Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What If Students Could Fire Their Professors?

npr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 190 posts

Re: What If Students Could Fire Their Professors?

#151

Post by nostrebored »

ohfunkyeah wrote: post #104
evanpw wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of students are there to get a degree, not to learn something. Employers don't know or care how much freshman chemistry you remember (unless you're a chemist), but they do care if you didn't finish your degree because you couldn't pass some requirement. I wonder if the the same relationship is true in fields where there is a licensing exam at the end of your degree (like engineering). Or maybe something like a…

I'd argue that most employers don't really care. They want to use degree, university, and sometimes grades as a first-round filter for screening applicants. Do they actually care if you took the challenging Philosophy course from the good professor, or the easy-A from the Roman History professor? Hell no. So if the primary thing you want is a job, why would you ever take the challenging class? If a professor is signi…

I think that you're right that employers don't care about the specific courses that you took. I think you're wrong to assume that that doesn't mean that those who do take the more challenging courses do get ahead. The best networking I've done was in my challenging courses, where I met smart people who were also interested in learning and bettering themselves. My admittedly skewed and anecdotal evidence is that those people I knew who challenged themselves are now working at better jobs or going to better grad schools than those who decided to coast by.

I did not have a single situation where I did not know the difficulty of a course going in. While professors may not adequately let you know, any one of your friends or a number of websites make this information easy to obtain.

I feel like I might be alone in this, but I feel like if anything, a professor should warn you if they know that they do not challenge and push. You're in a university course -- it should be challenging. Courses should not be designed for an average student to excel.

Re: What If Students Could Fire Their Professors?

#152

Post by kefka »

xamuel wrote: post #142
kefka wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The professors should be servants, in the same light a server is to a meal. I pay for it, I get it the way I want.

That's not a very realistic view of things. First of all, a professor's job consists of many things, of which teaching is just one. Depending on the institution, your tuition may be a very miniscule portion of the professor's paycheck. Finally, even if they're solely a lecturer and payed entirely from tuition, what you want isn't necessarily what other students want, so unless you've hired the prof as a private tutor…

I know it's not "realistic". But it is a viewpoint as from a student. I just distilled it down to the absolute minimum I could.

I work in a staff role at an university. I see things from the students and the faculty role. I see many students who skate by, doing little and collecting the degree. I also see professors who I'm surprised still figure out how to breathe.

I also see that the university props up a great deal of failing architectures (both buildings and power structures) that would fail readily except for the 'wonderfulness' of student loans. What money they bring in now will be paid in 10 fold twenty or so years from now.

I also know that my own job is artificially propped up because of students' debt. I also reduce cost for the university, knowing that the huge monument or statue or building was funded, because the uni has easy money.

Re: What If Students Could Fire Their Professors?

#153

Post by VLM »

I see an article and HN post full of obsolete old people thinking. You can't outsource responsibility for your life to someone else and then complain about it. The prof is not responsible for what a student learns or enjoys any more than the prof is responsible for the students sex life or religious belief. The student is responsible for learning the material. If the prof refuses to answer questions or refuses to eval the students the prof is guilty. If the students are lazy thats too bad for the student, sucks to be them. If the students don't like their prof, who cares, they're just ignorant kids till they learn something useful...

Old people thinking is you learn for 4 years then work at the same company doing the same thing for 43 years and retire with the corporate gold watch. Young people thinking is you learn full time for 4 years and then work while learning part time for 45+ years. For 4 years you have profs who you think you can outsource your responsibility for learning to... and your plan for the following 45+ professor-less years, still have to learn with no one to outsource your responsibility for learning to? Good luck with that.

There is also the missed effect of warped samples because the population is not constant over time. Lazy students either sink or swim and possibly learn to avoid hard profs in the future. Given that selection pressure its hard to imagine hard profs not resulting in better grades later because the sample is self selecting itself away from hard profs or dropping out. Even if there is no difference in educational attainment between hard and soft profs.

Re: What If Students Could Fire Their Professors?

#154

Post by amateurpolymath »

noobermin wrote: post #145
evanpw wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of students are there to get a degree, not to learn something. Employers don't know or care how much freshman chemistry you remember (unless you're a chemist), but they do care if you didn't finish your degree because you couldn't pass some requirement. I wonder if the the same relationship is true in fields where there is a licensing exam at the end of your degree (like engineering). Or maybe something like a…

Tell me about it. I TA for a physics class for premeds, and while they may find some passing interest in the course, they certainly don't care to learn it...and actually, I agree. May be a general knowledge of physics for someone going into medicine might be somewhat beneficial, but do I really expect my doctor to care about calculating the net force on a spaceship between the earth and the moon? Really? I'm still at…

Ability in physics could be considered a proxy measure of student ability to understand abstract mathematical models. Or perhaps it's just another "are you smart?" filter.

Re: What If Students Could Fire Their Professors?

#155

Post by VLM »

Dotnaught wrote: post #3

Everyone would get an "A"?

Something to think about: My intro to philosophy prof felt the value of his class was the performance art aspect of sitting thru his admittedly pretty well performed Socratic method in class. The administration wouldn't let him skip finals, so he told us to write whatever we felt like writing to him, place whatever grade we felt we earned on the top, and that would be our grade. From memory the other CS students and I ganged up on him and convinced him to talk about brain-in-a-vat in class for a couple days so I wrote on that topic.

This could apply outside philosophy. I sat thru some chemistry classes that bordered on performance art working thru endless examples of problems in class. I think I pretty much learned quantitative chemical analysis by osmosis just watching the prof work problems. I still remember endless buffer solutions puzzles over 20 years later. Also ochem lab was self explanatory, its a practical lab class nothing more, from memory there was no lecture component beyond "this is the fire extinguisher, here is the safety shower, here is the eye wash station" etc. This could probably be extended to CS/IT classes, somehow.

Re: What If Students Could Fire Their Professors?

#156

Post by douche »

In my experience, the teachers I learned the most from were also the best teachers, i.e. the most engaging. Difficulty was really a separate concern, in a lot of ways. There were very easy courses that I learned a huge amount from, and difficult courses that weren't worth the time I spent on them.

To be honest, I only bothered to rate professors because I couldn't see my final grades until I did so. Consequently, only the very excellent and the very terrible really got any kind of response.

Re: What If Students Could Fire Their Professors?

#157

Post by joe_the_user »

evanpw wrote: post #85
ColinWright wrote: post #2

Here's the take-away quotation for me: The better the professors were, as measured by their students' grades in later classes, the lower their ratings from students. "If you make your students do well in their academic career, you get worse evaluations from your students," Pellizzari said. Students, by and large, don't enjoy learning from a taskmaster, even if it does them some good.

A lot of students are there to get a degree, not to learn something. Employers don't know or care how much freshman chemistry you remember (unless you're a chemist), but they do care if you didn't finish your degree because you couldn't pass some requirement. I wonder if the the same relationship is true in fields where there is a licensing exam at the end of your degree (like engineering). Or maybe something like a…

Yes,

It seems illogical to expect students to make an acts focused on selfless learning right at the point that you are making the teacher's position tenuous and thus forcing said teacher to be thinking about immediate self-interest.

Re: What If Students Could Fire Their Professors?

#158

Post by VLM »

sgustard wrote: post #114

After I'm finished firing my professors, do I still get my degree?

The purpose of higher ed is to outsource the selective pressure from corporate HR depts to university admissions depts. So the corporation can hire the "right people from the right social groups" by using the degree as proxy.

Seeing as the admissions dept has already done all the work of filtering applicants to select the right ones, sure, why not.

May as well issue the degree at admission time, skip the dog and pony show of 4 years of attendance. It'll have little to no effect on outcomes in non-vocational fields.

The vocational fields don't belong at uni/college anyway, they belong at vo-tech schools just like welding or diesel repair.

Re: What If Students Could Fire Their Professors?

#159

Post by semi-extrinsic »

noobermin wrote: post #145
evanpw wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of students are there to get a degree, not to learn something. Employers don't know or care how much freshman chemistry you remember (unless you're a chemist), but they do care if you didn't finish your degree because you couldn't pass some requirement. I wonder if the the same relationship is true in fields where there is a licensing exam at the end of your degree (like engineering). Or maybe something like a…

Tell me about it. I TA for a physics class for premeds, and while they may find some passing interest in the course, they certainly don't care to learn it...and actually, I agree. May be a general knowledge of physics for someone going into medicine might be somewhat beneficial, but do I really expect my doctor to care about calculating the net force on a spaceship between the earth and the moon? Really? I'm still at…

"calculating the net force on a spaceship between the earth and the moon"

Well, that's your problem. There's a ton of physics that premeds should learn, but gravity is not one of them. Calculating electric potentials, forces etc. as applied to biological membranes would be infinitely better. Teach them the doppler effect, so they'll understand that ultrasound flow meter from the get go. Don't even get me started on NMR, PET, proton radiation therapy, ...

Re: What If Students Could Fire Their Professors?

#160

Post by noobermin »

amateurpolymath wrote: post #154
noobermin wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell me about it. I TA for a physics class for premeds, and while they may find some passing interest in the course, they certainly don't care to learn it...and actually, I agree. May be a general knowledge of physics for someone going into medicine might be somewhat beneficial, but do I really expect my doctor to care about calculating the net force on a spaceship between the earth and the moon? Really? I'm still at…

Ability in physics could be considered a proxy measure of student ability to understand abstract mathematical models. Or perhaps it's just another "are you smart?" filter.

Why not teach abstract mathematical models instead, or a may be something around quantitative models in biology? I'm all for my students learning abstraction and math but I think applications in biology would be more interesting and ultimately more useful for them than a mass on an inclined plane with friction.
Post reply on HN