IANAP, but my spouse is a Bio-Statistics Professor in a medical school. She appreciates most of her students, but I’ve heard her complain about the following:
Students who routinely cut class, then come to office hour and demand that she teach them enough to pass the test.
Students who cheat.
Students who flirt during lecture.
Students whose only interest is test questions, not the subject itself.
Students who miss an exam on some flimsy excuse, then demand that the Department create a make-up test for them.
Two medical students who once asked for extra time on a big exam. They had arrived late because they had driven to another state to buy lottery tickets! :rolleyes:
Students who don’t study and then claim it’s your fault because half the class failed…
I mean, people, high school teachers get that crap constantly and they succumb to it because they are so exposed but college profs are much more insulated. If students don’t know the material it doesn’t matter if 10% failed or 80%. The college prof is not held responsible for you actually learning the material (unlike high school).
I was known as an ‘easier prof’ for teaching math so this didn’t happen much to me but at least twice a semester students in classes would get a petition going where most of the class signed a complaint against a prof. They would always use the excuse “60% (or whatever) failed so it must be the prof’s fault!”. It went nowhere. I would get these complaints and have to act on them (I was in charge of part time faculty) and everytime (except once) the teacher was not being too hard.
If you don’t know the material, no curve will bring you up, students! Study damn it!
Students that complain “I’m not going to be a Math major so why…(insert complaint about not wanting to study here)”
Excuse me, this class ISN’T FOR MATH MAJORS! They wouldn’t even get credit for it you lazy lump!
I would always get their goat by ME asking THEM why they were taking the class. They would get confused and say that the math department was FORCING them to take it. WTF??? I would then say that we were doing no such thing. They would get confused and I would point out that it was their major department that was forcing them and if they had a beef they should take it up with them since the math department couldn’t care less if they took the class or not. Otherwise, LEARN THE MATERIAL or YOU WILL FLUNK!
Other departments would piss me off. We were an open enrollment college so we had to take everyone. However, certain popular departments couldn’t take everyone so they would set up ‘screener’ classes to weed out students.
Calculus was a very popular screener class. Teaching these classes sucked big time because students didn’t want to be there and DIDN’T NEED TO BE THERE. The students were always whiny and the class drained your life force like a vampire. Extreme negativity abounded since they had to pass, usually with a high grade.
Now my bitch. If you, as a department, wish to set up a screener class, DO IT IN YOUR OWN DEPARTMENT YOU SPINELESS WEASELS! I hated doing your dirty work. If you want to screen, YOU teach the damn class and you put up with the negativity instead of spinelessly dropping it off on another department.
First of all, I agree with all your gripes. If I were a professor, then those would definately urk me, and actually, as a student some annoy me.
Now to the above quote. I would say that if someone were pre med, and in a pre med class, then yes, they should be interested in the subject. However, if it were a general education requirement and had nothing to do with the student’s major, then wanting to pass the test and not care about the subject is valid.
BlinkingDuck - thats what education has come to. Making everyone an “A” student just so they can be happy. One of my physics teachers in high school gave probably the fewest As in the entire school. His reasoning was that “A” meant superior. “B” was above average, and “C” was average. HES RIGHT. I remember him telling me about how this one girl got a “C” and her mother, another educator actually awarded for her skills as a teacher, went into the classroom and asked “well, then why don’t you make the tests easier, so more kids can get A’s?” No wonder some of the kids in my old High School who had 4.0 GPAs were morons… Dang student whining! (or is it, dang parents and education standards?)
Oh, and one last thing that pisses me off. This doesnt happen in college (thank God) but in high school kids would skip half the time, fail the tests, but do so much extra credit they would still pull out an A. I don’t blame the teachers for this, though.
Students who think mummy and daddy have bought them a diploma, sometimes a diploma with honors, just by writing a check for their tuition.
Clue: This buys you a place to put your butt in class. The rest is up to you.
Me: Hello?
Him: Hello, this is Mr. Soccermajor, can you tell me why my daughter, Buffy Soccermajor is getting a D in your statistics class?
Me: Well, didn’t she tell you about not doing half the assigned work? She only got a D because she guilt-tripped a friend who actually did the work to carry her through the rest of the class.
Him: Oh. Thank you.
And he was one of the reasonable ones.
Did any of you ever have a freshman who read a couple of heady essays, convinced himself of his genius, and then set out to point out the inadequacies (which he saw everywhere) in every single damned thing he read? Who took any suggestion, no matter how helpful, as a personal insult to his glory?
'Cause we’ve got one of those in my Evil English class. I don’t know how the professor stands it. I’d be kicking chairs.
Not a professor yet, but a TA who has been spending a great deal of time this weekend grading 3 page essays. Now, the ones which are clearly written by dolts don’t bother me too much-- a lot of dolts can’t help it and are actually trying to learn something and I appreciate that and it is what we are all here for. What irritates me are the kids who were perhaps considered smart in high school and cruised through and now think it a matter of pride to not proofread, write from outlines, or write drafts. Kids, it is clear that you are not morons, which is why it is pissing me off that you have reduced your ‘A’ content paper to a B or C because you are too slothful or proud to run the thing through a spell checker. As if writing a second draft is a sign of weakness.
And everyone, you enrolled in a liberal arts college for a reason-- you are here to be well rounded with a humanistic education. If you didn’t want to take a core art history class (which happens to fill 3 of your requirements) you should have gone to a polytechnic, studio art academy, business/typing college, or gotten a job and played football in the city league on the weekends, damnit.
And if you are enrolled in a mandatory discussion section, ask questions in there-- don’t just sit sullenly glaring at me with no paper or writing implement in sight. I am trying to help. Since lecture has 900 kids in it, section is your chance to get to know the person who is GRADING YOUR PAPERS and find out what is really going on so you don’t have to email them with 20 questions the DAY BEFORE THE MIDTERM. I will soon cease to count you as present if you are for all useful purposes absent.
Sorry, one of those weeks.
Dr. LindyHopper is a history professor, so I get to hear these all the time.
One of her least favorite things is people who classify education as a business. Their reasoning is always “I paid for an education, so you should give me one!” Buttheads. You were exactly right, cher3; all their money buys them is the right to earn an education.
My least favorite thing (vicariously) is “But I’m getting A’s in all my other classes!” or the even more evil “I’ve always gotten A’s before!” (even better with freshmen). Excuse me, but that would apply in this situation exactly how? No professor is responsible for anyone else’s class but their own. It’s not their problem what the situation is in any other class. Who knows; Dr. Assbiscuit from the Invertebrate Sociology Department may be so committed to grade inflation that he has to change the helium tank in his office every day. Maybe you study more for your other classes. Maybe your other professors don’t require you to think critically or write well. Or…could it be that…history just isn’t your subject!
I’m not a professor yet, but I was the rough equivalent of a lab assistant in the CS department for a couple years. Two semesters I worked the second semester programming class, which also served as a weedout class. And I had to have office hours where people could come and ask for help on their programs.
I swear, half these kids hated me for not doing their homework for them! There were over 200 of them, so I couldn’t spend much time with any one person, but a lot of them still seemed to think that I was their personal hand-holder. It was easy to tell who had crammed for the tests in the intro class, cause they didn’t know anything. We did everything we could to help them, and they were downright rude in return.
To be fair, there were a few who understood the demands on our time. There were even a few of them who wanted to actually understand the material, rather than just get an A on the homework. Of course, their homework stood head and shoulders above the rest…
Oh, did we hate about half of them. If it weren’t for the homework and the tests, we would’ve gone nuts.
Ah yes, the homework and tests. I have this philosophy about grading for CS classes, which is based on the observation that people who pass our classes might go on to write life-critical code. Now do I want the people writing that code to get the job because we were lenient, or because they actually knew what they were doing? So yeah, I was a harsh grader. I lobbied for the homework to be more challenging. And you know what? The people who did well were the people who put effort into understanding the material.
Boy, that was cathartic. It’s been over a year, and I still get worked up. Huh.
Do I look like a fucking moron? Do I have “FUCKING MORON” tattooed on my forehead? No? They why do you think I’m a fucking moron? Obviously you do, because only a fucking moron wouldn’t notice that your paper shifted tone abruptly from one paragraph to the next, only a total fucking moron would think that a dipshit non-science major suddenly figured out how to fling around highly technical terms without slipping up when they demonstrated in the introductory paragraph that they haven’t got clue one about the paper topic, and only a complete and utter fucking moron would be unable to type a sentence from your paper into Google and find the exact JPL website your plagairized your paper from.
You have no respect for your own academic integrity, you have no respect for the hard work of your fellow classmates who actually do the assignment instead of cheating, and you have shown that you have no respect for the instuctor of this class or his dedicated cohort of graders.
Enjoy your F.
p.s. I also hate people who talk to their friends in class. This is college, kiddies, and you don’t have to be in class if you don’t want to. If you do decide to grace us with your presence, shut the hell up so the rest of the class can hear the lecture.
I once wrote a government paper for a friend of my sister for 75 dollars. It was 8 pages long and included a bibliography. She ended up getting an F because whoever graded it knew she didn’t write it. Oh well, I still got my 75 dollars.
I’m still a student, and getting sick of teaching already. I currently am the TA for the organic chemistry lab, and have barely escaped with my life at least once a month.
If one more mindless drone tries to boil ether on an exposed-coil heater, or balances bromine precariously on a ledge…
Think, for god’s sake; you’re in a lab with flammable, caustic, and carcinogenic chemicals everywhere. Use your brain, and if you’re going to be a danger, at least do it in the corner so you don’t take somebody with you.
Does any of you have students(English composition class) that relate every single piece of literature to something that happened/happens/ has to do with the US? Even if said work was written in England at a time period nowhere near a war?
I’ve been on both sides of the lectern. My peeve with students is the ones who don’t want to think. This includes not only the vapid boulderlike student-shaped objects who don’t want to put any energy into their coursework whatsoever, but also the habitual straight-A student who wants to know what the Right Answers are in order to commit them to memory and continue to Be Right.
So I ask for essays and I get…The Book Report! The assignment says "Take one of the five essays on ‘Deviance’ that were handed out in class. Disagree with it, developing your own counter-position. Outline your point of departure from the author’s thinking and explain your own, contrasting yours with the author’s as you go. DO cite other authors and/or popular-culture material as illustrations of your point (or as illustrations of points you disagree with), but don’t worry about the validity of the sources. Don’t use citations to back up your assertions (‘prove you’re right’) so much as to explain better to your readers what you’re trying to say.
From a class of 60 undergraduates, I get maybe 6-7 good expository papers from theorists-in-the-making, 11 incoherent ramblings, 4 outright plagiarisms from published essays, and 35-40 book reports. The straight A students keep coming to the office and asking for a list of good writers who have already explained what is wrong with one of the essays that were passed out.
“There aren’t any. The essays are all unpublished. They are the opinions of another person just like yourself. They don’t agree with each other, so you can’t possibly agree with all of them. Pick one and pick it apart.”
They don’t. They write book reports. “Author So-and-so said this. He is saying that.” By the fourth paragraph they are no longer saying that Author So-and-so is saying these things–they have gone on to parrot Author So-and-so, making exactly the same assertions themselves, paraphrased with fragments of So-and-so’s original terminologies interspersed. At the end of five pages of this, there will be a one paragraph undeveloped dissent: “I think when So-and-so says that we need deviants in order to be normal ourselves, he is wrong because deviance is relative and comparative, like he said, but we don’t need to be normal. Society would let us know if we were too deviant, so I don’t think we need deviants for that.”
C’mon, folks, this isn’t 4th grade! This is NOT a reading comprehension test! This is NOT a “did-you-read-the-material” checking mechanism!
Ok, Great Expectations test on Friday. Open notes. In fact, I told them in advance “I will be checking your notes. You must have notes.” (These are ninth graders. Honors nineth graders.) Two kids brought in Xerox copies of a third’s notes. And didn’t really see the problem.
I also had a child put down “rim job” as an answer to the question “What did Circe do to Odysseus’s men?” We we at a University, I could of cracked a smile. At 14, he went to the principle’s office.
Myrr21, sounds as if you need some…appreciation? If that’s the case, look around for a thread in MPSIMS that I started about a month ago…TA appreciation thread.
AHunter3, it seems you give good essay works. If only my English teacher would explain the papers as you seem to have done…sigh
Oh yes. I had a student who copied her paper out of the textbook. The textbook for the class.
So, of course I gave her an F in the class. And she had the nerve to argue with me and tell me that I was blowing her chances of getting into a Master’s program for teaching.
