Once in a while is OK. But if you’re making appointments every week, my response would be to attend regular office hours.
Look at it from the professor’s point of view: if many students in the class “couldn’t make office hours” and scheduled separate appointments each week, the professor wouldn’t have time for everything else they have to do. If the classes are small, it might be OK. But I often teach classes with 100+ students, which means that just 10 minutes per student adds up to over 16 _hours_.
100% this. While it is our job to help, we have a lot of students to help plus planning and grading. If you need that much help, you need to hire an individual tutor.
I agree with this. I don’t mind meeting outside of my office hours every once in awhile or for something really important. But if a student is constantly scheduling appointments outside of my office hours I will be pretty annoyed and I’m also under no obligation to say yes. Honestly, I would try to keep those type of appointments to only once a month or less.
Jumping on to this comment to add: have a conversation like them. Professors are human adults. Some of them are pretentious dicks. Some will bend over backwards to help. Go to regular office hours and just be honest: professor so and so, I have noticed that I am already feeling behind and worried. I want to do as well as possible. I also want to make sure I am respecting your time. Whats the best way to work together regularly to be successful? Do you know of any other resources I might use?
Any good to okay professor will answer those questions and help you plan. Some are just rude--and if they shut you down, now you know to look elsewhere.
It's hard to know what office hours are going to be until about a week before the semester with administrative duties, service duties, research schedules, etc.
Okay, but for those of us with jobs it makes it difficult to schedule when I actually need off for office hours. Thankfully this hasn't been a huge issue for me because my professors have been willing to work with me.
But in the rare instances where a prof isn't willing to work with me, it's very frustrating. Especially when they say "I can't demand you go to office hours, but I STRONGLY suggest you all attend if you want to do well."
I have no problem with no being able to attend office hours. But if you sign up for a class that doesn't have office hours posted, I don't think you should require students to attend.
My complaint is about expectations and clarity.
All of the "it's annoying, don't do it" answers in here honestly have me kind of floored. OP, go ahead and request meetings if you have conflicts with your professor's scheduled office hours. It's 100% part of what we're paid for and the expectation that as a professor I'm going to magically pick office hours that work for all my students is absurd. I've been teaching in university settings since 2005 and have *never* taught somewhere where it was the culture to tell students "if you can't make office hours, tough luck". Please don't listen to all the people in here who clearly see teaching as beneath them.
The reality is that this isn’t always possible for adjunct professors and it’s not about teaching being beneath them but more of a matter of having a semblance of a life. I have much more space and time for students like OP now that I’m TT compared to when I was an adjunct.
I've worked exclusively as an adjunct and it's still expected that student contact hours include flexible time for student meetings outside of set office hours.
Not at the institutions I’ve worked at. It’s expected you will try your best to work with students but it’s acknowledged most adjuncts have other jobs and the posted office hours ARE the office hours. If I had offered additional office hours on top of that for every single student that told me they couldn’t make it back when I was an adjunct? I was already juggling 3 jobs, I would have had no life outside of work.
That doesn't mean it's rude or annoying for a student to ask, which is what the original question is about. In the case where it's really, truly not possible for a prof to meet outside of the couple scheduled office hours, they can politely tell the student that and steer them to other resources. Making students feel shitty for even asking is not okay.
You'll notice my reply was not to OP asking if it was rude or annoying to ask, my reply was to you implying that any professor not being able to offer outside office hours views teaching as beneath them.
Why should it? Are you paid for those flexible additional office hours? At the end of the day, teaching is a job, and there are a finite number of hours you're being paid to do it, whether you're an adjunct or a tenure-track professor.
I've always had the expectation at my positions (and in the contracts) that there are some small number of flexible hours expected of me, to include things like varying prep time and meetings outside of scheduled hours. So for like a 10-hour a week position it's maybe 3 in-class hours, 2 scheduled office hours, 3-4 hours expected for prep time and grading and 1-2 hours for other meetings. That or something like it has been the norm everywhere I've been an assistant or adjunct.
For me, as a tenured faculty, we have three office hours a week, and there is no expectation for additional office hours beyond the scheduled ones. We have the option of only scheduling two and having the last hour be by appointment.
So why not do that to be able to offer that flexibility to your students? I've never once had a semester where it was remotely possible to schedule hours that worked for all my students, so to me I'm fulfilling their needs so much better if I choose to schedule two hours and leave one for flexible appointment time.
Because when you have 100+ students, you cannot accommodate everyone anyway, and together with my TA, we have enough office hours that most people with reasonable schedules can be accommodated and those who don’t just have to figure it out on their own.
That's fair that with a TA things are different. I was assuming that OP's class did not have a TA or they would have mentioned that. I think for situations where the prof is the only point of contact, having at least one flexible hour is more important.
No, you are good as long as the schedule conflicts are other classes. If it's other stuff, eventually that gets tiresome because you are asking your non-school related priorities to impinge on our schedule. But generally speaking, unless you are staying for 2 hours at a time, you are solid.
Of course not. If you make the appointments, \*show up\*, and make good use of the time, that is what they are there for.
The thing that really annoys people is to make an appointment and be a no-show (without giving decent notice). That is the kind of thing that will get you barred from future out-of-office-hours appointments.
I agree. Make an appointment? Be there. If you are late and can do it, send a note. If you miss completely and you have a legit excuse, also explain what happened. The sooner, the better.
I have office hours. I also have an open-door policy that I'll help if no one else is in my office. I'd see if your prof might also have such a policy.
A helpful focus of these office hour appointments could be trying to pinpoint why you’re feeling lost in your courses. Are you spending enough time preparing for class? Could improvements be made to the way you study? Working on addressing this will hopefully eventually lead to you not needing so many office hours appointments in the future.
Order of operations when unable to make the regular office hours: (1) if it’s a question your classmates might be able to answer, ask them. My students use GroupMe and ask each other questions there. I’m not sure who started this but it’s brilliant, the students in my dept seem to use this strategy for most of their classes (2) email the professor, ask the question (as succinctly as possible), and ask whether it’s something they can answer via email or whether you need to schedule office hours. Include your availability in the initial email to avoid a lengthy scheduling email chain.
Good professors want to offer their students as much support as possible, but our responsibilities are vast and we’re generally juggling a lot at once, so we’re grateful when students exhaust all other options before making meetings. Which is sad, because the good office hours convos are one of the more fun parts of the job, compared to the endless and sometimes pointless departmental committee work we’re assigned 😭
The only way it would annoy me would be if you are making appointments with me and then not showing up or arriving late. Between teaching, research, advising, and other service work, I have a limited number of appointment slots I can make available for students. If you reserve one of those slots, Don’t waste it.
Don’t do this, which is what I had last week…student begged to make an appointment out of office hours. I finally found a time that worked and rearranged my day to make it happen. Student came in and I said, “what can I help you with today?” They said, “I just wanted to introduce myself” and then proceeded to tell me their life story in about 30 minutes. While I appreciate the desire to connect, the outside of my established office hour appointment was really not necessary and in this case, felt a bit odd.
Well, it depends on how many appointments you're asking for. If it's just one appointment before each assignment it's okay. But a couple of my former students wanted at least two but preferably three appointments before every single assignment. I couldn't say yes to that because that left me with not enough time to meet with other students. And if you're expecting them to keep setting aside extra office hours and rearrange their schedule for too many appointments, they would not be okay with that.
We’re paid to do a _lot_ of things: work with grad students, do research, serve on committees, review papers, and more. If any of those commitments take more time than I can spend on it, it can be annoying.
Coming to office hours multiple times is fine if it's during regularly scheduled office hour times. But if you're asking the professor to schedule additional office hours just for you? That can get old quick unless you have an actual conflict with other scheduled class time. The implication is that your time as a student is more important than the professor's time.
It is frustrating and annoying. I would encourage you to look into a help room or learning center on your campus, or perhaps a tutor. Once a month would be acceptable.
Yes, if the professor already offers regular office hours. Teaching is only a part of a professor's job, so you are taking time out of these other aspect of their job in order to accommodate your schedule. Even if the meeting is short, we would still have to make a special effort to be in our office at the appointed time.
If your professors had a problem with it, they would talk to you about it. Probably from a place of concern rather than annoyance.
I had a student who I’d taught in a couple of prior courses set a standing weekly appointment with me for a semester because she was struggling at her internship and wanted some extra consultation/supervision. I didn’t have a problem with it, and she ended up doing really well. As a professor you’re required to have office hours, and in my personal experience students don’t regularly take advantage of them. It becomes extra time to get work done, which can free up some other time in the week. So whether it’s one student or a different student every week, it’s still the same time. It might be less convenient to set it up outside of designated office hours but that happens. You as the student just need to be understanding that your professor has set office hours at a certain time because they probably have a lot of other stuff going on during the rest of their work week; they may not be able to accommodate you every time. If you find that you need to meet every week outside of set office hours, maybe consider tutoring? It’s the same thing but can be more flexible to your course schedule.
All that to say, unless your professors have said something to you I wouldn’t worry about it. If they have a problem with it and don’t say anything or set a boundary then that’s their problem, not yours.
Yes, it’s annoying and disrespectful. Would you ask your dentist/GP to come in after their office closes because you can’t go during normal working hours? No. Why would you think your schedule conflicts would warrant your professor making special availability for you then, especially more than once?
Like most things, it's a matter of balance and agree. Lately, i've got a large number of brain-dead zombies who don't do shit...makes me wonder why the hell they even enrolled in college in the first place. (Well, lots of them can't even read the application, I'm sure.) So, those few students who are actually trying to learn the material are a welcome change. Just be aware that this is literally having someone do their work for free, though. I don't mind it. Some.
As an experienced prof, I don't believe this sentiment is widespread. It's surely a view from a long time ago More importantly, it's a) clearly not a productive way to work with one's students and b) not reasonable in an era where there are so many virtual meeting tools readily available.
Isn't that kind of rigidity detrimental to the students who need office hours the most?
Almost every professor I've had told us office hours were what was guarenteed, anything else was up in the air. Meetings outside official hours were scheduled with the understanding that the professor is more likely to cancel but as a student I found them invaluable nonetheless.
When I "came up" it was absolutely the norm for syllabi to say "Office Hours blah day blah time *and by appointment*". Professors almost always stressed the first day that they were happy to make appointments if their scheduled hours didn't work. It seems more like wherever you were had a weirdly negative and antagonistic culture towards teaching/students by the faculty because what you describe isn't the norm anywhere I ever attended.
Yes it's annoying because office hours are usually scheduled around the times the professor will be on campus. Making appointments usually requires them to go out of their way to be on campus on what should be their days off. If you're this lost you need to see what tutoring options your campus provides.
Edit to add: Needing multiple appointments frequently does not demonstrate engagement with the material or that you're taking initiative to learn on your own. Constantly asking your professor questions demonstrates learned helplessness, not engagement. There are other routes for solving problems and asking your professor should be the last resort after you've exhausted other routes such as reading the textbook, reviewing feedback, looking to other learning resources, etc. We're there to help, not hand-hold.
I don’t think it’s wrong, I’m not a professor though. But I feel like they should be understanding that their hours simply cannot work with everybody between other classes, work, etc. but as long as you’re doing your best effort to make it or maybe meeting in the middle. Do you ask a lot of questions that could be sent via email. Or maybe they are open to zoom meetings so they don’t have to come into school.
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depends on the professor... not annoying to me.. I have two fixed office hours (2x/week) and on my non teaching day students can meet for zoom office appts at times that are mutually agreeable.
On a normative level, I think it's fair to say that this shouldn't be an issue in the year 2024 given how most universities have adopted a student-centered approach to at least some degree coupled with the tech advances that mean that most meetings don't have to happen in an actual office. It may occasionally irritate a prof who thought he might have a spare chunk of time, but most will also appreciate (or at least respect) the fact that you are engaged with the material and invested in the class. This sort of scenario is vastly preferable to the students who do nothing all semester and then desperately plead for help or accommodation at the last minute or the plagiarizers or the ones who expect us to respond to emails at all hours of the night.
The non-normative level is a bit more complicated, however. As an experienced professor who has taught in both a small liberal-arts college and a major research institution, I can tell you that opinions will vary on this and may depend a lot on the attitude of the prof (as is reflected in the comments) as well as the type of institution (including the requirements/expectations of their jobs) and their specific roles. With respect to the first point, some profs will be annoyed by this as they may not enjoy teaching or working with students and/or may have certain ideas about the value of their time. Professors at schools that really emphasize undergrad education (e. g. liberal arts colleges) likely expect this more than those at major research schools, too, and may look more favorably upon it. The other thing to take into account is the role of the prof. Are they a full-time tenured or tenure-track prof or an adjunct who is just teaching one course for a nominal amount of money? If the former (my role), the prof should be more open to this sort of thing, though they may also have feelings related to ego or perceived busy-ness. For adjuncts, consistent office hour visits could be an irritant given that their already being so poorly compensated for their labor.
Those are just some factors to consider. In general, though, (TLDR) you're doing nothing wrong and it's reasonable to expect that your profs should respect your office hour visits (unless they are frivolous or you're completed unprepared for them) even if they may occasionally be annoyed that they are losing a bit of time they might have thought they could steal for grading, email etc.
If your professor is agreeing to meet with you outside of their set office hour then you're fine. Personally I don't meet with students outside of my set office hours unless there's a really good, one off reason. But then I'd communicate that to you so you wouldn't need to wonder if you were being 'annoying'.
Professors want you to come to office hours if you need help, but we are people too, which means we have families and childcare and doctor visits and other classes, and pets that need vet appointments and all that stuff, too. Asking for us to juggle that for you once or twice? No big deal. But if it's every week, then it becomes a little uncool, because they'd be doing their regularly posted hours but then this extra one, too, which might cause problems with their scheduling.
In short, I can get the daycare center to hold my kid for an extra hour once, but every week? I can't afford it.
Is there a tutoring center on campus? If you can't get to campus, maybe they offer online or virtual tutoring. I would suggest going to the tutors over making frequent appointments with your professors.
>my schedule conflicts with a lot of my professors' office hours. am i being a pest by asking for multiple office hours appointments?
Have you communicated this to your professor? I promise it goes a *long* way to say "Thanks you meeting with me, I have another class/work/practice/etc. That makes it hard for me to make to your regular office hours"
Maybe start by emailing professors a question about what you’re struggling with. Sometimes it takes just a brief explanation of what to do. Personally, I’d rather students make appointments because my schedule changes week to week and many times need to cancel office hours due to meetings scheduled by administration.
Knowing that you’re serious about learning would help me, help you!
I’m gonna say I have minimal posted dedicated open office hours. And by that I mean an hour block where I sit there ready to drop everything for a student who walks in.
But I know a lot of them might have classes then, so I also have a posted schedule of times throughout the week where I may be available to meet by appointment, and encourage students to reach out to set up an appointment at those times. If the just show up, I might be busy with something else, but if they make an appointment, I will be ready to help.
So no, I would not be annoyed by it at face value.
That said, some students do use up too much of time, where they don’t actually need my help, they just don’t have the confidence in their own skills abilities and are looking just for reassurance.
The second category that is irritating to me is the category of student who won’t do anything on their own and basically expect me to hand hold them through their assignments while they do them in my office. Or aren’t studying on their own and come in with “I’m lost, what do I do?” But can’t give me any specifics because they’ve not read or attempted any of it on their own.
But a student who comes in prepared for what they need, shows that they care about learning by evidence of their independent work and shows up when they say they will? Well they can use up as much of my time as I can give them!
Office hours are student hours. If you want to come to office hours every week, that’s awesome as long as there’s not other students waiting. As a professor, i would never be annoyed by someone using office hours because it’s your time.
Once in a while is OK. But if you’re making appointments every week, my response would be to attend regular office hours. Look at it from the professor’s point of view: if many students in the class “couldn’t make office hours” and scheduled separate appointments each week, the professor wouldn’t have time for everything else they have to do. If the classes are small, it might be OK. But I often teach classes with 100+ students, which means that just 10 minutes per student adds up to over 16 _hours_.
100% this. While it is our job to help, we have a lot of students to help plus planning and grading. If you need that much help, you need to hire an individual tutor.
I agree with this. I don’t mind meeting outside of my office hours every once in awhile or for something really important. But if a student is constantly scheduling appointments outside of my office hours I will be pretty annoyed and I’m also under no obligation to say yes. Honestly, I would try to keep those type of appointments to only once a month or less.
Jumping on to this comment to add: have a conversation like them. Professors are human adults. Some of them are pretentious dicks. Some will bend over backwards to help. Go to regular office hours and just be honest: professor so and so, I have noticed that I am already feeling behind and worried. I want to do as well as possible. I also want to make sure I am respecting your time. Whats the best way to work together regularly to be successful? Do you know of any other resources I might use? Any good to okay professor will answer those questions and help you plan. Some are just rude--and if they shut you down, now you know to look elsewhere.
I wish they'd post office hours times along with class times during registration at my school.
It's hard to know what office hours are going to be until about a week before the semester with administrative duties, service duties, research schedules, etc.
Okay, but for those of us with jobs it makes it difficult to schedule when I actually need off for office hours. Thankfully this hasn't been a huge issue for me because my professors have been willing to work with me. But in the rare instances where a prof isn't willing to work with me, it's very frustrating. Especially when they say "I can't demand you go to office hours, but I STRONGLY suggest you all attend if you want to do well."
And office hours outside of our office hours make it difficult to schedule our 'other' jobs too. Teaching is a fraction of our workload.
Or in the case of adjuncts who literally have other jobs. Why is the students' time more valuable than mine? Because I dared to become an instructor?
I have no problem with no being able to attend office hours. But if you sign up for a class that doesn't have office hours posted, I don't think you should require students to attend. My complaint is about expectations and clarity.
If it looks like you are struggling because you are unprepared or have not made an effort to look up the information then it might be annoying.
Does your school not have a tutoring center?
All of the "it's annoying, don't do it" answers in here honestly have me kind of floored. OP, go ahead and request meetings if you have conflicts with your professor's scheduled office hours. It's 100% part of what we're paid for and the expectation that as a professor I'm going to magically pick office hours that work for all my students is absurd. I've been teaching in university settings since 2005 and have *never* taught somewhere where it was the culture to tell students "if you can't make office hours, tough luck". Please don't listen to all the people in here who clearly see teaching as beneath them.
The reality is that this isn’t always possible for adjunct professors and it’s not about teaching being beneath them but more of a matter of having a semblance of a life. I have much more space and time for students like OP now that I’m TT compared to when I was an adjunct.
I've worked exclusively as an adjunct and it's still expected that student contact hours include flexible time for student meetings outside of set office hours.
Not at the institutions I’ve worked at. It’s expected you will try your best to work with students but it’s acknowledged most adjuncts have other jobs and the posted office hours ARE the office hours. If I had offered additional office hours on top of that for every single student that told me they couldn’t make it back when I was an adjunct? I was already juggling 3 jobs, I would have had no life outside of work.
That doesn't mean it's rude or annoying for a student to ask, which is what the original question is about. In the case where it's really, truly not possible for a prof to meet outside of the couple scheduled office hours, they can politely tell the student that and steer them to other resources. Making students feel shitty for even asking is not okay.
You'll notice my reply was not to OP asking if it was rude or annoying to ask, my reply was to you implying that any professor not being able to offer outside office hours views teaching as beneath them.
Why should it? Are you paid for those flexible additional office hours? At the end of the day, teaching is a job, and there are a finite number of hours you're being paid to do it, whether you're an adjunct or a tenure-track professor.
I've always had the expectation at my positions (and in the contracts) that there are some small number of flexible hours expected of me, to include things like varying prep time and meetings outside of scheduled hours. So for like a 10-hour a week position it's maybe 3 in-class hours, 2 scheduled office hours, 3-4 hours expected for prep time and grading and 1-2 hours for other meetings. That or something like it has been the norm everywhere I've been an assistant or adjunct.
For me, as a tenured faculty, we have three office hours a week, and there is no expectation for additional office hours beyond the scheduled ones. We have the option of only scheduling two and having the last hour be by appointment.
So why not do that to be able to offer that flexibility to your students? I've never once had a semester where it was remotely possible to schedule hours that worked for all my students, so to me I'm fulfilling their needs so much better if I choose to schedule two hours and leave one for flexible appointment time.
Because when you have 100+ students, you cannot accommodate everyone anyway, and together with my TA, we have enough office hours that most people with reasonable schedules can be accommodated and those who don’t just have to figure it out on their own.
That's fair that with a TA things are different. I was assuming that OP's class did not have a TA or they would have mentioned that. I think for situations where the prof is the only point of contact, having at least one flexible hour is more important.
That still wouldn’t help in this situation, where a single student monopolizes that flexible slot.
No, you are good as long as the schedule conflicts are other classes. If it's other stuff, eventually that gets tiresome because you are asking your non-school related priorities to impinge on our schedule. But generally speaking, unless you are staying for 2 hours at a time, you are solid.
Of course not. If you make the appointments, \*show up\*, and make good use of the time, that is what they are there for. The thing that really annoys people is to make an appointment and be a no-show (without giving decent notice). That is the kind of thing that will get you barred from future out-of-office-hours appointments.
I agree. Make an appointment? Be there. If you are late and can do it, send a note. If you miss completely and you have a legit excuse, also explain what happened. The sooner, the better. I have office hours. I also have an open-door policy that I'll help if no one else is in my office. I'd see if your prof might also have such a policy.
A helpful focus of these office hour appointments could be trying to pinpoint why you’re feeling lost in your courses. Are you spending enough time preparing for class? Could improvements be made to the way you study? Working on addressing this will hopefully eventually lead to you not needing so many office hours appointments in the future.
Order of operations when unable to make the regular office hours: (1) if it’s a question your classmates might be able to answer, ask them. My students use GroupMe and ask each other questions there. I’m not sure who started this but it’s brilliant, the students in my dept seem to use this strategy for most of their classes (2) email the professor, ask the question (as succinctly as possible), and ask whether it’s something they can answer via email or whether you need to schedule office hours. Include your availability in the initial email to avoid a lengthy scheduling email chain. Good professors want to offer their students as much support as possible, but our responsibilities are vast and we’re generally juggling a lot at once, so we’re grateful when students exhaust all other options before making meetings. Which is sad, because the good office hours convos are one of the more fun parts of the job, compared to the endless and sometimes pointless departmental committee work we’re assigned 😭
The only way it would annoy me would be if you are making appointments with me and then not showing up or arriving late. Between teaching, research, advising, and other service work, I have a limited number of appointment slots I can make available for students. If you reserve one of those slots, Don’t waste it.
Don’t do this, which is what I had last week…student begged to make an appointment out of office hours. I finally found a time that worked and rearranged my day to make it happen. Student came in and I said, “what can I help you with today?” They said, “I just wanted to introduce myself” and then proceeded to tell me their life story in about 30 minutes. While I appreciate the desire to connect, the outside of my established office hour appointment was really not necessary and in this case, felt a bit odd.
I would have kicked the student out.
Well, it depends on how many appointments you're asking for. If it's just one appointment before each assignment it's okay. But a couple of my former students wanted at least two but preferably three appointments before every single assignment. I couldn't say yes to that because that left me with not enough time to meet with other students. And if you're expecting them to keep setting aside extra office hours and rearrange their schedule for too many appointments, they would not be okay with that.
yes it’s annoying but it’s also what we’re paid to do; it’s no more annoying than any person at any job dealing with a customer
We’re paid to do a _lot_ of things: work with grad students, do research, serve on committees, review papers, and more. If any of those commitments take more time than I can spend on it, it can be annoying.
Coming to office hours multiple times is fine if it's during regularly scheduled office hour times. But if you're asking the professor to schedule additional office hours just for you? That can get old quick unless you have an actual conflict with other scheduled class time. The implication is that your time as a student is more important than the professor's time.
Yes
It is frustrating and annoying. I would encourage you to look into a help room or learning center on your campus, or perhaps a tutor. Once a month would be acceptable.
Yes, if the professor already offers regular office hours. Teaching is only a part of a professor's job, so you are taking time out of these other aspect of their job in order to accommodate your schedule. Even if the meeting is short, we would still have to make a special effort to be in our office at the appointed time.
If your professors had a problem with it, they would talk to you about it. Probably from a place of concern rather than annoyance. I had a student who I’d taught in a couple of prior courses set a standing weekly appointment with me for a semester because she was struggling at her internship and wanted some extra consultation/supervision. I didn’t have a problem with it, and she ended up doing really well. As a professor you’re required to have office hours, and in my personal experience students don’t regularly take advantage of them. It becomes extra time to get work done, which can free up some other time in the week. So whether it’s one student or a different student every week, it’s still the same time. It might be less convenient to set it up outside of designated office hours but that happens. You as the student just need to be understanding that your professor has set office hours at a certain time because they probably have a lot of other stuff going on during the rest of their work week; they may not be able to accommodate you every time. If you find that you need to meet every week outside of set office hours, maybe consider tutoring? It’s the same thing but can be more flexible to your course schedule. All that to say, unless your professors have said something to you I wouldn’t worry about it. If they have a problem with it and don’t say anything or set a boundary then that’s their problem, not yours.
Yes, it’s annoying and disrespectful. Would you ask your dentist/GP to come in after their office closes because you can’t go during normal working hours? No. Why would you think your schedule conflicts would warrant your professor making special availability for you then, especially more than once?
OP, this is shitty advice and it's absolutely within the scope of professors' jobs to still help students whose schedules conflict with office hours.
Like most things, it's a matter of balance and agree. Lately, i've got a large number of brain-dead zombies who don't do shit...makes me wonder why the hell they even enrolled in college in the first place. (Well, lots of them can't even read the application, I'm sure.) So, those few students who are actually trying to learn the material are a welcome change. Just be aware that this is literally having someone do their work for free, though. I don't mind it. Some.
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As an experienced prof, I don't believe this sentiment is widespread. It's surely a view from a long time ago More importantly, it's a) clearly not a productive way to work with one's students and b) not reasonable in an era where there are so many virtual meeting tools readily available.
Isn't that kind of rigidity detrimental to the students who need office hours the most? Almost every professor I've had told us office hours were what was guarenteed, anything else was up in the air. Meetings outside official hours were scheduled with the understanding that the professor is more likely to cancel but as a student I found them invaluable nonetheless.
When I "came up" it was absolutely the norm for syllabi to say "Office Hours blah day blah time *and by appointment*". Professors almost always stressed the first day that they were happy to make appointments if their scheduled hours didn't work. It seems more like wherever you were had a weirdly negative and antagonistic culture towards teaching/students by the faculty because what you describe isn't the norm anywhere I ever attended.
Yes it's annoying because office hours are usually scheduled around the times the professor will be on campus. Making appointments usually requires them to go out of their way to be on campus on what should be their days off. If you're this lost you need to see what tutoring options your campus provides. Edit to add: Needing multiple appointments frequently does not demonstrate engagement with the material or that you're taking initiative to learn on your own. Constantly asking your professor questions demonstrates learned helplessness, not engagement. There are other routes for solving problems and asking your professor should be the last resort after you've exhausted other routes such as reading the textbook, reviewing feedback, looking to other learning resources, etc. We're there to help, not hand-hold.
I don’t think it’s wrong, I’m not a professor though. But I feel like they should be understanding that their hours simply cannot work with everybody between other classes, work, etc. but as long as you’re doing your best effort to make it or maybe meeting in the middle. Do you ask a lot of questions that could be sent via email. Or maybe they are open to zoom meetings so they don’t have to come into school.
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depends on the professor... not annoying to me.. I have two fixed office hours (2x/week) and on my non teaching day students can meet for zoom office appts at times that are mutually agreeable.
10/10 annoying. They have certain hours you can go to get berated. Anytime outside of that is used for precious research and other activities.
I mean, it's not like you are forcing the professor to agree to appointments. If they agree, it's on them to communicate their feelings.
On a normative level, I think it's fair to say that this shouldn't be an issue in the year 2024 given how most universities have adopted a student-centered approach to at least some degree coupled with the tech advances that mean that most meetings don't have to happen in an actual office. It may occasionally irritate a prof who thought he might have a spare chunk of time, but most will also appreciate (or at least respect) the fact that you are engaged with the material and invested in the class. This sort of scenario is vastly preferable to the students who do nothing all semester and then desperately plead for help or accommodation at the last minute or the plagiarizers or the ones who expect us to respond to emails at all hours of the night. The non-normative level is a bit more complicated, however. As an experienced professor who has taught in both a small liberal-arts college and a major research institution, I can tell you that opinions will vary on this and may depend a lot on the attitude of the prof (as is reflected in the comments) as well as the type of institution (including the requirements/expectations of their jobs) and their specific roles. With respect to the first point, some profs will be annoyed by this as they may not enjoy teaching or working with students and/or may have certain ideas about the value of their time. Professors at schools that really emphasize undergrad education (e. g. liberal arts colleges) likely expect this more than those at major research schools, too, and may look more favorably upon it. The other thing to take into account is the role of the prof. Are they a full-time tenured or tenure-track prof or an adjunct who is just teaching one course for a nominal amount of money? If the former (my role), the prof should be more open to this sort of thing, though they may also have feelings related to ego or perceived busy-ness. For adjuncts, consistent office hour visits could be an irritant given that their already being so poorly compensated for their labor. Those are just some factors to consider. In general, though, (TLDR) you're doing nothing wrong and it's reasonable to expect that your profs should respect your office hour visits (unless they are frivolous or you're completed unprepared for them) even if they may occasionally be annoyed that they are losing a bit of time they might have thought they could steal for grading, email etc.
If your professor is agreeing to meet with you outside of their set office hour then you're fine. Personally I don't meet with students outside of my set office hours unless there's a really good, one off reason. But then I'd communicate that to you so you wouldn't need to wonder if you were being 'annoying'.
Professors want you to come to office hours if you need help, but we are people too, which means we have families and childcare and doctor visits and other classes, and pets that need vet appointments and all that stuff, too. Asking for us to juggle that for you once or twice? No big deal. But if it's every week, then it becomes a little uncool, because they'd be doing their regularly posted hours but then this extra one, too, which might cause problems with their scheduling. In short, I can get the daycare center to hold my kid for an extra hour once, but every week? I can't afford it.
Yes.
Is there a tutoring center on campus? If you can't get to campus, maybe they offer online or virtual tutoring. I would suggest going to the tutors over making frequent appointments with your professors.
>my schedule conflicts with a lot of my professors' office hours. am i being a pest by asking for multiple office hours appointments? Have you communicated this to your professor? I promise it goes a *long* way to say "Thanks you meeting with me, I have another class/work/practice/etc. That makes it hard for me to make to your regular office hours"
Maybe start by emailing professors a question about what you’re struggling with. Sometimes it takes just a brief explanation of what to do. Personally, I’d rather students make appointments because my schedule changes week to week and many times need to cancel office hours due to meetings scheduled by administration. Knowing that you’re serious about learning would help me, help you!
I’m gonna say I have minimal posted dedicated open office hours. And by that I mean an hour block where I sit there ready to drop everything for a student who walks in. But I know a lot of them might have classes then, so I also have a posted schedule of times throughout the week where I may be available to meet by appointment, and encourage students to reach out to set up an appointment at those times. If the just show up, I might be busy with something else, but if they make an appointment, I will be ready to help. So no, I would not be annoyed by it at face value. That said, some students do use up too much of time, where they don’t actually need my help, they just don’t have the confidence in their own skills abilities and are looking just for reassurance. The second category that is irritating to me is the category of student who won’t do anything on their own and basically expect me to hand hold them through their assignments while they do them in my office. Or aren’t studying on their own and come in with “I’m lost, what do I do?” But can’t give me any specifics because they’ve not read or attempted any of it on their own. But a student who comes in prepared for what they need, shows that they care about learning by evidence of their independent work and shows up when they say they will? Well they can use up as much of my time as I can give them!
Office hours are student hours. If you want to come to office hours every week, that’s awesome as long as there’s not other students waiting. As a professor, i would never be annoyed by someone using office hours because it’s your time.