<p>How is the quality of teaching at Cornell? Do you find the professors to be interesting, engaging, and stimulating teachers? Do they meet your expectations about what a great teacher should be?</p>
<p>it’s hard to give a broad generalization. some professors are amazing, some need a little bit of help, and some just plain suck. if you go to office hours, however, you’ll find that ALL of them are willing to help. go to ratemyprofessors.com for more specific professors if you want.</p>
<p>you’ll also find that the classes that are more “interesting, engaging and stimulating” (and every other word under those in the thesaurus. ahaha, just teasing a little) will be the ones that YOU have an interest in.</p>
<p>They fall along a spectrum. In general, I think the professors range from good to amazing. I think I had one professor in my four years that simply wasn’t accessible.</p>
<p>You’ll have professors that you adore, professors that don’t exactly stand out, and professors that are there to do their research and could care less, or don’t know how, to teach. </p>
<p>In my case, I thought my professors in my major were amazing. Some of the engineering professors…not so much. Although there was this one who made me think I was in one of my favorite high school classes again, he was that good.</p>
<p>Having a good teacher at Cornell is a privilege, even though your parents pay $50,000 for you to go here. Don’t expect your professors to be great, although some may be. Most professors are here to do research, but this is pretty much how it is at any top research university. I have friends at Penn and Harvard who have told me they felt the same way about the teaching at their schools.</p>
<p>Be very wary of ratemyprofessor.com. Very few professors it seems (from my experience) have more than a few ratings. If the professor has a lot of ratings (20+) then you can go by it probably, but if there are only 5, that’s meaningless since the professor has likely taught hundreds, if not thousands of students.</p>
<p>I’ve finished 3 semesters at Cornell and I’ve liked most of my professors. I can only really complain about 2 classes so far, teaching-quality wise. Only one of those was the class actually poor academically, the other was just the professor’s lectures were almost useless, but his problem sets were hard so you still learned the material, you just had to teach yourself more. Overall I’m satisfied with the teaching quality at Cornell.</p>
<p>for language classes i would recommend continuing the language you had in high school (some even go as far as faking their placement test to place into elementary spanish/french/etc)…</p>
<p>the reason they do this is because cornell does not teach languages (they dont teach grammar that is)</p>
<p>your language classes will basically be a review of your 2-3hr nightly homework assignments…</p>
<p>My professors in engineering have all been surprisingly good my first three semesters so far. They definitely know what they are doing, and they are dedicated to teaching undergraduates. I did come from an okay public high school, where the teachers were comparatively terrible, but in any case the quality of instruction here in engineering, I would say, is at least good.</p>
<p>ILR professors are amazing…small faculty and they really care about what they study…true academics…</p>
<p>I mean, the answer to this question can be generalized to every Ivy.</p>
<p>They hire extremely qualified people - thus, some of them are absolute crap at teaching, the grand majority are good, and a few will inspire you (no, really, they will!).</p>
<p>Example:
Shankar Sen; research in “invariants associated with representations of Galois groups of p-adic fields and algebraic number fields.”<br>
Absolutely brilliant…</p>
<p>He can’t finish one complete sentence without interrupting himself, is condescending and is a terrible teacher.</p>
<p>Alan Nussbaum.</p>
<p>Think of how awesome 300 and Dark Knight were when you first saw them.</p>
<p>Now, call the Ackerman function with Graham’s number as the arguments. </p>
<p>That’s how many times more awesome Prof. Nussbaum is.</p>
<p>Cornell is a major research university, so in general, for most of the basic sciences and social sciences the professors are researchers first and teachers second. That doesn’t mean that the teachers are bad, but that there are some that aren’t naturally gifted at conveying complex ideas to students. However, one should always inquire about a class and a teacher with someone who’s already taken the course before one takes it themselves IMO.</p>
<p>I do sincerely feel that most of the engineering professors are good, though. Some of them undeniably are not natural teachers, and some of them can barely speak English, but the majority in my experience (and according to my upperclassmen friends) have been clear and enthusiastic. Before coming here my freshman year I was concerned about reports that professors at research universities tend to make teaching a secondary concern, but Cornell has so far shown me that good research and good teaching are not mutually exclusive.</p>
<p>ResurgamBell, I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying. Regardless of the language taken in high school, many choose to place into elementary level language courses because the work is difficult? Because the professors are lackluster? Doesn’t going over homework assignments help/won’t that eventually teach students the material? Maybe I’m missing something, but could you clarify?</p>
<p>let’s say someone took 4 years of spanish in high school, they could probably place into an upper level course (not the first elementary semester) but instead they choose to fake/fail their placement test to be placed into elementary spanish so that they have a better shot at an A in the course. why struggle with upper level courses if you only want to fulfill a language requirement? </p>
<p>what i mean by going over hw assignments is that the instructor/professor is just there if you have any questions/difficulties. rarely do they give grammar lessons on the board as you might have gotten in high school.</p>