Can we have some college rants?

The BBQ Pit
1

Mine are from the perspective of the student. Teachers, TAs, and really anyone else is welcome to join.

I’m currently going back to school for a bachelor’s in IS, and mostly I love it - but I do have some complaints.

  • What is with professors that provide seemingly no way for a good student to get help? They say “E-mail me if you need help.” So…the assignment is due Sunday. I e-mail them on the previous Tuesday with a detailed layout of everything I have done to this point, notes on where I got stuck, notes on where I tried to look in the book to get answers, and a request for help. The prof? Does not get back to me until the following Monday. Not even a comment like “I’m busy this week…Turn in your work on Sunday and I’ll see what I can do,” just no response at all until Monday.

  • One of my assignments was due, say, on 11-1. On 11-1, no one has turned in the assignment. I post mine. Two weeks go by and no one has posted the assignment. Finally at the end of two weeks one other person posts theirs! But the professor is not going to mark any of them late. I wouldn’t care - I can only control my own behavior - but the fact is the assignment has two parts. 1., post your assignment. 2., review two other people’s assignments. I can’t do the second part of my assignment until they post theirs, and you are not even going to take points off their lateness? Why did I bother being on time then?

  • Group projects. Ok, I go to a school that is specifically meant for adult and returning students. We have a few young ones but very few. Most people are in the workforce and have been for years. We’ve been doing group projects all our lives. We don’t need to be trained anymore. I have a group project in two of my classes. I have a good group in one, except for one woman, who needed her hand held on how to do basic research and was shocked SHOCKED! to find out she had to do slides for the powerpoint. Um, professor said it a hundred times? Do you just zone out in class?

  • Speaking of which, our classes are infrequent. Mostly the classes are online. So one of my classes only meets once a month…at that point, why are we subjected to the very same powerpoint presentations the professor posted online? We should be discussing those, maybe doing some in-class activity related to those. This is college - the expectation is you read the powerpoints and the associated chapters.

  • And I had a professor change the dates on the syllabus this semester (because of those late assignment people above). In theory this is a good thing. But really, it’s not. I am a good planner. I plan my next couple weeks out in advance. Changing the dates totally threw me off. Grr…I read the syllabus, and I also mark out all the important dates for the whole semester in my planner. It’s how I stay organized!

I guess I had a lot. It’s been a tough semester. Feel free to add your own!

2

Could you not call him/her or go in during his/her office hours?

3

IMHO, all of Anaamika’s gripes, including that one, are perfectly legitimate; but yeah, sometimes an email does get lost in the shuffle, and if you haven’t heard back in a day or two, it makes sense to follow it up with another email, or a phone call, or an in-person visit, or something.

4

In my syllabus I say I will acknowledge every email within 24 hours, M-F (even to say that I’m busy and will get back to them soon), so if they don’t hear from me, they need to contact me again. I also require they use the University email, as personal email (like hotmail etc) can end in my spam folder and I’ll never see it. That said- emails do get lost and having the student send a second one out after 24 hours is a good back up. One week later with no explanation- not good.

Late work should be marked late, unless there is a policy saying otherwise.

Changing dates in the syllabus willy-nilly- not cool. I won’t do it except in extreme situations.

5

He doesn’t have any office hours. I actually did follow up with an e-mail on Friday, and he still didn’t get back to me until Monday. He apologized in the e-mail, but by then I had already struggled through the assignment and submitted it.

6

I’m a grad student. I just had a committee meeting today.

I win.

7

I hear ya, Anaamika! I am currently in group work hell in both of my classes.

Dear Professor H.:

  • Please post the 30+ page assignment more than 4 days before it is due. My “team” refuses to start work until they know exactly what needs to be done, and 4 days isn’t enough time to competently do everything you want, even if the rest of my “team” knew what they were doing.

  • Please provide feedback sometime before the end of the quarter. If we aren’t doing things the way you want, we need to know sometime before the final project (constituting over half of our grade) is due.

  • Please, for the love of Og, don’t lecture by reading the bullets on your powerpoint. You want to know why nobody comes to class? This. Give examples. Expand on your thoughts. Answer questions by doing more than re-reading the bullet.

  • Don’t expect the students to do your teaching for you, and then get upset when we don’t make the point you want us to. Having us draw diagrams on the board and then trying to explain them when we have no fucking clue what you’re getting at just makes all of us frustrated.

  • When I tell you I have to miss class to have surgery, I want you to tell me what I need to do to make up missed exercises. I do not want you to offer to pray for me.

Kthxbai!

8

When I was a university student, you know what bothered me a lot? When I was in the computer lab, and I desperately needed access to a computer because I needed to print out an assignment that was due at the beginning of the next class, the class being in 5 minutes’ time and on the other side of campus. All computers were taken, and some of the students were playing with Facebook and MSN messenger instead of even doing real work.

Yes, MSN Messenger was the big thing back then. Shows you how long ago I was a student. :stuck_out_tongue:

Other things that bothered me, being a music student, included people leaving chewed gum wads on the music stands, and picking their noses and wiping the boogers on the practice room walls. Seriously, I don’t think there were many practice rooms with absolutely no boogers on the walls. Did the students think nobody would notice?

9

[Bolding mine] I think that anybody who would do that did so because they wanted it to be noticed.

10

I just finished my second degree (this one in game design) a little less than a year ago. It was mostly a very good experience. Except for one teacher. Tim.

Tim would lecture by putting the subject’s Wikipedia entry the over-head projector, and reading it to us.

Tim once forced half the class to restart their final project for his networking class, from scratch, two weeks before it was due, because we didn’t follow specifications he admitted he didn’t tell us about.

The first half of any class Tim taught would invariably be spent waiting for Tim to figure out why his example wouldn’t compile

Tim once taught a class called “Working with Motion Capture Data” that, at no point, ever featured any motion capture data.

When a student was having a problem with their code that Tim couldn’t answer (which was pretty much any time a student had a problem with their code) he’d tell them to Google it. At the end of the term, it took an intervention by the department chair to keep Tim from flunking half his class for “plagiarism,” because we’d used code samples we’d found online to get our projects working.

I didn’t have too many gripes about other students, after making allowances for the fact that they were mostly fresh out of high school and still pretty much kids. Although the kid who failed to do any assignments for six months because “My computer is broken!” and then was legitimately shocked that he was about to be flunked out of school was a bit hard to take.

11

One major private university has a MS program which is a profit center for them. Everyone in it takes the same courses. I get flooded with resumes of those with a good GPA.
Everyone one of these resumes is identical except for name, the last digit of the GPA, and sometimes being a TA. The project descriptions are the same. The bad formatting of the resumes is the same.

When you get 20 identical resumes over two days you basically delete all of them, since I sure as hell aren’t going to call all 20 and there is no reason to call any particular one.

If I ever see a different resume from this program, I’ll probably get into contact with that person for exhibiting some degree of creativity.

And no, I have no evidence that the graduating class is not all clones.

12

Sounds very similar to my nemesis, Dr. Jack. Some of his ratemyprofessors reviews bring me PTSD-style flashbacks:

13

I graduated in 1991, but I’m still hot about this, so I’ll share. :smiley:

I majored in Public Relations at a really good Journalism school. In my final PR class for my major, we were taught by Prof. Mad Men, who had his own advertising agency on Madison Avenue back in the day. He was revered as a Diety of advertising and PR and his main philosophy was to teach you how adv/PR works in The Real World®. This school was on a quarter system – ten weeks per quarter plus one week for finals.

Beginning of the quarter, we get a syllabus. The class met every day for an hour. We would have a daily assignment – usually half a page of something to turn in. There was also usually a weekly assignment of something more along the lines of 5-10 pages, due on Fridays. Then there were the mid-term and final papers: minimum 40 pages each. The midterm was a PR proposal for anything we wanted to promote (I picked a crappy garage band and made up a plan to make them bajillionaire pop stars). The final was the financial proposal – how you would pay for your PR proposal.

That quarter, I happened to be taking some other classes where it would wind up with all of my finals or final papers being due pretty much on the first day of Finals Week. Which would be nice, 'cause then I’d have a free week to party, but that last weekend before the Monday Everything In the World Was Due… OMG.

So on Monday of the last week of class – seven days before that last 40+ page paper would be due, Prof. Mad Men throws us a curveball. He explains that he’s going to Maui for Spring Break and wouldn’t be around to accept or grade our papers on the day the final exam was scheduled. So he was moving up the due date to the last day of class, which was in 4 days… on Friday. :eek: I freaked the fuck out. While I hadn’t procrastinated anything – all papers due had been started, research done, etc., I had an extremely tight schedule that week because all my finals and final papers were due on Monday or Tuesday. And now the biggest one was due a week early. No physical way that was going to be possible without cheating.

So I went to his office and cried hardship. And he gave me the answer I was expecting: If he made the change for me, he’d have to make it for everyone. And in The Real World® sometimes your client moves up deadlines and you have to adapt and make it happen. Too bad, so sad, figure it out.

Okay, but the syllabus is like a contract (with that analogy) and AFAIC, Prof. Mad Men was in breach of contract.

So I went over his head, to the director of the J-school. I showed him my syllabi (all my classes, so he could see I wasn’t just making shit up), and explained what Prof. Mad Men had said and begged to be allowed to turn my paper in to the J-school Dean’s office on the scheduled Final Exam day, as the syllabus stated. Director said he’d talk to Prof. Mad Men and would get back to me. I wander off to work.

About 15 minutes later, I get a call from Prof. Mad Men, “You’re going to get what you want, Dogzilla. But I have to remind you, in The Real World®, when you go over somebody’s head, sometimes that hurts you more than helps you.” Which was a thinly veiled warning that my grade would suffer because I had done this. I got a C on the paper and a B in the class. On the first day of class, he told us if we didn’t earn an A in his class, we’d have no business practicing public relations professionally. (He was right. I can’t promote things that go against my core values. Just. Can’t.)

So, to the rant (Prof. Mad Men is now dead):

Dear Professor Mad Men:
Yes, you are so clever and that was a very valuable real-life lesson. Sometimes, your client really does fuck you up. But you know what doesn’t happen? If you pull people off other assignments to get help (all hands on deck!), that’s not counted as cheating or plagiarism and the end result still counts and is perfectly acceptable and deliverable to the client. If I had asked my friends for help with that paper, you would have failed me for cheating. In The Real World®, I would be able to call other clients and re-assign my other work and shift things around in order to meet the deliverable. In fact, I’ve done both of these things in real life. But none of my other professors would have accepted that and my Sociology professor certainly wasn’t going to reschedule his final exam (that I still had to study for) to accommodate your trip to Maui. And finally, you didn’t go to fucking Maui. I talked to a friend who took the same class the following quarter and he told me you did the same thing, only you claimed to be going to Jamaica that time. You pulled that exact same bullshit on every single class and you never once had any intention of actually accepting papers on the day of the final. I’m not quite sure how you got away with consistently lying on your syllabus, but the Dean must have been in on your game. Also, I bet you had at least one student like me each quarter who had legitimate reasons why your eleventh-hour schedule change was impossible. And I also bet you screwed every last one of us.

Fuck you and your 1950s style of corporate bullshit. The way you taught us the world works? It doesn’t work that way anymore. Nice try, but most of your classes turned out to be somewhat useless in The Real World®. There’s a reason the dinosaurs went extinct.

14

From a professor:

I gave every student full info and warnings on plagiarism on the first day of class. They took a quiz. We went over examples. They signed a statement. I’ve got the warnings and the consequences in my syllabus. I’ve told them what’s happened in the past. Told 'em that if they’re caught once, I will not allow a rewrite and will report the offense to the Student Life office. If they’re caught again, they will face a suspension hearing or possibly an expulsion. I told them repeatedly that I use the same internet that they do, and if they can find something online, I can find it as well. I said specifically NOT to copy and paste papers from websites, even pieces of papers from various websites, into their blank documents and pretend they wrote them on their own.

And what happened? Yep–I have had half a dozen cases of plagiarism, with the offenders doing exactly what I told them NOT to do. One bought an online paper for twenty bucks. Another swiped an online essay with another professor’s name on it and turned it in without even changing that name to mine , not that I wouldn’t have caught it anyway. And so on.

Now I wonder why our department/division wants us to spend so much time and energy warning people not to do what they already know is wrong and some are just going to try it anyway. I know–it’s insurance; we have to put it in the syllabus so students can’t claim they weren’t warned. :rolleyes:

15

Yes, the way that students plagiarize really boggles the mind. I had one student who plagiarized at the beginning of the semester. I blamed myself for not specifically outlining the policy regarding plagiarism. I allowed the student to redo her assignment, then spent an entire class talking about plagiarism - what it is and what would happen if they did it. I tried to drive home the fact that it is REALLY FUCKING OBVIOUS when a student plagiarizes. And then at the end of the semester the SAME STUDENT plagiarized an entire essay off the internet. She didn’t even try to change any of it. And that isn’t even the worst part. When I gave her an F she lodged a formal complaint with the school saying her grade was unfair. I had to go back in (after vacation had started) and fill out a ton of paperwork justifying the grade I had given her.

Nowadays I teach at a high school and one of my colleagues had a similar experience. He told the student in question that if he ever plagiarized again, he would make it his personal mission to write to all the colleges the student applies to and tell them that this student was a liar and a cheat. The student signed a contract saying he understood. And then he did it again after a few months.

16

My college screwed me out of graduation – I had all my requirements save only one class – and they stopped offering it – and wouldn’t allow me to substitute.

(They also misled me as to what classes I required, because the university and the department had not coordinated their requirements lists. I was using the university-level list as my check-list, and it was off – by one class – from the department list. Damn!)

The most useful thing I learned there, I think, was “Bureaucratic Procedures 510.”

17

I was in an MBA program at a very expensive private university. The class was assigned a group assignment.

The professor was one of these guys that would throw out jargon just to try to impress the class. A real asshole.

Our group does the assignment and gets it back with a less than perfect grade. Yet, nothing had been marked up. We had no idea what it was that we did or didn’t do that was either incorrect or didn’t warrant a top grade.

Fuck that bastard and the rip-off he was perpetrating. I doubt that he even read the thing. It wasn’t perfect bound with gold lettering so it probably didn’t meet his standard of bullshit.

18

Something I’ve always thought would be a good idea are print-only stations made up of older computers. You’d walk up to them, plug in your flash drive (faster than logging in most cases), choose a file, and then it would be set to print at the printer. These stations would not require all that much maintenance if designed properly, being completely locked down save for the print function.

Of course, the better option would be for teachers to stop requiring you to actually print out your work. We’re to the point where you can handle something electronically almost as easily as if it were a hard copy. Just review the paper on your tablet, allowing you to make marks on it just like you would in any other case.

19

The most central library at my college had these or something pretty close to it. I don’t think they were totally locked down, but they had a five minute limit and no chairs.

20

Professor checking in here - I teach graduate students, master’s and doctoral at a flagship state university.

I see you’re enrolled in an online program. The solution to this is to make it known that the turnaround for responses isn’t working for you. Something like “Prof. X, I love the class and I’m learning a lot, but is there a better way to get in touch when I need assistance? Sometimes email doesn’t seem to be fast enough,” etc. You’re gently chiding him/her for not being more prompt AND inviting another method. I have actually given my cell number to students (the good ones) who need extra assistance. Or even make a point of turning around those emails quicker. I saw IvoryTowerDenizen’s response, and I simply can’t respond that quickly given the volume of emails I receive daily (about 250). However, I tell students that if they need something, they should be persistent in getting back to me, including judicious use of the exclamation point thingy on email and “I need a response by…” sentences in the email.

I’m like this a little. I don’t get excited about papers being turned in at 4 pm on Monday. If you get it to me at 5, it’s no big deal. Now, if it’s two days late and you haven’t reached out explaining what’s going on, you get the stinkeye (and a grade reduction). And I grade assignments turned in on time first.

I think you need to give the prof feedback about this very issue. Generally if it doesn’t affect you, my attitude is “why should you care?” But as you need to see the other assignments it sets you back. Prof needs to know that’s a problem. Personally, I want people to tell me when there’s a problem before the semester evaluation. It’s kind of a waste if something isn’t working and you don’t say anything 'til the end. (I mean, you can improve it next semester, but it might be something that can be fixed now.)

Dirty secret about group projects… profs love 'em because it’s less grading. There’s also the idea that it’s collaborative learning, sparks discussion, etc. etc. But it’s a reality of higher ed, and the best you can do is be normal in groups, but be a stickler for deadlines and be a clear communicator. I have my groups meet to discuss communication preferences, personality types, schedules, and pet peeves before they start - and I recommend that anyone working in group do exactly that. Sometimes it’s easier to have someone be the powerpoint person, versus having people who have no idea sticking their fingers in it. She can be the spokesperson.

Does the prof state that this is the expectation? In my classes, I use the readings as a starting point, and supplement the readings with my rants and observations (and those from respected voices in the field). The students then generate questions and observations from this. Sadly, given the nature of your program, I suspect your classmates aren’t doing this. Again, this would be good feedback for the prof and to find out what his/her expectations are. Then you’re pointing out that you are preparing for class and find it wasteful to review things you’ve already done.

Does this preclude you from doing the assignments as you planned to? I know there’s another component for you to do, but you have the benefit of getting it done ahead of time. No need to shift your part of preparing because of this.

But seriously, you have lots of good feedback for your prof. I would ask if you can have an appointment to discuss. My students are pretty open, but occasionally I get a course eval back and say, “Why didn’t this student tell me that this wasn’t working during the semester?”