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Study: Highly Rated Profs are Overrated

post #1 of 8
6/12/10 at 12:31pm
Thread Starter 
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/col...=sec-education

I could have told them that!

Take what you want from the article. I've heard it myself from other students "I hate this professor. He/she gives out too much homework, the tests are too hard. It's too much work. This is supposed to be college, not high school!".

No kidding, it's college, it shouldn't be easy.

www.ratemyprofessor.com is one of the worst offenders for this attitude. To be fair there are some really good professors getting fair evaluations, but there are just as many, if not more, who get poor ratings because the students have to actually work and learn something in order to pass the course.

I took the same professor for all three world history classes. His reviews from students on the aforementioned site were terrible. Why? Because you have to work to pass the class. He didn't throw you softballs. He lectured, and you had to take very good notes, made sure you answered questions if you didn't understand something, and study a lot for the tests. To this day he is one of my favorite teachers. I get more out of the challenging classes.
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post #2 of 8
6/12/10 at 6:45pm
I agree, strict professors motivate me a whole lot more But, they get bad reviews If I see a professor putting a lot of work into the class, coming up with interesting lectures, simply caring, I feel very motivated and I want to do all of the work, I end up loving the class, even if it's more difficult.

However, I've had professors who were lazy, that's one thing I absolutely detest, because they try to make it seem like it's not laziness.. They refuse to put any work into the class, for example they want to have a 'disucssion day' without having any more questions about the reading than "what did everyone think about it"
Ughh I can't stand professors like this!!!
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post #3 of 8
6/13/10 at 2:04pm
Oh my I had a good laugh just at the title... Going oh my someone has alot of time to waste if they can rate their profs...

From what I can tell high school is the new elementary school and college was a continuation of high school and this was 10 plus yrs ago ... I can imagine the whole picture is worsening by the day..
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post #4 of 8
6/14/10 at 4:38pm
I really hope they didn't get a boatload of money to do that study! The results are so predictable that it wasn't really even a "theory" to start with, just getting the data to prove the truth that was already known by anyone with half a brain (and generally outside of the university setting, who observes the idea of "student evaluation" from a distance, as well as seeing the results of college education).

Maybe we are/were the rarities in college. I much preferred the harder professors & classes as well. I came to college to learn, which was the whole point of the piece of paper that I got at the end of it. (Frankly, I wish I could have made a profession out of being a student - I love learning!) Unfortunately, at the college that I chose, the professors and classes that actually challenged me were few and far between. One of my favorite professors, though, saw that I wasn't being challenged in the writing course and had what she thought was a greater potential than I was showing. (She was right - I was totally skating the first part of that class!) She approached me to work with me and push me so that I did learn and grow from her course. Yes, this was/is a small college, but she was the only one who really reached out like that.
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post #5 of 8
6/14/10 at 5:06pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by ut0pia View Post
However, I've had professors who were lazy, that's one thing I absolutely detest, because they try to make it seem like it's not laziness.. They refuse to put any work into the class, for example they want to have a 'disucssion day' without having any more questions about the reading than "what did everyone think about it"
Ughh I can't stand professors like this!!!
I can't either, and there are some bad professors out there. Some just can't teach.

There's a guy in one of my classes this term who is going into law enforcement and since his path is already laid out and he doesn't put any effort into anything he feels that it is responsibility to berate people who like to maintain a good GPA. Just because it isn't important to him doesn't mean that it isn't important to others...like me. I don't want to rely solely on student loans, I'd like to try and get some scholarship money to help fund my BA.

Except for a couple of classes I'm finding college to be too easy. I'm hoping it gets a little more challenging when I transfer to a university.
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post #6 of 8
6/15/10 at 4:10pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Essayons89 View Post
Except for a couple of classes I'm finding college to be too easy. I'm hoping it gets a little more challenging when I transfer to a university.
In my experience...time-consuming, yes...cognitively challenging, no. I had to use my brain more in my first two years at a community college than in the last two of my BA or my first run through grad school. That may have been partly my major since ed majors out of my undergrad college take dibs and dabs of all sorts of classes with mostly group work and very little content. I mean, my ed psych prof gave the midterm as multiple choice, open-book, take-home for a week, with a class forum for collaboration up to and including "#5 is C" so basically no one studied anything. I made Magna Cum Laude, mostly coasting through on visual/verbal memory and reading the summaries instead of the full chapters.

I'm taking a second run at grad school, in a Secondary Math Ed. program that's heavy on the content courses, this time so I can be Highly Qualified and have a degree that means something, and I'm working harder on it through an online school (PM if you care about which one) than I worked at any of the traditional campus-based colleges I went to...again, that may be partly the major, since now I'm in a program with actual content to learn.
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post #7 of 8
6/16/10 at 12:39pm
Thread Starter 
I've done pretty well with the online classes I have already taken: English Comp 3, two Biology classes, a class on Excel, and two American history courses. I scored an "A" in all of them, but have found them to be a little more difficult because all of the work is placed on the student to read and learn the material without being in a lecture. I don't know if I want to do all online classes. Depending on the course I would wind up missing being able to hear the lecture and participate in debate and/or discussion.
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post #8 of 8
6/17/10 at 4:22pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Essayons89 View Post
Except for a couple of classes I'm finding college to be too easy. I'm hoping it gets a little more challenging when I transfer to a university.
My AP Comp & Lit class is high school was more difficult and challenging than anything I took in college. That includes studies at my primary college, and summer courses at 3 different universities (before and after graduation). The only one that was close was British Literature at Colorado State University...and I found out that the professor who taught that class was one of the people who graded our term papers in AP Comp & Lit (our teacher had them reviewed and graded by three people, herself and two professors at CSU) - which was the biggest reason that class was so hard!

My term paper in AP Comp & Lit was to compare, contrast and find the common threads in at least three novels by a classic author, as well as researching their life and other writings (i.e. articles, essays, short stories) that give deeper meaning and understanding to the themes in their novels.

I was a Language Arts major in college, which was a double major of English - Composition/Writing, Literature, Linguistics, Drama, and Journalism. Nothing in college was even a glimmer of that paper I wrote in high school!

Sorry, Bryan. Maybe with another major it would be different, but I sure didn't find it to be all that challenging. Intersting, yes. Challenging, no.
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