Social Sciences TA Matching Tips & Guidelines

General Info for both Graduate Students and Instructors

The matching uses a variation of the Stable Marriage algorithm, with some additional tweaks for our needs in Social Sciences.
If you are an instructor/student pair and you want to guarantee that you will work together, you should know that the algorithm will be guaranteed to match you to each other as long as you both meet these requirements:
1. The course will even be assigned any TAs at all. (Many do not.) Usually that just means it has a large enough class size.
2. The graduate student, through the myapps Apply for a TA-ship application, chooses the instructor's course as their #1 choice of their 10.
3. The instructor, through the myapps Submit My TA Preferences application, chooses the TA as their #1 choice for that course. (Instructors have to fill out separate TA preference rankings for each course.)
Regardless of how the algorithm assigns matches, sometimes it is still overridden.
- Departments do override the matching algorithm each quarter, but only in a great minority of cases, and for a variety of exceptional reasons which mostly involve keeping everyone happy.
- If you think there is an issue which would prevent you entirely from working with the course/instructor or graduate student to which you were assigned, then you can check with the graduate advisor (John S) -- as soon as possible after the assignments have been announced each quarter -- to understand what happened. (But it is best to express any extreme aversions to John directly, in advance of matching.)

Tips for Instructors

Sometimes instructors wonder why they did not get the TA they wanted. Check the following:

See the General Info section above, item #2 ("If you are an instructor/student pair..").
- Did you fill out your preferences with the myapps Submit My TA Preferences application (Steps 4 and 5)? In the past, instructors have occasionally not even filled out the app, and thought that just speaking to the TA would accomplish what they wanted, but it didn't. You need to fill out the app, and express your TA choices/preferences in it.
- In filling out the app, did you make that TA your #1 choice?
- Did you speak with the TA to see if they wanted you enough to rank you #1?
- If you did, and they said yes, is it still possible they have been put into a situation would make it uncomfortable for them, or difficult or even impossible to say, "No" to you, so they had to say, "Yes", but when they actually applied, they ranked another course higher than yours? (Please be sensitive to their situation: In our experience this has happened more often than you might think.)
Is it possible that both you and the TA chose each other #1, but another instructor overrode your choices via a departmental override?

Tips for Graduate Students

From within the courses taught during your available schedule you provide to the app in Step 2, there are 3 groups of courses you may be assigned to, according to how you fill out your TAAPP application. The algorithm tries to get you your highest preference from the first group of courses. If it can't, it tries for a course for you in the 2nd group. If even those courses don't work, then the algorithm picks something for you from the 3rd. The 3 groups are these:
1. The first range is the 10 undergraduate courses (within your schedule) that you pick and rank in Steps 3 and 4. The algorithm tries to get you one of these first. The vast majority of students get in their top 5. (See my 2006 study of the stats on this.)
2. If the algorithm cannot fit you in one of your top 10 preferred courses, then it will try to match you to a course in one of the departments/areas you specified in Step 6. This happens infrequently, but when it has to, at least the algorithm has matched you to a course in a general subject area you expressed interest in.
3. If the algorithm still cannot match you to a course in one of the first two groups above, then it will try to match you to any remaining course taught in Social Sciences next quarter which still matches your schedule. This is much rarer, but still occasionally happens.
It is best if you leave your schedule (Step 2) as wide open as possible, to give yourself the widest range of courses in all three groups above.

I am the programmer of the myapps portal and the TA matching infrastructure. Please contact me with any questions, suggestions, requests, or ideas: Jeff Stern jas@uci.edu 824-2326

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