That TF in your Core class last semester wasn't really pulled off the street in front of the Coop, despite what you may have thought about her performance in section.

She was carefully scrutinized to determine her competence, administrators say.

Nevertheless, Harvard adminstrators acknowledge that the process of hiring teaching fellows can continue into even the fourth week of any given class.

Because of varying enrollments in some classes, professors say they are often left scrambling to find extra section leaders well after their courses have begun to meet.

So some end up hiring unprepared TFs who suffer through the semester with a section or two full of undergraduates--who themselves are suffering under their guidance.

Last week the Faculty Council adopted a new set of guidelines for appointing teaching fellows. The new guidelines were long overdue, according to the graduate students and administrators who spearheaded the effort.

The guidelines, the grad students and administrators say, will begin to structure formally a process that has plagued professors and teaching fellows, semester after semester.

Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Christoph J. Wolff presented the guidelines to the Faculty Council Wednesday.

"We generated these guidelines as a response to complaints that were made to the Graduate Student Council," Wolff said in an interview yesterday. "We came up with these guidelines hopefully to provide a first step towards creating a more logical, helpful process."

Helpful to whom? Wolff says it is graduate students who need the most help because they are the most victimized by the current process. The problem, Wolff says, is that too many graduate students, who rely on income from their teaching assignments, begin the semester not knowing whether they will be employed.

"The graduate students will benefit from this because it would enable them to begin their financial planning early," Wolff says. "Hopefully by the spring they will know whether or not they'll be section leaders in a certain course in the fall."

Wolff says that happier and more financially secure graduate students will provide undergraduates with a higher caliber of teaching.

"Graduate students would have the summer to think about their assignments and prepare to teach, so their performances would be better," Wolff predicts.

"I expect undergraduates to see the results of these guidelines immediately in the fall," Wolff adds.

But some question how beneficial the changes will be to teaching fellows and their students.