You are right that the suggestion of the TA does not work. Using that approach one will accept $\{\; a^n b^i c^k d^\ell \mid 5n = i+j+\ell \;\}$. We can force the PDA to make $i$ and $j$ even, but that will not help much.
Of course this does not prove that there is no PDA for the language $K = \{\;a^nb^{2n}c^{2n}d^n \mid n\ge 1\;\}$ : another clever technique might work.
Recall that $L = \{\;a^nb^nc^n\mid n\ge 1\;\}$ is a very similar language, known not te be context-free. Hence it is intuitively clear that also your language is not context-free.
To formally show that one might use the direct approach and use the pumping lemma for CF languages to show it is not context-free. Alternatively one may use closure properties of the context-free languages to show that if $K$ is context-free then so is $L$ (leading to a contradiction). Informally the language operations you need would be halving the number of $b$'s and $c$'s and deleting the $d$'s. Formally those can be "implemented" by homomorphisms and their inverses. Those operations map letters to words.