Exactly. And I’ve met many a professor who seemed detached and arrogant at first but that was just because they already had their bullshit shield on by default.
Wow… just wow. Elitist of you to… hahaha!
That’s pretty terrible. I do wonder, though: do many professors really get mixed evaluations?
I temped for awhile in UNC-CH’s biostatistics department, and part of my job was typing up and organizing student evaluations of professors.
The evaluations were remarkably uniform. For one professor, almost every student wrote something along the lines of, “This was the worst professor I’ve ever had in my life. I will never take another math course because of him. Thank God he’s retiring: he obviously no longer cares about teaching.”
And for another professor, almost every student wrote something like, “Wow! I never understood statistics before, and now I do! This professor is absolutely amazing, the best teacher I’ve ever had!”
(My favorite evaluation was of this second professor. It was from a Japanese exchange student, and it read, quite simply, “Professor ___ is the man I admire second-most in life. The first is my father.”)
Anyway, maybe I just dealt with superlative-worthy professors, but I got the impression that students tended to either mostly like or mostly dislike a professor. (and how’s that for an obnoxiously split infinitive?)
And it can turn around, too. My freshman year, I had several great professors, and then one professor who played favorites, who gave ambiguous assignments, who refused to clarify what she was doing. At my end-of-quarter meeting with her, she had the unmitigated gall to ask for and read my critical evaluation of her during the conference, and then argue with me about it! (I was a freshman; I didn’t know better than to give her the eval at the conference). Her written evaluation of me mentioned her hope that I would become a less negative person.
Ooooh, the hatred.
Daniel
It might depend on the subject. A math class is probably well-taught or not, but I’ve had some poli-sci professors who really split opinion; it seems that smart people like professors who push and stupid people don’t.
Danger, Will Robinson!
This varies from state to state. Do not rely on legal information received from strangers over the internet.
Great. Thanks a lot. Where were you BEFORE I bought all that Enron stock?
While I am all for the responsibility of students, I have to say that, sometimes, professors are rather inconsiderate with things like deadlines.
I have finals this week. I’ve also had five papers due in the same week. Of the five papers, only two of them had pre-set expectations; the others were defined about a week beforehand. There are times when students really can’t get everything done. The whole mentality of, “well, you should stay up all night every night for a week in order to get this paper done when I won’t even take the time to get the assignment out in advance” is bullshit. I’m a fast writer, and I am a good writer. I can write an A-paper in some classes in about two and a half hours (for a 10 pager). I am not the norm, however, and for classes where I haven’t had the professor before, it doesn’t apply.
I’m not saying this diminishes the OP’s claim; the girl sounds like a total fuckwit. But there are irresponsible teachers, too.
I agree. But students (in my classes anyway) often ignore reminders about using their time wisely. In this class, I spent a few weeks answering questions about when the final draft of the paper is due by saying that, while I would accept the paper up until the last week of class, I would strongly recommend that they hand the draft in by the end of April so if I find that they need to do some further work on it, they’ll have time to do so. But 20 out of 24 students have still not handed in their work, meaning that they’ve given THEMSELVES no wiggle room. Usually, they blame their shortcomings on me, saying that if I had FORCED them to hand it in earlier then they would have had the extra time.
Of course, when I force them to do so, by imposing a deadline, then they resent my penalizing the papers that come in after the deadline. That’s why I maintain it’s all about the students’ preference for looking elsewhere for the source of their problems.
Huh. Now I don’t feel quite as bad about teaching at a Community College as opposed to a four-year institution. At our level, if our students are disruptive, failing, or not attending class we can simply go down to the Registrar’s office and withdraw them using a simple one-page form. It’s a fully legal recourse, backed by the administration and is rarely appealed. So there’s no bullshit from the Dean, no raging parents and no spoiled over-entitled students grousing about how they paid for the class so they should be able to stay and do whatever they feel like, even if it’s nothing at all. And if the student pisses me off enough (for example, continues to flagrantly violate our policies despite written notice of said violations and their consequences) I can even give him or her a “Withdraw Failing” which will negatively affect their financial aid status in the future (almost 75% of our students receive Pell Grants).
No, the students who try any shit with me don’t last very long. Maybe a university gig isn’t what I want after all.
Almost everybody has a tendency to blame everyone but themselves for bad shit that happens to them.
Consider the driver who rockets down the onramp onto the freeway, doesn’t merge in the first available slot, but instead hugs the shoulder and crams into a slot half the size two cars ahead, causing many flashes of brake lights and honking of horns. Does that driver think, “Oh, perhaps I was too aggressive, I may want to rethink my driving habits”? No, that driver flips off the people behind him and blames them for, well, not cooperating in his fantasy world or something.
Consider the shopper at the grocery store who swipes his debit card and is surprised by a “denied” result on the register. Does he think to himself, “Oh, crap, I guess I should have checked my balance beforehand, since that deposit an hour ago apparently hasn’t gone through”? No, he yells at the checker and stomps angrily out of the store, thinking, “Stupid bank.”
Consider the employee who spends way too many hours browsing a certain message board when he’s supposed to be working. 
When he gets caught and reprimanded, does he think, “Man, I really should get this addiction under control”? No, he stews and fumes about his unreasonable boss and the company’s policy nazis, and daydreams about getting another job where it’ll be “better” so he can tell his current employer to fuck off.
Does everybody do these things? No. Some of us take responsibility for our actions. Are we in the minority? Yes, we are. Is there anything we can do about it? Not at all. Does it suck? To an unbelievable degree.
Education is the most extraodinary commodity: many are perfectly happy paying more to get less.
“Geez, at 30,000/year, I’d better get a good grade just for - um, well, just for - being me!”
Even in my law school I saw variants of this. It was virtually impossible to fail anyone, because the university noticed that students who flunk out don’t pay tuition anymore. And I know at least two practicing lawyers (one’s making rather a name for himself already and we’ve only been out nine years) who browbeat the administration into granting their degrees even though they failed to complete “mandatory” requirements.
The stories in this thread remind me of the incident a year or so ago, when a high school teacher had assigned one of her classes a project wherein the students had to collect a variety of leaves and write up brief summaries of them etc. turned out that something like 90% of the students had plagurized, and not just one or two sentences, but entire pages.:rolleyes:
The teacher quite rightly failed the students, who of course went bleating and screeching to mommy and daddy about “How unfair and cruel the teacher was, etc.”
The parents claimed that the teacher hadn’t informed the students about what plagurism was, but the teacher pointed out that there was a definition posted on the wall in her classroom and it was also in the memo/assignment form that she had passed out to the students.
The parents then claimed that the teacher hadn’t explained the definition of plagurism well enough to the students and therefore the teacher, not the students were at fault.:rolleyes:
The whole thing ended up before the school board, which decided that the teacher would have to reduce the percentage that the project was worth, thereby ensuring that the students who had plagurized wouldn’t fail the class.
The teacher quit in protest.
And what did the students learn?
That if you bleat and screech about “cruel and unfair your teacher is,” you can get all the way through high school without having to take any resposibility, personal or otherwise, for your actions.
Hey look at it this way. Maybe the student will go to the tutoring center, and since it’s so close to the end of the year either A)Not get a tutor or B)Only have time for one appointment. Then the blame will shift from you to us…uh…I mean, the tutoring center, and we’ll…they’ll…get yelled at for being inconsiderate fuckwits and not chaining the tutors to the tables so they can never leave and will always be on call to help every desperate, lazy, thoughtless, selfish student, no matter how short the notice.
Yeah, I found that too. I had one prof whose policy was to not give `make-up’ exams for any reason whatsoever, so don’t even ask. So on the midterm I neglect to turn the test paper over; it turns out it was printed double-sided to save paper :smack: :smack: :wally
But given his policy, which he had stated many times over, I kinda just accepted that my idiocy would do evil things to my final grade, and got on with life. The next lab class, the prof surreptitiously slipped me a note with an appointment to re-take the exam for a better grade ;j
Geez, what sort of an institution do you go to? Isn’t the assessment/submission date laid down at the start of semester? While I generally have at least three papers due in the same week (because of the way the Aus. uni semesters work), these requirements are made clear in the first week or two of semester so that we can organise our time properly to get them all handed in.
Not that I manage without begging the lecturer/s for extensions of course…
One of the problems that results from the administrations failure to uphold standards is that unqualified people get their degrees. A good number of them will enter the teaching profession. They will be allowed to “teach” our next batch of unqualified students.
For twenty years I taught high school English. I once had a student in the ninth grade who still could not write his complete name and address by the end of the semester. The administrator changed the grade of “F” to a “D.” His excuse was that since the kid did not do well in the ninth grade, maybe he would have better luck in the tenth.
At one time there was a state university here that required an ACT score of 11 for entrance. When the university’s president was criticized for this lower standard, he said, “The state needs a university for the academically handicapped.” Many of their graduates became teachers – a recipe for disaster.
I am ashamed to say that at the University I attended (which shall remain nameless for now) the extent to which paying students were pampered was quite shocking. A lecturer was suspended from his position because he had the nerve to fail two paying students for plagiarising their papers. The evidence of plagiarism was very straightforward but apparently he was insensitive and had caused them distress by his actions.
The students’ grades were lifted, the lecturer was suspended and subsequently (quite rightly I think) quit and took the Uni to court. But that was the prevalent attitude in a mixed fee based/government funded University - don’t dare do anything, ever, that might discourage our paying guests from coming to buy a degree.
A system in which people feel entitled to pass or get good marks is no academic system that I want to be a part of.
It won’t surprise anyone to learn that I’ve often had the experience of being informed by one of my students that they’re paying my salary, so I should pay attention to how they think the course should be taught. The sad part is that my stock response (“Actually, the university pays my salary”) isn’t supported, ironically enough, by the university, whose message it is to ignore the comment in the aim of greater student retention.
I was trained to think that “Don’t let the door bang your ass on the way out” is any respectable university’s resonse to any threat or implication that the “customer” can take his business elsewhere, but that’s no longer the case, at least where I teach.
I actually maintain that a certain percentage of students who flunk out is desirable, as it puts marginal students on notice that they need to buckle down harder and that graduation is no certainty, but that flies in the face of the whole “student retention” rap. Man, I am SO out of step here, it’s not funny.
If you’re tenured, I wouldn’t worry too much about the evaluation forms. They seem not to have much an effect where I am. My chemistry professor, while a very nice man, was obviously senile. He left of his own aacord, three-fourths of the way through the semestre.
Right now I’m a student and a TA, and I’ve seen just about every excuse there is. It shocks me how little some of those kids tried, especially because I’m teaching a class I took not long ago. I know what I did, I see what they did, and I’m appalled.
Even more annoying are students who are so irresponsible they don’t even bother coming to class on time. I live in the country, and commute 45 minutes every day to college in a small city. There are kids who live a couple miles away and saunter in when class is half-over. I could write a pit thread just about that!
I think asking them to sign the form is a good idea. If they refuse, drop it, but I don’t think many of them will. Just hand it to them and say, “Ok, sign this form please.” They’ll probably do it. Good luck.
-M
Idlewild, I love your name. Tell me, when you argue, do you see shapes?
We know when the papers are due. We don’t know what the papers are supposed to be about. And our teachers sometimes have an annoying way of not giving the most obvious assignment. In Christ College, it’s usually pretty good, but in the other classes, it’s maddening.
Sounds like an experience I had last year in my student teaching. One girl who had been a decent student first semester suddenly went down the skids second semester. I was checking papers shortly before I took over teaching the classes and I found that she had plagiarized her entire paper. And put the urls she had plagiarized from in her bibliography. D’OH! My clinical teacher wisely advised me to just fail her on the paper, explain to her what plagiarism is, and why she had failed, and he would call her parents. The mother gave us the same response as the parents in Payton’s story. It didn’t go as far, though, because the girl was later suspended for marijuana possession. Turns out her parents were in the midst of a nasty divorce and she was trying to get their attention.
Here’s the kicker: her mother demanded–DEMANDED–that her daughter be given the maximum penalty for the marijuana, but she tried to get her off for plagiarism? 
Does…not…compute…