How hard is it to get into UCSF med school from Berkeley?

sakky
Thu, 15 Jun 2006 13:21:37 +0000

sakky, do you know how freshmen and sophomore seminars are creaeted each semester? A faculty member applies to teach it, as far as I know (as in not because a departmet make him or her), voluntarily. Now L and S allowed him to it, sure, but it’s not as if they ran to him in particular begging him to teach seminars.



You just stated the problem right there - the math department let him do it. The math department knows Wu is a bad teacher, and in fact, has known it for at least a decade. A conscientious math department would not have a guy like that to teach a lower-division seminar. Like I said, it’s probably better to simply not teach a lower-division seminar at all than to have it taught by somebody that you know is a bad teacher.



As far as I’ve heard, prof evaluations are used primarily to hinder or help advance salary increases- profs with terrible evaluations get raises at a much slower pace than those with positive evaluations. I bet they have some influence on tenure as well. In addition, many departments (most notably the college of engineering) release some of this data to students.



As far as the tenure issue is concerned, the problem comes when a guy already HAS tenure (as Wu has). You can’t revoke tenure to a guy who already has it. And you can’t fire a tenured guy for bad teaching. After all, tenure by definition means that you can’t be fired without cause, and sadly, bad teaching is not considered to be ‘cause’.

The salary/promotion issue is also I believe untrue, at least as far as the math department is concerned. Math salaries and promotions are based almost solely on research acumen. And besides, even if the salary issue was true, it hardly matters. As I have said on other posts, the fact is, prof’s in the technical disciplines tend to get the bulk of their pay from side consulting work. Even if a prof were to be docked some of his professorial pay, it would hardly matter compared to the kind of money he could make off that side work.



In addition, many departments (most notably the college of engineering) release some of this data to students



This is the only instance where I can see that the prof evals could be valuable, and where ratemyprofessors.com is also valuable, because the information allows students to avoid bad profs. The problem is that most departments refuse to release this information to students (which is where ratemyprofessors.com steps in), as if they have something to hide (which, in many cases, they do). It also doesn’t alleviate the problem of being forced to take a class with a bad prof simply because he happens to be teaching the class that is next on a sequence of classes that you have to take in order. For example, if you’re a chemical engineering student, you HAVE to take ChemE 140 in your sophomore fall semester, and then you HAVE to take ChemE141 in the upcoming spring, if you want to graduate on time. These courses are only taught once a year, and they are the gateways to the rest of the ChemE courses. So if they happen to be taught by bad profs at the time you need to take them, you’re screwed.

The REAL solution is for a department to prevent bad teachers from teaching required undergrad classes. Heck, I admit that I would have probably preferred to have my high school calculus teacher be the one to teach my lower division math courses.

Now, I agree with you that other research universities also often times don’t really care about teaching. But that just leads to one of my other points that I have made here on CC which is that people ought to have more respect for the elite LAC’s. All of my personal experience with bad teaching at research universities has given me great respect for the LAC’s. Good teaching really is a gift that not all people have, and good teaching really does influence how much you can learn from a class and how inspired you will be about a particular subject. Few things can kill student enthusiasm faster than bad teaching can.