Western Political Thought II in the spring of 2024, all four TAs were undergraduates, while only a single TA was an undergraduate in Western Political Thought I last fall.
I have served as a teaching assistant and held a grading role for three different courses in three different departments. In the fall of 2025, I was the TA for Scenic Fabrication, a woodworking class in the theater department. This semester, I am TA-ing for Political Science Research Methods and grading for Probability in the math department. I have also been a student of undergraduate TAs in Western Political Thought II, Political Science Research Methods, US Elections, and Computational Geometry. I have enjoyed and benefited from being on both sides of the student-TA relationship.
I will concede that, when applicable, departments should prioritize Ph.D. students over undergraduates. I will address the question of undergraduate TAs in cases where hiring Ph.D. students from within the department is not an option—such as the case of our political science department, which has no graduate programs.
The benefits of being a teaching assistant as an undergraduate are clear. Unlike working as a receptionist or in Tufts Dining, working as a TA is an on-campus job that allows you to directly apply your area of study. For students interested in teaching, whether in higher education or primary and secondary schools, it provides an opportunity to gain experience. It allows them to build more competitive graduate school applications, get into better graduate programs, and ultimately elevate the standing of Tufts.
The benefits to students and the university at large are more contested. However, I believe that in many contexts, undergraduate TAs outperform the alternatives. Although graduate students may have experience with similar material, they often will not have experience with the exact course structure, the grading system, and the quirks of the professor. In contrast, undergraduate TAs have almost always taken the exact course that they are teaching, allowing them to serve as a much more comprehensive guide to students. While they may be lacking in terms of general knowledge of the field, they make up by a large margin with their course-specific—and Tufts-specific—knowledge.
Compared to the alternatives, undergraduates are far more in touch with the department they are teaching in. Tufts graduate students often live far from campus and commute only a few days a week. Other options, such as Harvard Law School students, live even farther. It is unlikely you will be able to schedule a time to meet with them in-person if you have a class conflict with their office hours. In contrast, undergraduate TAs are far more accessible; you might run into them studying in Tisch or getting a coffee at the Sink. Hiring undergraduates helps build a tight-knit community across class years within a department.
Although there are reasons to be skeptical of undergrad TAs, the potential downsides are easily mitigated with a little care and clear policies. While one might be concerned about the maturity of undergraduates, professors hiring seniors will often have known them for two to three years and had them in multiple classes. Although the average undergraduate may be less mature than the average Fletcher School student, the students selected to TA are not random; they are the students whom professors know to have demonstrated knowledge and maturity.
Skeptics may also worry about TAs’ ability to fairly grade friends and acquaintances in the class. The solution to this is simple: require TAs to declare any conflicts of interest they may have in grading, and the professor teaching the class grades whomever they list. While slightly less pressing, this procedure should be necessary for all teaching assistants, including graduate students.
Fundamentally, there is no reason to arbitrarily prevent prepared undergraduates from taking on these roles. There is no reason that a second-semester senior should be prevented from TA-ing a class, but allowed the following fall while pursuing a master’s at Fletcher. Undergraduate TAs should be held to high standards of knowledge and maturity and given clear expectations—but so should all TAs. The advantage undergraduates have is, very often, a much more intimate understanding of not just the course material, but what it’s like to be a student in the class they help teach. Preventing students from TA-ing is a loss to students, professors, and the Tufts community as a whole.
Artwork by Morgan Zhang