<p>Since when is a professor required to teach everything that his students should know?</p>
<p>I recall professors saying that they’re only going to cover 25% of the material in the book but that they expected us to know the whole thing.</p>
<p>That can happen. ANd what a difference that can make as compared to the prof who actually made the point of covering 100% of the material. Especially if the material is going to show up on the final.</p>
<p>In my experience, the professors who say they are going to cover 25% of the material in the book, but expect the students to know the whole thing, are often going at heck-for-leather speed just to cover the 25%. Faculty members in the sciences tend to have the expectation that students will work a great deal outside the lecture hall–nominally, 3 times the amount of time spent in lectures, but in actuality, more like 5 to 6 times . . . to say nothing of Math 55 at Harvard, where it’s more like 20 times.</p>
<p>The perception that science faculty are weeding out pre-meds in the introductory science courses could hold at some colleges. In the large state universities, the courses are not designed to weed out pre-meds, nor are they designed to weed out anyone else. They are designed to provide the background material that is needed for the higher-level courses in the subject, so that when a student eventually graduates with a B.S. in chemistry, say, the student is not a hazard to employ, due to lack of knowledge or capability. The courses just get more demanding higher up. </p>
<p>Med schools may use these courses as “weeders” (I don’t even like the term), because they know the grading standards are tough–but the science faculty aren’t complicit with the med school admissions folks.</p>
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<p>The study Coase mentions refutes this claim. In this case, teaching to the test didn’t work. ** The students who did better on the tests ended up knowing the class material less well.** That’s the point: the authors discovered that some professors prepared their students well for the calculus exams, but then those students were unable to actually use the calculus to solve physics problems.</p>
<p>A student takes a calculus class to learn calculus, not to pass tests. Passing calculus tests but not knowing how to use calculus? Useless. It would be like getting an A in French class, but not being able to speak, understand, read or write French: useless.</p>
<p>Interesting.</p>
<p>I was perusing the “ratemyprofessor” site and noted that many professors get both extremely good and extremely poor ratings and comments from students. I decided that site is worthless because you don’t know anything about the people doing the rating.</p>
<p>Did someone downgrade a professor because they (the student) were lazy and thus flunked? Or had wrong expectations for the course? Or was the professor truly a lousy teacher? There is no way to know.</p>
<p>Edit: Conversely, did a glowing review come from someone who is related to the prof and wanted to help them out? Because to see both ends of the spectrum for the same professor makes you wonder.</p>
<p>Rate my Professor has a lot of flaws. It’s totally anonymous, and I know that some profs do go on the site and rate themselves. The only students who bother to post are either those who really like a professor or those who had a terrible experience…the very nature of the site discourages the middle-of-the-road posts. RMP, like onsite course evaluations, is also very easy to game - simply give out chocolate or extra credit, and your ratings go up. Show youtube videos in class, your ratings go up. Be young, friendly, attractive, or walk your adorable puppy around campus, you guessed it, your ratings go up.</p>
<p>That being said, I’ve looked at my own ratings and those of my colleagues, and sat with my kids as they checked out their profs and even elementary/HS teachers on the companion site rate my teacher. On the whole, the online ratings have been consistent with our experiences with those folks in real life. That demanding, really picky but exceptional middle school social studies teacher? Both positive and negative comments that were accurate. The technology teacher who really needs to update their skills? Students didn’t miss that point. The highly intellectual stereotype of the absent-minded professor who truly wants students to share his excitement with ideas? Appreciation of the enthusiasm alongside a plea for better organization.</p>
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I’d have to disagree with that. Last fall I was TA for an intro general physics course in which most of the 300+ students were Pharmacy major hopefuls. No one seems to know why pharmacy majors would need 2 semesters of hard-core physics, but that’s the requirement. And the tests were really difficult, so lots of people ended up with grades which were not acceptable to getting into the pharmacy program. Meanwhile, there are not enough slots in the pharmacy program for 300 new students, so it certainly appears to be a weed-out effort.</p>
<p>The word tends to get out about certain courses and teachers. Easy graders, tough graders tend to be identified. Not a lot kids can do about it if the course is required and the set up is so that staff teaches the course or TAs are the major teachers for it. </p>
<p>Cardinal Fang, if someone is teaching so strictly to the test that it is the limiting factor, I agree that the material is not going to be well learned. Ideally, the test should be such that it requires using the knowledge from the course that is important. Not being able to pass such a test, means not knowing those principles that are necessary for that course to serve as another brick in the students’ learning foundation. I don’t know of any college professors that teach directly to a test anyways. The problem often comes when the kids don’t learn the nasty fundamentals that are needed and they show up on the test.</p>
<p>sylvan8978, was the course being taught by the physicist to weed out pharmacy hopefuls, or did pharmacy require a tough course, just to cut their numbers? I see a difference. I doubt that the physics classes got easier after that one. For that matter, it was probably non-calculus based physics?</p>
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<p>You keep saying that, but you don’t explain how it accords with the study, which found exactly the opposite:
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<p>The instructors had no personal interest in weeding out people, that’s always the perview of the individual departments. In this case, the pharmacy department. However, since I was TA for both the Fall (pharmacy wannabees) and Spring (engineer wannabees) run of the same exact course, I couldn’t help but notice that the Spring exams were much easier (and one of the faculty members taught both, along with 1 other in fall and 2 others in spring). </p>
<p>The pharmacy wannabees who survived the fall course then had to survive general physics 2 in the Spring. And they are both the calculus based courses, or I would not have termed them the hard-core physics.</p>
<p>Interesting. Our pre-pharmacy students normally take the non-calc based physics. If it’s a repeated pattern that the course is easier in the spring, you’d think word would get around to the pre-pharmacy students, and they’d take it then. Some reason why they can’t?</p>
<p>I don’t know, QuantMech. Just how their schedule falls, I guess. The pre-pharmacy students are typically sophomores by the time they take physics, and the pre-engineers start the physics sequence in their freshman spring. It’s not like they absolutely couldn’t take the spring course (in fact a few of the spring students were repeating in an attempt to get a passable grade), however they would probably need to take the second semester in the summer so as not to get off track altogether.</p>
<p>Another thing to consider: If lower division classes are tested via a departmental exam, why have a prof teach those courses? Might as well turn them over to TA’s who can simply teach to the test. </p>
<p>How many of you complain(ed) when a TA taught a course? You want(ed) a prof to teach you the material. Why? That prof is an expert in a certain area. What a waste to have a prof teach Calc 3 or Physics 1 or Orgo 1 if that prof is only spoon-feeding that material as outlined by the department. A TA can do that at a lower cost and, thus, free up the prof to teach upper division courses and grad courses more relevant to their area of expertise. </p>
<p>Usefulness of physics to a pharm student: By the end of the course you will know the distance from the floor you can drop a pill, how high it will bounce off the floor, and the angle to tilt the tray to recapture that pill so you don’t have to bend over to pick up the pill off the floor to put it back in the bottle before dispensing it. :)</p>
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I have been an adjunct, as well as a TA for courses where everyone had the same final. The instructors teach the X number of chapters of the material required for the course. In calculus and physics, it’s not like there is much variation in what they can cover. Everyone uses the same text. The next professor down the line expects everyone to have covered material X. Since the finals are not even made until the last week of classes, it’s not like people can “teach to the exam.”</p>
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I take it you don’t have much regard for TA’s. Did you ever have any yourself? After nearly 300 credit hours, I no longer automatically hold profs up to such high regard.</p>
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<p>Quite the opposite. I see no reason why a TA should not teach a lower division course. Afterall, they are now in grad school and should have a solid understanding of the basic material covered in Calc 1, 2, 3, or Physics 1 & 2, or Chem 1 & 2, etc. I was a TA for several years and was perfectly capable of teaching intro/lower division courses. It saved the department money, gave me teaching experience, and paid me a salary while I was in grad school. Why not do it for lower division math, physics, chem? Why have a prof teach those courses only to hog-tie him/her from approaching the subject from his area of expertise? Does anyone really benefit from having an expert in statistics, geometry, or algebra teach lower division cal classes rather having a qualified TA teaching the course? </p>
<p>As far as when the exams are written - supposedly they are written to test knowledge of what appears on the syllabus. My DS’s experience was that the prof writing the exam somehow always managed to include material NOT on the syllabus, but was taught in his/her class only. Needless to say, that prof’s students did better on exams than the students supposedly taking the same course /different section/different prof.</p>