Anyone have any truly bad professors?

[Knickerbocker]

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Today, a group of students in one of my classes went to the Dean of Students to file a complaint against a certain professor.

On top of doing a lot of things that make him a lousy teacher, the students are accusing him of something beyond that. Supposedly, he did something to give an unfair advantage on an exam to a certain female student. They also claim that he calls this female student in the morning to wake her up for class.

Even if nothing is going on, it looks kind of bad.

 

[bucket of karma]

my physics professor was so bad he was fired halfway through the semester.

no joke.

i asked him once if we had to write out the quadratic formula and show my work, or if i could use the program in my calculator. he tried to explain how the quad formula worked. it took me 20 minutes to get an answer.

he used to scratch his fingernails down the chalkboard at least once per 5 minutes of class.

the first test. the class was only an hour and a half long. i was there for 3 hours, and he wouldn't let me leave until i had a write answer. most of the class got up and left en masse, but those of us who stayed to try and figure stuff out, he wouldn't let us leave. he started explaining how to do the problems to the 5 students left in the room, but they were multi-step problems and as soon as you figured out what he was talking about for step 1, he was finishing his explanation of step 7.

in the middle of the exam, he stepped into the hallway and had a phone conversation, SHOUTING into the phone in spanish.

Apparently he was born in Cuba, raised in Russia, and educated in Spain. You can imagine the accent. He had his degree in Physical Chemistry, but had only ever taught SPANISH before.

Oh there were many more problems with this man, but well, he got fired halfway through the semester, and we got a much better teacher who took us on as his 5th course of the semester. God bless him! It was still rough because that foundation was completely missed, but I managed to strongarm my way through. Thank god I didn't have to take physics II.

 

[PaperDome]

My structural biochemistry professor practically talked to himself throughout all the lectures and when he did talk to us, he showed us powerpoint slides. Because I didn't know what to know and what I wasn't responsible for the midterm and final, I literally memorized the entire book. I'm glad I did because he asked us to draw 3-D pictures of specific proteins. I thought I was going insane. But the class didn't kill me. It made me stronger 😛

 

[UES Girl]

I had two hellish profs - even though I had gotten As in both of their classes - it cost me roughly an arm and a leg.

Number one was this brilliant researcher guy who taught ochem 2. His research apparently was something realy special, as even though he had a 60 % drop rate - the department still looked up to him and did absolutely nothing. A typical day in his class was - he would come in and tell us a story about his research. One that was stuck in my mind was how an e-flask blew up in his eye and he kept working with a piece of glass stuck in his eye for hours. Then he would go on and start explainng some kind of mechanism - from his research that had very little to do with the class. He would finish by telling us something along the lines of " you all are unbelievably stupid, my four year old gets this." I stopped going to class after roughly 3 weeks, studied day and night and got one of the highest scores - but it almost cost a relationship with my bf, as I was always studing for that class.


Number 2 was my biochem 1 instructor - she apprently liked people to fail as well. It was crazy to a point where I knew people who have taken her class - 7 !!! times and couldn't pass it. This is when I literally moved into UCSF library and studied so much - I would pass out immediately after I got home. I have gotten an A in her class as well and I have never been more proud of any A I have ever gotten.

 

[labrat024]

My econ teacher was a complete idiot. I had to answer students questions for her because she was horrible at explaining things. Of the couple of questions I asked she said she would have to read the book to answer my question because she wasn't sure (worthless). When I asked why I got a question wrong on a test because the wording was obscure, she said that she didn't make up the questions, they were standardized questions. Hmm... maybe you could read the questions first and omit questions that are worded completely stupid!! The question was like: if the value of the dollar increases than a countries net exports will..... And I thought that "a country" would refer to any country other than the US because the question made clear that the US's money (dollar) increased in value. So I got the question wrong because "a country" was in fact referring to the US. WTF

 

[AngelaCL]

I took orgo this summer as a 6 week course, and it was a terrible 6 weeks. The professor was really rude and condescending. I went to office hours and he would roll his eyes, so I started going to a tutor every single day during the lunch break, and he complained about why would I go to a tutor when he's so much smarter and he's the one with a degree. When I failed two exams in a row (the class average was failing) I started crying in class. I later went to his office hours and explained to him that I've only gotten one B before and otherwise was a total A student, and I was failing his class and I was working so hard and what should I do? He told me that I can go cry to mommy and daddy, and at least I won't be sent to Vietnam (???). He is too young to have ever been to Vietnam, so whatever. All I did those 6 weeks was work and study (and study at work) - I lived on Red Bull and Mountain Dew so I could study more, I formed study groups, I went to office hours, a tutor, another tutor, asked a friend in med school for help, got books from the library, went to study sessions.... The grades were based totally on exams, and he told us that we would probably all fail the final.

My final grade ended up being a B. I almost passed out from shock. I guess the guy must have curved it at the end, though he had said he wouldn't. If I had gotten a lower grade, I would have complained to the Dean, because it's not right to teach that way and delight in failing students. Oh, and I don't know a damn thing about orgo now, which is great because I'm taking the second half next semester (different school though! This incident made me switch campuses).

 

[k0ni]

My gen chem professor had a strange accent and I couldn't understand anything he said. The first time I took his class, I got C's. The second time around, I managed to finally understand what the hell he was saying during lecture and got A's with no effort. Go figure.

 

[KTZ53]

he would come in and tell us a story about his research. One that was stuck in my mind was how an e-flask blew up in his eye and he kept working with a piece of glass stuck in his eye for hours.

That is why you wear goggles. Yuck.😎

 

[DooberXL]

That is why you wear goggles. Yuck.😎

I guess his research was so important that he just HAD to see EXACTLY what was going on and refused to wear goggles!

 

[sle3pyguii]

My Organic Chemistry professor is new to teaching O chem. Although he boasts a PhD in Chemistry, the man cannot teach. He has this bipolar attitude (first he's happy and jumping up and down, and the next he's pissed because we dared to ask him to repeat something) while he lectures which is very weird.

The averages in the exams were in the low 40's, which he curved, which brought us up about 50% each test. Now on the final, a test worth 25% of our grade, he refuses to curve it...even when the averages of all the exams were in the 40s....

God I hate O Chem...can't wait till O Chem II....I hear its a BLAST.

 

[angioletto]

Oy. I just had one for an engineering class (before I changed my major) that made my head spin. This prof was Asian and not a single student in the class (over 100) could understand a word he said. He would stand up there and lecture for the whole hour and 40 minutes and we'd all walk out in a daze because we had no clue what he said. It was terrible.

 

[wazzz]

My Chem II teacher was a joke. The class was mainly based on kinetics of rxns, and she could not work a single problem to completion throughout the entire course course! Her tests were nightmares also. The only thing she taught me was about her strange relationship with her husband (how they dated each other & other people simultaniously, yet were maried...😕)

It didn't help it was a summer class, either.