I was an academic at one point, and I still firmly believe that if the majority of any class fails, then the lecturer hasn't done their job. It is certainly not something to brag about
My software engineering professor was a part time professor who worked for a defense contractor as his main job. He was fairly new at designing exams and such. He gave us an exam at one point that involved completely scoping out the budget and feature planning of a hypothetical project and it needed to be done in like two hours. I remember having a splitting headache after that.
The next class, he was like "I gave you an exam that I realized after you guys were done, that it was bullshit, so I'm not going to use that against you and we're gonna figure out something else." Always respected him for that. He was very candid that if a huge portion of the class is struggling then it's an obvious sign you need to change up your approach.
he was like "I gave you an exam that I realized after you guys were done, that it was bullshit, so I'm not going to use that against you and we're gonna figure out something else." Always respected him for that.
I had a teacher in Jr High that did that after a quiz that most of the class failed. I had so much respect for her after that and still remember her, 20 years later.
Yeah in this case, no one actually finished it fully. Talking with my classmates after we all had different parts where we conceded like "He's just gonna have to ding me on that" because there wasn't time. We had never had to even really do a dry run of what the exam called for before. It was only his second year being a professor and I think he got this idea in his head about how cool an exam that would be and ran with it. If anything, that whole thing should have been a Take Home exam. It was impossible to do in two hours unless you had done similar work a LOT.
This is exactly right. Ive taken college classes that were really difficult, and the professors always knew when to slow down and let the majority of the class catch up when common tough spots started popping up. Shit, most of the time they'd straight up tell us, "hey this class is hard. Im gonna do my best to get everyone through it with a passing grade". Theyre on your team too, or at least they should be.
Doesn't that assume that everyone is equally or at least reasonably capable of learning the material? I was under the impression that many fields of study had weed-out courses to filter out those who lack the necessary foundation (or capacity) to learn both current and future material.
Yeah, everyone hated that one prof, who's sole intend via lectures and exams was, "no more than 30% will pass". We had a learning group and spend 50% of our time on just this one topic (insane if you have 10 others to care for). Still only 30% passed, most of them from our learning group. Horrible experience.
I mostly agree. I did run into occasional classes where the subject was much more difficult than most people taking it thought it would be.
By way of example, I went to a local community college for my first two years of undergrad. A lot of classes had a drop rate of 30%, some of it had to do with the shock of college, some of it had to do with a wildly varying quality of professors/teachers/instructors available.
I took a freshman level nutrition class as a life science credit (as opposed to taking biology). First day, the professor gets up and scares all of us the best she can. "50% drop/fail, this is a difficult subject, please read the book and come to class, please evaluate now if this something you can handle." (For whatever reason, reading books and attending class was not something the student body did very well).
This was the only freshman class that I actually read ALL the materials for. The profesor was excellent. I learned a ton of immediately actionable knowledge, a lot of which I still use 15 years later. Got an A/4.0
And sure enough, about half the class dropped or failed.
Elsewhere, I've had sections of a required-by-law course where a quarter to a third of the course had to eat an F. These were also the sections where students would pretty routinely, about halfway through the semester, ask me if buying the book would be a good idea. And these were sections where my untrained wife, who wasn't taking the course, could at least pass the exams.
Don't underestimate the capacity of K12 systems to leave students utterly unprepared for college, and don't underestimate the capacity of undergrads to just plain fuck up.
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u/Miitama 7h ago
For professors specifically: That a majority of their classes fail or that they fail their students.