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

sakky
Wed, 14 Jun 2006 19:40:53 +0000

Ratemyprofessors - now there’s an interesting website. Interesting because I see that professors that were known to be bad 10 years ago are still there, and current students are STILL ranking them poorly.

For example, take the infamous math professor Hun-Hsing Wu. Before ratemyprofessors.com existed, heck, before most people had ever even heard of the Internet, Wu was known at Berkeley as a bad math prof. I look at ratemyprofessors.com, and unsurprisingly, he’s still known as a bad math prof. In other words, nothing has changed at all.

But that’s precisely what is sad about the situation. A long time ago, Wu was teaching lower division math courses, and doing it badly, as evidenced by poor teaching ratings and a strong reputation among the students as being a bad teacher. Years later, the math department is STILL having Wu teach lower division courses badly. In other words, Wu has been providing poor math teaching to undergrads for at least a decade now, and probaby a lot longer than that.

Seriously, what’s up with that? It’s one thing for a department to let a new guy try to teach undergrads. If it turns out that he teaches them badly (as evidenced by the teaching evals), then you just send in some other guy to teach it next time. But it’s quite another thing to have your undergrad classes be taught by a bad teacher over and over again. In the case of Wu, he’s a bad teacher, the department knows he’s a bad teacher, and in fact, the department has known it for at least a decade now. But they keep sending him out there to teach undergrads anyway.

In fact, it actually gets worse. In Spring 06’, not only was Wu teaching undergrads, he was actually teaching one of the special fresh/soph seminars (Math 39). For those who don’t know, these fresh/soph seminars are those special small seminars designed to provide a limited number of Berkeley undergrads with a small and intimate academic experience with a Berkeley prof and to alleviate Berkeley’s problems with impersonality and coldness. I happen to believe that these seminars are a fantastic idea - but only when run by profs who are good teachers. There’s no point in creating a highly personal and intimate seminar class if the teacher is bad. In fact, I would say that it’s actually counterproductive to do this - that you’d be better off not having these seminars at all than having them run by bad teachers. Yet who did the Math department decide to have teaching its fresh/soph seminar in the spring? Wu. Come on, what’s up with that? That’s almost like a slap in the face. You have a prof This just tells me that the Math department really doesn’t take undergrad teaching seriously at all. The purpose of these seminars is to inspire undergrads by demonstrating to them the wonder and joy of a particular discipline in a highly intimate environment, yet the math department decides to have its seminar taught by a prof who has a long-standing reputation as a bad teacher.

If this is the way that Berkeley runs its undergrad teaching, then I have to ask - why even have prof evals at all? By prof evals, I mean those sheets that students fill out on the last day of each class in which the profs get rated for their teaching effectiveness. Why even have these evals, if bad teachers still end up teaching undergrads anyway? Seriously, if nothing is going to change via these evals, then why even do it? In the case of Wu, all his bad evals have apparently not changed a thing.