Reference Letters and TAs

I am finding more and more that students that I have never met are asking me for letters of reference. These are students who have attended my lectures, but have never had me as a seminar leader. These students have gone through their university careers instructed mostly by part-time contract employees. So they are in an awkward situation when it comes to requesting reference letters as the part-timers tend to be transient and anyway their lack of academic qualifications weakens the authoritativeness of their recommendation letters.

Undoubtedly the quality of education these students have received is inferior to that that students I taught in my early years at Brock received when classes were much smaller and direct interaction with tenured faculty was more the norm. This is a serious concern and a source of considerable regret to me.