"By saying that we have to be [polished teachers] when we're just starting to TF may be threatening that aspect of our learning process," he says.

And like Undergraduate Council members, graduate students wonder if the new training guidelines are the best thing for undergraduate education.

"I'm not sure what's going to be accomplished," says Margaret Kim, a third-year graduate student in the Department of English and American Literature and Languages.

"Of course it's an important goal to enhance teaching and to ensure that everyone has gotten the proper training before they start taching," she says, "but I don't think this plan will have much effect in my field."

According to Malaguti, the flexibility of the TF training and screening plan could hurt undergraduates.

Malaguti says TF screening done by a faculty member may not be effective because "it is very difficulty for the teacher to put him or herself in the position of [an undergraduate] student."

"In some departments the professors try to protect their graduate students-each department has its own particular problem," he says.

Many graduate students say they're not even sure how large the problem of ineffective TFs really is.

One M.D./Ph.D. graduate student in the bio-physics department says that, as a Harvard undergraduate, he found TFs "are generally quite adequate, and they're especially helpful one-on-one."

But the student, who graduated with a joint degree in Chemistry and physics in 1989, acknowledges that his American Born TFs were usually more comprehensibel than his foreign-born instructors.

The graduate student says: "The TFs that spoke English better I understood better and I got more out of the learning experience from them."