Is better possible? I like the "startup weekend" style courses. But run over a term or 2 rather than a weekend. There are a few around.
Why Your Professors Suck
21–30 of 59 posts
Re: Why Your Professors Suck
#22The structural problem he mentioned at the end is this: students are not customers. Had they been customers, who could instantly stop paying this professor because they think he's boring and doesn't deliver, you'd see a completely different picture. It wouldn't be about grades and diplomas anymore. It would be about acquiring knowledge and skills that students can later apply. If they decide this professor cannot tea…
Universities are institutions of research, that also happen to teach. To many faculties, students are a necessary evil to fund research. In order to teach students about their research, they have to go through three years of basics, not-so-basics, and then maybe some - to the professor - dull, repetitive, been-there-a-hundred-times preliminaries to their work.
The teaching many of them enjoy is their departmental or faculty seminars. And as a senior undergrad, those were the sessions I enjoyed attending the most. No surprises there. They were talking about the subjects they enjoyed the most.
Now - I'd argue that a professor should be bringing in revenue - either by teaching a popular set of courses that are relevant for students - or by bringing in research dollars. But then that's somewhat missing the point - universities should be exploring areas that industry doesn't yet understand and therefore doesn't want to fund... it's a quandary for sure!
Re: Why Your Professors Suck
#23The structural problem he mentioned at the end is this: students are not customers. Had they been customers, who could instantly stop paying this professor because they think he's boring and doesn't deliver, you'd see a completely different picture. It wouldn't be about grades and diplomas anymore. It would be about acquiring knowledge and skills that students can later apply. If they decide this professor cannot tea…
The other side of students being customers is that they will see a passing grade as something they have paid for and should receive, not something based on merit. If you paid a lot of money for a course but didn't get a good grade are you more likely to blame yourself or blame the teacher? More likely to give good feedback to a lecturer that gave an A because the course was easy or to a lecturer that gave a C for a very challenging course? Are people more likely to pick courses that have a reputation for low marks, or pick one where they will get better 'value for money'?
The result is grade inflation and it has been well documented:
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/14/the-history-of-...
They then attribute the rapid rise in grade inflation in the last couple of decades to a more “consumer-based approach” to education, which they say “has created both external and internal incentives for the faculty to grade more generously.” More generous grading can produce better instructor reviews, for example, and can help students be more competitive candidates for graduate schools and the job market.
Re: Why Your Professors Suck
#24The structural problem he mentioned at the end is this: students are not customers. Had they been customers, who could instantly stop paying this professor because they think he's boring and doesn't deliver, you'd see a completely different picture. It wouldn't be about grades and diplomas anymore. It would be about acquiring knowledge and skills that students can later apply. If they decide this professor cannot tea…
This would probably result in a lot of illiteracy, good education only for the rich, and very little fundamental research.
Market mechanisms are excellent at solving many problems, but they're not magic. They don't work well to provide public goods like high education standards or social mobility, and they generally have a hard time with intangible goods like knowledge.
Re: Why Your Professors Suck
#25> Good student: "When will the midterm be?"
> Me: "Why do you care?"
> Good student: "Um... I'd like to be able to plan when I
> should study for it."
> Me: "Oh, okay. I don't know when it's going to be."
> Good student: "Um... Okay. What's it going to cover?"
> Me: "I'm not sure, but it'll be really great!"
> Good student: "That's good, I guess. Can you be more specific?"
> Me: "Not really. But why do you care?"
Wow, this guy is a jerk. This just shouldn't happen. Fair enough, don't tell a student exactly what's on the exam - they should be learning all the material, not cramming for a test. But not telling them when it's going to be is ridiculous. People have lives and need to structure their time.
If a professor or lecturer had refused to tell me the date of an exam, I would have pursued a complaint as far as possible, which would probably have resulted in disciplinary action. In the UK, this just isn't acceptable. Do US universities really treat their students with such disdain?
Regarding the classifications, he missed out "cynical good student", which I suspect is overrepresented amongst HN readers. I never believed my professors were particularly smart people or worth listening to so I didn't attend lectures or hand in work to get feedback, but I did see the value of learning the material so I taught myself and aced exams.
Re: Why Your Professors Suck
#26The structural problem he mentioned at the end is this: students are not customers. Had they been customers, who could instantly stop paying this professor because they think he's boring and doesn't deliver, you'd see a completely different picture. It wouldn't be about grades and diplomas anymore. It would be about acquiring knowledge and skills that students can later apply. If they decide this professor cannot tea…
The other side of students being customers is that they will see a passing grade as something they have paid for and should receive, not something based on merit. If you paid a lot of money for a course but didn't get a good grade are you more likely to blame yourself or blame the teacher? More likely to give good feedback to a lecturer that gave an A because the course was easy or to a lecturer that gave a C for a v…
Abolish grades. Teachers are there to teach. Employers are there to assess and hire. You're just looking at it from the same old perspective.
Let me give you an example. I teach programming privately. People pay me $100/hr. Some of them found jobs thanks to my lessons. Some of them realized it's not for them and they didn't waste tons of money and time. And I've been doing this long enough to say there's a demand for my services and people generally like it. I don't grade them, I give them useful feedback on what should they improve and if they should continue. My primary goal is their success, not some stupid grade. Market works great if you apply it right.
Re: Why Your Professors Suck
#27> Good student: "When will the midterm be?" > Me: "Why do you care?" > Good student: "Um... I'd like to be able to plan when I > should study for it." > Me: "Oh, okay. I don't know when it's going to be." > Good student: "Um... Okay. What's it going to cover?" > Me: "I'm not sure, but it'll be really great!" > Good student: "That's good, I guess. Can you be more specific?" > Me: "Not really. But why do you care?" Wow…
Some schools require midterm dates on the syllabus, some don't. But in this case, the schools are more likely imposing structure on the professor rather than the other way around.
If you know exactly what you are going to teach for a semester, you can plan it all out. But god forbid if the class gets stuck on some material...if the schedule is strict the prof will just move on and let the curve sort it out. I preferred more flexible teachers in college and there were real reasons why universities in the US are high regarded.
Re: Why Your Professors Suck
#28When I went to uni, I had high expectations that I'll learn intellectual bases of different fields of knowledge, and will be taught how they relate to and improve human life. But my expectations were shattered very first day in the first calculus class when professor started explaining how to solve questions in first chapter of course book. Wait madam, what is calculus, how does it relate to me, what need was felt to invent it, what problems does it solve? My questions remained unanswered and I lost my faith in uni education.
Re: Why Your Professors Suck
#29Definitely not an engineering prof. Top university professors (ie. R1 schools) are primarily judged on their research , not their teaching . If your professors "suck" it's because they're spending all of their time on the things that matter to their careers: grant writing and publications. And students (good or bad) care about exam times because of... procrastination. The "bad" students (of the goof-off variety) don'…
True. The worst professor I had in school was a Nobel prize winner in physics.
Re: Why Your Professors Suck
#30It's not that black or white.
I was a cynical student myself. I flunked a few of my classes simply because I looked at them and decided they weren't useful or interesting to me. This was at a particularly anti-authoritarian point in my life (and I also wasn't that happy) so consisted of me just skipping the coursework and focusing on other intellectual domains that felt right to me.
Although I am sure this made me more creative (and doing things because I wanted to know more about the world has made me love learning), I was ignorant to not acknowledge the inherent risk in following your passions in learning. The world is stratified by easily measured educational standards - my string of As and Fs did not help me here, and when you are tested by somebody that is canon (and you will be) you will be at a strong disadvantage.
I had to fill in a few holes over the last few years. You can't always be sure that you won't need something, and even if you don't need it what if you are graded on it? It's crazy luck that my industry is fast-growing and was new and unregulated enough to accept me. If I wasn't in technology I almost certainly wouldn't have managed to come out of this unscathed.
Incomplete access to the mainstream educational signalling mechanism is a very dangerous situation. The other methods of signalling intelligence are a lot more difficult and have a much smaller market. (My achilles heel is institutional leverage, but my saving grace is being obsessed with learning.)
I couldn't have stopped myself from being who I was when I was younger. I hated being told what to do. I was too depressed to make myself do something that I wasn't enjoying (the first year of University was unfortunately an emotional ground zero for me and I rebuilt myself brick by painful brick.) But it's not right to say that specialisation and conforming is only important in academia. 80/20 rule is probably best for most people, maybe 60/40 if you're extremely secure...