Teaching fellows, like undergraduates, have reservations about the new compromise plan. But their concerns don't center around the need for a uniform standard to keep teaching quality universally high.

Instead, many graduate students say that the new, flexible departmental rules could be used to attack TFs.

"There are some departments in which professors are out to get students," says Andrea Malaguti, a graduate students in the department of Romance Languages and Literatures. "Some professors would like to screen their TFs every day just to find flaws in their preparation."

Andrew Robertson, a second-year graduate student in the History of Science department, says he fears that a flexible system with standards differing between departments could be used against some TFs and to the benefit of others.

"But that could also happen under the present system of no rules," he adds.

Robertson says another issue of concern with the imposition of new standards is the limited number of available TFs.

"They can't start setting standards too high or some departments will run out of `qualified' TFs and they won't be able to teach some classes," he says.

TFs also say that the complaints undergraduates have about foreign TFs do not all stem from real language problems.

Xenophobia and racism can also play a part in undergraduates' dismissal of teachers from other countries, graduate students say.

"There are always going to be some people who aren't going to make the effort to understand what someone's saying," Robertson says. "Frankly, there is an element of racism that is just barely being covered up by the excuse of student's interests."

Graduate Student Coordinator for the Mathematics Department Donna R. D'Fini says some of the problems students have with their section leaders result from undergraduates' prejudices.

"A lot of students use their TF's accent as an excuse not to do their best work," D'Finisays. "Some students concentrate on the accent, not on the math."

TFs also bring up another concern: the education of graduate students. TFs say novice section leaders are learning the skills that will make them better teachers in the future.

"Departments use discussion sections as a pedagogic tool for graduate students," Robertson says. "The point of doing this for a lot of graduate students is to teach them how to teach in the future."

Testing graduate students' teaching skills before they even enter a classroom may be to the detriment of the graduate students' education's, Robertson says.