Newly elected GPSC representatives said they want to help teaching assistants they consider to be overburdened by paying them more and reducing required teaching hours.

First-year and last-year graduate students should be exempted from teaching requirements, said newly elected Graduate and Professional Student Council representative Karen Sweazea in her campaign statement.

She said this would allow first-year students to adjust to graduate student life and would allow students in their last year of study to concentrate on their theses and dissertations.

Sweazea also said minimum and maximum working hours should be set for TAs, to make it easier for them to determine how much time they should be putting into their teaching requirements.

Issues involving overworked teaching and research assistants have been ongoing since at least 1999, said Kirsten Copeland, president of the Graduate and Professional Student Council.

Copeland said the university administration adds sections of general education classes to meet demand of undergraduate students, and the departments must provide the TAs needed to teach the new sections.

In the past, TAs have been so overworked that they were teaching 30 to 40 hours a week while also taking classes, Copeland said.

Tight budgets in the departments can prevent TAs from getting paid for the work they do, causing TAs working 40 hours a week to get paid for only 20, she said.

Copeland said the hours worked by a TA include time spent out of class grading assignments.

"Studies on teaching assistant salaries, benefits and workload comparing the University of Arizona with peer institutions should be conducted, as I believe is done for the faculty," said Avnish Kapoor, a newly elected GPSC representative for the College of Agriculture.

He said TA working conditions should be reviewed and adjusted annually on the basis of these studies so that TAs get paid fairly.

Last year, GPSC pressured the Legislature to provide departments with $1.5 million to alleviate this problem.

The Legislature approved the GPSC proposal, agreeing to pay UA $1.05 million last fall and pay the additional $450,000 in the spring semester.

When the Legislature cut $15.8 million from the UA budget last December, graduate students lost the $450,000.

Dorian Voorhees, assistant dean of the graduate college, said no TAs lost their jobs as a result of the cuts.

She said the college is working to use federal work-study funds to replace the $450,000 lost. She said this money is not usually used for students at the graduate level, but hopes it will help increase stipends for TAs.

Copeland said the $1.05 million was given to individual departments at the university. The money was used to hire more TAs to lessen the workload of current TAs.

Maite Correa, a graduate TA working toward a master's degree in Spanish, said she does not think the workload is very high but that other graduate students thought their workload was challenging.

Correa said she has to correct a lot of papers for her classes. This semester, she is teaching Spanish 202 and Spanish 251.

She said graduate TAs in the department of Spanish and Portuguese are required to teach three classes per year.

Copeland said the most obvious problems have been taken care of, but there still may be overworked TAs at UA. However, she also noted that the problems would probably happen anyway.

"It's one of those 'the squeaky wheel gets the grease' things," she said. "If departments aren't squeaking, it's assumed that they're okay."