
Why Your Professors Suck - prostoalex
http://zacharyernst.blogspot.com/2013/06/why-your-professors-suck_23.html
======
austinz
The truly good student is the one who signs up for the class with the goal of
mastering the material being taught as well as possible. The 'good' student in
this example cares more about gaming the signaling mechanism than actually
learning the material - this is why he'll spend his time arguing with the TA
over a handful of points on his problem set than spending that time going over
the material again. The 'cynical bad' student is already convinced that he's
not going to get anything out of the class, in which case he either 1). is
taking the class because he has to or 2). is a fool who should be taking a
class better serving his needs and not wasting his time.

Also, I don't know much about philosophy (and I suspect this is far less
applicable for philosophy), but in science and engineering often mastery and
innovation in a field requires an extremely narrow focus that, in turn,
requires a significant investment in time and resources. This includes
transmission of specialist knowledge to graduate students and postdocs, grant
writing, paper publishing, acquisition of equipment or access to equipment. So
I don't really think it's entirely fair to chalk up lack of interdisciplinary
interest and/or innovative methodology predominantly to a system that weeds
out people not willing to think the way it wants them to. (Not saying that
tenure doesn't have its own problems...)

~~~
silvestrov
The 'good' student belives that the signaling mechanism and the understanding
of the material is the same thing, they're identical. For those students
nothing exists beyond (the signals of) good marks. So in a way they don't
really game.

~~~
raylu
I find it difficult to imagine that anyone would actually believe the two are
equivalent, but maybe I've just been hanging around HN-types too much.

~~~
AYBABTME
I have friends who firmly believe that getting high grades is all that matter
and that surely university is taking care of making them employable.

Arguing with them on that point proved useless in the past, but now that I get
interesting internships while they don't, I believe they are somehow waking
up.

At least, focusing on being a 'good student' is not the worst strategy out
there. If one day you come to be aware of it, it's not an irrecuperable
situation.

------
Blahah
> __Good student: "When will the midterm be?"

> Me: "Why do you care?"

> Good student: "Um... I'd like to be able to plan when I

> should study for it."

> Me: "Oh, okay. I don't know when it's going to be."

> Good student: "Um... Okay. What's it going to cover?"

> Me: "I'm not sure, but it'll be really great!"

> Good student: "That's good, I guess. Can you be more specific?"

> Me: "Not really. But why do you care?" __

Wow, this guy is a jerk. This just shouldn 't happen. Fair enough, don't tell
a student exactly what's on the exam - they should be learning all the
material, not cramming for a test. But not telling them _when_ it's going to
be is ridiculous. People have lives and need to structure their time.

If a professor or lecturer had refused to tell me the date of an exam, I would
have pursued a complaint as far as possible, which would probably have
resulted in disciplinary action. In the UK, this just isn't acceptable. Do US
universities really treat their students with such disdain?

Regarding the classifications, he missed out "cynical good student", which I
suspect is overrepresented amongst HN readers. I never believed my professors
were particularly smart people or worth listening to so I didn't attend
lectures or hand in work to get feedback, but I did see the value of learning
the material so I taught myself and aced exams.

~~~
rmrfrmrf
I think you're taking that conversation the wrong way. When I saw the
exchange, I sympathized with the author immediately because _I 've been in
this situation many times_. It's _very_ distracting when a professor is giving
an in-depth lecture, then suddenly, the "good student" pops their face up from
their daily planner and raises their hand in the most conspicuous way
possible. "Oh, man," I think, "the professor was on a roll; this question
better be good."

"Um, will this be on the midterm, and by the way, when will that be?"

Every time this happens (and it actually happens a lot), you can physically
observe the lecturer's train of thought derailing and exploding into a mangled
pile of molten wreckage. If the professor manages to answer all of the
disruptive student's concerns, they then have the difficult task of re-
engaging the other 25-100 students whose concentration has since gone
elsewhere.

It's incredibly rude to ask a professor whether or not the material that they
are covering will be on an exam. What you're essentially asking is, "do I need
to be paying attention to you right now, or can we all just zone out while you
talk at us?" That thought process represents a very immature mindset that
still thinks you're paying for "an education" and not paying to actually
_learn_.

That said, I don't think that this is something that most people will
understand given the rise in tuition costs and the (flawed) notion that
students are paying for a 4-year "educational resort and spa" experience. As
someone who got an undergrad degree then worked for a few years before going
back to grad school part time, it's amazing how much I learned to appreciate
the classroom environment. IMO students must not realize how infrequently
after graduation they'll have the opportunity to learn new things from someone
more knowledgable than themselves.

~~~
Blahah
I agree, the situation you describe sounds very annoying and rude, and
indicates someone is just interested in jumping through the hoops to get their
qualification.

------
nagrom
As a physics postdoc who is thinking of switching careers, I definitely
sympathise with this article. And I agree with almost everything about it,
except this line:

    
    
        Success as a faculty member requires one thing above all else: a good reputation in your field.
    

And all I really disagree with is the wording - a good reputation _does not
mean a reputation for excellence._ A good reputation means agreeable, means
suitably deferential, means knows the correct people and will do as they're
told. None of this correlates with excellence...and people who are excellent
at research probably don't really want to become faculty, aside from the
status and security - it takes away the ability to do research, for a large
part.

So I agree with the conclusion that the overall standard of faculty is not
impressive to students, but it's not because the faculty are not risk takers
or innovative - it's because for the most part, the faculty are political
animals, not technical ones. They may also be very good technically, but this
is an accident and not a feature of the system and untrue more often as not.
The cynical students mentioned in the article will likely sniff that out quite
quickly whereas, in my experience, the good students are simply more naive.
Both types tend to be just as intelligent and hard working, but the cynical
students will work on what they want, rather than what the professor wants.

~~~
dnautics
As a practicing (bio)chemist, I am usually somewhat cynical about philosophy
professors, but what this guy says is spot on. Perhaps this is a self-serving
agreement, since I was definitely one of these "good bad students".

In my experience, yes, including your minor clarification on the word 'good',
the full description applies equally to chemistry as philosophy (presumably).
But then that makes one wonder: Why are we entrusting this system with
taxpayer resources to produce science?

Secondly, "But the university doesn't need to exert any pressure, because it's
already filtered out the people who would need to be pressured..." What does
this mean for controversial topics, like climate science, where political
decisions are made based on 'consensus'?

"But the climate science community doesn't need to exert any pressure to
conform to the accepted model, because it's already filtered out the people
who would need to be pressured to accept it"?

Equally valid, to replace "climate science" with "cancer research", eg.

~~~
yummyfajitas
It's not even necessary for the topics to be politically controversial (by
which I mean Democrats and Republicans have opinions on it) for this effect to
occur. You can get the same filtering effect purely via internal pressures.

As examples, consider the Copenhagen consensus in foundations of quantum
mechanics or the (currently being overturned, thanks to machine learning)
Frequentist consensus in statistics.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
About the statistics thing: I thought that Frequentism and Bayesianism were
two separate frameworks to use in two separate contexts? Basically, I thought
that you used Frequentism when you could do a definite experiment that yields
an exhaustive probability distribution (like rolling a die to see how often it
yields each number), while you use Bayesianism to evaluate accumulations of
evidence about a distribution you can't experiment on directly. Is that wrong?

~~~
yummyfajitas
That's not correct. Frequentists view the world as an experiment measuring a
set of unknown parameters describing a probability distribution. These
parameters are fixed, and cannot be described probabilistically.

In contrast, Bayesians use probability to represent uncertainty.

I.e., to a Frequentist, it doesn't even make sense to ask the question "what
is the probability that the coin is rigged", whereas the Bayesian would come
up with a probability distribution for the probability of the coin coming up
heads.

~~~
dnautics
Largely, though it's a matter of terminology[0]. I doubt that any but the most
dogmatic frequentist would say there isn't something to the _notion_ behind
the question you're asking "what do you think is the chance the coin is
rigged", but rather that it should not be conflated (by using the term
"probability") with the notion of a situation where something can be repeated
and measured - or at least one that sufficiently approximates that situation.

[0] I find that battles over terminology can be the harshest and most
recriminating minefields among the intelligent.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
Ok, so frequentists believe P(x) for some event x is the limit of the fraction
of trials in which x happens, as we increase the number of trials to infinity.

Whereas Bayesians believe P(x) is odds at which they would gamble, so to
speak, that a particular proposition x is true.

Is that it?

~~~
yummyfajitas
It's deeper than that. The difference in views influences everything you
compute. For example, Frequentists compute p-values, which is P(reject null
hypothesis | null hypothesis is true) [1].

In contrast, Bayesians compute P(null hypothesis is false | prior knowledge).

Similarly, Frequentists compute _confidence_ intervals (say at 5%), which is
an interval that represents the set of null hypothesis you can't reject with a
5% p-value cutoff. In contrast, Bayesians compute _credible_ intervals, which
represent a region having a 95% probability of containing the true value.

Personally, I'm solidly in the Bayesian camp simply because I can actually
understand it. To take an example, consider Bem's "Feeling the Future" paper
[2] which suggests that psychic powers exist. From a Bayesian perspective, I
understand exactly how to interpret this - my prior suggests psychic powers
are unlikely, and my posterior after reading Bem's paper is only a little
different from my prior. I don't know how to interpret his paper from a
Frequentist perspective.

[1]
[http://www.bayesianwitch.com/blog/2013/godexplainspvalues.ht...](http://www.bayesianwitch.com/blog/2013/godexplainspvalues.html)

[2]
[http://www.dbem.ws/FeelingFuture.pdf](http://www.dbem.ws/FeelingFuture.pdf)
For background, his statistical methods were fairly good, and more or less the
standard of psychology research. If you reject his paper on methodological
grounds, you need to reject almost everything.

------
snitko
The structural problem he mentioned at the end is this: students are not
customers. Had they been customers, who could instantly stop paying this
professor because they think he's boring and doesn't deliver, you'd see a
completely different picture. It wouldn't be about grades and diplomas
anymore. It would be about acquiring knowledge and skills that students can
later apply. If they decide this professor cannot teach them, for whatever
reason, they would stop paying. If they decide it takes too long - they would
stop paying and find a better path or drop it.

What you currently have is a system in which professors feel superior for some
reason. And they are not punished financially if some students fail. So the
best way to incentivize this system in which professors actually serve their
students is to apply market mechanisms to teaching.

~~~
anon1385
The other side of students being customers is that they will see a passing
grade as something they have paid for and should receive, not something based
on merit. If you paid a lot of money for a course but didn't get a good grade
are you more likely to blame yourself or blame the teacher? More likely to
give good feedback to a lecturer that gave an A because the course was easy or
to a lecturer that gave a C for a very challenging course? Are people more
likely to pick courses that have a reputation for low marks, or pick one where
they will get better 'value for money'?

The result is grade inflation and it has been well documented:

[http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/14/the-history-
of-...](http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/14/the-history-of-college-
grade-inflation/)

 _They then attribute the rapid rise in grade inflation in the last couple of
decades to a more “consumer-based approach” to education, which they say “has
created both external and internal incentives for the faculty to grade more
generously.” More generous grading can produce better instructor reviews, for
example, and can help students be more competitive candidates for graduate
schools and the job market._

~~~
snitko
Abolish grades. Teachers are there to teach. Employers are there to assess and
hire. You're just looking at it from the same old perspective.

Let me give you an example. I teach programming privately. People pay me
$100/hr. Some of them found jobs thanks to my lessons. Some of them realized
it's not for them and they didn't waste tons of money and time. And I've been
doing this long enough to say there's a demand for my services and people
generally like it. I don't grade them, I give them useful feedback on what
should they improve and if they should continue. My primary goal is their
success, not some stupid grade. Market works great if you apply it right.

~~~
jamii
Teaching programming sounds very rewarding. How did you get started?

~~~
snitko
As for how to get into the business... I posted a submission on a popular
(Russian) programming site offering Ruby and RoR lessons. 2 years later my
post is Google's search results first page. Then I started doing Ruby and RoR
screencasts in Russian, they became #1 in Russian. That brings even more
people. It's not a lot of money, mind you, but at some point I even quit my
job completely and went to Thailand for 6 months. I'm thinking of stopping
doing it, because frankly, I'm just tired of teaching. For now.

------
caster_cp
In my experience, cynical bad students are usually douche bags that think they
are too good for the world and that university is just a bunch of crap. A
small ammount of them is really intelligent. The most part of it are people
who think too highly of themselves.

Really, I couldn't disagree more that doing assignments, reading books and
studying end up "closing" one's mind. From my point of view, there's no such
thing as "useless knowledge". Granted that you don't learn everything you need
to be successful in college, but IMO college is not there to make you
successful and give you heaps and piles of money. That is not the point.

One thing got me thinking: If you really don't respect the university "system"
that munch, why devoting your life to it?

------
beambot
Definitely not an engineering prof. Top university professors (ie. R1 schools)
are primarily judged on their _research_ , not their _teaching_. If your
professors "suck" it's because they're spending all of their time on the
things that matter to their careers: grant writing and publications.

And students (good or bad) care about exam times because of...
procrastination. The "bad" students (of the goof-off variety) don't stick
around in engineering. At most of the top schools, a few C's and you're out.
The cynical bad students often achieve mediocre grades but compensate by doing
cool non-coursework stuff.

~~~
nagrom
The top professors tend not be judged on their research, in my experience.
They're judged on their publications. I, personally, know many 'top'
professors that have _enormous_ publication lists that come from being the guy
who supplied the money via a grant application. From their publication list -
which is what 'proves' their research excellence, you would be forgiven for
thinking that they were savants. But they're generally just administrators
with an eye for the main chance who view the publication list as yet another
thing to be gamed.

~~~
beambot
Publications (or more generally, H-Index) are used as a proxy for research by
administrators that cannot possibly judge the merits of the research itself.
During the tenure process, administrators use other signals too:
recommendation letters from peers, grants, "service", graduated students and
their placements, etc.

When your work is only relevant or approachable to less than a dozen people on
the planet, how can you expect a dean to judge it? They can't. So they use
(often poor) proxies.

------
yodsanklai
Basically, he's saying that our professors suck because they are hired for
their abilities to do research.

Being a good researcher doesn't imply being a good teacher, but neither does
it imply being a bad teacher! I agree more emphasis should be put on
pedagogical skills when hiring professors, but overall plenty of researchers
are good at teaching.

I may be wrong, but it seems the author of this article is frustrated by a
lack of research accomplishment so he bitches on his colleagues that
supposedly suck at teaching. And in the process, he tries to get the students
on this side!

------
AlexanderDhoore
I'm definitely a "cynical bad student". Fit the description perfectly. I only
respect teachers who also work part-time as a programmer, sysadmin, ...
anything interesting.

~~~
capisce
Me too, although it was less about the individual lecturers than about
questioning the value of the whole system. I got mediocre grades overall but
excellent grades in a few subjects considered very hard, simply due to finding
them interesting and thus being motivated to go to the lectures and putting
effort into the assignments. If I could go back, I would not have chosen a
five year track.

------
k1m
There is a great book on this topic by Jeff Schmidt called Disciplined Minds:
[http://www.amazon.com/Disciplined-Minds-Critical-
Professiona...](http://www.amazon.com/Disciplined-Minds-Critical-
Professionals-Soul-battering/dp/0742516857)

Here's a review:
[http://www.uow.edu.au/~bmartin/pubs/01BRrt.html](http://www.uow.edu.au/~bmartin/pubs/01BRrt.html)

~~~
cJ0th
hehe the book's website is hosted on tripod:
[http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/](http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/)

I didn't even know they're still alive.

Another interesting bit about the author (taken from the website above)

> Upon publication of Disciplined Minds, the American Institute of Physics
> fired author Jeff Schmidt. He had been on the editorial staff of Physics
> Today magazine for 19 years.

------
minikites
Did the author plagiarize Noam Chomsky?

\---

In this way, faculty are like columnists for major newspapers. Columnists for,
say, the New York Times are perfectly free to write whatever they like (within
appropriate professional guidelines, of course). But the range of opinion
expressed in those columns is terribly narrow. The problem is not that the
Times is exerting pressure on its columnists. The problem is that in order to
be a columnist for the New York Times to begin with, you have to be the kind
of person whose opinions already fall within a specific range. The same goes
for faculty. Universities are generally pretty good about not exerting overt
pressure on faculty and their research. Intellectual freedom is generally
respected. But the university doesn't need to exert any pressure, because it's
already filtered out the people who would need to be pressured. Those who
survive are, for the most part, narrow specialists who care little about
what's happening outside their own area of specialization.

\---

[http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199710--.htm](http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199710--.htm)

When you critique the media and you say, look, here is what Anthony Lewis or
somebody else is writing, they get very angry. They say, quite correctly,
"nobody ever tells me what to write. I write anything I like. All this
business about pressures and constraints is nonsense because I’m never under
any pressure." Which is completely true, but the point is that they wouldn’t
be there unless they had already demonstrated that nobody has to tell them
what to write because they are going say the right thing. If they had started
off at the Metro desk, or something, and had pursued the wrong kind of
stories, they never would have made it to the positions where they can now say
anything they like. The same is mostly true of university faculty in the more
ideological disciplines. They have been through the socialization system.

~~~
yummyfajitas
Having similar ideas is not plagiarism.

~~~
minikites
But it's the exact same idea with the exact same example:
journalism/university and the New York Times.

------
lhnz
It's not that black or white.

I was a cynical student myself. I flunked a few of my classes simply because I
looked at them and decided they weren't useful or interesting to me. This was
at a particularly anti-authoritarian point in my life (and I also wasn't that
happy) so consisted of me just skipping the coursework and focusing on other
intellectual domains that felt right to me.

Although I am sure this made me more creative (and doing things because I
wanted to know more about the world has made me love learning), I was ignorant
to not acknowledge the inherent risk in following your passions in learning.
The world is stratified by easily measured educational standards - my string
of As and Fs did not help me here, and when you are tested by somebody that is
canon (and you will be) you will be at a strong disadvantage.

I had to fill in a few holes over the last few years. You can't always be sure
that you won't need something, and even if you don't need it what if you are
graded on it? It's crazy luck that my industry is fast-growing and was new and
unregulated enough to accept me. If I wasn't in technology I almost certainly
wouldn't have managed to come out of this unscathed.

Incomplete access to the mainstream educational signalling mechanism is a very
dangerous situation. The other methods of signalling intelligence are a lot
more difficult and have a much smaller market. (My achilles heel is
institutional leverage, but my saving grace is being obsessed with learning.)

I couldn't have stopped myself from being who I was when I was younger. I
hated being told what to do. I was too depressed to make myself do something
that I wasn't enjoying (the first year of University was unfortunately an
emotional ground zero for me and I rebuilt myself brick by painful brick.) But
it's not right to say that specialisation and conforming is only important in
academia. 80/20 rule is probably best for most people, maybe 60/40 if you're
extremely secure...

------
um304
When I went to uni, I had high expectations that I'll learn intellectual bases
of different fields of knowledge, and will be taught how they relate to and
improve human life. But my expectations were shattered very first day in the
first calculus class when professor started explaining how to solve questions
in first chapter of course book. Wait madam, what is calculus, how does it
relate to me, what need was felt to invent it, what problems does it solve? My
questions remained unanswered and I lost my faith in uni education.

------
eddyparkinson
Is better possible? I like the "startup weekend" style courses. But run over a
term or 2 rather than a weekend. There are a few around.

------
pcrh
According to his description, his "good" students are sycophants, and no one
likes those.

------
enupten
This reminds me of course of the Bipolar Lisp programmer :)
[http://www.lambdassociates.org/blog/bipolar.htm](http://www.lambdassociates.org/blog/bipolar.htm)

