4 ms·
tl;dr: professor has a few bad experiences with students and, combining them with a choice anecdote from an unnamed colleague, proceeds to generalize to not onl
by yakult 11y ago
tl;dr: professor has a few bad experiences with students and, combining them with a choice anecdote from an unnamed colleague, proceeds to generalize to not only the (presumably) hundreds of students he has taught, but students, everywhere, in general.
Having been a student myself, I could recount the time when a professor chose to replace her all twelve of her lectures with student presentations, then tested us on entirely untaught content; or perhaps the other time when submitted assignments and tests were not marked or discussed, at all, so that the only feedback was a numerical result at the end of the semester.
I could choose to say that this is symptomatic of a system where research is king and teaching is for peons and undergraduates are lower than dirt.
Or I could choose to say that perhaps some professors are just bad at their jobs. Or, even, they just had a bad semester. The advantage is that I could do this without cherry-picking the outliers.
What did the writer teach? I hope it is not statistics.
edit: that's some fast negative karma there. Those of you that downvoted, I would love to hear your thoughts.
- arbitrage 11y agoPersonally, I tend to downvote people who whine about karma. I can get enough of that crap on reddit. Someone can disagree with you without having to get into an extended debate. That's why the voting buttons exist.
- emp_zealoth 11y agoNo, that is exactly and perfectly wrong. Downvoting because you disagree is against the rules. As a student I wholeheartedly agree - I have classes now where a tutor comes in, tosses a two page pdf with an assigment in Labview (which we were never taught or even got to use before) to do during class and ITS GRADED right after that class. He also throws a hissing fit every time anyone dares to ask him for help.
- pc86 11y agoI'm sure you've brought this behavior up with the professor though, right?
- mcphage 11y ago> I could recount the time when a professor chose to replace her all twelve of her lectures with student presentations, then tested us on entirely untaught content; or perhaps the other time when submitted assignments and tests were not marked or discussed, at all, so that the only feedback was a numerical result at the end of the semester. > I could choose to say that this is symptomatic of a system where research is king and teaching is for peons and undergraduates are lower than dirt. > Or I could choose to say that perhaps some professors are just bad at their jobs. Or, even, they just had a bad semester. The advantage is that I could do this without cherry-picking the outliers. Which is to say, you just did do all those things; you were just passive-agressive about it.