Foreign-Born Teaching Assistants and Student Achievement : An Ordered Probit Analysis

This paper deals with a wide spread perception that foreign-born teaching assistants (FBTA) have an adverse effect on American undergraduate students. The maximum likelihood technique is used to arrive at an unbiased and efficient estimate of the grade function. It is demonstrated that while the FBTA appears to have an adverse effect on the academic performance of American students, the effect does not seem to be due to the lack of language proficiency of the FBTA. Furthermore, the adverse effect is not uniform among students with different performance levels in the course and is absent in more rigorous classes