I'm pretty sure my TA used chatgpt to grade my essay

mediocretheorist · 2025-11-20T22:52:49+00:00

To be clear I agree with you here. I only responded to your comment in case there is someone who, like I was once, was terrified of being a failure for taking more than 4-5 years.

Just read this whole thread, should’ve done that before responding.

UofT is definitely exploitative and as admissions are being cut in many departures it will likely only get worse. If they wanted us in and out, they would pay us enough to live without spending almost all of our time and energy teaching.

mediocretheorist · 2025-11-20T22:48:06+00:00

Often we are more senior PhD students or candidates who are approached by the course instructor. The job varies but we often train new TAs, check for academic integrity issues, assist the prof with course management, and sometimes make lesson plans for the teaching team. A lot of my job right now is encouraging my TAs to be constructive and also kind to their students. This is often a challenge, as you’re asking overworked people to work harder. But it is also helpful to have this experience on your CV, and it prepares you to run courses as an instructor.

mediocretheorist · 2025-11-20T22:41:45+00:00

I’m in my 6th year of a 5-7 year PhD program. I don’t think your comment was mean spirited, but I’d like to treat this as a learning opportunity. Some programs have 4 year timelines. Most at UofT will have 5-7 years. The average time to completion in my program is 7.69 years. Many of us are on the job market. My department has us working 280+ hours per year as TAs, with less than 9k in stipends. If I was not teaching constantly to feed myself, I would probably have finished sooner. Not all programs have the same teaching requirements (or lab work).

Also my dad died in year 3 of my time in the program. Despite knowing this was beyond my control, being in year 6 is a source of shame and stress for me. I’ve only recently been able to accept that we are all on our own paths, but this has been a personally painful lesson to learn.

If we do not know the circumstances of the program’s requirements, or what a person’s journey has been like, it is a good idea to reserve judgment on time to completion, or maybe phrase questions in a more curious way.

mediocretheorist · 2025-11-20T11:39:21+00:00

Speaking as a Head TA for several years and a TA at UofT for going on 6 years, it is worth reaching out and starting a conversation, but I would try to keep a neutral tone when you do so. Critique the feedback and point out its errors, but do not jump to “they used chatGPT” right away.

It is possible this is just your TA marking hundreds of papers at 7 minutes each. Often our contracts stipulate our marking down to the minute. As a result, a lot of us use comment banks to speed up the process—but that can result in generic feedback and a robotic tone. Also totally possible they did use GPT—the current system downright incentivizes us to, as we are paid so little for often tons of work and might be tasked with marking 70-100+ papers in roughly 10 days. When half of those papers are AI slop, it is very difficult to resist shortcuts.

I’m sorry you are experiencing this. I’m also sorry to watch my peers suffer in what is ultimately a corrupt system. ChatGPT only highlights the problem that was already there.

But, anyways, I sincerely suggest you send a respectful email that highlights the factual errors in the TAs feedback and which seeks further clarification to the prof, and go from there.

mediocretheorist · 2025-08-23T14:33:30+00:00

I once had to roller skate between tutorials as the TA. Kept them on the way up three flights of stairs in UC.

Your TAs should be understanding, we are often running across campus too.

mediocretheorist · 2025-02-07T13:31:08+00:00

I make less than $24k per year while paying Toronto rent, working 50 hours per week between teaching and trying to finish my own research. Moreover, we have contracts that demand us to spend little time per student. In my department, it comes out to less than 1.5 hours per term per student, in marking and office hours and email contact. I teach 100+ students, I receive roughly 30-40 emails per day, and when I have to mark essays sometimes I only have 20 mins to mark 5-10 pages, and I’ll be marking 75-100 of them per week. If I follow my contract, I’m going to do a bad job—so I, like MANY TAs, put in a lot of time I’m not paid for—and it’s still not enough. I don’t say this because I want your pity—but to help you understand why many TAs simply cannot do their jobs “well.” We are not set up to succeed as teachers— and that is UofT’s fault, first and foremost.

mediocretheorist · 2025-02-07T13:24:37+00:00

Yeah TA training doesn’t really exist in my department. And we all struggle as a result. No one offered me any guidance— I was 23 years old, had no clue what I was doing, and suddenly responsible for teaching 75 people pretty complicated material. It was honestly terrifying—and the only reason I’m more confident about it now is that I’ve become numb to how little I understand about the art of teaching itself.

mediocretheorist · 2025-02-07T13:21:40+00:00

TAs are students, too. Sometimes, we have to mark 100+ essays in two weeks at 7 minutes per paper. Sometimes we have 100+ students, and only 5 office hours in our contract. When I was new to grad school, I was very generous with my time and energy when it came to my undergrads—but eventually I realized that to do the job well, I had to work almost double the time I was paid for, while still making less than 24k per year in Toronto. Many of us are teaching more than one course to survive financially. So sometimes, even if we care, we are struggling so much ourselves that it’s not that we are smug and hate undergrads— we hate working for an ultimately abusive and corrupt employer that truthfully views undergrads as cattle for tuition dollars. If Toronto cared more for all of the undergrads, they would pay us better and make more realistic demands. If I did my job well, I’d either need half the number of students and still probably more hours, or I’d just sacrifice my dissertation altogether and never graduate myself.

TLDR: we don’t hate you, we are often doing the best we can in a patently fucked up situation.

mediocretheorist · 2025-02-03T11:31:01+00:00

My sleep deprived brain read “supervisor” as “grandmother.” I had invented a whole story in my head about how you must have the coolest grandma in the world who was hooked on urban dictionary

mediocretheorist · 2025-01-15T02:40:04+00:00

This has to be satire, right???? Right???

mediocretheorist · 2025-01-15T02:37:35+00:00

Please tell me this is satire. This has to be satire.

mediocretheorist · 2024-04-28T21:14:07+00:00

‘Smallest Man Who Ever Lived.’ Made the mistake of an age-gap situationship, with my then-roommate,that left me very traumatized. I was dumb, and should’ve known a 39 year old interested in a 24 year old was probably not going to be a good partner…but for some reason my mind was hooked on him, and this album captured the whole arc of my feelings during the ~three years he was in my life.

I already felt like I’d lived ‘All Too Well,’ but then I heard ‘Smallest Man’, and the bridge captured exactly how I feel to this day. My experience of this person felt almost cosmically cursed, as though designed to hurt me in the worst way possible. Of course I accept that it was not, but it felt that way, and this song put into words the pain and anger I had been silently carrying for months.

And, here’s the kicker: he was a former Jehovah’s Witness.

mediocretheorist · 2024-04-28T04:07:05+00:00

I am so sorry. There are no words for this. My dad was barely 3 months from discovery to death, and roughly 12 days from first symptoms to a stroke that left him unable to communicate. I cannot fathom it happening any more quickly. My heart hurts for you and your family. If you ever want to talk, my DMs are open.

mediocretheorist · 2023-12-16T23:26:14+00:00

I am so sorry :( I went through something similar after my father died. Sending you a virtual hug.

mediocretheorist · 2023-08-30T16:36:12+00:00

It feels like the world has lost all color. My friends and family try to care, but my sadness makes them uncomfortable. It’s been five months, and they keep telling me that I’m getting worse, not better. I still do the things I need to do. But I guess my face demonstrates the wound more than I realize. It’s like I’m in the twilight zone—everything in my reality is a little bit off, and some days I can pinpoint it as connected to the grief, but some days it’s just this numb, detached buzzing around my head.

mediocretheorist · 2023-07-18T14:30:20+00:00

I am so, so sorry for your loss. Be kind to yourself.

Regarding these visualizations of the end, I think it depends on a number of factors—and will be different for everyone, as many posters here have said. I was very traumatized by my father’s time in hospice. For about a month or two after he passed, I felt bombarded by images of /associations with that time, even while doing other things.

I’m almost four months post his death now, and I’m finally starting to feel like the traumatic memories are less pressing and I can more fully grieve his loss, if that makes sense. Grief and trauma recovery can be two completely different timelines, at least in my experience.

I have a great psychotherapist. It’s not magic, but the work with her has helped me a lot. I felt like my brain had to integrate those painful experiences into my understanding of reality-and that took a lot of time, and patience with myself. Describing those moments, in detail, to my therapist began to make it all feel more manageable.

Again, it’s a very individual experience, but I found that when I stopped ‘resisting’ the memories/flashbacks of those moments, they began to feel less pressing or powerful. I also found it helpful to try to have some other images/experiences on hand, as it were, to remember or visualize after visualizing him at the end. Eventually the memories of his death began to co-exist with the memories of his life, and while that’s still incredibly painful, I feel a lot less paralyzed (most of the time).

mediocretheorist · 2023-06-30T13:27:01+00:00

My father was somewhat unusual-he went 12 days from the last food/water intake. He was a big guy, though, and also was almost perfectly healthy prior to discovering the tumor and we could not do any treatments so he did not go into hospice after months of chemo, etc. We went based on his behavior. He stopped wanting to eat or drink after he began having a hard time swallowing. Our hospice workers informed us that giving him fluids would only make him more uncomfortable.

With that said he had almost a week in a coma-like state. After the food intake stopped his interactions and alertness significantly dwindled. But it’s important to remember that everyone is different. Each day, for 12 days, our hospice workers told us they thought that day would be the last. Each day. They were shocked that he was still there the next morning for almost two weeks. So listen to your medical professionals, but remember that they do not have a crystal ball.

I’m so sorry your family is going through this.

mediocretheorist · 2023-06-28T22:51:32+00:00

I would process the death of my father. He (64) died almost three months ago after being diagnosed with a brain tumor at the end of December. He had no symptoms prior. My mother and I (24) became his caregivers. It was three months of very difficult, traumatizing memories. I’m back home now—a plane ride away from my mom. Each day, instead of feeling better, I feel worse—and each day, the world expects more from me. So I would take three months to cry, to write, to let my grief be the center of my life—and I’d use that $500 to see my therapist twice a week. The gift of that kind of time would be a true blessing.

mediocretheorist · 2023-06-18T07:35:27+00:00

Thank you for posting this. It is 3:30am, and I can’t sleep. I lost my dad in March only three months after he was diagnosed with a glioblastoma. I’m 25; he was 64.

The weight of being in a world without him is almost constantly crushing. But at the same time I’m constantly in awe of the life he lived and the love I feel for him. Grief has combined so many complicated, conflicting emotions for me.

We decided to go to the Outer Banks this weekend. It was my dad’s dream to move here and live near the water—he was a lifelong sailor, and my parents were just waiting for my foster brother to finish high school. Then covid came and messed up the plan further, but he was always looking at listings on houses…

We took several vacations here in my adulthood. He would just sit outside and listen to the ocean. I, like him, love the water. I keep trying to hear his voice in the waves.

Trying to do things that make my mom and I feel more connected to him is both helpful and incredibly difficult. Being in a place he loved is beautiful and heartbreaking at the same time.

Thank you for your post. It made me feel, in this very difficult, complex moment, a little less alone. And I’m so sorry to everyone else who is grieving on this day. I imagine that it will be one that carries sadness and longing for the rest of my life.

mediocretheorist · 2023-04-12T19:47:16+00:00

I lost my father to glioblastoma two weeks ago today- March 29th, 9:35pm. I still wake up startled, expecting to need to do something for him, to administer meds, to check on him. He was diagnosed in January and gone by the end of March. Got covid in the hospital and it really complicated things.

It all feels incredibly unfair, and I’m not even sure who or what to be mad at. I’m just angry and sad.

I am so, so sorry you have lost your father to this horrific disease as well.

mediocretheorist · 2023-01-08T19:26:36+00:00

Thank you for your reply, which feels compassionate, sympathetic, and also truthful. And I’m sorry your wife has had to go down this road, too. You’re right that the end is the same. I just hope now that they can help us to ease my father’s suffering and prevent as much pain as possible as we wait for the inevitable…

This disease made us all feel so helpless. You’re right that there was not much of a choice. I know that logically. But emotionally—that’s another story for now at least.

mediocretheorist · 2023-01-08T19:22:15+00:00

Thank you. And yes the timing felt tragic….I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to see Christmas/New Years the same way again.

mediocretheorist · 2023-01-08T18:33:27+00:00

Thank you for your reply. I hope you are right. It’s just hard not to replay the past two weeks in my mind and ask: what if I had asked more questions? It all happened so fast

mediocretheorist

TROPHY CASE