<p>If you could erase on grade on your college transcript and retake the class which one would it be? </p>
<p>If it were me I would retake general chemistry. I wasn’t as smart as I am now and made a lot of mistakes. If I were as smart as I am now, I would ace all of them. Just kinda weird how I ace the hardest one and organic but messed up the basic stuff. I’m sure most engineers have this story.</p>
<p>Control Systems. Not becaues of the grade, per se (although it was my worst in my last two years of school), nor because of its impact on my future studies (none), but rather because it was the worst taught course I ever took.</p>
<p>The professor was new faculty, “retiring” into academia after a long career in industry. He knew nothing about setting up a course at all. I was in his first lab section of the week, and neither he nor his TA’s could make any of his experiments work - I used to be an electronics technician, and I was sat next to two Navy nuclear technicians in an officer training program, and the three of us would troubleshoot his lab assignments and present a fixed version to the TA’s at the end of each lab. </p>
<p>He decided not to use a text book, preferring to use just the manuals for the equpment and some preprinted course notes, accompanied by rambling and uninformative lectures. He completely switched out all the materials (including the board and chip) that the previous classes had used, despite the fact that neither he nor his grad students could competently use them. </p>
<p>His first two exams were so easy that the average on each exam was in the mid 90%'s. In a panic, he designed a final that skipped over all of the core material for the course, instead asking fill-in-the-blank questions based on comments he made in lecture that had generally preceded the statement “you don’t need to know this, its not important”. The result completely upended the class ranking - me and the techs, and the handful of others who could actually do this stuff got B’s after bombing that “Trivial Pursuit” final. Meanwhile, the guys who sat up front frantically copying every word he said because they had no idea how to do any of it got A’s.</p>
<p>This may sound like I am exagerrating - I swear I am not. I have neither before nore since had an instructor so completely undeserving of the title. It was the first and only time I complained to the Dean about a faculty member, and I know I was not the only one. The Dean initially stonewalled, stating that he had to allow the professor the space to develop the class, but I found out later through one of the grad students that the Dean had to assign a mentor to him to help with future classes - he was getting complaints from students, faculty, and advising staff.</p>