Thank God for anonymous class surveys...the offical "bitch about classes" thread

The BBQ Pit
1

The semester is winding down, so it’s time to bitch about all that anymosity you’ve built up over your classes this spring!

I’ve only got ony rinky-dink online MATLAB programming class, but good GOD was it terrible!

  1. Even for an online class, there was very little material from the professor. It was mostly just reading the book, and then a one-page PDF that explained things a little more. Often times, she’d just link to a online tutorial from the program’s officla website.

  2. (more a rant about the school) The system we use for online classes…ugh! I’m sure someone else here has used Blackboard and hated it as much as I did!

I would always get errors with the online quizzes telling me I didn’t submit any answers for half the questions, even though I clearly did AND pressed the stupid “save answer” button.

I’d also have to upload a lot of files for the homework assignments. When I got the screen that said “upload complete!” it would list the files that were uploaded…and about half the time it wouldn’t list one or two of the files, causing me to freak out because you are only allowed ONE submission. I emailed the prof. the first time, and she was confused because it came through to her. So from then on I uploaded, then got to that screen, that had to exit and re-login and go back to the submission history to see that it was actually uploaded.

  1. The difficulty in the assignments was all over the map. Some HW assignments we were given two weeks to work on, when I barely took an hour to do them…others we were given a week, and it took me forever to do them because some crucial new command we needed wasn’t in the reading assignment or lecture notes!

  2. The overall content. For those not familiar with it, MATLAB is a programming lenguage…or sorts. It’s not like C++, Python, or Java, though. It was designed to ahve a mathematical/scientific/engineering slant to it, and as such, it can do simple programming, yes, but it excels at things like plots, solving equations, etc…yet we barely did any of that. The main reason I took this course was so I could take another course that uses high-level differential equations where the prof. basically says good knowledge of MATLAB is required to do them…and yet we never got into any of that. We went over basic “mx+b” plots and that’s it. No calculus, no equation solving. It was more like what I’d expedct an intro course in C++ to be like…and in fact, WAS just like that intro to C++ course I took nine years ago when I was an undergrad.

I guess that one is more my fault, but when I saw a course about programming in MATLAB, I expected it to about MATLAB specific programming, not just a general com sci 101 course that just hapopens to be in MATLAB, especially since, from what I know, python is the main language of the school’s com sci department, so a seperate course in MATLAB makes it seem, to me, more likely that it would be about the types of things MATLAB is known for.

  1. The final project. We are given nothing, other than, “design and do your own final project aboutwhatever you like!” Seriously? I fucking HATE IT when professors don’t give enough structure. Open-endedness is nice to a degree, but at least give me an idea of how complex it should be, what concepts and tools you tink we should focus on more than others, etc…I’m also very, VERY terrible at thinking up my own ideas for things like this…I don’t know why, but I can never think of an idea that interests me. So I just went with a blackjack game…I mean, what com sci student hasn’t made that? hell, it’s usually a HW assignment.

I actually expectd her to reject it saying it was too wasy an idea, but she approved…probably because I did add in that I’d use some of the GUI interface things we just barely learned about to make it slightly more tricky.

So, what do the other denizens of the dope have to bitch about in relation to school? I can’t be the only one!

2

For God’s sake PEOPLE! I teach PE…PE for crying out loud! I am probably the easiest A in the entire department, and definitely the entire University. BECAUSE this is a PE class, students are primarily graded on you know…being physically present for the physical activity?

I have very few grade requirements for my class, most of it is attendance, promptness and participation related. With just a few small easy assignments thrown in. My absence policy and makeup policies are super generous, so much so I often have to fight the Uni for the right to keep them.

I repeat attendance requirements and how to make up classes on the first class day, and about every 2-3 weeks thereafter. They’re also posted on “Blackboard”. This is a paperless class.

How in God’s name can I get at least one student each session of each semester who gets a lower grade than they expected who comes to me and says “why did I get a C, this is ‘only’ PE”. So I look on my attendance roster, “well, you had over the allotted absences and several late arrivals”. “Well why am I getting graded down on tardies???..”

Sigh…really? do you really not get this? Even after I explained this 11enty7 times throughout the semester? And posted it, AND went over it several times just prior to finals week?

Makes me wonder how/IF they manage in their academic classes (and yeah, I know they’re degree students, our PE classes are part of degree program requirements)

3

Oh, god, I had the class from hell this semester. Prof opened the class bitching about how he hates teaching social work because we’re all women therefore we don’t know anything about policy or business. He then gives us an hour-long exam on material we’ve never covered and concludes that because we don’t know the answers, we lack commitment.

Then he starts sending us all these e-mails at the last minute about extra-curricular events he expects us to attend. To put this in context, we are full-time students with three days a week (24 hours) of internship. I live 45 minutes from school, and he wants me to drive into a major city at rush hour after a full day’s work just to satisfy his whims about what real engagement looks like.

He would write comments on students’ work like, ‘‘Considering this is being written in the context of a social work program, this is an acceptable paper.’’

Classes consisted of students complaining and him insulting their intelligence in all manner of creative ways. After two months of weekly hour-long tests on 300+ pages of reading per week, and our classes devolving into something just short of a shouting match due to all the patronized and pissed off students, he suddenly, inexplicably, changed. Now we’re taking field trips and he’s letting us waive all the syllabus assignments in favor of other projects (like making short videos) and just generally acting not at all in the way he did at the beginning of the course. Now he’s acting like he doesn’t give a shit whether we attend all these extra activities.

He invited a handful of us out for drinks, so we went, I was thinking, okay, I can get to know this guy, maybe like him. He asked me what I wanted to do with my life and I told him of a specific program I was interested in. His response was, essentially, ‘‘Have you taken a class with X? If you haven’t taken a class with X you won’t get into the program.’’ I realize he was trying to be helpful, but really he just made me paranoid and even more insecure.

Throughout the semester I was involved in a major policy project with seven others that we were all absolutely psyched about. He loved it, absolutely loved it. On the last day of class I had to get up and do a two-minute spiel on my part of the project, and I was so fucked up from his terrifying presence and lack of sleep that I totally froze up and got all voice wobbly and basically sucked up a presentation for the first time in… oh, a decade. I’m still pissed off about it.

Then he ended the class by sharing with us an e-mail he sent to the faculty of our school. You see, he got in deep shit for ditching the syllabus because students outside of our course complained. His response to the entire faculty, Dean included, was the most blatantly sarcastic ‘‘fuck you’’ apology ever. I’m not gonna lie, it was sort of funny, because that students would complain about not being able to participate in this absolute nightmare of a course strikes me as ridiculous, and it struck him as ridiculous too, because we had to do 3x more work than any other class.

Then, I shit you not, he talked about how inspired he was by all of us and how we were really going to do good in the world. After months of putting us through absolute hell because we are so inferior to his precious undergraduate urban studies students, suddenly we are inspiring and make him believe in teaching social work again.

Whatever.

4

:eek:

Is this guy retiring next semester? Or is he just perhaps facing a health challenge?

5

I’m nearing the end of a class in International Postmodern Literature that is really, really burning my ass, but I’ve been keeping my mouth shut because I really like the professor.

But goddamn I hate the course content.

I wish Kathy Acker was still alive so I could kick her in her self-important cunt.

6

I’m in that class now. It ain’t worth it.

7

He probably thinks riding you hard then “rewarding” you at the end is a quality of great leadership. Probably has no idea how incompetent he is.*

I wouldn’t hold it over him, most don’t.

8

Oh, goodie, I get to vent.

I have students in several of my 200-level classes (sophomore equivalent, it’s a community college), write an investigative report (research paper, term paper, whatever). In between lectures on, you know, actual psychology, we talk about research, writing, APA format, organization of one’s thoughts as one is reading primary source material, interpretation of research results, critical thinking, etc.

I’m grading them now. And I want to kill myself.

These papers are written as if these students are all ESL students. No, scratch that. My foreign students write BETTER than native-born English speakers.

The concept of a well-written sentence? No clue. Subordinate clause after subordinate clause after fragment after subject/verb tense disagreement after comma splice, ad infinitum.

Organization of source material into relevant paragraphs? Apparently they’ve never done it.

Sticking to one main topic? Nope, they can’t write 7-10 pages on just one topic - why, no one in the history of EVER has EVER written that much on ONE TOPIC. They seem to forget that the textbook has entire chapters on their one topic.

Honest to Goddess, I weep for the future.

And I’m drinking. Heavily.

9

Oh, I know it’s not. As I said, I attempted to take it and it, along with another class, forced me to drop out. But it’s a requirement for finishing my master’s, which I would very much like to do, so I gotta do it.

But this class was mostly a waste of my time…at least I didn’t have to pay for it, though.

10

I had to take an anthropology intro class this semester. Interesting stuff, but good Lord, the professor was so unintelligible, it was incredible. I’ve never had a harder time taking notes in my life because every time she started to define a term or explain a concept, it would be completely derailed within a few seconds by a stream of gibberish. I started writing down some of her sentences. Example:

“Personhood is what anthropologists call a state of being a person in a culture as it relates to an individual.”

A typical question posed to the class, always answered by crickets:

“What is the writer trying to tell us about a space and a place in which this event is occurring at the present time?”

She also likes to use words incorrectly because they sound smarter- example, referring to the syllabus as “the syllabi”, yet using verb forms for the singular.

One of our requirements was to bring in food. It had to be under $5, portable, and nutritious. I know this because she wrote it on the board FIVE TIMES, and repeated it so many times that I think she just likes to say the word “portable.” Then we had to go around the room and each student had to give an example of a portable, nutritious food item. It’s a class of about fifty. Thus, we all just named various foods for TWENTY MINUTES.

I cannot wait for this nonsense to end.

11

As an undergrad I got stuck in one positively terrible Asian Literature course in a department that was otherwise pretty awesome. The instructor was on exchange from Italy, and basically spent 14 weeks gleefully making our lives a living hell.

For starters, my university didn’t require students to speak any Japanese to take undergrad Japanese lit. courses, but the visiting instructor’s home institution did. As a result, well over 90% of the materials she’d built the course around weren’t available in English. Now she could’ve shrugged and found something new for us to read… …but instead she simply assigned us all the readings in Japanese, and yelled at the students who complained that they didn’t speak the language for their lack of commitment and intelligence. The worst days occurred when she wanted us to do in-class reading, and those days generally went like this:
Prof: Joe-san, please read the first sentence on the projector.
Joe-san: Umm, I don’t speak or read Japanese.
Prof: Well, try!
Joe-san: I… don’t speak any Japanese…
Prof: TRY!!!
Joe-san: Err, okay. The first word is… butterfly?
Prof: No. Try again.
Joe-san: House?
Prof: No. Try again.
< 45 minutes later, class ends>
Prof: Joe-san, you aren’t leaving until you translate at least one sentence.
Joe-san: gets up and walks out, grumbling with rest of class

The instructor was also massively intrusive in our personal lives, to the point of outright impropriety: she would repeatedly call students into her office and demand that they break up with their boy/girlfriends and refrain from dating until after college, and on multiple occasions she told me that I was too stupid to be in university, and should be studying a more appropriate field. (For the record, I was majoring in linguistics, and never gave her any reason to suspect I was an asian studies guy.)

Well over half of the supplementary readings were in Italian (this was a Canadian university), and she required no less than 50% of our secondary sources on the final paper to be from Italian-language journals.

And the assignments, oh the assignments: our course grade was 20% attendance/participation, 30% final paper, and 50% final exam. No assignments. At all. Even a little bit.

Which is why you might imagine the class’s annoyance at her tendency to regularly assign one or two-thousand word writing assignments with very little notice, which she would read in class and critique, often in the most belittling manner imaginable. At one point she told us, on a Wednesday, that we had to split into 2 teams, and each team was responsible for writing and illustrating a 30-page Japanese-language comic that was faithful to the format of a kind of 16th-century comic we’d been studying.

Of course, the comics were due on that Friday. :smack: When we submitted them she did this whole song-and-dance routine about how she couldn’t give us a grade for them, but if she could they’d be graded X. Our team’s assessment was “You managed to draw 30 pages and write dialog for them, but your team contains people X, Y, and Z. They aren’t very good students so I wish you’d given them less of a role, but since you didn’t I would give you an F if I could.”

This went on for the entire term, and I shudder to imagine how much worse it could’ve been: I was one of the lucky few who actually spoke and read Japanese, and so I was able to do the (untranslated) class readings… a lot of the students had to put together what the readings were about from the fragmented class discussion.

So we put up with her insults, and wrote our term papers, and showed up for the final exam, which I might remind y’all is worth 50% of our grade. The instructor had been so awful to us, we were expecting a massively long, tortuously difficult test. The instructor enters, and hands us each a single piece of paper which reads “For 50% of your grade: name the five types of comedic parody we examined this term”. :smack:

I learned later that the instructor gave half of the class failing grades, and when the department head quietly had a tenured prof blindly grade the same papers and tests the lowest revised grade was an 89. I don’t know what on earth was wrong with that instructor, but it wasn’t a fun term.

12

Why didn’t you just drop when you saw the syllabus?

13

Had I been in that class, and had she tried this with me, I guarantee that I’d be spending time in the campus police department’s slammer.

What a cunt.

14

He has a law background, and usually teaches in the urban studies department. He really is only a guest lecturer for our department. I guess last term he had an extremely negative experience with the social work students and decided that class was representative of all of us.

Also, I think he is a little bit asperger’s or something neurological is going on that prevents him from being socially normal. He is a genuinely good person, in the sense that he does good things, is extremely involved and committed to the community, and is ridiculously generous (I mean he paid for one of his former students’ rent for six months generous.)

And when he told us that women suck at business and policy, he made it clear that he didn’t think we sucked because we weren’t capable, he thought we sucked because society had taught us not to value those things.

He was really good at turning compliments into insults, but I don’t think he did it on purpose. I think he meant well. Either way, I don’t think he’s going to be invited back.

Oh, this is fabulous news! Given my ridiculous levels of insecurity, I have no choice but to conclude that I’m brilliant! :smiley:

That sounds like an absolute nightmare. Did you ever receive fair grades?

15

I have the grrs…

I’m doing an MSc in Translation. One of the courses is Localization, which can be defined as “translation of things you will normally read in some sort of computer”. The most common materials are computer programs and webpages. It’s actually half of a course, the other half being “Technical Writing”. We had Tech first, and had to choose a webpage to localize and write an essay on it, a lynguistic analysis. Then we had to perform the actual localization, and write an essay with a different linguistic analysis of the webpage, and submit a physical copy of this essay plus a CD with the essay, the original and translated pages and any additional materials. This delivery was due yesterday, Monday 26th.

I left the school on the 8th, leaving behind the CD and printed essay, and a letter for a friend to be able to deliver it for me.

We’d had serious problems with the programs which the university was providing for us to do the work. I’d found a workaround and agreed with the teacher (in writing, thank Og and Ogette) that I’d present the essay based on the workaround used.

The problems with the programs got fixed last Friday, and the higher ups actually expected the students to be doing the work then. Three days to do something for which in theory we’d had five weeks.

We have letters from yesterday, that is, from the day the work was due, with new information about the formats we had to use. Apparently we had to include, among other things, screenshots of every program we used “in order to prove that we actually did use them”. Really? The teacher needs a screenshot of MSWord not working and one of OpenOffice.org working? The teacher needs a screenshot of Catalyst not working and one of OmegaT working? Should I also provide screenshots proving that I used three different OSs, or that the computers in most of the university’s labs were unable to use the “ghost” computer the university had given us? Do they want pictures of me seated at my desktop computer, my netbook, and each of the four university labs where I tried (including the one where I finally was able to) to use the university-provided systems?

You
have
to be
fucking
kidding
me!

I do hope the professor will remember our agreement re. the difficulties, because if she doesn’t… she speaks Spanish, so I may get flunked but by all my foreparents and hers, she’s going to get such a verbal spanking she’ll end up deaf for a month.

16

Small potatoes by comparison, but I hate when TAs are given a lot of responsibility and then not adequately supervised.

Computational Econometrics is a bullshit class required for my MS program. A well-trained high schooler could pass the class - it basically just involves changing variables and options in the ‘example’ SAS code discussed in class. You didn’t really need to understand the material, although it helped - the interpretation questions in the weekly labs weren’t difficult, and we were allowed to discuss the labs amongst ourselves during the designated lab sessions.

This means that the TA, whose only job is to grade the labs, had very little work to do. She had to look at the 9 labs from my section and the 11 from the 12:30 PM section each week and check that the output and the answers to the interpretation questions are correct. She doesn’t need to sift through the code - it’s result-oriented. Her only responsibility is to provide timely, fair feedback.

She felt this was below her because sometimes when she gave back homework people asked her questions about why they received the grade they did.

If THAT amounts to “harassment,” then you’re going to have a hell of a time as a professor.

17

Nontranslated Japanese in an Asian Studies course is one thing (even if inappropriate in your situation,) but – ITALIAN in a Canadian Asian Studies course? WTF?

18

Give them a break. They try hard, they done there best, after all, because.

19

Oni no Kami- please tell me the prof got the chewing out of the century by the administration. And that the students were given a long apology.

20

(puts Brian Ekers on The List).