True, but what about when professors don’t uphold their job of “ensuring that the opportunity I provide you is up-to-date and of high quality”? Students have become disenchanted with such a notion because of the abundance of bad professors out there. The few classes that I’ve had actually outstanding professors in, I’ve considered a valuable educational experience and I’ve felt I learned something.
The bad professors were bad. I’m talking about the ones who obviously don’t care about teaching and are only there to get their research funded. It’s those professors who can turn a subject you’re interested in to a subject you hate because they teach or present it so poorly. I’ve been in those classes, and it’s then that it’s less of an educational experience and more of a fight for survival. I didn’t care about learning anything, just passing, and it’s thus become just a sales transaction to get credit for the course.
Yeah, I always hated classes where attendance was counted as a major portion of the grade. And I always sympathized with the people forced to teach those kinds of classes.
You’ll disagree with what I’m about to say, but I don’t believe that students are necessarily the best judges of what a “bad” professor is. Students consider professors who are teaching a topic that the student finds boring a bad professor just because they don’t like the topic. Students consider a professor bad because he or she won’t let the student turn in work after due dates. Students consider a professor bad if the professor actually expects them to read the textbook or explore outside sources.
It’s a given that there are “bad” professors out there in the sense that there are professors who do a poor job of teaching, but frankly, given the complaints I hear from students about what they think is a bad professor, I think students quite often have a skewed perspective about what constitutes a bad professor.
I also point out to students that it is ALWAYS their choice to be in my class. “But this is required for my degree and I don’t want to take a psychology class!” Then take a different class to fill that requirement - you can take any social science class we offer to fill that slot on the degree requirements. You CHOSE to take this course. So, the argument that students give about being “forced” to take classes in subjects that they’re not interested in falls apart - there are always choices to fill requirements.
“But I don’t understand why I have to take social sciences courses at all - I just want a degree in computer science!” Well, that’s the way the school sets up the degrees - we’re following a liberal arts education model here. You CHOSE to pursue a degree here, so it’s still YOUR CHOICE to confirm to our degree requirements. Other schools (and there are many in this metro area) have different degree requirements - go there if you don’t like ours.
[li]Pajamas are not everyday wear, and are not intended as appropriate clothes for going places while wearing. If you’re so sick that getting out of your PJs seems like a bad idea, you should be in the infirmary, not class. [/li][/QUOTE]
HA! Have you ever been to a college? I don’t mean that as an insult, but c-mon, Monday through Friday these kids LIVE in pajama pants. I don’t know how anyone who has walked a college campus could not know this.
Sure, other students may think those are reasons to say they’re professor is bad. I’m not one of them.
I have a bad professor right now. What makes him bad? Well, first off, he’s brand new to the university, English is his (far) second language, and he doesn’t really teach the material, he just scans the book into Powerpoint format and presents that instead. Every example he does is literally scanned from the book, saved as an image, and put onto a screen. He never ventures outside the book nor does he explain the material in any format other than the book. He is the book.
What, then, is the point of attending such a class when I can stay home and read the book myself? I’m not alone in my thinking either, several other students agree. So while I certainly agree that some students aren’t the best judges of how good professors are, I’m also saying I’m a better judge than most of them.
That’s for general electives though. What about class-specfic, degree-required classes for which there are limited (or one) offerings? Then what? Wait a semester to try and get a new professor and throw off your plan of study? And sure there are choices, but unless you believe what’s on RateMyProfessors.com, there’s no way of telling if a professor is considered good or bad before enrolling in the class.
What? The person receiving the education isn’t capable of judging the quality of the education received?
Do you think your class is valuable to these students? If you are unable to show them it is valuable you have done a poor job teaching them. If you don’t think the class is valuable to the student you are wasting their time and money. Don’t blame your students for being smart enough to recognize bureaucratic nonsense.
None of my students that complain about professors think they they are, either.
Yea, that doesn’t sound like a good situation. I did, however, say that there ARE bad professors out there. However, what I hear students complain about are NOT what you are stating. In fact, one complaint I sometimes receive in student evaluation feedback is the opposite - I never read from the text, I assume my students can read, so I use external outside material to expand on the textbook. This, apparently, pisses some students off.
Therefore, some of your fellow students may actually be thinking that this particular professor’s approach is working for them. They, therefore, may not think that professor is bad.
In fact, the feedback on my student evaluations makes me laugh, because in the same class I’ll have students say that my lectures and group discussions and other aspects of my lesson plans are top-notch, the best they’ve ever encountered, and other students in the exact same class will say that my lectures are useless and that I really need to just read out of the book. Which of those sets of students is correct or accurate in their judgment of me as a “good” or “bad” professor?
Which again goes back to my statement that students are not necessarily the best judge of a good or bad professor, since those judgments are sometimes made on the basis of personal preferences and not the professor’s actual knowledge of the field or teaching of that knowledge.
Sure there is. Talk to other students, talk to other professors, sit in on a couple of classes prior to the semester you want to enroll in the course. And if a particular professor is widely considered by large numbers of people as universally “bad,” that does suck and does happen, but I remain skeptical of the idea that this is true for as many professors as students think it is.
I did not say this at all. I said that students are not necessarily the best judges of what makes a professor “bad,” for reasons stated.
I long ago realized that some students just don’t care about my class. There’s a bell curve of motivation and interest in any group of students in any given class. I used to worry and stress about how to reach and engage every single student that walked in the door. As a result, I would spend an incredible amount of time attempting to reach on some level the stoner in the back row who is enrolled in school only because his or her parents said “school or job, or move out of our house” and has absolutely no interest in my or any other class. However, even with this particular type of student, it’s still that student’s choice to be 1) in school and 2) in my classroom.
I am not obligated to make every class period, every lesson plan, every discussion of every concept in my field a song-and-dance entertainment session for the purpose of entertaining students so that they never ever encounter a class session in which they are bored for a single minute. I am obligated to put together the best lesson plans with the most up-to-date information in my field, and I do so. I also use active learning techniques that minimize the amount of lecture I give and maximize the amount of class involvement.
But the idea that students should never ever be bored, never ever encounter difficult learning situations, and never have to study anything that they don’t want to is not a valid argument to me.
Working out with gym equipment for an hour a day to get a particular body style or health situation is BORING to some people, but they know it’s necessary to obtain a particular goal. If a student can sit through an entire semester of a class and feel that there’s literally nothing in the class that’s worthwhile to them in pursuit of their goals, well…I don’t really know what to say to that, other than :dubious:
Maybe it’s because I generally interact with honors students and such, but I’m baffled by your assertion, Kolga, that students insist there are as many bad teachers as you say they do. I’ve heard exatly one instructor described as flat out bad. Bad enough that the entire class almost agreed to go to the course organizer as a group and complain, I can’t say I disagree (I was in said class). Of course, cases of truly bad instructors are usually a mix of many flaws, rather than minor lecture quibbles that the “bad ones” that you are talking about.
All the other evaluations I’ve heard have been along the lines of “he doesn’t work well with the way I learn” or “clearly knows what he’s doing, but is often unprepared for the lecture he’s going to give,” and other miscellaneous quibbles (i.e. too much focus on definitions or rote memorization for their taste) without a definite descriptor of “bad.” I’ve also heard a lot of “if you want an A with little work, look for this guy. If you want to learn something, go for her.” And usually the former is considered the poor teacher and offered as an “if you have too much on your plate” option. But again, honors students. You clearly encounter many more students and teacher reviews than I do. I’ll admit that in my English class (which is the crossroads of all students since everyone has to take it, no alternatives for any degree, except perhaps English majors who start at a higher level) I do see some people complaining about having to do what was in the course description so it doesn’t seem impossible that there are more students who complain on those grounds.
Also remember that on your evaluations that they’re essentially being forced to boil down their opinion to a number and two sentences. You lose a lot of nuance in that space, what they wrote may not always be an unqualified “read from the textbook” and if confronted they may simply think that you don’t tie the concept behind the current readings into the current activities or something they couldn’t express adequately with 5 minutes to jot down a quick and dirty evaluation. Hell, I’ve written things for evaluations that I wondered later that day why I wrote them, since it’s a severe overstatement/understatement or too vague to be useful. In one class I put that some of the homework seems like busy work, which is true, I did think that, but I didn’t really have enough space to mention that it wouldn’t be that hard to modify it and that it wasn’t just unsalvageably useless. Nor did I have enough time during the 5 minutes we’re given to do the evaluation to completely form those thoughts beyond “I vaguely recall some of the homework not doing much for me.”
And of course, like the bad professors there ARE always the students who hated the class before they took it and gave you a bad evaluation for no good reason.
I was responding to this statement from a previous poster:
The use of the phrase “abundance of bad professors” and “the few classes…I’ve considered a valuable educational experience” were the focus of my comments.
In terms of your post about evaluations - I’m totally aware of everything you wrote, and do take it into consideration, which is why I personally am frustrated with the whole evaluation process, because it rarely gives me any good information to work with. I truly do want to respond to legitimate student complaints, but it’s hard to tell what those are if the evaluation process and the tools used aren’t functional (which they aren’t).
FWIW, I never got the impression you were. Kolga has some points that have some validity (I’ve seen student evaluations for the exact same class that say diametrically opposite things), but you’re not in the congregation s/he ought to be preaching to.
Yep, that’s bad. If I were paying good money to take a class, and got a “teacher” like that, I would feel ripped off.
It’s a common misconception that all universities are mainly educational institutions. Some look on teaching (at least teaching undergraduates) as a necessary evil. If a prospective student really wants to get a good education, involving worthwhile classroom experiences with “good” professors, their best bet is to enroll in a college or university that places a high priority on teaching (and shows it in the way it hires, evaluates, and promotes faculty members). And in a place like that, a teacher like you had would be relieved of his teaching duties, or at least encouraged to improve his teaching.
Sure there is: talk to people who’ve taken classes from that prof before. That may not work in a case like yours, where the prof is brand new to the university. But profs who’ve been around awhile definitely develop a reputation.
Just for the record, my experience as a college (English) professor has been very, very similar to Kolga’s. In my evaluations for the same class I will get comments such as “Too much review for tests” and “Not enough review for tests,” or “Best teacher I ever had,” “Worst teacher I ever had.” Some students love how I teach and the assignments I give and come to me after class to tell me how useful they are; others tell me the class is a waste of time and that all the assignments are pure “busy work.” I have had students write blatant, outright lies on the evaluations, things that the administration laugh at because they are so clearly not true. For example, some students complained that I asked them to email their assignments before they left the class because I “knew” they didn’t have internet access in the classroom. Our campus is completely wireless, and in my travels around the classroom I saw many people on Facebook, so it’s a complete surprise to me that they didn’t have internet access–and a complete lie.
The bottom line is that you can’t please everyone, so you just have to do the best job you know how to do, and also that the professionals hired to teach the class are the experts in course content–not the students.
Having said that, I have to agree with Brandon that the professor who simply scanned in pages from the book and presented them as slides isn’t doing a very good job, but Brandon, please don’t write on this professor’s evaluations that “I’ve discussed this with other professors and they agree with me!” I’ve only heard one side of the story here.
