TA student issues -- how to have more authority?

Hello, I'm a new Teaching Assistant at a university. I am having issues with some of my students. They seem to get very agitated whenever I return them papers to them with my comments written down on them. I don't think I make comments that are far off the mark. One student actually came to me to "complain" about my comments. I reread the paper and my comments, and I still stood firm with what I wrote. This happened even when I gave them good grades. When I write comments, I usually mean to be helpful, just so that students can further improve the paper. I do not know why they are getting angry about them. I wonder if I should stop writing comments. It's time consuming process for me that I would rather do without.





I'm generally nice and I try to listen to my students -- at least that's what I think. I feel being taken advantage of.





Can you please give me suggestions as to how to handle these students and how to improve my authority over them?

TA student issues -- how to have more authority?
If I were you, I'd just stop writing comments. They usually either don't read them or get upset by them, but I hardly ever see improvement due to the comments. Just tell them, when you're handing stuff back, that they are free to ask you about why they got the grade they did.





And don't worry - that's not much of a 'bucking authority' problem. I've actually had to threaten to fail my students during labs just to get them to behave.