[staff-physics-and-astronomy-HL-UHD-UD] [VWP-l] TA deployment policy '26/'27 Physics & Astronomy Bachelor Program

[Broedersz, C.P. (Chase)]

Dear colleagues,

We are proud to run the top-ranked program in the country, and we are committed to preserving both its high academic standards and its positive atmosphere. At the same time, we are facing some important challenges. We need to continue to address the financial losses we are currently experiencing and prepare for a likely decline in student numbers due to demographic changes.

Last year, I outlined a stepwise approach to reducing the program’s costs, and together we took an important first step. Now it is time to continue building on that progress. With this email, I would like to share the student TA hiring policy for the coming year.

There is a great deal at stake, and we fully recognize that these are not easy steps. We sincerely appreciate your understanding and cooperation as we move forward together in implementing these measures. Thank you for your continued efforts and commitment.

Tutorials and TA deployment

1.Group size = 25-30   Last year, we increased tutorial group sizes to around 25 students, and in most cases this has worked well. At the same time, we still see instances where groups become quite small—sometimes even dropping below 10 students, particularly after the initial decline in attendance. Unfortunately, this is not something we can sustain. Our aim is for tutorial groups to have approximately 25–30 students present, and we ask course coordinators to help maintain this throughout the course.

It is also important to keep in mind that a significant fraction of registered students do not attend, and that attendance often drops after the first one or two weeks. We are happy to support you in estimating expected group size. Please feel free to reach out to me and Joris Peters for this.

One practical approach is to plan for an additional group in the first one or two weeks, which can be run by staff or PhD students, and then consolidate groups as attendance stabilizes. Where needed, small groups can be merged, and any unused room reservations can be cancelled. If this leads to PhD TAs becoming available, we would greatly appreciate it if you could let us know as soon as possible so they can be deployed where they are most needed.

2.Tutorials are predominantly run by staff or PhD students – Last year, we were able to reduce the number of student TA hours by 35%. Thank you for your efforts in making this possible. To continue this progress, we will need to further refine and sharpen our TA deployment policy.

In the academic year 26’/27’ we will implement the following policy:

-Third-year classes are no longer allowed to hire student TAs.
-Second-year classes are expected to run at least 60% of their tutorials by staff or PhD students.
-First year classes should aim to run at least 30% of their tutorials by staff or PhD students.
-Honor’s courses cannot hire student TAs.

-The Tutoraat, KMSRT, PVLO, Practical’s (all years) and “Reflectie op Natuurkunde” may hire more student TAs as an exception, as it is challenging to staff your tutorials with Dutch speaking PhDs with the necessary expertise and background. But, we still do ask you kindly to try to use PhDs and staff members as much as possible.

If you hire student TAs, please critically consider how many hours you employ them for. I will be in touch with relevant course coordinators with new guidelines on student TA hours, as we are using more hours per course EC for student TAs than other programs. Of course, their workload may have to be adjusted accordingly.

Also, please help to further streamline the system to deploy available PhD students within your institute and enable PhD students to also TA in courses coordinated from staff from other institutes. In practice, we see that it is not sufficient to only depend on the availability of PhD students in your own institute. We have also seen very positive results with staff members who run tutorials and we need to increase these efforts. It’s a great opportunity to interact more directly with our students.

3.Tutorials should be active and interactive – Tutorial’s become much more valuable when students are stimulated to actively participate and to interact. Please encourage the people in charge of your tutorials to use active learning methods (think of blended learning, flipped classroom, quizzes, group assignments etc). I understand this is extra challenging with a bigger group. Tutorials where students are passively doing homework with a TA that is available for questions has limited added value. We will devote time to this topic in the teacher’s meeting on May 19.

4. No external’s -  We cannot hire external people.

5. Room reservations - Book rooms that match the size of the group of actively participating students. If you no longer need a room, cancel the reservation.

I realize that these new guidelines may place additional demands on our staff and PhD students. The teaching coordination team will do its utmost to keep everything running smoothly and to preserve the high standards and positive teaching atmosphere of our program. We truly appreciate your commitment and the effort you put into making this work.
Best wishes,
Chase

-------------------------------------
Prof. dr. Chase Broedersz
University Research Chair Professor
Theoretical Physics of Life
Program Director Physics and Astronomy BSc JD
VU Amsterdam - Research building 4B-145
Group website<http://broederszgroup.com/> <http://broederszgroup.com/>


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