I’ve had two professors who bascially quit without warning. One resigned two weeks into the semester. After about a week of having different instructors fill we got a dedicate instructor for the rest of the semester. She was actually pretty good. She was an ABD grad student and worked off his original syllabus.
The 2nd time happened after midterms. Not only did he quit with no warning he took all off his records, all of our exams, and everything we turned in with him. We were pissed. The Dean was pissed. They were scrambling to figure out what to do. At first they wanted us to resit the midterm, but pretty much everyone refused. We had to turn any papers and assignments we’d gotten back graded so they could record those grades.
Some people had “conveniently misplaced”; the administration ended up just taking their word for it regarding what grades they got. Which pissed some other students off. Papers that he was in the process of grading had to submited to another prof for grading. We took the finale as scheduled, but they had to change the alter the way final grades were determied to take into account the lack of midterms. Everybody ended up being promissed a passing grade with special dispensation to retake the class if you weren’t satisfied and have it deleted from transcripts.
Here is my story of administrative stupidity. While no one was looking, the graduate school at McGill instituted a minimum CGPA requirement of 3.0 for admission. A few years after that, I was chair of my dept.'s (Math & Stats) graduate affairs committee. A former graduate of McGill had sleepwalked his way through a stats program and then gotten a job with Statistics Canada and, five years later, had become gotten seriously interested and wanted to come back to school and get a master’s degree. Was there any way to make up for his poor record. I didn’t realize how rigid the rules were and I suggested he might take a couple of stats courses as a special student and if he did well (i.e. two A’s) maybe he could get in anyway. Certainly the department would look favorably on such an application. Well the upshot was that they wouldn’t allow him to register as a special student. The reason they gave me for not allowing this was that he might get two A’s and then we would look foolish when we couldn’t admit him as a regular student.
Just last week we had a Christmas party for my school in the local University. I was a Designated Driver, so none of this concerned me, however:
I asked for a soda. Sorry, only beer, wine, and champagne to drink. You can drink out of the water fountain.
We were promised a dinner. Only 3 types of smallish hors d’oeuvres were served.
So, here I am sitting with about 150 drunk people who were expecting dinner, but pound booze for four hours on empty stomachs. Several people are calling cabs to get home when they are told, “You can’t leave your car here or it will be towed in the morning!”.
I was, and still am, dumbfounded at the total lack of planning and ignorance shown by this event.
You can bet that if I got Tom the Toaded by one of the non-designated drivers on his/her way home from this “party,” my heirs would be asking for the school’s entire endowment. Hard to say they wouldn’t get it.
Sound like all you wanted was a Pepsi. But they wouldn’t give it to you!
My current gripe is with several administrative divisions, chiefly financial aid. They are now saying I owe them $1600, with zero notification of why. I’ve emailed six of the finaid people, each passes me off to another. The best is one guy who replies in 14pt blue text telling me to email someone, but doesn’t give me her last name or email address, and nobody by her exact first name exists in the directory. Other groups, like the graduate school, aren’t much better.
Frankly, I think she would have had some problems enrolled, graduated, and gone into teaching. Doesn’t sound like she would have been successful at dealing with real-world students. Especially Jr. High!
I’m having a difficult time understanding your prose. This student graduated with a Bachelor’s in Statistics by just meeting the minimum requirements, then tried to come back for a Master’s. But I don’t understand what the problem was.
Schools are f’d up - even the “charity” ones. I went to a Jesuit college and was granted a scholarship based on academic performance which would cover at least half of my tuition. Each semester, it was cut in half… because they were “increasing the endowment fund.” So money that I earned as a good student went into a bank account. And it’s not like the school was poverty stricken (something on the order of the order of $500/per student/year, IIRC - that’s not a lot of money in some analyses, but think about compounding the interest - it’s a lot of money).
Decades ago, when I was graduating from college, we were advised to get recommendations from up to three teachers to be kept on file so that these could be provided to prospective employers, graduate schools, etc. without our having to re-request them all the time from the teachers. Great idea, right?
Fast forward 20+ years and I was changing careers and wanted to pursue a master’s degree. The school I was applying to required a recommendation from an undergraduate teacher. Excellent, I thought. I’ve got that covered. I called my alma mater and requested that they send along the archived recommendation. I am told that the oldest ones were culled and discarded. I proceeded to launch into a gigantic verbal barrage on them. Who is going to need these more, I asked, a recent graduate or a 20-years-ago graduate whose former professors are all DEAD NOW!!!??? What lamebrain authorized that action? A small pause and a smaller voice on the other end. “Oh. I guess I did. Sorry about that.” I never did get into graduate studies.
This is the dumb part. Tossing out decades-old letters of recommendation doesn’t sound that unreasonable.
A 20-year-old letter of recommendation from an undergraduate professor can’t possibly have much predictive power for how a person will do as a current student. Did you ask the school if it could be waived, or substituted with a boss’s letter?
I have a lot of issues with the administration of the college where I got my Masters. The teaching and faculty were great, but the administrators were civil service, and were used to dealing with undergraduates. Here are a few (minor and major):
I needed to give them evidence of a physical. I had taken one course, but they wanted it for the second term. My doctor couldn’t get me in for a physical for a month or so. I called them to ask when the second term began, so the date was in time.
They didn’t know. Not the day, not the week, not even the month.
I was going for a Masters in their Creative Arts/Writing program. The thesis requirement was different for that than for other degrees and did not require an exam (you could hand in a creative work written for it). I did this and thought I was set.
The departmental secretary told me that I had to take the exam. I pointed out that my advisor and the college catalog did not require an exam. Too bad, she said, and she called my advisors and told her I had to take an exam, something that mystified my advisor, since it had never been done before. I then contacted the department head. She wasn’t in, and she didn’t return my calls. I kept calling the department (and getting the secretary), but never heard anything.
Finally, during a call, I said, “Did you give the message to the department head?”
The secretary said, “No, I threw it in the garbage.”
Without a pause, I said, “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.”
I think she got embarrassed by that lapse. The department head called me that day. In which she told me exactly the same thing I had been telling the secretary for days: No, I didn’t have to take an exam. It reminded me the payoff of I Was a Male War Bride when Cary Grant kept spouting a regulation that everyone ignored until, at the end, someone explained everything by quoting that regulation.
I finally got my degree. But no diploma. About two months after graduation, I called and asked where it was. They had it in the office. “Do you want us to mail it to you?” the asked. :rolleyes:
Just after graduation, I got a letter from the college telling me that my time to get my degree had expired and if I wanted to attend any more courses, I’d have to reapply. :rolleyes:
My worst was as an undergraduate I applied for financial aid. I got the letter denying me anything. OK great, I have some savings and can always do loans. About 3 or 4 weeks into the semester I can’t find a job and have no spending money, so I go into the financial aid office to see if they have any “no-need” work study funds available so I can get a job on campus. They pull up my file, and say, “but you were awarded $x of need workstudy, all you had to do was sign this letter and mail it back to us”.
“you mean that letter in your hand there? The one that was never sent to me to let me know I was awarded workstudy?”
“oops”
At least I got the money and a job at the library guarding the downstairs exit that no one even knew about. Gave me plenty of time to study.
After a pretty breezy first semester of college, I enrolled in my second round of foundational courses for a computer science degree, including Physics II for Engineers. The course featured a lecture session once a week, with about 200 students in the lecture hall, and recitation in a smaller setting twice a week. Lectures proved to be completely and utterly maddening.
Our professor, an older, tenured prof with the voice of Kermit the frog, attempted to incorporate some new technology into his lectures. He would use an LCD projector to show video clips, slide shows, and have us take quizzes with little transponders–those little remotes with keypads to electronically answer multiple choice questions. The issues:
When showing video clips, the prof was able to show the images on the screen, but could not find someone to mic his laptop to the lecture hall’s speakers. His solution: dangle his lapel mic over his laptop so we could try to hear crucial information about the demonstrations.
Give timed quizzes that required the use of the transponder to submit your answer, but fail to recognize the limitations of the devices being used. On the ceiling of the lecture hall, two receivers were set up for us to aim our transponders at when answering questions. Unfortunately, these rather expensive-but-primitive devices had a habit of jamming if two individuals “answered” a question at the same time. So, the scene would run like this:
PROF: All right, here is the question. Reads multiple choice physics problem in Kermit the frog voice. You have two minutes to answer.
STUDENTS: (All 200 scratch numbers on paper, then begin aiming and “firing” transponders at the receivers on the ceiling. On the screen down below, you could try to find a numbered square that corresponded to your student ID number. If it turned green, you answer was noted as recorded)
STUDENT #1: Uh…I just pressed the button, like five times, but nothing is happening.
STUDENT #2: Gee, only three people have an answer in.
STUDENT #1: Professor, I think the receiver is jammed again. My answer isn’t going through.
STUDENTS: (197 of them) Yeah, me, too!
PROF: I guess all of your batteries must be dead…
STUDENTS: (grumbling, panic growing)
PROF: Well, you have thirty seconds to answer…put it on a piece of paper and run it down here.
STUDENTS: (197 students with scrap paper stampede down the risers).
Tell us for the four exams during the course, they would each consist of four word problems. We had to diagram the situation, write the relevant formulas, and then solve the equation. The first two exams weren’t bad. When we got the third exam, the entire pattern was a significant departure from this pattern. During our next lecture session, we questioned him about it.
PROF: Well, you see, this course is based on 20 years of data, and a particular curve for the course. Given the results of the more recent quizzes, the difficulty of the test had to be modified.
STUDENT #3: Wait…you mean that we were doing well on the quizzes?
PROF: Yes, significantly better than you have been.
STUDENT #4: So, you made the test harder?
PROF: In a manner of speaking, yes.
STUDENT #3: You made the test harder so that the appropriate number of people would fail?
PROF: If you want to look at it that way.
I wish I was making that up, but I’m not. :rolleyes: Needless to say, I did not do well in physics that semester.
Now, I’m a high school English teacher (go figure). Looking back, I wish all of those math and physics professors actually took education courses so that they could learn to teach well.
To complete my BS in Physics, I had to squeeze out one more general humanities credit or else enroll for an additional quarter (tuition, housing costs, fees, etc). Most arts and sciences classes and humanities classes didn’t qualify for arbitrary reasons, they had to be on the very short list of accepted cross-school electives. The only class available from any department that fit the narrow allowable credit criteria?
Anthropology - History of Peruvian Peoples.
The whole class consisted of the professor playing show and tell with trinkets he’d brought back. One entire class was about a wooden flute that he was trying to learn how to play, and played badly during most of the class time. I had to write a frickin’ 2-page paper about that damn flute.
So type up a letter of recommendation yourself and send it in to them. After all, the professor’s dead, so how could they challenge it? You probably remember approximately what your professor said, so put that in the letter.
P.S. Why didn’t you keep your own copy of these letters? Then you wouldn’t be at the mercy of 20 years of college administrators.
What’s to understand? Five years later he wasn’t the same person. But his five year-old record meant that no application could get past a clerk in the graduate school and he couldn’t take a couple courses as a special student to prove that he was now interested. While I can see requiring him to prove his new-found interest, they didn’t care because they had their rules and stuck to them. This is idiocy.
A few years after I got my Master’s degree I decided to get a teaching certificate in K-12 Music. I enrolled in a program in the local branch of the state university. Great music education program, mediocre (general) education program, and an absolutely horrid administrative mess in the office responsible for placement for field experience.
My third semester (last one before student teaching) I took “Teaching Reading in the Secondary Content Area”. The class was specifically designed to teach how to teach literacy in your particular subject. It required some number of field hours (I don’t remember how many). Logic would dictate that we would be placed in a classroom related to our subject matter so that we could practice teaching literacy. The placement office somehow didn’t understand that and placed us more or less randomly. They tried to place me with a service providing one-on-one math tutoring. Three problems with this: I’m not a math teacher; this placement had nothing to do with literacy; and I wasn’t studying to be a tutor, I was studying to be a classroom teacher.
Fortunately, our professor understood the importance of having a relevant placement, so she argued them into submission.
That’s pretty bad. Mine won’t take cash. So depending on when I get paid, it’s a mad scramble to figure out how to pay the school. I take online classes because I can’t get to campus easily, so it’s not as simple as just using cash to get a money order and bring it to them the next time I go in.
I’m not assigned a specific adviser. There is an advising department with online hours. I went every day and they were never “open.” I’d call and leave messages. I’d email. I couldn’t get any adviser to even answer the most basic questions.
I have a class starting in 2 weeks. Only yesterday were the books for classes posted. Not just that class: all classes for next semester. Registration started 6 weeks ago, so you had to register for classes “blind.” This semester, I could view my books before registration so I could kind of get an idea of what to expect.
My old school had a professor everyone hated. He taught sociology and was miserable. When he assigned work, you had to agree with his conclusions or he’d fail you. Not just knock your grade down a little but still pass you if you used good logic, but outright fail you for disagreeing with subjective things. They’d tried to fire him a few times, but he always threatened to sue and say the firing was because he was Jewish and the school always chickened out.
Last year I wanted to register for a graduate level class in instructional design at a nearby state college in Illinois. They wanted my undergraduate transcripts. Well, OK, I said… but my undergrad is up in Canada and I went there a loooooong time ago… how about I just pop by the university here in St. Louis where I much more recently got my Ph.D. and get some transcripts from them? Nope, they say. We need your undergraduate transcript. Huh? I can’t help but wonder, how does my grade in Bio 101 from over 20 years ago even remotely predict my ability to do well in this class compared to, you know, a frackin’ Ph.D.???
Silly me. I thought that the college wanted grades and transcripts in order to judge how well I may perform in the class or curriculum I hope to take. Nope. They just want to tick off a box on a list of requirements. Gah.
