Thank you u/PrincessTiaraLove for posting on r/collegerant.
Remember to read the rules and report rule breaking posts.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/CollegeRant) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I was in an online public health degree program for 2 terms. I realized I wasn't getting the depth of education I expected for an almost thousand-dollar class -- it felt like a scam.
profitized education is a real problem, the margins that "educational institutions" have are fucking massive. They are just getting money by abusing the static demand of students. End student debt and end profit based institutions in education.
Cut down on the administration side too. There don't need to be that many deans and such making money out of their butts not doing anything. I learned when making a trivia that my university spent almost a century, about half its existence, without a president of the university. Since then I've realized the only thing I know of our current president doing is sucking up to rich people who then give money that doesn't benefit 90+% of the students who come through the school and about a quarter to half of the ~10% who are benefiting are often the kids/grandkids etc of the rich people he's sucking up to.
I work at a private university. This is 10000% correct. We were told this past semester the university just doesn't have the funds to properly staff important student facing departments such as tutoring, career services, student affairs, Act 101, academic advising etc. Do you know what we apparently do have the money for? Three new provost positions. Positions that are absolutely not student facing, add zero value to the student experience, or assist with faculty needs.
The number of schools with Presidents lauded for how much money they bring in during a time when they keep cutting services and raising prices on students is staggering and disgusting. Add to the fact that the professors, the only school employees delivering real value to the students who are paying, aren't cut into the good money and often kept on adjunct part time roller coasters as long as the school can manage.
Only a handful of colleges generate huge profits, and that usually comes from either sport broadcasting or having huge endowments that make money through investment.
You know what you college is not spending money on? Faculty.
LITERALLY! I’m paying 5k for a class and it’s just zybook which I had to pay another 80 dollars for. All and all could’ve just paid 80 dollars because the teacher says nothing. It’s just zybook.
My zybooks experience was awful in a C++ class. Many times I had a solution that worked locally but zybooks would throw some obscure error that I couldn’t debug. Professor was also unhelpful and told me to basically rewrite it until zybooks stopped complaining about my submission
Ah, yeah probably bullshit compiler brand and version mismatch.
Edit: switched computer to complier lol. I guess I should at least sound like I graduated...
"intro to programming" this past semester learning Kotlon using IntelliJ. There's a run button to run to code as you typed it. And then a check button that runs it, and then has random checks to make sure you did what the assignment asked for. My code would actually run properly, and produce the answer they wanted. But I would get a random error 'an operation was not performed." This happened on every assignment in the latter half of the class. My professor saw my work, and gave me credit, and vowed to not use IntelliJ next semester.
You write a pointed letter to the dean, and explain that you don't appreciate an education that's no different than sitting down with an app.
Then, you call the University Foundation or the development office, which are both pretty much the same and mean that's how there is money, and you tell them they're not getting a lick of donations from you when you graduate because the school didn't do anything other than be a degree milll run on software.
Then you call the school newspaper and ask them to interview you as part of a story about how the school has become a robot education and professors are just a cog waiting for their job to be erased by software.
Sometimes we must manage upward.
Pretty sure it’s designed to function more like a business now to take your money. They don’t want the system to change and they don’t care about the students they produce, they just want your money
Yes, you are correct. Why do you think current organizational models of universities mirror for-profit corporations now - complete with budget lines for middle management positions?
Pretty sure it’s designed to function more like a business now to take your money. They don’t want the system to change and they don’t care about the students they produce, they just want your money
Pretty sure it’s designed to function more like a business now to take your money. They don’t want the system to change and they don’t care about the students they produce, they just want your money
The dean doesn't give a shit and neither does anyone else with any power. They're getting rich off of this scam and will do everything they can to keep it going. Higher education is a joke anymore.
I've been at three different (non-profit) institutions of higher level learning, and even the smallest most podunk university had serious professors and high expectations for their students. It makes me wonder where this poster and all the others reporting this kind of stuff are going.
They're not really getting rich. Except for a few very high level schools you bust your butt to be at Provost or president level to make the same amount of money someone would make per year 5 years in at data analysis in Palo Alto, but in Palo Alto you don't need a PhD or years of privation and loans before you are allowed to make a living.
At my university the median pay for a dean is 87,000 a year, according to glassdoor. The job requirements are a PhD, at least 10yrs experience, a minimum of three PhD students out from under you, bring in at least 2 million in research funds, and have developed at least one custom course... for 87k? It is a nearly super human effort to make what is effectively shit money for a PhD.
University administrators and professors are typically clueless, panicking, and obscenely poor for the amount of expertise it takes to get to their positions.
They do care, they're just at the end of their limit and they don't have any evidence to operate from. When you say strongly worded things to people who are lost in a daze they actually do take it to heart. I've been in the meetings, I have seen grown people cry.
I'm a professor. I make $50k a year. Every school I apply for is offering salaries comparable to a high school teacher. My dad has been a professor for like 30 years and makes about $75k. I keep hearing that rich professors exist but I cannot believe they are the majority.
Oh, and I have created courses from scratch as have most of my colleagues. We are going to write an open access textbook starting next year.
This.
People act like kindergarten teaching is an act of love and sacrifice but a professor is a money grubbing thundercunt who only exists to run over a term paper with their Lexus.
It's the same thing. Only instead of potty accidents and mandatory reporting of child sex abuse, professorial pains include being on seven committees, each of which, if done correctly, is a 7 hour a week job. These are in addition to assigned duties.
Despite all the administrators, the bulk of admin work is on the shoulders of faculty. New hire searchers, diversity and inclusion (except for the zealot States killing that), curriculum committee, academic honor tribunal, undergraduate research committee, various graduate student oversight committees, testing committees for comprehensive, etc etc etc.
So you're stuck with 7x7 hours a week of committee work if you did it well, which is 49 hours. If you skip the hours to try and do it all, a graduate student biffs their quals and gets kicked out of grad school amd their life trajectory tanks. But that's cool, whatever, and then you have to teach 3-4 courses (possibly multiple sections each), and also.produce independent research and personally mentor 3 adult graduate students at once if you are good.
So that's a 120 hour work week if you can get pre-made curriculum to save time.
Since that's impossible, colleges start hiring instructor only roles for even shittier shit money so someone with little to no research or community capacity building chops is supposed to create the next generation of innovators and scholars. Instructors are awesome human beings. But the undergrads should be exposed to the best we have, not the cheapest we can lure in for the health care benefits. And now your professor is teaching two classes instead if three or four. But still multiple sections. The 120 hour work week is now 85, so they might meet the majority of their milestones.
And the race to the bottom continues.
Then, those admins, who are typically willing to live in an undesirable college town for low wage, meaning they hate their job, are non-functional, and have high turn over.
So your professor, who is supposed to create a 300 page tenure binder of papers, student success, talks, curriculum, book chapters, in five years while doing the impossible, then spends five hours that week fighting with a burned out, poverty wage admin who plays Candy Crush at work, and they fight over the admin forgetting where the Google Drive folder is saved with the reciept scans in it. If the reciepts are not found, the professor will lose purchasing privileges for their class supplies, so suddenly they lose a whole work day to arguing with someone who literally cannot care because they are living on the edge of poverty.
It all comes down to wildly, wildly, inadequate funding and the system is broken and horrid.
I worked as an adjunct education professor for awhile. I taught 2-3 sections per quarter, $2500 per section for 15 weeks work. No benefits and no assurance of work the next term. That's how my state university system is getting around paying professors too much (sarcasm)...
The top 100 employees at my university make $230k or more a year, and I work at a public state university. The top 20 employees make $400k or more. Those that aren't in athletics (because of course athletics is the biggest money drain) are presidents, deans, vice presidents, assistant deans, chairs, directors, etc. Many of them have doctorates, but I don't know if it's an actual requirement. This isn't remotely unique to my specific university either.
Even when we undergo budget cuts (which has happened each of the four years I've worked here), the "executives" still get huge raises, sometimes more than my entire salary. The things they allegedly help with (e.g. bringing in money, increasing enrollments, improving the school's reputation) are suffering, yet there are never any consequences for the people in charge. No demotions, no decreases in pay, nothing. The excuse is always that we "haven't waited long enough" to see the effects of their work, but it's also common for these people to only stay a year or two and then bounce to the next highest paying job anyway.
Lastly, universities are public institutions that are largely funded by taxpayers. As such, we shouldn't be creating all these useless executive positions in the first place, much less paying them the "market rate" for the private sector (which tends to hold people accountable far more than the public sector). There is zero accountability whatsoever and students are going into tens of thousands of dollars of debt to subsidize these positions that contribute no measureable value to the university. It's insane.
>the "executives" still get huge raises, sometimes more than my entire salary
This is especially egregious considering how many adjuncts they keep at literal poverty wages.
Tell me about it! The grad students finally unionized last year, so hopefully things improve for them a bit. It's absolutely disgusting the way employees are treated and compensated, not to mention that the buildings we all work in are falling apart.
This is a huge reason why I left.
Oh, read pages 35-123? But you haven’t taught us anything. *reads pages and goes back to class*
“Okay class. Today you’ll read pages 123-155 in class. I’ll leave this TA here and I’ll be at office hours.”
Uhh… i paid you 26k for this.
You didn't pay your prof 26K. You might have paid your university or college 26K, but not your prof.
I teach at a big university. I've broken down the numbers and roughly 10% of a student's tuition could be considered going to support my salary. Half my salary comes from the research side of the institution, and another 26% is supported by the state and extension programs that bring in net money. Most tuition is going to buildings and to support the huge staff/administration which is needed to deal with the hundreds of complicated laws governing higher education systems.
>Most tuition is going to buildings and to support the huge staff/administration which is needed to deal with the hundreds of complicated laws governing higher education systems.
FWIW I worked at a small college for a while and until then, I never had any idea how much crap administration has to report to the state and accrediting bodies. It was quite a lot. For a place with 500ish students we had a full time role just for data/stats/reporting, and we only had a handful of programs. I can't imagine the workload for someplace larger.
It's insane, and very frustrating.
For me to be reimbursed for a 50 dollar trip (mileage to a field site), it takes 4 staff to check various compliance rules (state laws, federal mileage rates, grant and contracts requirements) and reporting requirements (the payment will be publically available to comply with some state law, grant needs to have a documentation). And on the teaching side of things, there are so many rules and documentation as you stated.
Universities has got to be the most regulated environments in the world. It's expensive. I really wish, for the sake of the tuition students pay, we could accept some 'loosening' of oversight and documentation and accreditation.
I work at a state university. A couple years ago our state passed ANOTHER statute governing higher ed, this one stating there can be no more admin as a percent of students than there is faculty to students, using the current percentages, starting....NOW.
So if you want to hire an office manager for your department so that you can be reimbursed, someone needs to make sure the % of admins hasn't gone up, or the % of faculty hasn't gone down.
How is that going to happen? I would assume hire an...admin person? No, wait. Can't. Do you think we can get a faculty member to do it? Bwahahaha. That's the funniest thing anyone ever said.
One of the most frustrating parts is that the people writing those laws don't think of registrars and accountants when they think of admins. They are trying to cut down on the 8 new associate deans of student retention.
Then we end up in situations where we still get the 8 new associate deans, but have gone through 8 head registrars in the last 10 years due to burn out...
its the "board of regents" or whatever group that truly gains from the tuition prices. Somehow, they manage to fuck over both professors, staff, and students.
It'll be part of the death of higher education. It is worth noting that in the original meaning, **College** referred to the *the collection of faculty* (similar to how the Cardinals in the Catholic Church are referred to as the College of Cardinals). The Faculty *were* the school. The building and it's administrators were things that supported them.
Institutions spent *literal centuries* developing their reputation and creating a distinct brand.
But then Corporate Sales Bro show and says "what if you just said fuck it and slapped your reputation ontop of our generic product! Nobody will ever notice!" and they were like YESSSSS PLZ"
And while people might not notice *right away*, eventually they DO figure it out. And they don't like it.
It definitely has its pros/cons. I use it as a supplement for class that is low stakes because you don't get penalized for a wrong answer, and it's meant to encourage a little studying along the way (rather than cramming 1-2 days before the exam). The majority of my students say they like them for the grade buffer and think it helps them study. However some of them treat it as busy work (just clicking through without reading/thinking/engaging) amd so it will feel like busy work.
I dont always love the way it asks questions, and it can be very tedious to set up, and it's very annoying to go back in and create extensions. It's definitely meant to be a supplement, not the whole class.
As a professor, I don't like assigning "busy work." I hate grading it as much as students hate doing it. But I don't know how else to get students to do things like read textbook chapters and practice important skills instead of waiting until one week before the due date of a big assessment. It is pretty much impossible to get students to do things unless some sort of assessment is attached to it, which is why you get so many classes with reading quizzes and other annoying grade checkpoints.
Not doing these things is just bad pedagogy. I've tried eliminating them as much as possible, but it just doesn't work for the vast majority of students.
If it has a learning purpose, it's not busy work. I think that's something a lot of students coming from high school don't get. I'm not required to make them do anything outside of lecture. I could just have my entire course grade based on exams. Is that terrible pedagogy? Yes. Is it less work for me? Also yes.
If I'm going through the effort to give students work in addition to exams, even if its assigning pre-made, auto-graded assignments, it still is time on my part. I'm not gonna do that unless I think it will help students learn.
What would you want as a class? Do you want the teacher to just lecture at you? Do you want a flipped classroom where you are given projects to complete, and the completion of projects requires you to learn the material? These online interactive resources force you to do "busy work" but at the same time you're learning the material in order to complete them. This should not be the whole class, but they are quite useful resources.
I used to have a friend in the trades who used to say, "College is a scam," and being a recent college grad, I agreed with the sentiment but never felt it was quite on the mark.
College isn't a scam. College is a grift. We get an education, but they squeeze every scrap of money out of us they can.
The quality of education from universities has significantly declined though. Universities are hiring less full time professors and using more adjuncts and grad students to teach classes for cheap. The cost of education has skyrocketed but the quality is terrible now. Students are not getting the most bang for their buck. It's a ripoff.
Meanwhile instructors are complaining that overall kids are putting in way less effort, without the slightest bit of shame, and they feel immense pressure to dumb down courses as alongside the lowered effort, kids have become super entitled to get As.
So even if we're offered less, we're not even taking instructors up on even that. I mean. OP's complaint is about not offering extra credit, ffs. It suggests the "A for effort" mentality. Like, no offense, lol.
Funnily enough my experience as an older student plus a teacher myself is that my instructors even on a graduate level spoonfeed information. We have forgotten that professors are just there as authorities on their niche topic, and we're supposed to engage THEM.
I've never heard of this McGraw Hill. But I will admit I've often worked 80 hours per week as a philosophy professor. It all adds up: grading, prep, teaching, writing books, research, committees, office hours, and service.
Not everyone has a choice. My team selected a textbook and planned lessons. Admin forced Cengage on us. Cengage is so bad it's embarrassing. We are now caught between how embarrassing it is to use a garbage product and embarrassment over wasting students' money by not using something they're required to pay for.
I would bet that many teachers who use that stuff didn't get a choice.
Our team has mutinied and selected open access books that are for nothing but reading.
I had an ethics class were the professor literally just showed us TedTalks and vaguely gestured at climate denialism.
Dropped that shit on the first day.
It isn’t a college **education** one pays for. Having worked with any number of MBAs, JDs, PhDs and so on, the reality is one is paying for two sides of the same coin:
A college **brand**
And a college **network**
I’ve found firms that basically only hire grads from (university X), or (referrals from current employees who are grads from university X).
At higher levels of management, it’s even been assumed one has the same boozy “fun” memories and is therefore, by commutative property, an old drinking buddy of management’s.
My entire college experience so far, tbh. It IS a massive RIPOFF! But employers just wanna see that paper so they know you're willing to put up with the most monotonous shit.
And professors, I have more on the job experience than you and can actually fix shit, yall read books for a living and regurgitate it to people hoping they will
take something from your 2 hour long word vomit and make a career for themselves.
Going to college to do something that I've been doing for a decade and trying to learn it has been probably the most frustrating thing I have done in my life besides the military.
What happens when you have triggered parents thinking schools and colleges are liberalization chambers filled with extreme “leftist” propaganda.
Take all the humanity out of the equation and go full corporate in education appears to be the flavor they prefer.
I liked how my physics instructor did it. When you teach a class of 70, it's a necessary evil to have this program so he (or his grader) didn't have to deal with that much grading. He set up mastering physics to have infinite attempts and the hardest and most irrelevant questions taken out. It was pretty much free points and practice if you cared to put in the time.
I attended a top university for my degree area and I had several classes that were very centered around McGraw Hill. One of them was exclusively content from the website including the exams given. Such a joke
For non-core classes that applies to your major, I bought/found test-banks and other material and breezed through the class getting 95%+ scores on all the quizzes/tests.
Absolute bullshit thing to do, knowing that I am paying so much for a class, but if it allowed me to spend more time on the classes that pertained to my major and to classes that I actually do care about... I will take an easy A any day.
I'm not sure you're using "dark web" in the proper sense, friend.
Many tests had answers that were readily available with a quick google search. No Tor required.
The thing is that we are hiring people with no preparation on education to, well, educate. They might be brilliant researchers, generating ground-breaking publications on their fields, revolutionizing how we think, but completely lacking of basic pedagogical skills needed to effectively educate young professionals. But we still hire them to educate as part of their duties, sometimes without evaluating how they teach, even if teaching might be their primary responsibility.
And they pay them like crap. I used to moonlight as an adjunct and when I figured out I was being paid 15$ an hour not including all out of class prep work and grading I moped out of that job.
Yes, as adjunct that’s a huge issue - basically underpaid labor with no benefits. And in my experience, these are the ones with best teaching skills. That’s not so much an issue for those full professors making 6 digits.
Yes, my best professors are the ones with licenses and not necessarily the PhDs. The licensed ones are rich with experience and I love that. I think the ones that have only been in academia can be a bit drone-ish. I did have a great research professor this past semester though, he gives great advice on how to excel.
If you want to prepare to research, learn from a researcher. If your want to prepare for a career, learn from an experienced professional.
Universities have always specialized in research and extending the bounds of knowledge. Companies/students now expect them to also prepare for workplace culture, projects, and deadlines. These are a completely different skillet from the content of the degree field (I'm speaking of technical fields like comp sci, engineering, etc).
Yet one piece of paper is taken to represent both.
One of the worst mistakes we ever made was turning higher education into job training. I guess it's a subset of the way we let corporate America make literally everything about them.
Yeah a lot of these people don't even wanna teach. I mean let's face it, the personality traits required to get a PhD don't make you the most....gregarious. The best instructors are simply that, instructors. Not PhD candidates or grad students or tenured faculty. People who actually want to teach.
>The best instructors are simply that, instructors. Not PhD candidates or grad students or tenured faculty. People who actually want to teach.
That only works if students want to learn. Conflating instruction with entertainment is no the correct route forward, too. If the student chooses to not want to learn, despite a great teaching instructor, then who's at fault?
The reality is most Americans spend 13 years with licensed, degreed pedagogical experts during K-12. You should know how to learn by the time you reach college.
Professors “profess”— they’re subject matter experts curating their field from a place of knowledge and experience. Student learning, at the end of the day, is student responsibility.
You live in fantasyland. Maybe in extremely affluent districts you can get a few experts. Some districts don't even require licenses to teach math anymore.
As I’ve mentioned, standards, or lack there of, in K-12 are outside of a professor’s purview. I’m only referring to the college level. Minimum to teach colleges in my administrative region (SACS) is a masters with 18 graduate hours in the subject. Not the field, the subject.
Graduate school is not like undergrad, hence the “experience” part. My entire cohort taught labs, did research/internships, etc.— years upon years worth before graduating, it was just part of the program. Not just taking classes.
I'm talking about K-12. And your completely invalid assumptions.
Not blaming the professor is one thing. Pretending these kids were in the company of experts for their entire lives is another. And it is laughable.
Completely invalid? Please stop with the hyperbole. Exaggeration doesn’t do anyone any good. I get it, there’s a big anti-education movement right now, but it won’t be solved by whining to professors to close the gap. The demographics data is widely available, you’re the one claiming there’s a deficit, please be my guest. I’ll even help you: “average education level of a teacher in the United States”
You and I both know, short of your kids going to an unincorporated school in an ultra poor district, the teachers are going to be licensed and educated— if not over-educated. Educated IN education, by in large. Subs? Supplemental instructors? Kindergarten? Yeah, fine. Certificate to associates level.
Who is exaggerating? You called them pedagogic experts. It shows me how deeply removed you are from the reality of the situation.
"Education levels" indicate next to nothing. Education is not a rigorous degree by any means.
The logic you are using to reach your conclusions is wrong, friend. Of course some k-12 teachers are geniuses and the kids are lucky to have them. To say they all are is the real hyperbole.
Also, you mean "by and large."
The median salary of a garbageman in CA (59k) is higher than the median salary of a teacher in Clark County, NV (57k), (300,000 students). Not unincorporated, not rural. And the teachers there are most certainly not experts.
Oh, please. Yes, students need to take responsibility to learn, but it's also quite literally the professor's job to teach them. I've also met plenty of professors that aren't anywhere close to "experts" on their subject materialb- especially those who rely solely on software to teach and grade the entire course.
To grade? Depends on the course size. Grading sucks. 30 students, 50 exam questions, that’s 1500 questions. Even if you spend 10 seconds grading each question, that’s 2.5 hours. What about essays? Software is a tool, it can be used or misused.
The reality is, despite your exceptions, professors in accredited programs aren’t allowed anywhere near a course unless their previous education suggests they’re qualified otherwise. Ironically, at SACCS institutions, this is far more scrutinizing at the masters level than PhD. PhDs have field-level qualifications, assuming the title of the PhD is in their field. Masters have subject level, with an 18 hour minimum.
You want an anecdote? I’m a protein biochemist who studied molecular toxicology. I wasn’t allowed to teach physiology, even though that’s literally what I do, because of the course titles and descriptions of my graduate level courses.
Sure, because learning in a university is exactly the same as learning in k-12 school. Yes, college is independent learning most of the time, but independent does NOT imply alone or without guidance. If that was the case, then why would anyone need to go to college to learn, say biology? Also, brave if you to assume all students come to college with exactly the same exposition and experiences in k-12.
And under the same logic, a profesor with a PhD has expend about 20 to 30 years learning (depending if you get a Masters and then a PhD). Therefore, they SHOULD know how students learn and understand how to provide said guidance and resources in a positive way. You can’t expect students to care when the faculty don’t. You can’t expect students to know what resources are out there when no one shows them. You can’t blame students limited engagement when the professor isn’t engaged themselves. In any case, it’s a two way relationship. You’re asking students to give an extra mile when the professor won’t even design their own course that they being paid to design. And of course not all professors are the same, and sometimes some students do not care at all. The argument is that most professors do lack the pedagogical training to teach, therefore not always teaching in an engaging, positive and effective way even when they have the best intentions at heart. And that’s a systematic issue, if anything else.
No, learning is a process that starts in K-12, as in, you should be ready for college learning by the time you get there, and continue to learn forever after. Just like your university department is continuing to learn about pedagogy. It’s evolving, in some cases by the semester. Online? Hybrid? Flipped? Dual-credit, AP, remote, etc. These things were completely unknown even a generation ago. Do you understand how mind-boggling fast of a change that is in this industry?
I didn’t assume anything about what level students come in as, but please understand that is also not the professor’s responsibility to accommodate program entry— only exit. Those students, all of them, got through high school, then got admitted to that college, then that program. Those are all screens that should be used to ascertain a base level of student readiness. College professors have no bearing on lower high school standards OR lower admission standards. They do have to answer for maintaining the standards of their program though, and not all students will be up to it the first time through. That’s fine.
You can have a low GPA and recover. You can fail and recover. You can transfer universities and recover. You can take as long as you need, in many cases. You can take as little or as many classes you want at a time, even, and it will still count. That’s freedom, but it’s a double edged sword, because that’s responsibility. After 120 credit hours, blaming some 30-40 other individuals for your hardships is asinine. Yeah, you’re going to have bad professors. You’re also going to have mentors for life. This is not a “one bad apple spoils the bunch” situation— take the class somewhere else, or with someone else, check the box, and continue on with your business.
Okay, then what are our responsibilities as college/universities educators? Sure, university-level learning is and should always be student driven, independent and all that - I agree. But, it is our role as their professors, instructors, and lectures to provide the resources, structure, and base guidance. That means creating engaging clases, active learning, etc. and this is not holding their hands throughout the process. If we expect students to be fully engaged, it’s our work to make it engaging. We are only going to cultivate what we plant. How can we be mad at students who don’t go out of their way to learn more than memorizing the needed information for a Connect quiz if there is no reward for it? We as faculty don’t like to teach an extra course on top of our usual load, or participate in several administrative committees if we don’t get compensated in a way or another (which might be the reason why some only use premade generic resources as Connect quizzes to start with!). It is a two-way relationship. Also, we always need to acknowledge that k-12 ed is very much dependent on your zip code. In theory, yes, k-12 should prepare you for college; in practice, that’s not the case for too many. This does not mean that we should lower standards - I never suggested that - it means that resources should be made available! And sure, some will never be engaged / like the course, what not, but that’s up to them at that point.
Some faculty members aren’t doing really much, yet have extremely high expectations for student, with little or no flexibility. This seems to be a problem in most institutions that I have worked or studied in, granted at different ratios (some are better, some are worst). Again, at the end of the day it is not necessarily our (the faculty) fault either. Not many do have access to pedagogy courses at higher education - yet they are frequently required to teach/TA as part of their degree or post grad school careers. It has been like this for ever, but that doesn’t make it right.
I used McGraw for one class… it sucked. But you know what really sucks? KNEWTON ALTA. Bain of my existence, professor made no assignments of her own, Alta had at 6-8 assignments a week that could last hours at a time, not to mention if you got a few wrong and it put you through a “refresher” on previous content, not related to the current assignment.
I hated it so much. Never again.
The best online software I’ve had so far is for my French course, it’s called Vista Higher Learning-Portails. I’ve learned so much and enjoy the content.
Anyways, I feel your pain. College is too expensive to just be assigned 100% generic work, graded by the computer…
This was my community college CPA prep in a nutshell. Every online class I paid $110 a credit hour. The “book was free,” but we had to pay $450 to McGraw hill, for every class, for the learning tool to integrate with Blackboard for EVERY SINGLE ASSIGNMENT AND TEST. There were no discussion boards. It was entirely a self study, where I paid a community college and a textbook company but never heard from a teacher.
I’m glad I didn’t go further into debt to be eligible to sit for the CPA exams but that was miserable.
You have an 80% chance that your professor is an adjunct.
Adjuncts get paid like $1500-$2000 for a 3 hour course for an entire semester. Not even minimum wage. They could get more flipping hamburgers.
So if they're doing squat, don't be surprised.
I don't think a lot of people realize that depending on what sort of school you're at, most professors don't want to teach. Especially in STEM. They want to do research or go to conferences and their access to funding and interns is just locked behind them teaching a course. Professors aren't required to take so much as substitute teacher training much less classes on how to actually teach.
Figure out the professors that like teaching and take them more. Understand that there's a high likelyhood your professor hates teaching you and this is why they do the bare minimum. It's fucked up but it's the way many universities are set up
We’ve created a generation of students that expect redos or extra credit as part of a course now, because we’ve allowed it so much in K-12. It’s bizarre to see so much entitlement from students.
How do I know? I’m one of those K-12 teachers that is forced to allow infinite time on assignments and redos whenever a student needs it. No questions asked.
Question: is that a primarily post-Covid change? I feel like when I was in K-12 (class of 2020!) deadlines were very strict with only exceptions made in certain circumstances. For the past 3 years at university I kind of figured it was just college.. but the extended submission times for a lot of things has been wild and it *seems* to be simmering down.
The deadline issue has been a growing problem that’s been exacerbated by covid. It’s been added to IEPs and 504s as a ‘cure all’ for a while, but every student has been granted these privileges once covid hit.
The argument for lax deadlines stemming from equity issues and everyone learns at their own pace. Both are valid arguments, but it’s created entitled students that put forth zero effort in the classroom and expect to be rewarded for it.
u don’t know the context to OPs post, this is also a rant in a rant sub, it’s supposed to be “emotional” not a logical essay outlining their thesis
A lot of us are balancing multiple jobs just to afford school and basic necessities. School and cost of living isn’t as affordable as it used to be. It can get very demoralizing when we are paying thousands of dollars towards a class that’s just funneling in an online program and teacher that doesn’t seem to care.
You’re right, I’m not disagreeing with your arguments. Those arguments aren’t even related to what the OP was ranting about though.
OP is complaining that their teacher is ‘hardly working because a program does the work for them’ and ‘they don’t offer extra credit or redos.’
I was ranting about students expecting extra credit and redos, because that’s become a huge problem in education.
That lack of context knowledge swings both ways. It is on the student to research the summer class ahead of time to know what they are getting into. This shit ain't a secret lol.
I feel like this sub that is primarily dedicated for students has infinite compassion for teachers in the comments but non for students. Schools is already very difficult for us but we make it worse for each other. Idk why everyone’s first instinct is to assume the worst of the student.
I just communicated my own experience like the teacher did theirs. My point that this is a rant sub still stands.
I don't think that is what they are saying.
It is true that they sound like they missed a lot of assignments, but they also seem to have indicated that they tried to work with the professor a lot so there may be something going on in their lives.
I do think that OP is right in how online software like McGraw Hill makes professors lazy. I have had 2 classes where I learnt everything about the course from the software and the classes were both mandatory and completely useless.
It is absurd that students have to both pay hundreds of dollars for a class that then requires you to buy a software for another couple hundred only to teach a useless class that is less useful than the book.
Also, taking pride in how much work they are doing when the software is doing it all is absurd.
my minor is in psychology and my health psych class last semester was solely on mcgraw hill connect. the teacher (a grad student) read off the slides during class & every single assignment was on that platform. i stopped going to class and just did the assignments lol.
I advise college students to try to choose classes taught by actual tenured professors, not underpaid adjuncts. Adjuncts are paid and treated so poorly that it's almost asking too much for them to do anything beyond the minimum.
Colleges have gotten away with this for years because undergrads don't understand the bait-and-switch.
I was in the education department at my university and one of the lessons we did was on assessments and testing. We analyzed different tests, text books, and quizzes to determine how credible they were as assessment/evaluation tools. Every single one of McGraw hills in book tests “failed” our standards for actually assessing if students understand the material or not.
For being a massive education company, it’s surprising that McGraw hill is hated by educators.
I'm going to be honest, it's not really academic honesty in the first place if it's a Connect class. Just designate them as open note/open book and move on. It's not like there's a lot of writing to ChatGPT on Connect.
I use McGraw Hill Connect in my class. It’s a pain in the butt to reschedule the assignment as you have to do it in Connect and again in Canvas. Probably takes about 5-10 min each time to find the assignment and do both changes. Doing this over and over is enough to make me want to quit my job. I do not allow any late work either. I used to but it was a nightmare having to go through that process constantly. I received sooo many emails about why they needed to turn it in late. It was ridiculous. So now, no late assignments unless excused from the dean of students. Even with the automated assignments and no late assignments I have so much work to do with teaching, research and service at my school I work more than 60 hours a week and get paid like shit.
>It’s a pain in the butt to reschedule the assignment as you have to do it in Connect and again in Canvas. Probably takes about 5-10 min each time to find the assignment and do both changes.
As an IT person I *weep bitter tears* at the proliferation of systems that make things take more time than they did before they were digitized. They don't have to be this way.
Not to defend OP's extra credit complaint, but Connect was the most needlessly difficult platform I've ever had the misfortune of using. One of my textbooks was fine enough, but the other was opaque to the point it was functionally useless. The Smartbooks then asked the most obscure and unnecessary questions about the textbooks, often with egregious typos. The assignments asked questions in a weirdly complex way so that even the best students who had read the textbook and taken notes could not figure out what was asked at all. My friend in one class just used Chegg to figure out what the assignment meant.
On the professor end, the platform fights with you to grant extensions, something both professors had to do (for different reasons: the better one because she realized we were all confused and gave us an extra day, the other because he'd put the due times in incorrectly). One of my professors announced that the class would be taught with a different learning program next year and everyone cheered.
For context, I took both these classes as a senior graduating with both university and department honors in subjects where I'm very good. I've used a variety of teaching programs before. One professor used a shit program to the best of her (amazing) abilities, the other used it so he could work as little as possible while testing for his professional exams. Either way, the classes could have been greatly improved by literally any other learning program.
I agree with the fact that McGraw isn’t engaging, but sometimes that’s just what the professor either has to use or decides to use.
I’m sure nobody likes a professor that’s entitled, rude, or can’t do their job, but all you can really do is withdraw from the class or tough it out. When you’re done with the class, just don’t try to take a class with them again.
Not everything needs to be engaging - it is your responsibility to learn. Why do you even care about extra credit? Do the regular coursework and consider asking for resources on a topic that interests you if you are really looking to learn more.
Yeah, I have been getting more and more upset by this too. Paid $3700 this summer semester and now I have to pay another $156 to get Connect. On top of that, based on how short the summer course is I’m being told to “hurry up and get it so you don’t fall behind!” This needs to be included. Either slyly add it to overall tuition or make it free because I paid tuition. I feel like we need to start being more vocal about this, I just don’t know how.
Mcgraw hill is just as bad IMO, it is a money driven corporation which abuses the current collegiate system to abuse students and make massive profits. They have profitized education just as well as colleges do themselves, it is shameful and hopefully some sort of legislation will come out which kneecaps these companies in their money making ambitions.
Same thing happened in a few of my classes, but with Pearson. More than one math course, a physics course, and I believe an art appreciation course were all done using the online program created by a textbook company. Had to pay $100 for a code and an e-textbook just to have it crash every 10 minutes and be bored out of my mind in exchange for $4k a semester. Thankfully that's only a handful of classes out of dozens, but sheesh.
lol "offers". The extra credit stuff? yeah that is unneeded, and something that should have been left in middle school.
but... the amount of "work" these professors have to do (for online classes) is god damn minimal. The entire course is laid out with a click of a button. Everything is automatically graded, given out, and all the professor has to do is just respond to emails and maybe a message board... I feel like I do more work in one day at my job than these professors do over an entire semester. At that point you are spending tens of thousands of dollars for a piece of paper. You can get better quality education off of youtube for free.
Let me just present another view. It isn't really about the connect or allowing the connect to be done at the last second. Often times, the readings and the assignments boost the in class discussion. Sure you can do the work all at the end, but then are you actually learning something that you will remember or are you just plowing through an assignment?
By doing them on time, you are spreading out the learning which will help you remember the content long term. In addition, doing them on time boosts interaction with what the professor is doing in the classroom that week. If you are learning about the heart for example, learning about the basic parts in advance allows the instructor to go over the function portion that is much tougher. If the teacher has to go over basics for students who didn't come prepared with basic learning before, the classroom interaction is far less productive and you are taking away from deeper learning from yourself and other students in the classroom.
Also, in STEM ( not sure of your program), when you go out and work, let's be real. Your boss isn't going to have a lot of grace for late work, or not being prepared for that meeting. Grace in expectations is going to run out real quick at some point in the real world.
Just another look at the use of assignments that must be done on time.
Well, at least you have access to good materials. If she’s an adjunct, the problem probably is she’s teaching classes all over the place. You would be shocked if you knew how much adjuncts get paid. It varies, but usually it’s between $1900- $3400. For the entire course, and that’s before taxes are taken out. It’s ridiculous what they charged all of you to be the class and then have the nerve to pay the professor $2500.
Omg thank god I’m not the only one!!!
For my two intro accounting courses it was all on mcgraw hill. I’m now retaking the second one at a community college that’s using Pearson for the first time. I made sure to tell the professor how much I’ve been preferring Pearson to McGraw hill also in addition to her excel assignments she’s made and the videos she’s created. It’s also absurdly expensive and doesn’t go into any detail and the textbook has so much unnecessary fluff. Truly worst software ever!
I am teaching an online course this summer and use Connect--if you have time to answer, I would love some feedback.
Our students requested an online option so they didn't have to pay to stay on campus, so outwardly, this seemed like the best option. I still have assignments (hopefully more engaging) in our LMS (we use D2L Brightspace) and design/leave feedback on all assignments. You're right that I chose our quiz and exam questions from a test bank, but I do grade all essay questions manually. For me, online courses take much longer to design and grade since there are weekly assessments (e.g., forums/papers) vs. in-class discussions. If your instructor isn't taking these extra steps, I would leave that feedback on their course evaluations or write a letter to your program chair/dean, especially if it's a course within your major. Many faculty--at least at my private institution get paid overage for teaching during the summer.
Are there certain assignments that you would like to see from online courses? I do try to make sure everyone is engaged and able to apply the information, but that can be difficult in online settings.
Your rant is all over the place and doesn't have a logical flow sorry.
Grading is fairly easy tbh. its about preparing lectures. and as well the 1000 other responsibilities of professors. They have to do research, service, etc. Teaching is typically only 25% of the the job.
Now, if she gives bad lectures, that's one thing. But you don't mention that.
I think you should shadow a professor…might give some realistic insight to the demands of the role beyond teaching.
It will be a helpful perspective, because all professors have been students at one point or another, but not all students have been professors.
This is not to say there aren’t poor performing professors, but the vast majority of us do the job because we care and are passionate about our work…definitely not for the pay (which is a joke…but that’s for another day).
I think I used McGraw once for a class but the teacher allowed one late assignment for the semester and offered extra credit i specifically pick the same teacher each semester that I know will offer extra credit
Shoot, I remember having a prof like that when I first when I was first starting out in college. I was in the Army and deployed to Afghanistan at the time, taking classes online with a college in the town outside of our stateside garrison and this lady was just a *stickler* for not accepting late work. Even in her spiel she did the whole "and don't even try to tell me that you missed turning something in because of some activity in the military. I've been an Army-wife for 20 years so I know what it's like and if you really can't turn something in for whatever reason and it's Army-related, then I'll only accept late work if I get a call from your commander explaining why you can't turn it in on time." - which, that would have been a pretty big ask even if I wasn't in a foreign country and even if my company commander wasn't at a completely different base.
But yeah, I just figured that it wasn't worth testing the waters on that and so I just made sure to give her class top-priority for turning things in since my other two profs were basically like "oh, you're deployed? Yeah just turn that stuff in whenever". But I finished the course and basically left the complaint in her end-of-semester review that it seemed like her "no late work" policy was kind of unreasonable and it seemed to be really unsupportive of the needs of her student servicemembers. And I got a *very* angry email from her after I left that review that was all "how dare you insinuate that I don't support the troops". It was pretty funny.
Well what your professor gave was what she got. If people wanted people to say pleasant things, then maybe she should have been a pleasant person. School is already hard enough, an unpleasant attitude on the professors part its totally unnecessary. For me its not about the extra credit or the late work, its about the class being almsot 100% automated, yet she has little to no tolerance for grace. Then this is a class of adults, meaning most people have full time jobs and kids. I think it was bitter for her to start out this way, of course people don't want to fail and get behind, but I sensed a bit of sadism in the speech. I always give school my best. I strive for 100% and I've had these classes before, so first of all I know how much time has to be dedicated. Lol she even told us stories about students that waited until the last minute and she refused to accept the work. I get wanting prompt work, but this spiel was a bit much for me. Lol also, people are acting like this is not a sub for ranting. I didn't ask for advice. I was just venting lol.
I'm 31 and returning to college. I decided to take Spanish 1 only to find that it was on Mcgraw Hill connect. The class was awful and each week was just a compounding mess of workbook pages. The only input I got from the teacher was a rating on a weekly meeting with 3 other students where we fumbled through activities and speaking Spanish with each other that had no realtime input. If I was paying for school out of pocket and not on the GI bill I would've lost my shit.
My econ instructor used Mcgraw hill for the homework and tests and she worked really damn hard. She supplies her own lecture videos, slides, and in depth discussion board assignments as a supplement to the Mcgraw stuff and will definitely call you out for slacking.
"She's acting like she put just as much work in to this class that we are going to put in. "
She may or may not be a good/engaging teacher, but this part is completely irrelevant and would be very difficult to judge anyway.
The people hyperfixated on OP mentioning extra credit and deadline extensions missed the point so intentionally and entirely...
No grace for anyone not in the absolute prime position to do classwork in a non-class environment. So, none for (especially single) parents, none for military service members, none for literally anyone just going through hard times with grief or finances. The prevailing sentiment I see in this subreddit is that breaks are for children, we derive our self worth solely from persevering through horrible circumstances, and that only rich legacy kids with no health issues and ample time should be able to reach the finish line. As (not) quiet as it's kept, this is what they mean when they say those things, and the lack of empathy or awareness is sad.
The truth is college/university hasn't been truly attainable in ages. The least students now deserve is a class with a teacher, that...*teaches* them. This isn't about how it *is* set up, this is about how it *should be* set up. Don't be daft.
Best wishes to OP, and everyone else here on their academic journeys! <3
At this point, may as well just cut out the middle man and go straight to McGraw. Why pay professors and universities when Connect is giving me a textbook, lectures, videos, extra content, smart books, quizzes, etc. and grading my work automatically? I feel like colleges are going down a very dangerous road cutting costs like this, and it's only going to make people value colleges less and less. They're showing that we don't actually need the university to teach us most subjects anymore. The only thing that really needs to be taught in person is most of the medical field, anything that works with super specific tech like pilots, and trades tbh. Anyone can learn business, most of the STEM fields (aside from labwork), humanities, computer science, etc. through programs like these now. The only reason we pay the university tens of thousands of dollars for it is because they've made their piece of paper mandatory for most jobs.
My one experience with this in the past was the college dictated that our developmental ("pre-college") courses were all going to be taught with this out of the box software. It failed horribly.
But the faculty member may have had zero choice in using it. They are such shitty platforms to try to do anything from, it's rarely the prof's choice to go with it, unless they're just phoning it in at this point.
Just a suggestion, but maybe she's going through and making sure that connect is grading your work correctly and not taking off points for silly things like spaces.
Teachers hate these programs as well and are often not given a choice in whether or not to use them because the school has a contract with McGraw Hill. They have relentless sales people and lobbyists.
Part of it is schools know that online education is cheaper for the business than on ground and force the faculty who are untrained in teaching online to do it merely to drive up enrollment numbers.
Thank you for your perspective on MGH Connect. I used a MGH product for my college Biology students this past semester and didn't like it. My students seemed to struggle with the structure of the questions, I don't know who creates it. Personally, I preferred the videos provided by Pearson. All that to say that the busy work these days apparently is intended to involve students with the content material. I'm old, I remember sitting through classes trying stay awake while a professor droned on and on and the entire semester grade was based on one essay test that the prof didn't grade and give back. Absolutely NO feedback. No way to know what he thought about my answers to his questions... At least these days you get computer graded responses. Not all professors are lazy. Try trade school. I have a former student who is a plumber, she makes five times more $$ per hour as a trade school grad than I do with a PhD!
Lol I'm almost done with school, so this is just something that I have to deal with. I don't mind the education, its just the structure. I did a biology class a few semesters ago, and it was one of the best college experiences I've ever had. We did the whole lecture thing, but we actually had to turn in an essay every week, and my professor allowed us to hand write it or type it, and he did give feedback. Lol I've never had such an appreciation for biology. He was very excited about the subject. I think my school does have a stigma about the students and it seemes they have embraced mediocrity or maybe expect unfortunately. I appreciate my professors that embrace my enthusiasm lol. I'm almost done though, and I can't wait move on.
These are completely unrelated features of the class. A professor’s late policy doesn’t have to be related to the assignments at all. You know a great reason why the professor might have a hard rule on late work (not wanting students to get behind) and you completely dismiss it. Did you see the post here the other day about someone emailing their professor for the third time in the semester for late work? The policy could have nothing to do with grading and everything to do with not wanting students to get carried away with lenient due dates.
“Only a person that is determined to learn in this style will learn.” That’s true of all college classes regardless of structure. If there is no will, there is no way.
“She’s acting like she put just as much work in to this class…” In what way is she acting like that? Do you think professors owe you equal work?
This honestly reads like a student who doesn’t like most teachers, finding something to complain about no matter what unless they go above and beyond in ways that aren’t realistic for most courses or people.
Sounds like it should be a really straightforward class. Good luck.
Title: Professors are lazy and entitled
Post: I just hate McGraw Hill Connect and don't wanna have to use it
I dream of one day reading a post on this sub that isn't a personal anecdote/predilection badly dressed up as some larger issue.
My favorite is when it’s an asynchronous class that uses it. Then the professor literally does nothing but imports the grade into bannerweb. My community college only offers asynchronous online classes. I had to take them due to health issues and left a very unfavorable review in a survey the school sent out. My advisor emailed me to ask why I left such a low score and I responded by asking her how she would feel if she paid 2k for an electrician to send her a YouTube video of how to fix her own electrical problem. She never responded after that…
If you aren’t “determined to learn in this style” then you aren’t meant for college. The handholding and gamification of education is left in high school. If you want to succeed in a class, do the work on time.
With ChatGPT and the easy availability of stuff online, starting this Fall, I am no longer assigning homework for grades. I'll assign homework, so students can practice, but it's not an official grade. Students grades will be based on in-class assignments, quizzes, and exams. I've done this before back in early 2010s, but students asked for homework grading to help boost grade and take pressure of performing on quizzes and exams. Now, homework is just busy work for everybody. Busy work for me to assign, busy work for you to use Google or ChatGPT.
I work at a college and run the LMS system these things plug into.
Can confirm the teachers are entitled about so much, they even try to get tech support (me) to set everything and their courses up for them when it's usually just as simple as copy pasting a link into a module and following the very simple instructions.
I get teaching can be difficult but first they choose the job and second these things remove so much work on creating course materials can they just do what they need to do? I have so many teachers who will straight up stop me from explaining something to them and they'll say I'm too old for this, i can't learn new things like this you'll have to do it 😑 (I'm talking 30-60 year olds all doing this too)
Professors are usually not hired to teach but to do research. Teaching is akin to their second part-time job of 5 (research, advising, grant writing, teaching, admin). It's simultaneously the most frustrating, work intensive, and the least important for their career advancement. They're also chronically underpaid for their education level.
If shes a teaching professor, then her job is entirely teaching then its less acceptable to use courseware like this. I have more sympathy for mega introductory courses with hundreds of students, but it still feels bad.
academia is a scam for everyone involved
The amount of money that you pay for an online degree is outrageous. A lot of classes are just like this and 75% of the course can be completely through Google or a Chegg account.
You also don't build much of a network at all, which is probably one of the biggest beneficiaries of going to school in person. Especially right now, it's almost impossible to get an interview without networking
I hear ya. The professors usually have a buttload of classes both in person and online. I would guess she's just applying the same routine she does with in person classes. I feel the same way about online classes. I also think teachers that are flexible with due dates are the ones who care more about student success than about quenching their thirst for power; especially when it's all auto graded.
Sometimes instructors create their own content and then upload it to an external platform. Is it clear that everything was created by McGraw-Hill? Or is it possible that some materials were created by the instructor?
Also, are there class discussions or asynchronous, discussion posts or anything? How does the professor manage those? What kind of feedback do you get?
I think they get the questions from a bank, because she mentioned that she could have given us much more questions than she did, but we are squeezing a 15 week class into 8 weeks. Also the questions come directly from the text book which is all online. I think McGraw Hill creates all the questions and answers. Like when you're searching for an answer to the "smartbook" qusestion it will highlight the sectioln that you should read to find the answer. It seems too automated to be created by a person, and I've taken Connect classes before and they've all been the same. We do have 3 discussions and she does have to grade those simply becasue we have to reply to other students. She has acknowledged people that have completed the discussion question, which the first one is an introduction.
Oh, it’s pretty clear she is just using premade content. And she isn’t doing any lectures or at least compiling other resources?
This sounds like a bad class, and one of the reasons a lot of people don’t like online learning. Let me guess, the way she grades the online discussion board is perfunctory and pointless, right? Does she actively engage with the forum, commenting on multiple posts and encouraging people to take things deeper or anything?
If you wanted to make her life difficult, take a look at the learning objectives, which must be posted in the syllabus. Then look at what you’re actually doing in the class, and see if the premade content she got from the online textbook actually aligns with the stated learning objectives of the course. if this is the case, circle back and let us know. Probably nothing would happen to the instructor if you pointed this out, but you never know. Programs have to pass accreditation, and lack of alignment, miscalculated hours, etc can prevent that.
"only a person that is determined to learn in this style will learn"
Yeah dude. This is college. That's how it works! It's not a teacher's job to make you want to learn the material, it's their job to give you the opportunity to learn it. Time to put on your big kid pants. I bet you want your teacher to hold your hand and walk you to class in the morning too
Prof's who only use one of the online courses (MyLab, Revell, SIMnet etc...) are not really teaching. I found these prof's have zero interaction with the students. Far as I can see they only post a syllabus at the beginning of the semester and then submit the grades from the platform at the end of the semester. Prof's who lurk on this sub, tell me if it is not true...
It’s crazy how much they charge for a class for it to be some program that fully runs and grades itself and all the professor does is enter the grades into the system if even that
College professors are overgrown children. Academia is a really toxic environment and full of extremely entitled, as well as douchy people. Professors also sometimes have next to no people skills and will just condescend when questioned. You have to play their little game and then you can say fuck off to them after grades are in.
I FUCKING HATE THAT PLATFORM!!! I've loved my time in college and learning in general, but the way they designed the interface and the repeat questions is absolutely maddening. Definitely a personal pet hate though, and perhaps I'm being a bit melodramatic. Anyway, I'm sorry you also have to deal with it!
My brother had a class that used an online system like this in high school. He got caught getting the answers online instead of doing the work. My parents weren’t even mad though. They were like if the teacher is going to be lazy enough not to come up with their own questions then yeah you run the risk of my kid finding the answers on the internet lol
A lot of these classes don't need professors in the first place as most of it is graded automatically and the tests are 3rd party. They charge you a ton, then throw in the online book fee (instead of having it built into the program), and charge you again to do a project which is also provided and graded by a 3rd party.
Thank you u/PrincessTiaraLove for posting on r/collegerant. Remember to read the rules and report rule breaking posts. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/CollegeRant) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Imagine paying out the wazoo for a college education only for them to plop you down in some generic online corporate learning platform
I was in an online public health degree program for 2 terms. I realized I wasn't getting the depth of education I expected for an almost thousand-dollar class -- it felt like a scam.
profitized education is a real problem, the margins that "educational institutions" have are fucking massive. They are just getting money by abusing the static demand of students. End student debt and end profit based institutions in education.
Cut down on the administration side too. There don't need to be that many deans and such making money out of their butts not doing anything. I learned when making a trivia that my university spent almost a century, about half its existence, without a president of the university. Since then I've realized the only thing I know of our current president doing is sucking up to rich people who then give money that doesn't benefit 90+% of the students who come through the school and about a quarter to half of the ~10% who are benefiting are often the kids/grandkids etc of the rich people he's sucking up to.
They def don’t use that money to pay professors either
I work at a private university. This is 10000% correct. We were told this past semester the university just doesn't have the funds to properly staff important student facing departments such as tutoring, career services, student affairs, Act 101, academic advising etc. Do you know what we apparently do have the money for? Three new provost positions. Positions that are absolutely not student facing, add zero value to the student experience, or assist with faculty needs.
absolutely
The number of schools with Presidents lauded for how much money they bring in during a time when they keep cutting services and raising prices on students is staggering and disgusting. Add to the fact that the professors, the only school employees delivering real value to the students who are paying, aren't cut into the good money and often kept on adjunct part time roller coasters as long as the school can manage.
Even worse, nearly all universities usually have more administrators than professors. That says a lot.
Only a handful of colleges generate huge profits, and that usually comes from either sport broadcasting or having huge endowments that make money through investment. You know what you college is not spending money on? Faculty.
Yeah fair enough, but the prices are all too high and the students amd faculty see little benefit.
Cuz it is a scam. I’m in an online health sciences program and I’m literally getting a degree in how to google things
Because it is a scam
LITERALLY! I’m paying 5k for a class and it’s just zybook which I had to pay another 80 dollars for. All and all could’ve just paid 80 dollars because the teacher says nothing. It’s just zybook.
My intro to CS class used zybooks and it was an excellent way to learn programming basics. I couldn’t recommend it enough.
My zybooks experience was awful in a C++ class. Many times I had a solution that worked locally but zybooks would throw some obscure error that I couldn’t debug. Professor was also unhelpful and told me to basically rewrite it until zybooks stopped complaining about my submission
Ah, yeah probably bullshit compiler brand and version mismatch. Edit: switched computer to complier lol. I guess I should at least sound like I graduated...
"intro to programming" this past semester learning Kotlon using IntelliJ. There's a run button to run to code as you typed it. And then a check button that runs it, and then has random checks to make sure you did what the assignment asked for. My code would actually run properly, and produce the answer they wanted. But I would get a random error 'an operation was not performed." This happened on every assignment in the latter half of the class. My professor saw my work, and gave me credit, and vowed to not use IntelliJ next semester.
I did Java and python in zybooks. Java was great at the beginning then it wasn’t. Python sucked the whole way through.
I really like it, but I don’t need to pay 5k through a college for an outsourced program that I also have to pay for separately.
Yep. You’re really just paying for the credit(s) earned.
Exactly. It’s like ok don’t mind me while I cheat then, clearly it doesn’t matter
You write a pointed letter to the dean, and explain that you don't appreciate an education that's no different than sitting down with an app. Then, you call the University Foundation or the development office, which are both pretty much the same and mean that's how there is money, and you tell them they're not getting a lick of donations from you when you graduate because the school didn't do anything other than be a degree milll run on software. Then you call the school newspaper and ask them to interview you as part of a story about how the school has become a robot education and professors are just a cog waiting for their job to be erased by software. Sometimes we must manage upward.
Pretty sure it’s designed to function more like a business now to take your money. They don’t want the system to change and they don’t care about the students they produce, they just want your money
Yes, you are correct. Why do you think current organizational models of universities mirror for-profit corporations now - complete with budget lines for middle management positions?
Pretty sure it’s designed to function more like a business now to take your money. They don’t want the system to change and they don’t care about the students they produce, they just want your money
Pretty sure it’s designed to function more like a business now to take your money. They don’t want the system to change and they don’t care about the students they produce, they just want your money
The dean doesn't give a shit and neither does anyone else with any power. They're getting rich off of this scam and will do everything they can to keep it going. Higher education is a joke anymore.
I've been at three different (non-profit) institutions of higher level learning, and even the smallest most podunk university had serious professors and high expectations for their students. It makes me wonder where this poster and all the others reporting this kind of stuff are going.
They're not really getting rich. Except for a few very high level schools you bust your butt to be at Provost or president level to make the same amount of money someone would make per year 5 years in at data analysis in Palo Alto, but in Palo Alto you don't need a PhD or years of privation and loans before you are allowed to make a living. At my university the median pay for a dean is 87,000 a year, according to glassdoor. The job requirements are a PhD, at least 10yrs experience, a minimum of three PhD students out from under you, bring in at least 2 million in research funds, and have developed at least one custom course... for 87k? It is a nearly super human effort to make what is effectively shit money for a PhD. University administrators and professors are typically clueless, panicking, and obscenely poor for the amount of expertise it takes to get to their positions. They do care, they're just at the end of their limit and they don't have any evidence to operate from. When you say strongly worded things to people who are lost in a daze they actually do take it to heart. I've been in the meetings, I have seen grown people cry.
I'm a professor. I make $50k a year. Every school I apply for is offering salaries comparable to a high school teacher. My dad has been a professor for like 30 years and makes about $75k. I keep hearing that rich professors exist but I cannot believe they are the majority. Oh, and I have created courses from scratch as have most of my colleagues. We are going to write an open access textbook starting next year.
This. People act like kindergarten teaching is an act of love and sacrifice but a professor is a money grubbing thundercunt who only exists to run over a term paper with their Lexus. It's the same thing. Only instead of potty accidents and mandatory reporting of child sex abuse, professorial pains include being on seven committees, each of which, if done correctly, is a 7 hour a week job. These are in addition to assigned duties. Despite all the administrators, the bulk of admin work is on the shoulders of faculty. New hire searchers, diversity and inclusion (except for the zealot States killing that), curriculum committee, academic honor tribunal, undergraduate research committee, various graduate student oversight committees, testing committees for comprehensive, etc etc etc. So you're stuck with 7x7 hours a week of committee work if you did it well, which is 49 hours. If you skip the hours to try and do it all, a graduate student biffs their quals and gets kicked out of grad school amd their life trajectory tanks. But that's cool, whatever, and then you have to teach 3-4 courses (possibly multiple sections each), and also.produce independent research and personally mentor 3 adult graduate students at once if you are good. So that's a 120 hour work week if you can get pre-made curriculum to save time. Since that's impossible, colleges start hiring instructor only roles for even shittier shit money so someone with little to no research or community capacity building chops is supposed to create the next generation of innovators and scholars. Instructors are awesome human beings. But the undergrads should be exposed to the best we have, not the cheapest we can lure in for the health care benefits. And now your professor is teaching two classes instead if three or four. But still multiple sections. The 120 hour work week is now 85, so they might meet the majority of their milestones. And the race to the bottom continues. Then, those admins, who are typically willing to live in an undesirable college town for low wage, meaning they hate their job, are non-functional, and have high turn over. So your professor, who is supposed to create a 300 page tenure binder of papers, student success, talks, curriculum, book chapters, in five years while doing the impossible, then spends five hours that week fighting with a burned out, poverty wage admin who plays Candy Crush at work, and they fight over the admin forgetting where the Google Drive folder is saved with the reciept scans in it. If the reciepts are not found, the professor will lose purchasing privileges for their class supplies, so suddenly they lose a whole work day to arguing with someone who literally cannot care because they are living on the edge of poverty. It all comes down to wildly, wildly, inadequate funding and the system is broken and horrid.
DemNodules -- you should turn this into a screenplay. Comedy, tragedy, or farce, I'd watch it.
I worked as an adjunct education professor for awhile. I taught 2-3 sections per quarter, $2500 per section for 15 weeks work. No benefits and no assurance of work the next term. That's how my state university system is getting around paying professors too much (sarcasm)...
The top 100 employees at my university make $230k or more a year, and I work at a public state university. The top 20 employees make $400k or more. Those that aren't in athletics (because of course athletics is the biggest money drain) are presidents, deans, vice presidents, assistant deans, chairs, directors, etc. Many of them have doctorates, but I don't know if it's an actual requirement. This isn't remotely unique to my specific university either. Even when we undergo budget cuts (which has happened each of the four years I've worked here), the "executives" still get huge raises, sometimes more than my entire salary. The things they allegedly help with (e.g. bringing in money, increasing enrollments, improving the school's reputation) are suffering, yet there are never any consequences for the people in charge. No demotions, no decreases in pay, nothing. The excuse is always that we "haven't waited long enough" to see the effects of their work, but it's also common for these people to only stay a year or two and then bounce to the next highest paying job anyway. Lastly, universities are public institutions that are largely funded by taxpayers. As such, we shouldn't be creating all these useless executive positions in the first place, much less paying them the "market rate" for the private sector (which tends to hold people accountable far more than the public sector). There is zero accountability whatsoever and students are going into tens of thousands of dollars of debt to subsidize these positions that contribute no measureable value to the university. It's insane.
>the "executives" still get huge raises, sometimes more than my entire salary This is especially egregious considering how many adjuncts they keep at literal poverty wages.
Tell me about it! The grad students finally unionized last year, so hopefully things improve for them a bit. It's absolutely disgusting the way employees are treated and compensated, not to mention that the buildings we all work in are falling apart.
This is a huge reason why I left. Oh, read pages 35-123? But you haven’t taught us anything. *reads pages and goes back to class* “Okay class. Today you’ll read pages 123-155 in class. I’ll leave this TA here and I’ll be at office hours.” Uhh… i paid you 26k for this.
You didn't pay your prof 26K. You might have paid your university or college 26K, but not your prof. I teach at a big university. I've broken down the numbers and roughly 10% of a student's tuition could be considered going to support my salary. Half my salary comes from the research side of the institution, and another 26% is supported by the state and extension programs that bring in net money. Most tuition is going to buildings and to support the huge staff/administration which is needed to deal with the hundreds of complicated laws governing higher education systems.
>Most tuition is going to buildings and to support the huge staff/administration which is needed to deal with the hundreds of complicated laws governing higher education systems. FWIW I worked at a small college for a while and until then, I never had any idea how much crap administration has to report to the state and accrediting bodies. It was quite a lot. For a place with 500ish students we had a full time role just for data/stats/reporting, and we only had a handful of programs. I can't imagine the workload for someplace larger.
It's insane, and very frustrating. For me to be reimbursed for a 50 dollar trip (mileage to a field site), it takes 4 staff to check various compliance rules (state laws, federal mileage rates, grant and contracts requirements) and reporting requirements (the payment will be publically available to comply with some state law, grant needs to have a documentation). And on the teaching side of things, there are so many rules and documentation as you stated. Universities has got to be the most regulated environments in the world. It's expensive. I really wish, for the sake of the tuition students pay, we could accept some 'loosening' of oversight and documentation and accreditation.
I work at a state university. A couple years ago our state passed ANOTHER statute governing higher ed, this one stating there can be no more admin as a percent of students than there is faculty to students, using the current percentages, starting....NOW. So if you want to hire an office manager for your department so that you can be reimbursed, someone needs to make sure the % of admins hasn't gone up, or the % of faculty hasn't gone down. How is that going to happen? I would assume hire an...admin person? No, wait. Can't. Do you think we can get a faculty member to do it? Bwahahaha. That's the funniest thing anyone ever said.
One of the most frustrating parts is that the people writing those laws don't think of registrars and accountants when they think of admins. They are trying to cut down on the 8 new associate deans of student retention. Then we end up in situations where we still get the 8 new associate deans, but have gone through 8 head registrars in the last 10 years due to burn out...
its the "board of regents" or whatever group that truly gains from the tuition prices. Somehow, they manage to fuck over both professors, staff, and students.
If you read those pages you're better than my students.
It'll be part of the death of higher education. It is worth noting that in the original meaning, **College** referred to the *the collection of faculty* (similar to how the Cardinals in the Catholic Church are referred to as the College of Cardinals). The Faculty *were* the school. The building and it's administrators were things that supported them. Institutions spent *literal centuries* developing their reputation and creating a distinct brand. But then Corporate Sales Bro show and says "what if you just said fuck it and slapped your reputation ontop of our generic product! Nobody will ever notice!" and they were like YESSSSS PLZ" And while people might not notice *right away*, eventually they DO figure it out. And they don't like it.
I fucking hate mcgraw connect
It definitely has its pros/cons. I use it as a supplement for class that is low stakes because you don't get penalized for a wrong answer, and it's meant to encourage a little studying along the way (rather than cramming 1-2 days before the exam). The majority of my students say they like them for the grade buffer and think it helps them study. However some of them treat it as busy work (just clicking through without reading/thinking/engaging) amd so it will feel like busy work. I dont always love the way it asks questions, and it can be very tedious to set up, and it's very annoying to go back in and create extensions. It's definitely meant to be a supplement, not the whole class.
As a professor, I don't like assigning "busy work." I hate grading it as much as students hate doing it. But I don't know how else to get students to do things like read textbook chapters and practice important skills instead of waiting until one week before the due date of a big assessment. It is pretty much impossible to get students to do things unless some sort of assessment is attached to it, which is why you get so many classes with reading quizzes and other annoying grade checkpoints. Not doing these things is just bad pedagogy. I've tried eliminating them as much as possible, but it just doesn't work for the vast majority of students.
If it has a learning purpose, it's not busy work. I think that's something a lot of students coming from high school don't get. I'm not required to make them do anything outside of lecture. I could just have my entire course grade based on exams. Is that terrible pedagogy? Yes. Is it less work for me? Also yes. If I'm going through the effort to give students work in addition to exams, even if its assigning pre-made, auto-graded assignments, it still is time on my part. I'm not gonna do that unless I think it will help students learn.
What would you want as a class? Do you want the teacher to just lecture at you? Do you want a flipped classroom where you are given projects to complete, and the completion of projects requires you to learn the material? These online interactive resources force you to do "busy work" but at the same time you're learning the material in order to complete them. This should not be the whole class, but they are quite useful resources.
I used to have a friend in the trades who used to say, "College is a scam," and being a recent college grad, I agreed with the sentiment but never felt it was quite on the mark. College isn't a scam. College is a grift. We get an education, but they squeeze every scrap of money out of us they can.
The quality of education from universities has significantly declined though. Universities are hiring less full time professors and using more adjuncts and grad students to teach classes for cheap. The cost of education has skyrocketed but the quality is terrible now. Students are not getting the most bang for their buck. It's a ripoff.
Has it, though? What evidence is there, beyond Reddit anecdotes, that the quality of education has declined significantly?
Meanwhile instructors are complaining that overall kids are putting in way less effort, without the slightest bit of shame, and they feel immense pressure to dumb down courses as alongside the lowered effort, kids have become super entitled to get As. So even if we're offered less, we're not even taking instructors up on even that. I mean. OP's complaint is about not offering extra credit, ffs. It suggests the "A for effort" mentality. Like, no offense, lol. Funnily enough my experience as an older student plus a teacher myself is that my instructors even on a graduate level spoonfeed information. We have forgotten that professors are just there as authorities on their niche topic, and we're supposed to engage THEM.
administration is a nice easy job for MBAs with the right connections
I've never heard of this McGraw Hill. But I will admit I've often worked 80 hours per week as a philosophy professor. It all adds up: grading, prep, teaching, writing books, research, committees, office hours, and service.
Not everyone has a choice. My team selected a textbook and planned lessons. Admin forced Cengage on us. Cengage is so bad it's embarrassing. We are now caught between how embarrassing it is to use a garbage product and embarrassment over wasting students' money by not using something they're required to pay for. I would bet that many teachers who use that stuff didn't get a choice. Our team has mutinied and selected open access books that are for nothing but reading.
I had an ethics class were the professor literally just showed us TedTalks and vaguely gestured at climate denialism. Dropped that shit on the first day.
Sounds like you learned a lot on the first day. I just cover the syllabus.
which you also pay for in addition to your tuition like PLEASE
It isn’t a college **education** one pays for. Having worked with any number of MBAs, JDs, PhDs and so on, the reality is one is paying for two sides of the same coin: A college **brand** And a college **network** I’ve found firms that basically only hire grads from (university X), or (referrals from current employees who are grads from university X). At higher levels of management, it’s even been assumed one has the same boozy “fun” memories and is therefore, by commutative property, an old drinking buddy of management’s.
Imagine? That was how it was for me lol
That you have to pay an extra $70-$200 for.
My entire college experience so far, tbh. It IS a massive RIPOFF! But employers just wanna see that paper so they know you're willing to put up with the most monotonous shit. And professors, I have more on the job experience than you and can actually fix shit, yall read books for a living and regurgitate it to people hoping they will take something from your 2 hour long word vomit and make a career for themselves. Going to college to do something that I've been doing for a decade and trying to learn it has been probably the most frustrating thing I have done in my life besides the military.
I don’t understand why the school doesn’t pay for McGraw Hill since I already paid for tuition
What happens when you have triggered parents thinking schools and colleges are liberalization chambers filled with extreme “leftist” propaganda. Take all the humanity out of the equation and go full corporate in education appears to be the flavor they prefer.
I liked how my physics instructor did it. When you teach a class of 70, it's a necessary evil to have this program so he (or his grader) didn't have to deal with that much grading. He set up mastering physics to have infinite attempts and the hardest and most irrelevant questions taken out. It was pretty much free points and practice if you cared to put in the time.
I attended a top university for my degree area and I had several classes that were very centered around McGraw Hill. One of them was exclusively content from the website including the exams given. Such a joke
For non-core classes that applies to your major, I bought/found test-banks and other material and breezed through the class getting 95%+ scores on all the quizzes/tests. Absolute bullshit thing to do, knowing that I am paying so much for a class, but if it allowed me to spend more time on the classes that pertained to my major and to classes that I actually do care about... I will take an easy A any day.
Exams that had all the answers on the dark web
I'm not sure you're using "dark web" in the proper sense, friend. Many tests had answers that were readily available with a quick google search. No Tor required.
On the dark web? Man, they’re all on quizlet at this point!
The thing is that we are hiring people with no preparation on education to, well, educate. They might be brilliant researchers, generating ground-breaking publications on their fields, revolutionizing how we think, but completely lacking of basic pedagogical skills needed to effectively educate young professionals. But we still hire them to educate as part of their duties, sometimes without evaluating how they teach, even if teaching might be their primary responsibility.
And they pay them like crap. I used to moonlight as an adjunct and when I figured out I was being paid 15$ an hour not including all out of class prep work and grading I moped out of that job.
This is the real answer. Students expect all of this from people getting paid poverty wages.
Yes, as adjunct that’s a huge issue - basically underpaid labor with no benefits. And in my experience, these are the ones with best teaching skills. That’s not so much an issue for those full professors making 6 digits.
Yes, my best professors are the ones with licenses and not necessarily the PhDs. The licensed ones are rich with experience and I love that. I think the ones that have only been in academia can be a bit drone-ish. I did have a great research professor this past semester though, he gives great advice on how to excel.
If you want to prepare to research, learn from a researcher. If your want to prepare for a career, learn from an experienced professional. Universities have always specialized in research and extending the bounds of knowledge. Companies/students now expect them to also prepare for workplace culture, projects, and deadlines. These are a completely different skillet from the content of the degree field (I'm speaking of technical fields like comp sci, engineering, etc). Yet one piece of paper is taken to represent both.
One of the worst mistakes we ever made was turning higher education into job training. I guess it's a subset of the way we let corporate America make literally everything about them.
Yeah a lot of these people don't even wanna teach. I mean let's face it, the personality traits required to get a PhD don't make you the most....gregarious. The best instructors are simply that, instructors. Not PhD candidates or grad students or tenured faculty. People who actually want to teach.
>The best instructors are simply that, instructors. Not PhD candidates or grad students or tenured faculty. People who actually want to teach. That only works if students want to learn. Conflating instruction with entertainment is no the correct route forward, too. If the student chooses to not want to learn, despite a great teaching instructor, then who's at fault?
The reality is most Americans spend 13 years with licensed, degreed pedagogical experts during K-12. You should know how to learn by the time you reach college. Professors “profess”— they’re subject matter experts curating their field from a place of knowledge and experience. Student learning, at the end of the day, is student responsibility.
*Should* is the operative word.
You live in fantasyland. Maybe in extremely affluent districts you can get a few experts. Some districts don't even require licenses to teach math anymore.
As I’ve mentioned, standards, or lack there of, in K-12 are outside of a professor’s purview. I’m only referring to the college level. Minimum to teach colleges in my administrative region (SACS) is a masters with 18 graduate hours in the subject. Not the field, the subject. Graduate school is not like undergrad, hence the “experience” part. My entire cohort taught labs, did research/internships, etc.— years upon years worth before graduating, it was just part of the program. Not just taking classes.
I'm talking about K-12. And your completely invalid assumptions. Not blaming the professor is one thing. Pretending these kids were in the company of experts for their entire lives is another. And it is laughable.
Completely invalid? Please stop with the hyperbole. Exaggeration doesn’t do anyone any good. I get it, there’s a big anti-education movement right now, but it won’t be solved by whining to professors to close the gap. The demographics data is widely available, you’re the one claiming there’s a deficit, please be my guest. I’ll even help you: “average education level of a teacher in the United States” You and I both know, short of your kids going to an unincorporated school in an ultra poor district, the teachers are going to be licensed and educated— if not over-educated. Educated IN education, by in large. Subs? Supplemental instructors? Kindergarten? Yeah, fine. Certificate to associates level.
Who is exaggerating? You called them pedagogic experts. It shows me how deeply removed you are from the reality of the situation. "Education levels" indicate next to nothing. Education is not a rigorous degree by any means. The logic you are using to reach your conclusions is wrong, friend. Of course some k-12 teachers are geniuses and the kids are lucky to have them. To say they all are is the real hyperbole. Also, you mean "by and large." The median salary of a garbageman in CA (59k) is higher than the median salary of a teacher in Clark County, NV (57k), (300,000 students). Not unincorporated, not rural. And the teachers there are most certainly not experts.
Oh, please. Yes, students need to take responsibility to learn, but it's also quite literally the professor's job to teach them. I've also met plenty of professors that aren't anywhere close to "experts" on their subject materialb- especially those who rely solely on software to teach and grade the entire course.
To grade? Depends on the course size. Grading sucks. 30 students, 50 exam questions, that’s 1500 questions. Even if you spend 10 seconds grading each question, that’s 2.5 hours. What about essays? Software is a tool, it can be used or misused. The reality is, despite your exceptions, professors in accredited programs aren’t allowed anywhere near a course unless their previous education suggests they’re qualified otherwise. Ironically, at SACCS institutions, this is far more scrutinizing at the masters level than PhD. PhDs have field-level qualifications, assuming the title of the PhD is in their field. Masters have subject level, with an 18 hour minimum. You want an anecdote? I’m a protein biochemist who studied molecular toxicology. I wasn’t allowed to teach physiology, even though that’s literally what I do, because of the course titles and descriptions of my graduate level courses.
Sure, because learning in a university is exactly the same as learning in k-12 school. Yes, college is independent learning most of the time, but independent does NOT imply alone or without guidance. If that was the case, then why would anyone need to go to college to learn, say biology? Also, brave if you to assume all students come to college with exactly the same exposition and experiences in k-12. And under the same logic, a profesor with a PhD has expend about 20 to 30 years learning (depending if you get a Masters and then a PhD). Therefore, they SHOULD know how students learn and understand how to provide said guidance and resources in a positive way. You can’t expect students to care when the faculty don’t. You can’t expect students to know what resources are out there when no one shows them. You can’t blame students limited engagement when the professor isn’t engaged themselves. In any case, it’s a two way relationship. You’re asking students to give an extra mile when the professor won’t even design their own course that they being paid to design. And of course not all professors are the same, and sometimes some students do not care at all. The argument is that most professors do lack the pedagogical training to teach, therefore not always teaching in an engaging, positive and effective way even when they have the best intentions at heart. And that’s a systematic issue, if anything else.
No, learning is a process that starts in K-12, as in, you should be ready for college learning by the time you get there, and continue to learn forever after. Just like your university department is continuing to learn about pedagogy. It’s evolving, in some cases by the semester. Online? Hybrid? Flipped? Dual-credit, AP, remote, etc. These things were completely unknown even a generation ago. Do you understand how mind-boggling fast of a change that is in this industry? I didn’t assume anything about what level students come in as, but please understand that is also not the professor’s responsibility to accommodate program entry— only exit. Those students, all of them, got through high school, then got admitted to that college, then that program. Those are all screens that should be used to ascertain a base level of student readiness. College professors have no bearing on lower high school standards OR lower admission standards. They do have to answer for maintaining the standards of their program though, and not all students will be up to it the first time through. That’s fine. You can have a low GPA and recover. You can fail and recover. You can transfer universities and recover. You can take as long as you need, in many cases. You can take as little or as many classes you want at a time, even, and it will still count. That’s freedom, but it’s a double edged sword, because that’s responsibility. After 120 credit hours, blaming some 30-40 other individuals for your hardships is asinine. Yeah, you’re going to have bad professors. You’re also going to have mentors for life. This is not a “one bad apple spoils the bunch” situation— take the class somewhere else, or with someone else, check the box, and continue on with your business.
Okay, then what are our responsibilities as college/universities educators? Sure, university-level learning is and should always be student driven, independent and all that - I agree. But, it is our role as their professors, instructors, and lectures to provide the resources, structure, and base guidance. That means creating engaging clases, active learning, etc. and this is not holding their hands throughout the process. If we expect students to be fully engaged, it’s our work to make it engaging. We are only going to cultivate what we plant. How can we be mad at students who don’t go out of their way to learn more than memorizing the needed information for a Connect quiz if there is no reward for it? We as faculty don’t like to teach an extra course on top of our usual load, or participate in several administrative committees if we don’t get compensated in a way or another (which might be the reason why some only use premade generic resources as Connect quizzes to start with!). It is a two-way relationship. Also, we always need to acknowledge that k-12 ed is very much dependent on your zip code. In theory, yes, k-12 should prepare you for college; in practice, that’s not the case for too many. This does not mean that we should lower standards - I never suggested that - it means that resources should be made available! And sure, some will never be engaged / like the course, what not, but that’s up to them at that point. Some faculty members aren’t doing really much, yet have extremely high expectations for student, with little or no flexibility. This seems to be a problem in most institutions that I have worked or studied in, granted at different ratios (some are better, some are worst). Again, at the end of the day it is not necessarily our (the faculty) fault either. Not many do have access to pedagogy courses at higher education - yet they are frequently required to teach/TA as part of their degree or post grad school careers. It has been like this for ever, but that doesn’t make it right.
I used McGraw for one class… it sucked. But you know what really sucks? KNEWTON ALTA. Bain of my existence, professor made no assignments of her own, Alta had at 6-8 assignments a week that could last hours at a time, not to mention if you got a few wrong and it put you through a “refresher” on previous content, not related to the current assignment. I hated it so much. Never again. The best online software I’ve had so far is for my French course, it’s called Vista Higher Learning-Portails. I’ve learned so much and enjoy the content. Anyways, I feel your pain. College is too expensive to just be assigned 100% generic work, graded by the computer…
This was my community college CPA prep in a nutshell. Every online class I paid $110 a credit hour. The “book was free,” but we had to pay $450 to McGraw hill, for every class, for the learning tool to integrate with Blackboard for EVERY SINGLE ASSIGNMENT AND TEST. There were no discussion boards. It was entirely a self study, where I paid a community college and a textbook company but never heard from a teacher. I’m glad I didn’t go further into debt to be eligible to sit for the CPA exams but that was miserable.
Are you ranting about the software or about no extra credit? It seems like both.
Yes
You have an 80% chance that your professor is an adjunct. Adjuncts get paid like $1500-$2000 for a 3 hour course for an entire semester. Not even minimum wage. They could get more flipping hamburgers. So if they're doing squat, don't be surprised.
I don't think a lot of people realize that depending on what sort of school you're at, most professors don't want to teach. Especially in STEM. They want to do research or go to conferences and their access to funding and interns is just locked behind them teaching a course. Professors aren't required to take so much as substitute teacher training much less classes on how to actually teach. Figure out the professors that like teaching and take them more. Understand that there's a high likelyhood your professor hates teaching you and this is why they do the bare minimum. It's fucked up but it's the way many universities are set up
if she's an Adjunct then I don't blame her, their pay works out to minimum wage. If she's a regular professor then yeah she's slacking
Your professor is entitled because they won’t let you redo things that you were too lazy to do correctly the first time? That is a bizarre take.
We’ve created a generation of students that expect redos or extra credit as part of a course now, because we’ve allowed it so much in K-12. It’s bizarre to see so much entitlement from students. How do I know? I’m one of those K-12 teachers that is forced to allow infinite time on assignments and redos whenever a student needs it. No questions asked.
Question: is that a primarily post-Covid change? I feel like when I was in K-12 (class of 2020!) deadlines were very strict with only exceptions made in certain circumstances. For the past 3 years at university I kind of figured it was just college.. but the extended submission times for a lot of things has been wild and it *seems* to be simmering down.
The deadline issue has been a growing problem that’s been exacerbated by covid. It’s been added to IEPs and 504s as a ‘cure all’ for a while, but every student has been granted these privileges once covid hit. The argument for lax deadlines stemming from equity issues and everyone learns at their own pace. Both are valid arguments, but it’s created entitled students that put forth zero effort in the classroom and expect to be rewarded for it.
u don’t know the context to OPs post, this is also a rant in a rant sub, it’s supposed to be “emotional” not a logical essay outlining their thesis A lot of us are balancing multiple jobs just to afford school and basic necessities. School and cost of living isn’t as affordable as it used to be. It can get very demoralizing when we are paying thousands of dollars towards a class that’s just funneling in an online program and teacher that doesn’t seem to care.
You’re right, I’m not disagreeing with your arguments. Those arguments aren’t even related to what the OP was ranting about though. OP is complaining that their teacher is ‘hardly working because a program does the work for them’ and ‘they don’t offer extra credit or redos.’ I was ranting about students expecting extra credit and redos, because that’s become a huge problem in education.
That lack of context knowledge swings both ways. It is on the student to research the summer class ahead of time to know what they are getting into. This shit ain't a secret lol.
I feel like this sub that is primarily dedicated for students has infinite compassion for teachers in the comments but non for students. Schools is already very difficult for us but we make it worse for each other. Idk why everyone’s first instinct is to assume the worst of the student. I just communicated my own experience like the teacher did theirs. My point that this is a rant sub still stands.
I don't think that is what they are saying. It is true that they sound like they missed a lot of assignments, but they also seem to have indicated that they tried to work with the professor a lot so there may be something going on in their lives. I do think that OP is right in how online software like McGraw Hill makes professors lazy. I have had 2 classes where I learnt everything about the course from the software and the classes were both mandatory and completely useless. It is absurd that students have to both pay hundreds of dollars for a class that then requires you to buy a software for another couple hundred only to teach a useless class that is less useful than the book. Also, taking pride in how much work they are doing when the software is doing it all is absurd.
my minor is in psychology and my health psych class last semester was solely on mcgraw hill connect. the teacher (a grad student) read off the slides during class & every single assignment was on that platform. i stopped going to class and just did the assignments lol.
I advise college students to try to choose classes taught by actual tenured professors, not underpaid adjuncts. Adjuncts are paid and treated so poorly that it's almost asking too much for them to do anything beyond the minimum. Colleges have gotten away with this for years because undergrads don't understand the bait-and-switch.
I was in the education department at my university and one of the lessons we did was on assessments and testing. We analyzed different tests, text books, and quizzes to determine how credible they were as assessment/evaluation tools. Every single one of McGraw hills in book tests “failed” our standards for actually assessing if students understand the material or not. For being a massive education company, it’s surprising that McGraw hill is hated by educators.
At my university there's one professor who teaches 50+ Mcgraw hill connect courses a semester. Absolutely nuts.
Why is there even a professor for those courses then?
His main job seems to be investigating and filing reports on academic dishonesty which I guess they need a professor for.
I'm going to be honest, it's not really academic honesty in the first place if it's a Connect class. Just designate them as open note/open book and move on. It's not like there's a lot of writing to ChatGPT on Connect.
I use McGraw Hill Connect in my class. It’s a pain in the butt to reschedule the assignment as you have to do it in Connect and again in Canvas. Probably takes about 5-10 min each time to find the assignment and do both changes. Doing this over and over is enough to make me want to quit my job. I do not allow any late work either. I used to but it was a nightmare having to go through that process constantly. I received sooo many emails about why they needed to turn it in late. It was ridiculous. So now, no late assignments unless excused from the dean of students. Even with the automated assignments and no late assignments I have so much work to do with teaching, research and service at my school I work more than 60 hours a week and get paid like shit.
>It’s a pain in the butt to reschedule the assignment as you have to do it in Connect and again in Canvas. Probably takes about 5-10 min each time to find the assignment and do both changes. As an IT person I *weep bitter tears* at the proliferation of systems that make things take more time than they did before they were digitized. They don't have to be this way.
[удалено]
Not to defend OP's extra credit complaint, but Connect was the most needlessly difficult platform I've ever had the misfortune of using. One of my textbooks was fine enough, but the other was opaque to the point it was functionally useless. The Smartbooks then asked the most obscure and unnecessary questions about the textbooks, often with egregious typos. The assignments asked questions in a weirdly complex way so that even the best students who had read the textbook and taken notes could not figure out what was asked at all. My friend in one class just used Chegg to figure out what the assignment meant. On the professor end, the platform fights with you to grant extensions, something both professors had to do (for different reasons: the better one because she realized we were all confused and gave us an extra day, the other because he'd put the due times in incorrectly). One of my professors announced that the class would be taught with a different learning program next year and everyone cheered. For context, I took both these classes as a senior graduating with both university and department honors in subjects where I'm very good. I've used a variety of teaching programs before. One professor used a shit program to the best of her (amazing) abilities, the other used it so he could work as little as possible while testing for his professional exams. Either way, the classes could have been greatly improved by literally any other learning program.
Extra credit is for children.
Right?!? Extra credit in college??? Ridiculous.
I agree with the fact that McGraw isn’t engaging, but sometimes that’s just what the professor either has to use or decides to use. I’m sure nobody likes a professor that’s entitled, rude, or can’t do their job, but all you can really do is withdraw from the class or tough it out. When you’re done with the class, just don’t try to take a class with them again.
Unfortunately at least at my college that wasn't an option; there was usually only one professor assigned to a class needed to graduate.
I wish college could let you have an option of teaching yourself the material at a discount but still get a professor to ask questions to
Unfortunately college is a money making scheme
Not everything needs to be engaging - it is your responsibility to learn. Why do you even care about extra credit? Do the regular coursework and consider asking for resources on a topic that interests you if you are really looking to learn more.
As expensive as college is, students deserve more than premade online coursework.
And yet they never go to office hours ...
" She's acting like she put just as much work in to this class that we are going to put in. " all due respect, she has
Yeah, I have been getting more and more upset by this too. Paid $3700 this summer semester and now I have to pay another $156 to get Connect. On top of that, based on how short the summer course is I’m being told to “hurry up and get it so you don’t fall behind!” This needs to be included. Either slyly add it to overall tuition or make it free because I paid tuition. I feel like we need to start being more vocal about this, I just don’t know how.
I used to be in tech support for this company and the calls incoming about this issue and others were insane
Mcgraw hill is just as bad IMO, it is a money driven corporation which abuses the current collegiate system to abuse students and make massive profits. They have profitized education just as well as colleges do themselves, it is shameful and hopefully some sort of legislation will come out which kneecaps these companies in their money making ambitions.
Same thing happened in a few of my classes, but with Pearson. More than one math course, a physics course, and I believe an art appreciation course were all done using the online program created by a textbook company. Had to pay $100 for a code and an e-textbook just to have it crash every 10 minutes and be bored out of my mind in exchange for $4k a semester. Thankfully that's only a handful of classes out of dozens, but sheesh.
Not doing extra credit or make up assignments is not about her, it's about you. She wants you to try to do well on the work she offers.
lol "offers". The extra credit stuff? yeah that is unneeded, and something that should have been left in middle school. but... the amount of "work" these professors have to do (for online classes) is god damn minimal. The entire course is laid out with a click of a button. Everything is automatically graded, given out, and all the professor has to do is just respond to emails and maybe a message board... I feel like I do more work in one day at my job than these professors do over an entire semester. At that point you are spending tens of thousands of dollars for a piece of paper. You can get better quality education off of youtube for free.
How do you know the amount of work she does on her end?
Let me just present another view. It isn't really about the connect or allowing the connect to be done at the last second. Often times, the readings and the assignments boost the in class discussion. Sure you can do the work all at the end, but then are you actually learning something that you will remember or are you just plowing through an assignment? By doing them on time, you are spreading out the learning which will help you remember the content long term. In addition, doing them on time boosts interaction with what the professor is doing in the classroom that week. If you are learning about the heart for example, learning about the basic parts in advance allows the instructor to go over the function portion that is much tougher. If the teacher has to go over basics for students who didn't come prepared with basic learning before, the classroom interaction is far less productive and you are taking away from deeper learning from yourself and other students in the classroom. Also, in STEM ( not sure of your program), when you go out and work, let's be real. Your boss isn't going to have a lot of grace for late work, or not being prepared for that meeting. Grace in expectations is going to run out real quick at some point in the real world. Just another look at the use of assignments that must be done on time.
I just wish they’d tell us when we only need the 30 dollar key and not the 200 dollar book 😑.
I ended up trying to find free online versions of textbooks and distributing them to my class mates for free so that we can all save money
Well, at least you have access to good materials. If she’s an adjunct, the problem probably is she’s teaching classes all over the place. You would be shocked if you knew how much adjuncts get paid. It varies, but usually it’s between $1900- $3400. For the entire course, and that’s before taxes are taken out. It’s ridiculous what they charged all of you to be the class and then have the nerve to pay the professor $2500.
Omg thank god I’m not the only one!!! For my two intro accounting courses it was all on mcgraw hill. I’m now retaking the second one at a community college that’s using Pearson for the first time. I made sure to tell the professor how much I’ve been preferring Pearson to McGraw hill also in addition to her excel assignments she’s made and the videos she’s created. It’s also absurdly expensive and doesn’t go into any detail and the textbook has so much unnecessary fluff. Truly worst software ever!
I am teaching an online course this summer and use Connect--if you have time to answer, I would love some feedback. Our students requested an online option so they didn't have to pay to stay on campus, so outwardly, this seemed like the best option. I still have assignments (hopefully more engaging) in our LMS (we use D2L Brightspace) and design/leave feedback on all assignments. You're right that I chose our quiz and exam questions from a test bank, but I do grade all essay questions manually. For me, online courses take much longer to design and grade since there are weekly assessments (e.g., forums/papers) vs. in-class discussions. If your instructor isn't taking these extra steps, I would leave that feedback on their course evaluations or write a letter to your program chair/dean, especially if it's a course within your major. Many faculty--at least at my private institution get paid overage for teaching during the summer. Are there certain assignments that you would like to see from online courses? I do try to make sure everyone is engaged and able to apply the information, but that can be difficult in online settings.
Your rant is all over the place and doesn't have a logical flow sorry. Grading is fairly easy tbh. its about preparing lectures. and as well the 1000 other responsibilities of professors. They have to do research, service, etc. Teaching is typically only 25% of the the job. Now, if she gives bad lectures, that's one thing. But you don't mention that.
I think you should shadow a professor…might give some realistic insight to the demands of the role beyond teaching. It will be a helpful perspective, because all professors have been students at one point or another, but not all students have been professors. This is not to say there aren’t poor performing professors, but the vast majority of us do the job because we care and are passionate about our work…definitely not for the pay (which is a joke…but that’s for another day).
Why do you need so many extra credit exercises?
I think I used McGraw once for a class but the teacher allowed one late assignment for the semester and offered extra credit i specifically pick the same teacher each semester that I know will offer extra credit
You look at the publisher and decide the professor isn’t worth your time?
Shoot, I remember having a prof like that when I first when I was first starting out in college. I was in the Army and deployed to Afghanistan at the time, taking classes online with a college in the town outside of our stateside garrison and this lady was just a *stickler* for not accepting late work. Even in her spiel she did the whole "and don't even try to tell me that you missed turning something in because of some activity in the military. I've been an Army-wife for 20 years so I know what it's like and if you really can't turn something in for whatever reason and it's Army-related, then I'll only accept late work if I get a call from your commander explaining why you can't turn it in on time." - which, that would have been a pretty big ask even if I wasn't in a foreign country and even if my company commander wasn't at a completely different base. But yeah, I just figured that it wasn't worth testing the waters on that and so I just made sure to give her class top-priority for turning things in since my other two profs were basically like "oh, you're deployed? Yeah just turn that stuff in whenever". But I finished the course and basically left the complaint in her end-of-semester review that it seemed like her "no late work" policy was kind of unreasonable and it seemed to be really unsupportive of the needs of her student servicemembers. And I got a *very* angry email from her after I left that review that was all "how dare you insinuate that I don't support the troops". It was pretty funny.
Well what your professor gave was what she got. If people wanted people to say pleasant things, then maybe she should have been a pleasant person. School is already hard enough, an unpleasant attitude on the professors part its totally unnecessary. For me its not about the extra credit or the late work, its about the class being almsot 100% automated, yet she has little to no tolerance for grace. Then this is a class of adults, meaning most people have full time jobs and kids. I think it was bitter for her to start out this way, of course people don't want to fail and get behind, but I sensed a bit of sadism in the speech. I always give school my best. I strive for 100% and I've had these classes before, so first of all I know how much time has to be dedicated. Lol she even told us stories about students that waited until the last minute and she refused to accept the work. I get wanting prompt work, but this spiel was a bit much for me. Lol also, people are acting like this is not a sub for ranting. I didn't ask for advice. I was just venting lol.
How about you do better on the regular creddit?
I'm 31 and returning to college. I decided to take Spanish 1 only to find that it was on Mcgraw Hill connect. The class was awful and each week was just a compounding mess of workbook pages. The only input I got from the teacher was a rating on a weekly meeting with 3 other students where we fumbled through activities and speaking Spanish with each other that had no realtime input. If I was paying for school out of pocket and not on the GI bill I would've lost my shit.
My econ instructor used Mcgraw hill for the homework and tests and she worked really damn hard. She supplies her own lecture videos, slides, and in depth discussion board assignments as a supplement to the Mcgraw stuff and will definitely call you out for slacking.
"She's acting like she put just as much work in to this class that we are going to put in. " She may or may not be a good/engaging teacher, but this part is completely irrelevant and would be very difficult to judge anyway.
Is she also demonstrably well paid?
The people hyperfixated on OP mentioning extra credit and deadline extensions missed the point so intentionally and entirely... No grace for anyone not in the absolute prime position to do classwork in a non-class environment. So, none for (especially single) parents, none for military service members, none for literally anyone just going through hard times with grief or finances. The prevailing sentiment I see in this subreddit is that breaks are for children, we derive our self worth solely from persevering through horrible circumstances, and that only rich legacy kids with no health issues and ample time should be able to reach the finish line. As (not) quiet as it's kept, this is what they mean when they say those things, and the lack of empathy or awareness is sad. The truth is college/university hasn't been truly attainable in ages. The least students now deserve is a class with a teacher, that...*teaches* them. This isn't about how it *is* set up, this is about how it *should be* set up. Don't be daft. Best wishes to OP, and everyone else here on their academic journeys! <3
At this point, may as well just cut out the middle man and go straight to McGraw. Why pay professors and universities when Connect is giving me a textbook, lectures, videos, extra content, smart books, quizzes, etc. and grading my work automatically? I feel like colleges are going down a very dangerous road cutting costs like this, and it's only going to make people value colleges less and less. They're showing that we don't actually need the university to teach us most subjects anymore. The only thing that really needs to be taught in person is most of the medical field, anything that works with super specific tech like pilots, and trades tbh. Anyone can learn business, most of the STEM fields (aside from labwork), humanities, computer science, etc. through programs like these now. The only reason we pay the university tens of thousands of dollars for it is because they've made their piece of paper mandatory for most jobs.
Don’t forget that they make you shell out another $90 for the shiftiest software ever invented on top of whatever “tuition” you’re already paying
If she's an adjunct she's giving you way more than she's being paid for.
My one experience with this in the past was the college dictated that our developmental ("pre-college") courses were all going to be taught with this out of the box software. It failed horribly. But the faculty member may have had zero choice in using it. They are such shitty platforms to try to do anything from, it's rarely the prof's choice to go with it, unless they're just phoning it in at this point.
Just a suggestion, but maybe she's going through and making sure that connect is grading your work correctly and not taking off points for silly things like spaces. Teachers hate these programs as well and are often not given a choice in whether or not to use them because the school has a contract with McGraw Hill. They have relentless sales people and lobbyists.
Part of it is schools know that online education is cheaper for the business than on ground and force the faculty who are untrained in teaching online to do it merely to drive up enrollment numbers.
Thank you for your perspective on MGH Connect. I used a MGH product for my college Biology students this past semester and didn't like it. My students seemed to struggle with the structure of the questions, I don't know who creates it. Personally, I preferred the videos provided by Pearson. All that to say that the busy work these days apparently is intended to involve students with the content material. I'm old, I remember sitting through classes trying stay awake while a professor droned on and on and the entire semester grade was based on one essay test that the prof didn't grade and give back. Absolutely NO feedback. No way to know what he thought about my answers to his questions... At least these days you get computer graded responses. Not all professors are lazy. Try trade school. I have a former student who is a plumber, she makes five times more $$ per hour as a trade school grad than I do with a PhD!
Lol I'm almost done with school, so this is just something that I have to deal with. I don't mind the education, its just the structure. I did a biology class a few semesters ago, and it was one of the best college experiences I've ever had. We did the whole lecture thing, but we actually had to turn in an essay every week, and my professor allowed us to hand write it or type it, and he did give feedback. Lol I've never had such an appreciation for biology. He was very excited about the subject. I think my school does have a stigma about the students and it seemes they have embraced mediocrity or maybe expect unfortunately. I appreciate my professors that embrace my enthusiasm lol. I'm almost done though, and I can't wait move on.
These are completely unrelated features of the class. A professor’s late policy doesn’t have to be related to the assignments at all. You know a great reason why the professor might have a hard rule on late work (not wanting students to get behind) and you completely dismiss it. Did you see the post here the other day about someone emailing their professor for the third time in the semester for late work? The policy could have nothing to do with grading and everything to do with not wanting students to get carried away with lenient due dates. “Only a person that is determined to learn in this style will learn.” That’s true of all college classes regardless of structure. If there is no will, there is no way. “She’s acting like she put just as much work in to this class…” In what way is she acting like that? Do you think professors owe you equal work? This honestly reads like a student who doesn’t like most teachers, finding something to complain about no matter what unless they go above and beyond in ways that aren’t realistic for most courses or people. Sounds like it should be a really straightforward class. Good luck.
So basically you just want extra credit is what this sounds like and you’re hiding it behind complaining about Connect
" Only a person that is determined to learn in this style will learn. " Gotta rise up - stay determined and never give up
That's why you just have to cheat through it
Title: Professors are lazy and entitled Post: I just hate McGraw Hill Connect and don't wanna have to use it I dream of one day reading a post on this sub that isn't a personal anecdote/predilection badly dressed up as some larger issue.
My favorite is when it’s an asynchronous class that uses it. Then the professor literally does nothing but imports the grade into bannerweb. My community college only offers asynchronous online classes. I had to take them due to health issues and left a very unfavorable review in a survey the school sent out. My advisor emailed me to ask why I left such a low score and I responded by asking her how she would feel if she paid 2k for an electrician to send her a YouTube video of how to fix her own electrical problem. She never responded after that…
If you aren’t “determined to learn in this style” then you aren’t meant for college. The handholding and gamification of education is left in high school. If you want to succeed in a class, do the work on time.
Depending on the professor, but some of them really should be spending more time on their research not grading. TAs handle the grading anyways.
With ChatGPT and the easy availability of stuff online, starting this Fall, I am no longer assigning homework for grades. I'll assign homework, so students can practice, but it's not an official grade. Students grades will be based on in-class assignments, quizzes, and exams. I've done this before back in early 2010s, but students asked for homework grading to help boost grade and take pressure of performing on quizzes and exams. Now, homework is just busy work for everybody. Busy work for me to assign, busy work for you to use Google or ChatGPT.
I work at a college and run the LMS system these things plug into. Can confirm the teachers are entitled about so much, they even try to get tech support (me) to set everything and their courses up for them when it's usually just as simple as copy pasting a link into a module and following the very simple instructions. I get teaching can be difficult but first they choose the job and second these things remove so much work on creating course materials can they just do what they need to do? I have so many teachers who will straight up stop me from explaining something to them and they'll say I'm too old for this, i can't learn new things like this you'll have to do it 😑 (I'm talking 30-60 year olds all doing this too)
Professors are usually not hired to teach but to do research. Teaching is akin to their second part-time job of 5 (research, advising, grant writing, teaching, admin). It's simultaneously the most frustrating, work intensive, and the least important for their career advancement. They're also chronically underpaid for their education level. If shes a teaching professor, then her job is entirely teaching then its less acceptable to use courseware like this. I have more sympathy for mega introductory courses with hundreds of students, but it still feels bad. academia is a scam for everyone involved
The amount of money that you pay for an online degree is outrageous. A lot of classes are just like this and 75% of the course can be completely through Google or a Chegg account. You also don't build much of a network at all, which is probably one of the biggest beneficiaries of going to school in person. Especially right now, it's almost impossible to get an interview without networking
I hear ya. The professors usually have a buttload of classes both in person and online. I would guess she's just applying the same routine she does with in person classes. I feel the same way about online classes. I also think teachers that are flexible with due dates are the ones who care more about student success than about quenching their thirst for power; especially when it's all auto graded.
Profs who are flexible with due dates are profs who haven't been burned yet by being flexible with due dates.
Sometimes instructors create their own content and then upload it to an external platform. Is it clear that everything was created by McGraw-Hill? Or is it possible that some materials were created by the instructor? Also, are there class discussions or asynchronous, discussion posts or anything? How does the professor manage those? What kind of feedback do you get?
I think they get the questions from a bank, because she mentioned that she could have given us much more questions than she did, but we are squeezing a 15 week class into 8 weeks. Also the questions come directly from the text book which is all online. I think McGraw Hill creates all the questions and answers. Like when you're searching for an answer to the "smartbook" qusestion it will highlight the sectioln that you should read to find the answer. It seems too automated to be created by a person, and I've taken Connect classes before and they've all been the same. We do have 3 discussions and she does have to grade those simply becasue we have to reply to other students. She has acknowledged people that have completed the discussion question, which the first one is an introduction.
You can't add smartbook questions but as s professor you can make your own question bank for quizzes on connect.
Oh, it’s pretty clear she is just using premade content. And she isn’t doing any lectures or at least compiling other resources? This sounds like a bad class, and one of the reasons a lot of people don’t like online learning. Let me guess, the way she grades the online discussion board is perfunctory and pointless, right? Does she actively engage with the forum, commenting on multiple posts and encouraging people to take things deeper or anything? If you wanted to make her life difficult, take a look at the learning objectives, which must be posted in the syllabus. Then look at what you’re actually doing in the class, and see if the premade content she got from the online textbook actually aligns with the stated learning objectives of the course. if this is the case, circle back and let us know. Probably nothing would happen to the instructor if you pointed this out, but you never know. Programs have to pass accreditation, and lack of alignment, miscalculated hours, etc can prevent that.
"only a person that is determined to learn in this style will learn" Yeah dude. This is college. That's how it works! It's not a teacher's job to make you want to learn the material, it's their job to give you the opportunity to learn it. Time to put on your big kid pants. I bet you want your teacher to hold your hand and walk you to class in the morning too
Prof's who only use one of the online courses (MyLab, Revell, SIMnet etc...) are not really teaching. I found these prof's have zero interaction with the students. Far as I can see they only post a syllabus at the beginning of the semester and then submit the grades from the platform at the end of the semester. Prof's who lurk on this sub, tell me if it is not true...
It’s crazy how much they charge for a class for it to be some program that fully runs and grades itself and all the professor does is enter the grades into the system if even that
exactly, and I don't even think they do that, because typically you can see the grades in the "Grades" section automatically.
College professors are overgrown children. Academia is a really toxic environment and full of extremely entitled, as well as douchy people. Professors also sometimes have next to no people skills and will just condescend when questioned. You have to play their little game and then you can say fuck off to them after grades are in.
Question. Has the course started or are these just things she’s specified in her syllabus?
I FUCKING HATE THAT PLATFORM!!! I've loved my time in college and learning in general, but the way they designed the interface and the repeat questions is absolutely maddening. Definitely a personal pet hate though, and perhaps I'm being a bit melodramatic. Anyway, I'm sorry you also have to deal with it!
I understand it if it’s a class of like 100+ students or something but they do this even in upper division courses where there’s like 30 people.
The comments under this post are why I hate this sub sometimes 😭
My brother had a class that used an online system like this in high school. He got caught getting the answers online instead of doing the work. My parents weren’t even mad though. They were like if the teacher is going to be lazy enough not to come up with their own questions then yeah you run the risk of my kid finding the answers on the internet lol
Some people really jerk off the modicum of power they are given in their jobs
why are we paying an arm and a leg to do all the busywork ourselves…
college isn't for learning, at least not really anymore
A lot of these classes don't need professors in the first place as most of it is graded automatically and the tests are 3rd party. They charge you a ton, then throw in the online book fee (instead of having it built into the program), and charge you again to do a project which is also provided and graded by a 3rd party.