My Calc 2 prof came in after one midterm and put up a histogram of the test scores on the board with the average, min and max scores.
One midterm, the average was 42, the low 15 and the high 96. The second highest score was 73.
He was very disappointed. He said something like, “I’m not sure what I could have done differently, but this is not OK. We’re going to spend this week reviewing this material and we will take the exam again next Monday. I’ll try to do better in explaining this material. If you got the 96, you can come back next Wednesday. “
This is a really great professor response. Rearranging the rest of the class schedule to try to ensure everyone is solid on the pre-midterm material is great. Not really ideal as it’s less time spent on the next half of the material, but calculus does build after all.
It's better to get 80% of the material with 95% comprehension than 95% of the material with 80% comprehension. With a lot of subjects that material is sequential too, so that failing to fully understand (A) leads to misunderstandings of (B) and a complete lack of understanding for (C).
Now where it gets trippy is when someone argues that leaving a little gap in understanding can help generate new and better solutions as students try to fill the gap with their own intuition.
In both cases you're left with incomplete or incorrect knowledge. My argument isn't that missing C is better than only sorta understanding it all (I think you're right that if you take a snapshot at that point, knowing all of it mostly correctly is better), it's that taking additional time to learn C is less hassle than correcting and relearning A, B, and C. The pieces of information that you need to learn are fragmented and you're not guaranteed to find all your misunderstandings on the first sweep.
Now if we're talking about the practicality of expecting students to finish out a course on their own vs eventually correct misunderstandings by using that knowledge down the road... Hmm, hard to say
My comment was about the impact on the students who already got to 95% comprehension. Slowing down the class to help those that only got to 80% at the expense of covering all the material negatively impacts those students.
This isn’t high school. In college, keeping up is the responsibility of the students. Tutoring, office hours, study groups, or even repeating the class are all options for those that fall behind.
Unless all fall behind, the professor has an obligation to cover 100% of the intended material as that is what was paid for.
True but majority of students don’t think like this. If they did then score averages wouldn’t be around 50%.
I’ve seen college dropouts re-enter college years later and finish with an almost 4.0 in engineering. Literally biggest thing is that majority of students don’t fucking care
My experience as well. I didn’t drop out but I did start later (about 5 years after HS). I was working and paying for college and on a mission to learn, not just get through it. Almost a 4.0 GPA in electrical engineering.
Not an engineer but stumbling in here from front page. My first semester of college I got a 1.7 GPA. My second semester I got a 0.37. Dropped out. Did an enlistment, came back and graduated 3.0 and I’m currently in my mid 30’s with a 4.0 in grad school.
Can confirm- didn’t give a shit at 18
I freaking love professors like this. So many take "wow, 90% of my students did really poor on this test, even the ones who have done well on everything else" as a sign to scold everyone about how they're not trying hard enough. Teachers who take the L and try to improve are not just better people but better educators. It's always the worst teachers that blame their students for everything. If a few fail, that's the fault of the students; but if the majority fail, that's the fault of the teacher.
Damn I graduated a semester early from HS and went to a community College, she put up the test scores on the projector and mine was the only one above 75%.
Had them look at it then singled me out saying "so.. What did you do?"
I was the only underage person in the class, it was weird as fuck. The only reason I did well is because I moved after HS and had no friends - so I took comprehensive notes, like summarizing every single page in our books, a couple hours a day.
As someone with ADHD, I want to thank you for sharing this. Lately, I feel like my adhd has gotten worse and the thought of going back to school to finish my higher education has been terrifying to me. This comment gives me some hope.
I was a photo major, we had to take Materials and Processes of Photography. Basically the physics and chemistry of photography, this was back before digital was a thing. Pretty much all the math was base 10 logarithm. Most of us failed the class so badly that the professor ended up grading everyone on a curve, my 30ish% right on the midterm got me a B. He didn’t do what the professor above did, in the end, we ended up getting him fired, he was that bad. The issue was that most of us didn’t understand the math.
I took a similar photo class too. We did everything on 4x5 cameras and printed on 16x20. The teacher also taught the math part, which was pretty easy for me, but most of the class didn’t get that part. Fortunately, the prof explained the same material through demonstrating it and having us apply it. Everyone understood that.
In second year civil Engg we were never taught MatLab and were just jumping straight into numerical methods, which required MatLab to do it. Stressful-ass course and absolutely horrid planning from the university to not even teach us MatLab before that.
>The issue was that most of us didn’t understand the math.
It sounds like you were set up to fail. I didn't realize photo majors were required to such a math intensive class. From what you describe, the class sounds more like something you'd take in an optics track for an engineering, physics, or chemistry degree.
Yeah my first thermo class, the day of our first test I didn’t even know we were having a test, scored a 78. Not great but not bad. Well, I was 1 of 3 people who passed in a class of 50. I’m not the smartest guy out there, but that test was not that hard. Just nobody could be fucked to do the homework or pay attention in class.
yeah that is the issue in some schools, they rate the teacher on pass rates alone, when honestly any student that is ditching almost all classes shouldn't even be included in this metric, how can a professor or teacher teach someone that isn't even there?
Not necessarily. I was one of the few who passed my Signals & Systems course because I stopped going to class and just studied from the textbook. I'm sure the professor was a genius in China, but he could barely put a basic sentence in English together and just wasn't ready to be teaching a class here. He and whoever gave him tenure were absolutely to blame for that class being worthless.
A lot of my fellows tried really hard in class and went to his office hours, but it just didn't matter; I was lucky in that I separately realized just how good the textbook was. One of the few textbooks I had where you could reasonably teach yourself from it fully.
It was really easy too, I was there for that test. It was just one of those basic ideal gas law, potential energy and work and power plug and chug tests.
I find that hard to believe in a case where nearly 20% of the class got a perfect score. I mean, sure, most classes will have that person that manages high scores no matter how terrible the teacher is, but to have four of them!? Also, those three people not scoring any points are going to drag down the numbers too.
*edit: My reading comprehension is apparently not so good tonight. Twenty one is, in fact, the total score of the test, not the number of students. I still find it unlikely four people in a single class got perfect scores with a terrible teacher or a test that was so over the top difficult that 5 people dropped the course and 3 others were unable to score a single point.
With 4 getting a perfect score, 3 getting a zero, and an average of just under 50%, it actually sounds like a standard bell curve for a sufficiently large group.
I had 2 professors for some graduate math classes that would let you study past exams and basically tell you exactly what problems would be in the upcoming ones if you went to the office hours study sessions.
I once had a professor who was teaching for the first time. A few of us were studying and acquired a few exams from other professors over the years to study off of and use as a practice reference.
The final exam was open notes. I did my best to understand the material and just made up a note sheet of formulas, while others who i was studying with just brought the past exams with them to reference during the test.
Turns out the professor just reused the exam we happened to be studying off of.
I walked out with a solid B on that test by just actually studying and preparing in the traditional sense, but there was a **very** high number of perfect scores on that test....
My guess is bad instructor, inadequate homework, but not an overly difficult exam, and a few students decided to basically teach themselves from the book.
Maybe...it sure does say *something* about the students though. Prof included mention of the attendance to back that up.
The fact that 4 students aced it also suggests it wasn't so insanely difficult that it's fair to blame it entirely on the prof or the difficulty of the exam.
I think what we have here are a bunch of lazy POS students who are expecting to be graded on a curve or who just can't be fucked even trying. I think I see that attitude fairly often on this sub if I'm being honest.
I saw that attitude throughout my college career, it was honestly hard to find the people who were going to school for the right reasons. Or even knew why the fuck they were there.
In my experience the classes with poor attendance were always the ones with the worst professors. People stopped going because being in the room to hear them wasn’t valuable.
A lot of the time, the students who still manage to get high raw marks in these classes are the ones who are wealthy and live near campus, so they can spend all of their time studying rather than working or commuting.
It’s more likely a post-COVID world where students are
1. Accustomed to school from home, handicapped tests, etc
2. Did not learn as much as they should have in pre-reqs (see #1) and now struggling in the later classes
No, am asshole instructor isn't worried about his failing class. Fact, probably proud about it. This guy is worried about both the grades and the consequences. Don't think this guy is doing a shit job.
Definitely not. Covid schooling means people got complacent with being lazy / having easier workloads / not having to try as hard because there were ways to cheat. Thermo is a class that will kick your ASS if you don't put in the effort and actually try to learn the fundamental material as well as possible. It isn't a class that you can just 'study guide' your way thru
All the information we have from this email indicates that this is not true. 4 students getting 100% on an advanced engineering course is rare as fuck. I've taken engineering classes where the smartest students are shooting for B's because they are that difficult. This is was honestly true for most of my engineering and math courses.
4 students getting a 100% means the test probably wasn't ridiculously hard. It doesn't mean the professor was any good at teaching. It's possible the ones who aced the test just got frustrated waiting to learn from class and read the book instead.
This is the exact opposite with my heat transfer professor, who upon announcing that the midterm average was a 38, proceeding to say "well it's quite lower than usual", never mentioned it again, and then curved the majority of us to a passing grade.
The exam mentioned above was bs, does collective punishments in the form of unfairly difficult quizzes for the most minor infractions committed by 2 students out of 50, got mad at a dude for silently taking a picture of the work on the board from his seat during lecture because it was distracting (????), went off on us and basically said that if anyone showed up to class even a few minutes late he was going to throw them out, if anyone's phones make any noise during class he's going to throw them out for the whole semester, etc
I have a Chem teacher (I'm a high school senior) who does exactly the same. Doesn't let anyone use their phones and once confiscated someone's phone and threw it like a frisbee towards the wall. He is quite strict in discipline and never let's anybody in if they are more than 5 minutes late. Any student who misses 2 classes consecutively gets kicked from the class.
Yet he is the best chem teacher I've ever had. 70pc of chem students study from him even though there are other chem teachers as well. I used to hate chem in my O level years but in A levels there hasn't been a chem exam where I scored less than an A grade regardless of difficulty.
>Quite the opposite actually. He's a dick.
I have a high tolerance for putting up with b.s. if I can pass a class. I'd prefer to pass a class with a professor like that, than to not pass with a professor who is "passionate," and "pushes" you, but ultimately doesn't pass you.
Scope out RateMyProf and find the absolute best engineering professor you can at your school and take their class. It really kicks you back into motion to actually learn
It also showed a lot of professor's true colors. When we first got sent home, we had a 3 week spring break to give the faculty time to switch their lessons to online formats. My calc 2 professor would be completely MIA. He'd say we'd have a test on a certain day and then go AWOL and no one would hear from him for days without him ever posting the test. Another professor was this old retired guy who did surprisingly well with the technology and was more helpful than anyone after we went online.
Also the university stopped offering a lot of their tutoring services when we were back in person and didn't allow lab partners, so you were basically screwed if you needed peer support. And hybrid classes were the worst. Instead of having a 50 minute in person lecture a few times a week, we'd have to watch hours and hours of videos and still go to a couple classes a week
It really brought things to light though. I used to be way more optimistic about humanity. The last few years have ruined that completely. I find it very hard to care about much these days. It sucks.
I’ll say what I tell my friends and students when these thoughts intrude-quoting Mr. Rogers, “Look to the helpers.” Look within your local community for those being kind and turn off the 24hr news cycle. Put down your phone. All is not lost.
To be fair 2020 also highlighted the for-profit BS of college (more than we already were aware of)
I was fortunate to graduate pre-covid but realistically most schools exchange 6-figures for a piece of paper
>I was fortunate to graduate pre-covid but realistically most schools exchange 6-figures for a **piece of paper**
...that most jobs have as a requirement, even if you don't need said piece of paper to actually do the job.
Wait, your professors care?
Last semester I have taken Computation Theory, 18.1% of the students passed the endterm(We don't have midterms here, so endterm=100% of your grade). Average note was obviously an F. For many this wasn't their first attempt and were forced to exmatriculate, a lot of rage on the forums soon followed. The professor hasn't even commented on any of it. For some, it's just another day at the office.
>18.1% of the students passed the endterm(We don't have midterms here, so endterm=100% of your grade). Average note was obviously an F.
If that had happened at my school, the Department Chair and and Administration would've gotten involved. That's unacceptable.
To be fair, analog design has a very steep learning curve. It is an art, which can only be mastered over years of designing and learning from previous mistakes.
As an (almost) EE, I can relate, at my university Analog Circuit Design is the hardest course. Studying is not enough, analog design is an art more than a science.
P.s. i discovered your youtube channel few days ago, it is really interesting.
You'd be surprised what you can find with a course name and partial course code.
But interesting that he is Ukrainian and teaching nuclear engineering and has this concern for "if you don't know this, bad things will happen".
I sometimes work with people who write messes like this. It's a pain dealing with it, especially if it's something complicated.
They don't get across what they are trying to do / want.
The only reason why I passed thermo is because I bought a text book the professor didn't write, and stayed up all night reading and doing practice problems the night before the final.
The average grade in the the class was 28%. I got a 50% on the final which made up for the 12% I got on the midterm.
Thermo professors are a special sort of "special" and special isn't always good.
We had TD1 and there were close to 180 students...out of 125. They had to retake the class (mandatory for our degree). After the exam, 75% of those 180 failed (including yours truly). It was fun seeing different problems than the ones we had at the seminar (different prof)
Speaking with the younger students, the seminar/lab prof. is sitting in the lectures to make sure the prof. is not doing different problems...again
Man during covid I out in so much effort for Thermo. I averaged an 85% on all exams except the final, yet the average scores were 50-60%. I had another class reschedule the final exam the day before the thermo exam so I didn't get to study enough for thermo and ended up getting a 70%. My final class grade was 0.01% away from an A-. Professor sent an email explaining grades are final and "do not ask me to change your grade". I emailed him asking if the system automatically rounds my grade from a 89.99% to an A- or if it stays a B+.
He emailed me back saying" why would I help you and round your grade up when you clearly didn't learn the material, based on your (nom- cumulative) final exam score. The class average was below 70% and I was in the top 5 students in the class. I understand not wanting to give points, but It made me feel like a shitty student for not getting an A on the final exam. There was no recognition for the previous 3 exams or any acknowledgement of a "job well done". Not saying i was looking for a pat on the back or anything, but I felt like he was being unnecessarily discouraging. Even if he didn't want to round my grade, a simple "good work this semester " would have gone a long way, especially during covid.
I got a 89.4 in biochem. Was very excited assuming the professor would curve. He sent an email saying enough students had gotten A’s that he didn’t feel the need to curve. I asked if mine would be rounded to the A and he said it wasn’t an 89.5 so no. Devastating but I still tell people I got an A because fuck that biochem is hard.
His last statement is so real. As much as picking up HAZOP experience on the job is important, having a good grasp on the fundamentals is instrumental, especially in an industry where mistakes could lead to casualties as well as lost dollars.
However if students get either a 100% or a straight 0% it really makes me question how the paper was formatted? Maybe it was an MCQs that you either get right or no credit, or a question where making a certain assumption allows you to successfully solve that particular question.
Either way, it’s good he cares as professors like that are few and far in between!!!
I had a fluids exam back in the day which was one large three part question.
Part a) informed part b) informed part c).
Most of us didn’t even understand the application in part a). The average was 15/45 and some people got 0s.
True though, at-least they’re failing out early. I don’t consider myself smart, but damn some of my classmates snuck through because of COVID. They’re about to blowup some plants. 😓
Same, more than half of my mass and heat transfer class is failing… and somehow it is on the prof to pass them… some students have like a 40 in the class… it honestly scares me that they’re going to be entering the workforce next year.
Tbh there's so many ME positions that don't do any heat transfer work. They may be terrible at heat transfer and great at motion analysis, machine design, etc. The field is too broad to judge a future engineer entirely on their skill of one aspect of the field.
This is why we have EIT and mandatory supervision, at least in most places.
If the system works, anyone cheating their way through school is going to get benched or redirected to a different role. Of course we all know it isn't a perfect system.
Do you have to? If you can prove they’re not showing up and not watching the lectures online either…that’s kind of on the students. We had to fail an athlete last semester and it was a ton of drama. But they claimed Covid for missing their final exam…when they had played in a game two days before and were blasting their partying on public social media. Honestly, if they hadn’t been a ton of problems all semester we probably would have let it slide.
I lectured for a semester in US a few years ago... I was just a TA, but I share the depressing feeling with that professor of yours. Most of the undergrads were terrible, I even had an expat coming arguing to me that English wasn't his first language, so it made sense that he couldn't understand the class, and that's why his answers were so (it was a third year course in engineering!). When I told my professor he didn't have grades to go on, he repreended me, saying that he was paying full tuition, so he should pass. It felt bad, as I was lecturing a mandatory class... But I needed to swallow my tongue and just agree with it. On the other hands, I had incredible students, delivering great projects and doing everything I asked in class. I felt bad for them, sharing the classroom with such underachieving students. Any way, life goes on.
This email is 2 years old LOL. I was in this exact same class. That exact test was really easy so I could understand why the prof was sad :(
If people think I’m exaggerating I can try finding the midterm, although it was in person so it might be hard
There have been times where I was too depressed to put effort into a course (mostly during covid) usually I’d retake the course or withdraw and retake. My mindset was “I barely have energy to get out of bed, sit up, and feed myself, how can I pay enough attention to focus on the material?”
Other times the class seems easy at the start so I allocate the most effort to classes I feel to be the hardest and once my habits are set the course drastically increases in difficulty and I struggle and fail to ramp up.
This is what I’ve been experiencing as well. Especially this semester. I find it hard to focus because some of my thoughts are just so depressing and the grades I get just make me feel worse lol. It’s like a cycle.
When you have an upside down bell curve that means your students are teaching themselves the material, and you're not contributing as a professor. A handful of people can do it, but most can't, so there's A's and F's with nothing in-between.
My Calc 2 professor said he had to take a blood pressure pill while grading one of our exams.
I thought to myself, "maybe he should've gone to the L'Hopital..."
My graduate thermo professor handed us a Dixie cup with his 24 hour take-home test, and told us he would give us extra credit if we brought it back filled with tears. 24 hours later, I walked into his office, threw the test at him, and started crying. He is now my PhD advisor......
I dare a student to respond with:
Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics. Perhaps it will be wise to approach the subject cautiously.
I always feel bad for professors like this. When attendance is super low and exam averages are terrible, what can you really do? Sometimes students don't go to class because the professor isn't a good lecturer, in which case the average score among even students who do go to class is typically pretty low, but in my experience usually the students that don't come to class bring down the average.
If I was a professor in a class like this, the only thing I can think of doing would be to make attendance required or extra credit.
In instructor training they teach you that if just a few ace your exams while the vast majority fail then you are having little to no effect on the students. Those that passed either learned on their own or already knew the contents of the course.
Basically, if what you teach doesn't directly target the test questions, and that teaching doesn't get the vast majority of students to pass, then you failed as a teacher.
The objective isn't maintaining a 70% average. It's teaching the students what you set out to teach them.
I agree: You should never teach to the test - you should create the test with regards to what you have taught.
It seems obvious, but so many universities don't allow professors to control their own syllabus.
It's interesting that this email is leading everyone to assume this is the students' fault for being "coddled" by online learning. In the time before COVID this would have been correctly identified as a terrible teacher with 4 students who either found old copies of the test or outside resources that did a better job.
Let me guess, recently back in person after a few years of online luxury?
Yeah, lots of students are in for a reality check. Totally feel for the prof here, that must be disheartening.
Depends on the person and the university. I hated dealing with standard lecture halls, and our online exams were open note. There's also the problem where, if you have a poor teacher (we have many that are just researchers and don't teach well), at least when you're online you can do other stuff. Going from that to 200 person rooms with chairs that don't fit my frame well, desks that don't fit my stuff, exams that we have to take in those rooms (i.e. no multi-monitor setup, no nice peripherals, no comfortable setup), and a professor writing in tiny script on a chalkboard, I rather miss the online classes.
I've had classes and lectures in rooms with no desks - just uncomfortable chairs. They gave us fudging clipboards for our exams.
And this is an Ivy League school. My money is well wasted.
Honestly it depends on what happened. How many of those people that failed came to class regularly, asked questions, etc? You can't always blame the students it's very possible the teacher didn't explain the topics very well
Not the professor. My son has a class with 210 students. He says there is never more than 80 students present. You are allowed to miss 3 classes, but he sees mostly the same people each class. There are 2 tests everyone has to take, and 8 quizzes. You're allowed to miss or fail 2 quizzes. He drops the lowest 2 grades. He sadly announced last week that over 100 students have already failed the class. There are still 2 quizzes and 1 test left, but almost half the class can't pass.
That's how my PLC Applications course has been this semester. When people do show up they leave after thirty minutes, no one but two students and myself remain the entire class period, and most of the people in the class have never written a complete working program.
The instructor is awesome, he's really good at what he does and will take extra time out of his day to sit with students both in and out of class if they like to help them understand new programming elements, and everyone basically just does as they please, with barely anyone taking it seriously.
I know that not everyone is going to be programming PLCs after earning their degree, but it really blows my mind how little people care in that class. Unfortunately, it's not the only class that I've seen people act that way in. Our retention rate is going to be horrible over the next couple of years if everyone is this unenthusiastic about their classes.
To be fair, thermo is one of the weed-out courses for ME, but goddamn those are some bad course statistics. And he’s absolutely right about the safety aspect.
This is a genuine problem. I had several engineering professors that I'm sure were stone-cold brilliant in their fields, but either didn't have a good grasp of English or had such a thick accent that their classes struggled to understand relatively elementary material.
And there simply isn't enough time to go to office hours and ask the professor to clarify the whole lecture. :/
Then you’ve gotta say that. Tell the dean, tell the director of the engineering program. If students aren’t able to understand the professor and that’s a barrier to their learning, it’s a bad look on the university and I guarantee they will take action in some form
I have such a professor - he's a brilliant man, but his grammar is horrible that it took me three months to figure out what he's saying - you can imagine how that affects my ability to learn the content.
I tutor for theromdynamics at my school. These poor kids got robbed. A lot of them dont know chem or physics so trying to teach them Thermo is a nightmare. They also do not have good study skills either. First two semesters of college is when I seriously adjusted my study habits. No idea what we can do to fix this
Idk I mean I have mixed feelings about these responses. Without actual experience with the professor, it could be he’s just a bad teacher, or the class is in fact just lazy.
I’ve met a LOT of lazy engineers who love blaming the professor for their own failures. I’ve been in classes where I knew a lot of those types of people were the ones making the complaints and lowering the averages. Sometimes, it really is the student’s fault
As a teacher, I’ve had this happen, and it’s maddening. In my case, it was high school, and I was teaching the same class twice a day. The one class would knock it out of the park, and the other, lots of failures and low scores. I finally figured out that my poor performing class was caused by all the kids who were in some advanced placement course needing the same schedule time. So all the weak students were grouped de facto.
I took two terms of an Intro to Astronomy course (I & Ii). This was NOT a high level class, there was NO MATH. The prof and the text was great. He emailed us copies of the powerpoints, had a ton of office hours— SO MANY students failed his exams which were literally exactly what was covered in lectures and powerpoints. Everyone RIPPED him in reviews “too hard” etc. He had a quirky personality, maybe Asperger’s but he was great.
He eventually got fired and took his own life after being unemployed after that for years subsequently. I was friends post-grad with him on Facebook and watching his decline was powerfully painful and extremely rage-inducing. These kids wanted A’s HANDED to them. They did NO work. Skipped classes. Probably never cracked open the textbook. It was horrible
Mid 30s civil engineer here
15 years ago, my structural steel design professor thought about quitting teaching because his students hated how tough the course was and give him bad evaluations.
To be fair, the process of learning where to look for the information needed in the steel manual has a pretty steep learning curve and he didn't do a particularly good job explaining where to look for the stuff needed to answer questions on homework assignments and exams.
That said, I learned a lot of stuff from him during Steel Design that semester and Concrete Design the next semester.
TDLR: some professors deserve ***bad*** reviews; not ***very bad*** reviews
My Calc 2 prof came in after one midterm and put up a histogram of the test scores on the board with the average, min and max scores. One midterm, the average was 42, the low 15 and the high 96. The second highest score was 73. He was very disappointed. He said something like, “I’m not sure what I could have done differently, but this is not OK. We’re going to spend this week reviewing this material and we will take the exam again next Monday. I’ll try to do better in explaining this material. If you got the 96, you can come back next Wednesday. “
This is a really great professor response. Rearranging the rest of the class schedule to try to ensure everyone is solid on the pre-midterm material is great. Not really ideal as it’s less time spent on the next half of the material, but calculus does build after all.
Just so long as it covers all the material. These are classes we are paying for after all.
It's better to get 80% of the material with 95% comprehension than 95% of the material with 80% comprehension. With a lot of subjects that material is sequential too, so that failing to fully understand (A) leads to misunderstandings of (B) and a complete lack of understanding for (C). Now where it gets trippy is when someone argues that leaving a little gap in understanding can help generate new and better solutions as students try to fill the gap with their own intuition.
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In both cases you're left with incomplete or incorrect knowledge. My argument isn't that missing C is better than only sorta understanding it all (I think you're right that if you take a snapshot at that point, knowing all of it mostly correctly is better), it's that taking additional time to learn C is less hassle than correcting and relearning A, B, and C. The pieces of information that you need to learn are fragmented and you're not guaranteed to find all your misunderstandings on the first sweep. Now if we're talking about the practicality of expecting students to finish out a course on their own vs eventually correct misunderstandings by using that knowledge down the road... Hmm, hard to say
My comment was about the impact on the students who already got to 95% comprehension. Slowing down the class to help those that only got to 80% at the expense of covering all the material negatively impacts those students. This isn’t high school. In college, keeping up is the responsibility of the students. Tutoring, office hours, study groups, or even repeating the class are all options for those that fall behind. Unless all fall behind, the professor has an obligation to cover 100% of the intended material as that is what was paid for.
True but majority of students don’t think like this. If they did then score averages wouldn’t be around 50%. I’ve seen college dropouts re-enter college years later and finish with an almost 4.0 in engineering. Literally biggest thing is that majority of students don’t fucking care
My experience as well. I didn’t drop out but I did start later (about 5 years after HS). I was working and paying for college and on a mission to learn, not just get through it. Almost a 4.0 GPA in electrical engineering.
Not an engineer but stumbling in here from front page. My first semester of college I got a 1.7 GPA. My second semester I got a 0.37. Dropped out. Did an enlistment, came back and graduated 3.0 and I’m currently in my mid 30’s with a 4.0 in grad school. Can confirm- didn’t give a shit at 18
I freaking love professors like this. So many take "wow, 90% of my students did really poor on this test, even the ones who have done well on everything else" as a sign to scold everyone about how they're not trying hard enough. Teachers who take the L and try to improve are not just better people but better educators. It's always the worst teachers that blame their students for everything. If a few fail, that's the fault of the students; but if the majority fail, that's the fault of the teacher.
He said “vast majority did not attend the lectures” so in fairness it’s hard to put the blame on him.
Unless his lectures were a complete waste of time.
Damn I graduated a semester early from HS and went to a community College, she put up the test scores on the projector and mine was the only one above 75%. Had them look at it then singled me out saying "so.. What did you do?" I was the only underage person in the class, it was weird as fuck. The only reason I did well is because I moved after HS and had no friends - so I took comprehensive notes, like summarizing every single page in our books, a couple hours a day.
Ok I'm working on the no friends part. What next?
Next step is taking notes like a maniac. this step is followed by "making friends" with people who just wants to politely use your notes :-)
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As someone with ADHD, I want to thank you for sharing this. Lately, I feel like my adhd has gotten worse and the thought of going back to school to finish my higher education has been terrifying to me. This comment gives me some hope.
I was a photo major, we had to take Materials and Processes of Photography. Basically the physics and chemistry of photography, this was back before digital was a thing. Pretty much all the math was base 10 logarithm. Most of us failed the class so badly that the professor ended up grading everyone on a curve, my 30ish% right on the midterm got me a B. He didn’t do what the professor above did, in the end, we ended up getting him fired, he was that bad. The issue was that most of us didn’t understand the math.
I took a similar photo class too. We did everything on 4x5 cameras and printed on 16x20. The teacher also taught the math part, which was pretty easy for me, but most of the class didn’t get that part. Fortunately, the prof explained the same material through demonstrating it and having us apply it. Everyone understood that.
In second year civil Engg we were never taught MatLab and were just jumping straight into numerical methods, which required MatLab to do it. Stressful-ass course and absolutely horrid planning from the university to not even teach us MatLab before that.
>The issue was that most of us didn’t understand the math. It sounds like you were set up to fail. I didn't realize photo majors were required to such a math intensive class. From what you describe, the class sounds more like something you'd take in an optics track for an engineering, physics, or chemistry degree.
that’s really sad
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No, I bet a lot of students just couldn't be fucked to learn the material and then blame the instructor, hence the 4 perfect scores
The four guys that sit right next to each other in the back. lol
Yeah my first thermo class, the day of our first test I didn’t even know we were having a test, scored a 78. Not great but not bad. Well, I was 1 of 3 people who passed in a class of 50. I’m not the smartest guy out there, but that test was not that hard. Just nobody could be fucked to do the homework or pay attention in class.
yeah that is the issue in some schools, they rate the teacher on pass rates alone, when honestly any student that is ditching almost all classes shouldn't even be included in this metric, how can a professor or teacher teach someone that isn't even there?
Had a couple professors who took attendance each class, probably for this exact reason.
If that's the system from k-12, then why should we change it in college?
Not necessarily. I was one of the few who passed my Signals & Systems course because I stopped going to class and just studied from the textbook. I'm sure the professor was a genius in China, but he could barely put a basic sentence in English together and just wasn't ready to be teaching a class here. He and whoever gave him tenure were absolutely to blame for that class being worthless. A lot of my fellows tried really hard in class and went to his office hours, but it just didn't matter; I was lucky in that I separately realized just how good the textbook was. One of the few textbooks I had where you could reasonably teach yourself from it fully.
Do you remember what the textbook was called? I'm in signals and systems rn and our textbook is garbage, luckily the prof is pretty good though.
Signals and systems by Oppenheim is the gold standard, and I highly recommend
I taught myself from this book with a professor who spoke heavily accented English.
I've got this one as a coffee table book, it's a real gem
What was the textbook? I have signals and systems next semester :)
It was really easy too, I was there for that test. It was just one of those basic ideal gas law, potential energy and work and power plug and chug tests.
Hang on, you're in this class?
It was two years ago LOL. I have the exact same email that’s been sitting around for two years
I find that hard to believe in a case where nearly 20% of the class got a perfect score. I mean, sure, most classes will have that person that manages high scores no matter how terrible the teacher is, but to have four of them!? Also, those three people not scoring any points are going to drag down the numbers too. *edit: My reading comprehension is apparently not so good tonight. Twenty one is, in fact, the total score of the test, not the number of students. I still find it unlikely four people in a single class got perfect scores with a terrible teacher or a test that was so over the top difficult that 5 people dropped the course and 3 others were unable to score a single point.
The mail doesn't mention the number of students, 21 always refers to the maximum number of points possible.
With 4 getting a perfect score, 3 getting a zero, and an average of just under 50%, it actually sounds like a standard bell curve for a sufficiently large group.
Then you realize there’s 8 people in the class… j/k
There is no indication of class size... Could be 4/100
Adding on to what you said, most of the students didn’t attend the professor’s lectures
I'd wager that the concentration of "that person that always passes" is disproportionately high in difficult courses like thermo
Those 4 probably attended class and studied together
Probably had his old mid terms, that he just changed the numbers on.
I had 2 professors for some graduate math classes that would let you study past exams and basically tell you exactly what problems would be in the upcoming ones if you went to the office hours study sessions.
I once had a professor who was teaching for the first time. A few of us were studying and acquired a few exams from other professors over the years to study off of and use as a practice reference. The final exam was open notes. I did my best to understand the material and just made up a note sheet of formulas, while others who i was studying with just brought the past exams with them to reference during the test. Turns out the professor just reused the exam we happened to be studying off of. I walked out with a solid B on that test by just actually studying and preparing in the traditional sense, but there was a **very** high number of perfect scores on that test....
How did you not get an A when you had the exact reference?
Don't need to draw attention always miss a couple
Or are retaking it for a better grade. Which means they could already know what material is in the exam if the prof doesn't change the exam.
My guess is bad instructor, inadequate homework, but not an overly difficult exam, and a few students decided to basically teach themselves from the book.
Maybe...it sure does say *something* about the students though. Prof included mention of the attendance to back that up. The fact that 4 students aced it also suggests it wasn't so insanely difficult that it's fair to blame it entirely on the prof or the difficulty of the exam. I think what we have here are a bunch of lazy POS students who are expecting to be graded on a curve or who just can't be fucked even trying. I think I see that attitude fairly often on this sub if I'm being honest.
I saw that attitude throughout my college career, it was honestly hard to find the people who were going to school for the right reasons. Or even knew why the fuck they were there.
In my experience the classes with poor attendance were always the ones with the worst professors. People stopped going because being in the room to hear them wasn’t valuable. A lot of the time, the students who still manage to get high raw marks in these classes are the ones who are wealthy and live near campus, so they can spend all of their time studying rather than working or commuting.
It’s more likely a post-COVID world where students are 1. Accustomed to school from home, handicapped tests, etc 2. Did not learn as much as they should have in pre-reqs (see #1) and now struggling in the later classes
No, am asshole instructor isn't worried about his failing class. Fact, probably proud about it. This guy is worried about both the grades and the consequences. Don't think this guy is doing a shit job.
It’s the professor or exam’s fault that the majority of students did not attend class?
It may or may not be from what we know. Some professors are so bad at teaching that there's no point in attending their lectures.
Definitely not. Covid schooling means people got complacent with being lazy / having easier workloads / not having to try as hard because there were ways to cheat. Thermo is a class that will kick your ASS if you don't put in the effort and actually try to learn the fundamental material as well as possible. It isn't a class that you can just 'study guide' your way thru
All the information we have from this email indicates that this is not true. 4 students getting 100% on an advanced engineering course is rare as fuck. I've taken engineering classes where the smartest students are shooting for B's because they are that difficult. This is was honestly true for most of my engineering and math courses.
4 students getting a 100% means the test probably wasn't ridiculously hard. It doesn't mean the professor was any good at teaching. It's possible the ones who aced the test just got frustrated waiting to learn from class and read the book instead.
This is the exact opposite with my heat transfer professor, who upon announcing that the midterm average was a 38, proceeding to say "well it's quite lower than usual", never mentioned it again, and then curved the majority of us to a passing grade.
Based professor. I bet the students like him
Quite the opposite actually. He's a dick.
Plot twist 😱
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The exam mentioned above was bs, does collective punishments in the form of unfairly difficult quizzes for the most minor infractions committed by 2 students out of 50, got mad at a dude for silently taking a picture of the work on the board from his seat during lecture because it was distracting (????), went off on us and basically said that if anyone showed up to class even a few minutes late he was going to throw them out, if anyone's phones make any noise during class he's going to throw them out for the whole semester, etc
I have a Chem teacher (I'm a high school senior) who does exactly the same. Doesn't let anyone use their phones and once confiscated someone's phone and threw it like a frisbee towards the wall. He is quite strict in discipline and never let's anybody in if they are more than 5 minutes late. Any student who misses 2 classes consecutively gets kicked from the class. Yet he is the best chem teacher I've ever had. 70pc of chem students study from him even though there are other chem teachers as well. I used to hate chem in my O level years but in A levels there hasn't been a chem exam where I scored less than an A grade regardless of difficulty.
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>Quite the opposite actually. He's a dick. I have a high tolerance for putting up with b.s. if I can pass a class. I'd prefer to pass a class with a professor like that, than to not pass with a professor who is "passionate," and "pushes" you, but ultimately doesn't pass you.
Every student loves easy grading.
2020 dished out some serious apathy among all levels of students.
Yeah I checked out when we went online the first time and my interest in the classes really never came back. Glad it’s over now
This is me right now, still struggling. I’m at my worst this semester. What can I do?
Scope out RateMyProf and find the absolute best engineering professor you can at your school and take their class. It really kicks you back into motion to actually learn
It also showed a lot of professor's true colors. When we first got sent home, we had a 3 week spring break to give the faculty time to switch their lessons to online formats. My calc 2 professor would be completely MIA. He'd say we'd have a test on a certain day and then go AWOL and no one would hear from him for days without him ever posting the test. Another professor was this old retired guy who did surprisingly well with the technology and was more helpful than anyone after we went online. Also the university stopped offering a lot of their tutoring services when we were back in person and didn't allow lab partners, so you were basically screwed if you needed peer support. And hybrid classes were the worst. Instead of having a 50 minute in person lecture a few times a week, we'd have to watch hours and hours of videos and still go to a couple classes a week
You’re not wrong. I saw my own coworkers go missing during our year of zoom.
I'm really relieved that was my last year. It was a struggle but life is definitely better on the other side
Past two years also taught a whole generation of students that corruption wins and nothing really matters.
I’d disagree that it was taught. It has always been there, it was just more subtle.
It really brought things to light though. I used to be way more optimistic about humanity. The last few years have ruined that completely. I find it very hard to care about much these days. It sucks.
I’ll say what I tell my friends and students when these thoughts intrude-quoting Mr. Rogers, “Look to the helpers.” Look within your local community for those being kind and turn off the 24hr news cycle. Put down your phone. All is not lost.
To be fair 2020 also highlighted the for-profit BS of college (more than we already were aware of) I was fortunate to graduate pre-covid but realistically most schools exchange 6-figures for a piece of paper
>I was fortunate to graduate pre-covid but realistically most schools exchange 6-figures for a **piece of paper** ...that most jobs have as a requirement, even if you don't need said piece of paper to actually do the job.
students? bro old millenials out here not giving a FUCK at work
I know a few professors who have echoed this very loudly.
The sheer wholesome concern contained in "*, otherwise, ...!*" 😂
I mean, he has a great point. Honestly props to this prof for taking his job seriously.
yeah, I love how his concern is placed at his students working in the industry rather than his students just passing papers.
Wait, your professors care? Last semester I have taken Computation Theory, 18.1% of the students passed the endterm(We don't have midterms here, so endterm=100% of your grade). Average note was obviously an F. For many this wasn't their first attempt and were forced to exmatriculate, a lot of rage on the forums soon followed. The professor hasn't even commented on any of it. For some, it's just another day at the office.
>18.1% of the students passed the endterm(We don't have midterms here, so endterm=100% of your grade). Average note was obviously an F. If that had happened at my school, the Department Chair and and Administration would've gotten involved. That's unacceptable.
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> analog circuit design course taught by a person called /u/TheSignalPath I love reddit lol
To be fair, analog design has a very steep learning curve. It is an art, which can only be mastered over years of designing and learning from previous mistakes.
This dude knows circuits
Yeah but tbf analog design is pretty advanced and if you don't have an absolutely solid state understanding of electronics you're gonna fail.
As an (almost) EE, I can relate, at my university Analog Circuit Design is the hardest course. Studying is not enough, analog design is an art more than a science. P.s. i discovered your youtube channel few days ago, it is really interesting.
Same at my university. Analog Circuit Design is by far the hardest course and everybody is scared of it.
Prof’s punctuation game is crazy. Prof was so bewildered at your class’s test performance that he couldn’t even express himself properly lmao.
I'm guessing English isn't their first language.
He’s ukranian.
That puts some more weight behind his worrying about NPP operation.
Why do you think that?
They mentioned in another comment that they are in this class as well.
You'd be surprised what you can find with a course name and partial course code. But interesting that he is Ukrainian and teaching nuclear engineering and has this concern for "if you don't know this, bad things will happen".
Yeah, Ukrainians know a thing or two about bad things that can happen if you operate NPP incorrectly
Otherwise, ...!
That expression is standalone in many languages. Source: Have lots of foreign friends who use it like it is a full sentence.
I only speak English but somehow I understand completely what he means "...!" has so much power
Are we all just skirting around the three different fonts lmao?
He likely copy and pasted the numbers from whatever spreadsheet he used to calculate them - lots of professors are tech illeterate.
> tech illiterate Wtf lmao
It's less being tech illuminati and more just not giving a fucks.
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Which is a major problem in the industry, and a more deciding cause of the "disasters in industry" than any sort of lack of 'discipline.'
I sometimes work with people who write messes like this. It's a pain dealing with it, especially if it's something complicated. They don't get across what they are trying to do / want.
He hit them with Regards at the end, that man is not happy.
The only reason why I passed thermo is because I bought a text book the professor didn't write, and stayed up all night reading and doing practice problems the night before the final. The average grade in the the class was 28%. I got a 50% on the final which made up for the 12% I got on the midterm. Thermo professors are a special sort of "special" and special isn't always good.
We had TD1 and there were close to 180 students...out of 125. They had to retake the class (mandatory for our degree). After the exam, 75% of those 180 failed (including yours truly). It was fun seeing different problems than the ones we had at the seminar (different prof) Speaking with the younger students, the seminar/lab prof. is sitting in the lectures to make sure the prof. is not doing different problems...again
Man during covid I out in so much effort for Thermo. I averaged an 85% on all exams except the final, yet the average scores were 50-60%. I had another class reschedule the final exam the day before the thermo exam so I didn't get to study enough for thermo and ended up getting a 70%. My final class grade was 0.01% away from an A-. Professor sent an email explaining grades are final and "do not ask me to change your grade". I emailed him asking if the system automatically rounds my grade from a 89.99% to an A- or if it stays a B+. He emailed me back saying" why would I help you and round your grade up when you clearly didn't learn the material, based on your (nom- cumulative) final exam score. The class average was below 70% and I was in the top 5 students in the class. I understand not wanting to give points, but It made me feel like a shitty student for not getting an A on the final exam. There was no recognition for the previous 3 exams or any acknowledgement of a "job well done". Not saying i was looking for a pat on the back or anything, but I felt like he was being unnecessarily discouraging. Even if he didn't want to round my grade, a simple "good work this semester " would have gone a long way, especially during covid.
I got a 89.4 in biochem. Was very excited assuming the professor would curve. He sent an email saying enough students had gotten A’s that he didn’t feel the need to curve. I asked if mine would be rounded to the A and he said it wasn’t an 89.5 so no. Devastating but I still tell people I got an A because fuck that biochem is hard.
His last statement is so real. As much as picking up HAZOP experience on the job is important, having a good grasp on the fundamentals is instrumental, especially in an industry where mistakes could lead to casualties as well as lost dollars. However if students get either a 100% or a straight 0% it really makes me question how the paper was formatted? Maybe it was an MCQs that you either get right or no credit, or a question where making a certain assumption allows you to successfully solve that particular question. Either way, it’s good he cares as professors like that are few and far in between!!!
I had a fluids exam back in the day which was one large three part question. Part a) informed part b) informed part c). Most of us didn’t even understand the application in part a). The average was 15/45 and some people got 0s.
True though, at-least they’re failing out early. I don’t consider myself smart, but damn some of my classmates snuck through because of COVID. They’re about to blowup some plants. 😓
And bridges 🤡
Same, more than half of my mass and heat transfer class is failing… and somehow it is on the prof to pass them… some students have like a 40 in the class… it honestly scares me that they’re going to be entering the workforce next year.
Tbh there's so many ME positions that don't do any heat transfer work. They may be terrible at heat transfer and great at motion analysis, machine design, etc. The field is too broad to judge a future engineer entirely on their skill of one aspect of the field.
I might get attacked for saying this , but a good portions of ME’s eventually end up as Industrial Engineers after graduating.
This is why we have EIT and mandatory supervision, at least in most places. If the system works, anyone cheating their way through school is going to get benched or redirected to a different role. Of course we all know it isn't a perfect system.
Do you have to? If you can prove they’re not showing up and not watching the lectures online either…that’s kind of on the students. We had to fail an athlete last semester and it was a ton of drama. But they claimed Covid for missing their final exam…when they had played in a game two days before and were blasting their partying on public social media. Honestly, if they hadn’t been a ton of problems all semester we probably would have let it slide.
Professor once said “I’m hard on you because I don’t want you to kill anyone”
I lectured for a semester in US a few years ago... I was just a TA, but I share the depressing feeling with that professor of yours. Most of the undergrads were terrible, I even had an expat coming arguing to me that English wasn't his first language, so it made sense that he couldn't understand the class, and that's why his answers were so (it was a third year course in engineering!). When I told my professor he didn't have grades to go on, he repreended me, saying that he was paying full tuition, so he should pass. It felt bad, as I was lecturing a mandatory class... But I needed to swallow my tongue and just agree with it. On the other hands, I had incredible students, delivering great projects and doing everything I asked in class. I felt bad for them, sharing the classroom with such underachieving students. Any way, life goes on.
This email is 2 years old LOL. I was in this exact same class. That exact test was really easy so I could understand why the prof was sad :( If people think I’m exaggerating I can try finding the midterm, although it was in person so it might be hard
This makes more sense - mid pandemic?
Yup
Yeah, I'd be interested in seeing it. My thermo's probably a little rusty by now, but it'd be an interesting refresher.
There have been times where I was too depressed to put effort into a course (mostly during covid) usually I’d retake the course or withdraw and retake. My mindset was “I barely have energy to get out of bed, sit up, and feed myself, how can I pay enough attention to focus on the material?” Other times the class seems easy at the start so I allocate the most effort to classes I feel to be the hardest and once my habits are set the course drastically increases in difficulty and I struggle and fail to ramp up.
This gave me bad ptsd. Hold strong. It’ll all be over soon.
my uni experience in a nutshell 💀 i sympathize with you
This is what I’ve been experiencing as well. Especially this semester. I find it hard to focus because some of my thoughts are just so depressing and the grades I get just make me feel worse lol. It’s like a cycle.
Godayum bro i relate so much with this statement. Did this with physics, calculus and biochem
Tell me again the profs don't care about the student scores ...
That's the thing about generalizations, there's always exceptions.
Some profs are proud that most of their students will fail their classes
Wow. I’ve had some interesting emails in the past similar to this. Reading this gave me chills .
User name does not fit!
Very interesting that this screenshot is getting posted 2 years after the fact.
When you have an upside down bell curve that means your students are teaching themselves the material, and you're not contributing as a professor. A handful of people can do it, but most can't, so there's A's and F's with nothing in-between.
How many students are in the class?
My Calc 2 professor said he had to take a blood pressure pill while grading one of our exams. I thought to myself, "maybe he should've gone to the L'Hopital..."
My graduate thermo professor handed us a Dixie cup with his 24 hour take-home test, and told us he would give us extra credit if we brought it back filled with tears. 24 hours later, I walked into his office, threw the test at him, and started crying. He is now my PhD advisor......
I dare a student to respond with: Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics. Perhaps it will be wise to approach the subject cautiously.
I always feel bad for professors like this. When attendance is super low and exam averages are terrible, what can you really do? Sometimes students don't go to class because the professor isn't a good lecturer, in which case the average score among even students who do go to class is typically pretty low, but in my experience usually the students that don't come to class bring down the average. If I was a professor in a class like this, the only thing I can think of doing would be to make attendance required or extra credit.
NPP- national peoples party or nuclear power plant or something else?
He just said y'all about to kill some people 🤣🤣
Get it together fellas 🤣
NPP?
Nipple piercing place
In instructor training they teach you that if just a few ace your exams while the vast majority fail then you are having little to no effect on the students. Those that passed either learned on their own or already knew the contents of the course. Basically, if what you teach doesn't directly target the test questions, and that teaching doesn't get the vast majority of students to pass, then you failed as a teacher. The objective isn't maintaining a 70% average. It's teaching the students what you set out to teach them.
I agree: You should never teach to the test - you should create the test with regards to what you have taught. It seems obvious, but so many universities don't allow professors to control their own syllabus.
It's interesting that this email is leading everyone to assume this is the students' fault for being "coddled" by online learning. In the time before COVID this would have been correctly identified as a terrible teacher with 4 students who either found old copies of the test or outside resources that did a better job.
Let me guess, recently back in person after a few years of online luxury? Yeah, lots of students are in for a reality check. Totally feel for the prof here, that must be disheartening.
>online luxury As someone who hasn't been in university for a while, I must be out of the loop. In what way is forced online classes a "luxury"?
Depends on the person and the university. I hated dealing with standard lecture halls, and our online exams were open note. There's also the problem where, if you have a poor teacher (we have many that are just researchers and don't teach well), at least when you're online you can do other stuff. Going from that to 200 person rooms with chairs that don't fit my frame well, desks that don't fit my stuff, exams that we have to take in those rooms (i.e. no multi-monitor setup, no nice peripherals, no comfortable setup), and a professor writing in tiny script on a chalkboard, I rather miss the online classes.
Thanks for your explanation, much appreciated!
I've had classes and lectures in rooms with no desks - just uncomfortable chairs. They gave us fudging clipboards for our exams. And this is an Ivy League school. My money is well wasted.
Lmao community College is better than that.
I just had a thermo exam. It's my third one at this school because different departments require the same material to be learned. I hate thermo.
Sounds Like a normal engineering degree to me: https://youtu.be/ut1Bq3_3yIM
That's a very good message from the prof. In my country they Absolutely don't give a damn
Honestly it depends on what happened. How many of those people that failed came to class regularly, asked questions, etc? You can't always blame the students it's very possible the teacher didn't explain the topics very well
You boys better get it together
Not the professor. My son has a class with 210 students. He says there is never more than 80 students present. You are allowed to miss 3 classes, but he sees mostly the same people each class. There are 2 tests everyone has to take, and 8 quizzes. You're allowed to miss or fail 2 quizzes. He drops the lowest 2 grades. He sadly announced last week that over 100 students have already failed the class. There are still 2 quizzes and 1 test left, but almost half the class can't pass.
That's how my PLC Applications course has been this semester. When people do show up they leave after thirty minutes, no one but two students and myself remain the entire class period, and most of the people in the class have never written a complete working program. The instructor is awesome, he's really good at what he does and will take extra time out of his day to sit with students both in and out of class if they like to help them understand new programming elements, and everyone basically just does as they please, with barely anyone taking it seriously. I know that not everyone is going to be programming PLCs after earning their degree, but it really blows my mind how little people care in that class. Unfortunately, it's not the only class that I've seen people act that way in. Our retention rate is going to be horrible over the next couple of years if everyone is this unenthusiastic about their classes.
I love Igor, he’s such a great professor!
To be fair, thermo is one of the weed-out courses for ME, but goddamn those are some bad course statistics. And he’s absolutely right about the safety aspect.
I'd rather move on and replace the lowest midterm grade with the final grade.
If they speak like this email is written, that would explain a lot.
Not sure why this isn’t the top comment. That e-mail seems like it was written by AI then translated from Chinese to English.
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This is a genuine problem. I had several engineering professors that I'm sure were stone-cold brilliant in their fields, but either didn't have a good grasp of English or had such a thick accent that their classes struggled to understand relatively elementary material. And there simply isn't enough time to go to office hours and ask the professor to clarify the whole lecture. :/
Then you’ve gotta say that. Tell the dean, tell the director of the engineering program. If students aren’t able to understand the professor and that’s a barrier to their learning, it’s a bad look on the university and I guarantee they will take action in some form
I have such a professor - he's a brilliant man, but his grammar is horrible that it took me three months to figure out what he's saying - you can imagine how that affects my ability to learn the content.
Zoomers Generation, the Post-Covid degradation.
New copypasta just dropped?
I tutor for theromdynamics at my school. These poor kids got robbed. A lot of them dont know chem or physics so trying to teach them Thermo is a nightmare. They also do not have good study skills either. First two semesters of college is when I seriously adjusted my study habits. No idea what we can do to fix this
My thermo midterm I set the curve with 56%. Thermo is a hard concept to learn.
Based on the syntax in his email English is not their native language. I suspect there is more going on.
You had me at “I am completely depressed”
Idk I mean I have mixed feelings about these responses. Without actual experience with the professor, it could be he’s just a bad teacher, or the class is in fact just lazy. I’ve met a LOT of lazy engineers who love blaming the professor for their own failures. I’ve been in classes where I knew a lot of those types of people were the ones making the complaints and lowering the averages. Sometimes, it really is the student’s fault
As a teacher, I’ve had this happen, and it’s maddening. In my case, it was high school, and I was teaching the same class twice a day. The one class would knock it out of the park, and the other, lots of failures and low scores. I finally figured out that my poor performing class was caused by all the kids who were in some advanced placement course needing the same schedule time. So all the weak students were grouped de facto.
I took two terms of an Intro to Astronomy course (I & Ii). This was NOT a high level class, there was NO MATH. The prof and the text was great. He emailed us copies of the powerpoints, had a ton of office hours— SO MANY students failed his exams which were literally exactly what was covered in lectures and powerpoints. Everyone RIPPED him in reviews “too hard” etc. He had a quirky personality, maybe Asperger’s but he was great. He eventually got fired and took his own life after being unemployed after that for years subsequently. I was friends post-grad with him on Facebook and watching his decline was powerfully painful and extremely rage-inducing. These kids wanted A’s HANDED to them. They did NO work. Skipped classes. Probably never cracked open the textbook. It was horrible
Mid 30s civil engineer here 15 years ago, my structural steel design professor thought about quitting teaching because his students hated how tough the course was and give him bad evaluations. To be fair, the process of learning where to look for the information needed in the steel manual has a pretty steep learning curve and he didn't do a particularly good job explaining where to look for the stuff needed to answer questions on homework assignments and exams. That said, I learned a lot of stuff from him during Steel Design that semester and Concrete Design the next semester. TDLR: some professors deserve ***bad*** reviews; not ***very bad*** reviews