Incompetent Professors...

[Rotinaj]

So I'm a big believer in ratemyprofessor to get a pulse on what people think of the professor for a lot of reasons. Contrary to popular belief, it's not just about finding the "easy" professors, and many of the comments are about how the class is so easy that they regret taking it because the students learned nothing. Good professors are worth their weight in gold because they test over what they teach and they don't focus on minutia or misleading questions with "best" answers when there are two or more that are technically correct.

Anyways, my Intro to Cell and Molecular Biology teacher is a real peach.

He spent the better part of three 50-minute classes over what science is, going on ad nauseum about how to test a hypothesis.

Took up an entire lab session having us watch "Race for the Double Helix", a mediocre B-film with almost no in-depth information on the subject.

Been five or more minutes late to half of the class periods and is so unprepared that it takes him ten minutes to set himself up at the beginning of the period essentially cutting the class time down by a third.

It took him five days to grade our exams which were 100% multiple choice.

The highest grade on his exam was 85% and there were five B's in a class of 30. This was due to a test that covered extreme minutia that was not stressed whatsoever. Example: we were supposed to "glance over chapter six to get the basic ideas" for the exam because he'd wasted so much time with meaningless fluff that he didn't have time to cover it. Six is the first chapter that even mentions organelles, sample question: Which organelle from the list has hydrolitic enzymes? Yeah, really basic idea that I would remember from glancing over the subject...

He stopped the class at ten minutes before the end to hand out our graded exams and decided that rather than give us time to go over them, he'd let his five-year old daughter hand them out, giving most of us less than 3 minutes to go over the questions we missed before we had to hand the tests back in.

The exam covered material that was first introduced this week in class.

There is no curve on the exam, no opportunities for extra credit.

Figuring the weight of the exam against his quizes, 80% of his class has a C or lower as of now. Statistically, only 2 of 30 have the possibility of currently holding a very low A, depending on their quiz grades.

He's a real nice guy even if he's oblivious to the afforementioned, but it still baffles me how someone can have a PhD and be unable to teach a basic college 101 course.

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[Isoprop]

a few comments

1. ratemyprofessor is overrated (pun unintended). comments are extremely polarized and repeatedly i've encountered "easy" professors who were difficult, "good" professors with monotone lectures, and "hot" professors with... well let's just say i was not motivated to sit in the front of class.

2. you haven't had a bad professor until you meet a bio professor who thought the R group in an amino acid was called the carboxcyclic acid. man, am i glad i tranferred away from that school.

3. typically, i found that teaching introductory courses require a higher degree of understanding. just from my experience tutoring though.

 

[Dienekes]

you haven't had a bad professor until you meet a bio professor who thought the R group in an amino acid was called the carboxcyclic acid. man, am i glad i tranferred away from that school.

I didn't realize you attended Saginaw Valley State University! I have friends there and heard about a prof that did this.

 

[Isoprop]

I didn't realize you attended Saginaw Valley State University! I have friends there and heard about a prof that did this.

actually i didn't. either the professor is moving around or there's more than one now. either way, it's getting scary.

 

[metalgearHMN]

This is an aside

When I read your posts the voice in my head reads them as The Janitor from Scrubs. It's weird.

Yeah that's about it, I have nothing constructive to add.

 

[metalmd06]

My physics professor at Harvard was a Dinosaur. They had to dust him off prior to each lecture. In the middle of a conceptual problem or some exemplary problem, he often went off on tangents about how this problem or experiment reminded him of the Civil War. One time he dozed off standing up for about 2 seconds and woke up with the appropriate, "Where were we." Asking him a question was a challenge unto itself. In order to inquire you had to yell at the top of your lungs, especially in the event that he forgot his hearing aids. Then, even when he did have them, you had to yell over his belting "What? Speak up I can't hear you." All that aside he is a brilliant man who could solve any physics problem with ease and adequately explain it to you one-on-one. Lectures, however, were pointless.

 

[destiny1325]

My human genetics professor hasn't taught us about one genetic disorder... and the quarter is already more than half over! Instead we've been presenting our book reports for the last couple of weeks. He's also making all of the students go on a field trip. My group gets to go to Canada... yeah that's only a 7 hour drive, no big deal LOL He must think he's teaching a class of fifth graders

 

[DocCallaway]

My advice is the same for every class, especially since I dont take notes nor pay any attention. If the guy says the test is on Chapters so-and-so, for god sakes, study everything in minute detail. I always laugh when people say "I dont think thats going to be on a test, so I didn't study it." I think its your classes fault for the grades. Sometimes I think my slackership in class actually helps me more than my fellow classmates.

Moral of the story: Study hard and cover everything.

 

[Maxx4]

I can't stand easy classes and professors especially when the subject matter counts. You'll never learn anything and then you'll get into another class which requires basic knowledge of the first class and you'll get a C or maybe even fail because the professor was a lazy ****.

 

[BigRedder]

The highest grade on his exam was 85% and there were five B's in a class of 30. This was due to a test that covered extreme minutia that was not stressed whatsoever. Example: we were supposed to "glance over chapter six to get the basic ideas" for the exam because he'd wasted so much time with meaningless fluff that he didn't have time to cover it. Six is the first chapter that even mentions organelles, sample question: Which organelle from the list has hydrolitic enzymes? Yeah, really basic idea that I would remember from glancing over the subject...

[...]

He's a real nice guy even if he's oblivious to the afforementioned, but it still baffles me how someone can have a PhD and be unable to teach a basic college 101 course.

You kinda sound a little bitter about the toughness of the class. I'm sure that the department wouldn't let him get away with giving predominantly Cs, so look for your grades to improve. The question about hydrolytic enzymes is not really hard, it just looks like it is. A hydrolytic enzyme is going to perform hydrolysis. That means digestion. All digestion in the cell takes place in the lysosome. I learned about the lysosome in 6th grade.

I don't think that an Intro to Cell and Molecular Biology is a "Basic College 101 course". The question is how did you get past Intro Bio (I assume it is a prereq) without knowing about the lysosome or hydrolysis.

 

[186321]

This is no big deal and I think it's the norm everywhere. We want to be doctors and we are going to be tested mentally (whether fairly or not). There are always going to be insane professors whom you hope to avoid, but sometimes you can't. So you just gotta deal with it. Most importantly, remember that a "C" is average. My professors have always said that 50% of the class should get "C's", then 25% should do better and 25% should do worse.

 

[halekulani]

in my experience, everything has been in reverse

i asked my biochem teacher if we were responsible for everything in the book, he said yes. none of his tests ever went into more detail beyond what he went over in class.

all the teachers that say "just gloss over this or that" always end up picking out the tiniest details for a few questions on their tests

 

[Rotinaj]

You kinda sound a little bitter about the toughness of the class. I'm sure that the department wouldn't let him get away with giving predominantly Cs, so look for your grades to improve. The question about hydrolytic enzymes is not really hard, it just looks like it is. A hydrolytic enzyme is going to perform hydrolysis. That means digestion. All digestion in the cell takes place in the lysosome. I learned about the lysosome in 6th grade.

I don't think that an Intro to Cell and Molecular Biology is a "Basic College 101 course". The question is how did you get past Intro Bio (I assume it is a prereq) without knowing about the lysosome or hydrolysis.

At my college, this is Biology I. The department can't micromanage all of their professors and this is his first year, so it will take some time for them to analyze feedback and his class averages before anything can be done. Still, I hope that we'll be able to appeal if there's no one left standing with an A at the end of the semester. I am bitter however. It's not because the course is too hard or that the concepts are too abstract for me to grasp. It's because he's not testing over what he's teaching.

Since it's an intro class, the professor shouldn't assume that the students have a background in Biology yet. Common elementary school knowledge doesn't include how hydrolytic enzymes catalyze the hydrolysis of glycogen in lysosomes by lowering the activation energy of breaking the alpha bond thus breaking the polysaccharide down into usable glucose. Henceforth, he should cover that before testing us over it. If your sixth grade class covered that then I'm happy for you, but mine was busy focusing on keeping the ******ed kid in the back of the room from spitting on people.

 

[Rotinaj]

in my experience, everything has been in reverse

i asked my biochem teacher if we were responsible for everything in the book, he said yes. none of his tests ever went into more detail beyond what he went over in class.

all the teachers that say "just gloss over this or that" always end up picking out the tiniest details for a few questions on their tests

My Chemistry teacher is the same way. He always says to do all the practice problems and read the chapters in detail, but he's such a great teacher that I never even have to open the book and I retain a commanding knowledge of General Chemistry. I'll be the first to appreciate a truly good professor.

 

[Salsa45]

Since it's an intro class, the professor shouldn't assume that the students have a background in Biology yet. Common elementary school knowledge doesn't include how hydrolytic enzymes catalyze the hydrolysis of glycogen in lysosomes by lowering the activation energy of breaking the alpha bond thus breaking the polysaccharide down into usable glucose.

At my university, High school biology is a prerequisite for intro bio (bio I and II). And a lysosome isn't a minute detail either, it's a major component of the cell. Just read the textbook...

 

[135892]

At my college, this is Biology I. The department can't micromanage all of their professors and this is his first year, so it will take some time for them to analyze feedback and his class averages before anything can be done. Still, I hope that we'll be able to appeal if there's no one left standing with an A at the end of the semester. I am bitter however. It's not because the course is too hard or that the concepts are too abstract for me to grasp. It's because he's not testing over what he's teaching.

Since it's an intro class, the professor shouldn't assume that the students have a background in Biology yet. Common elementary school knowledge doesn't include how hydrolytic enzymes catalyze the hydrolysis of glycogen in lysosomes by lowering the activation energy of breaking the alpha bond thus breaking the polysaccharide down into usable glucose. Henceforth, he should cover that before testing us over it. If your sixth grade class covered that then I'm happy for you, but mine was busy focusing on keeping the ******ed kid in the back of the room from spitting on people.

If you didn't even know the answer to the example question you gave, then it clearly shows that you didn't even bother to open the book. Even if the professor didn't guide your hand to teach you everything, if you had read the book, you would have got atleast that question (and probably many more as well) right. Some professors just suck, and I'm sure we have all had to deal with some at one point or another.