Case Study

Dr Abdul was one of the most popular professors at his university. Students couldn't wait to take his courses. One year, there were so many students on the waiting list to get into his course that the department decided to double the class size. Dr Abdul didn't mind, but he knew that he would need more teaching assistants (TAs) to help with the grading of assignments and exams. Although he was given two TAs, the larger class size meant that much more time was needed to get exams and assignments graded. Unfortunately, final grades had to be submitted one week after the final exam. The two TAs had taken too long to mark tests and exams during the term, and Dr Abdul was concerned that he would not be able to submit the final grades by the deadline. In an attempt to speed things up, he decided to set a challenging goal for the TAs. He asked them to mark 50 exams each day. The TAs told Dr Abdul that this might not be possible because they had several exams themselves. Regardless, Dr Abdul told them to each mark 50 exams a day and to return the graded exams to him the day before final grades were due. Dr Abdul was pleased when the TAs arrived at his office with the graded exams right on time. "You finished them all?" he asked. "We sure did," said one of the TAs, "It was no problem." "Wonderful" said Dr Abdul, "How did they do?" "Very good" said one of the TAs, "They must have really enjoyed your class." After the students left his office, Dr Abdul began to review the exams before calculating final grades. To his dismay, he realized that many of the grades were the same for every question, and some of the questions had not even been graded. The professor was furious and realized that his two TAs had done a poor job and that he would now have to stay at his office all night to re-mark the exams himself. "Ah, students today" he said to himself. "What am I going to do?" *

Question 3. Use goal setting theory to explain why setting goals for the TAs was not very effective and how it could have been more effective.