How does UChicago compare with Ivy leagues??

sakky
Thu, 10 Nov 2005 18:30:33 +0000

Thats true, but the problem is how do you know which teachers are good at teaching? Sure you can ask and sit in their lectures but I’m puzzelled as to how exactly you can tell where to find the better teachers? Wouldn’t you assume they would have better “teachers” at Harvard than a community college???



How do you know? Prof teaching evals. Teaching awards. There are also a number of websites where students rate their profs. You can also ask the students there how good the teaching is.

I’ll give you an example. My brother went to Caltech and he did well there, graduating with honors in geophysics, one of Caltech’s top-ranked programs. But he’ll be the first to admit that the actual teaching at Caltech was mediocre at best. Sure, the profs were brilliant researchers, but they were also often times inarticulate and had great difficulty relating to undergraduates. Now obviously some Caltech profs are both great researchers and great teachers. But on average, the teaching really isn’t that hot. As a result, my brother often times found he was better off not going to lecture at all, because he would learn more just by sitting in his room and reading the book instead.

Nor is my brother an isolated case. The teaching at Caltech is widely reported to be problematic. Many of the college factbooks like the Fiske Guide and Princeton Review say so. Heck, even here on CC, many of the Caltech’ers say so. Ben Golub, for example, is a huge Caltech fanatic, and even he concedes that the teaching at Caltech isn’t the best. That doesn’t mean that Caltech is a bad school. Indeed, Caltech has many things to offer. It’s just that great teaching is not one of them.

There are also certain schools that are known to emphasize good teaching over research. The elite LAC’s immediately come to mind. In fact, the whole raison d’etre of the LAC’s is to provide a highly personalized and highly effective teaching environment, where profs are hired and promoted based on their teaching skills rather than their research. Obviously that doesn’t mean that every single LAC prof is a better teacher than every single research university prof, but the trend is clear - when you’re talking about comparable LAC’s and research universities, the LAC’s will tend to have better teaching.



I’m argueing about the nobel prize thing is that Chicago is one of the most underrated schools and the nobel prize thing is just a supporting statement as too how good its research is-



I am not disputing that Chicago is a great research university. The fallacy is that just because it is a great research university, it must automatically have lots of great teachers. This is not true. Again, take the example of Caltech.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. If top-quality teaching is really what you’re after, then you should be shooting for an elite LAC like Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore, Pomona, places like that.