You enter class ready for an hour or so of learning. You get out your notebook and pen and wait for the professor to start his or her hopefully enthralling lecture, only to have him or her stand at the front of the class and start reciting definitions from the book. After 10 minutes of trying to write down coherent notes, you realize everything sounds strangely familiar. That’s when it clicks: The professor really isn’t teaching anything new at all. He or she is simply regurgitating examples from the text you read last night. No new concepts, no new examples, no applying theory to the real world — you didn’t even need to come to class at all.
At this point, I flip to the front page of the syllabus. Sure enough, Professor Smith does have a “Dr.” in front of his name. I can’t help but wonder, if my professor spent six or more years of his life getting a doctorate, why is he teaching from the book?
This is where I blame the university. As students, we pay tens of thousands of dollars to learn skills and concepts that will prepare us to work in the real world. As such, I expect to come to class and learn something. I expect my hands to be cramping at the end of a lecture. I want the professor to stand in front of the class with a PowerPoint presentation (or at least a structured lesson plan) and teach me a theory that I could not learn on my own. Maybe I’m an idealist. Or maybe I’m an academic masochist. Either way, at the end of the day, I at least want to feel like I got my money’s worth and feel like an improved person. Unfortunately, I have experienced too many professors who have left me feeling extremely empty at the end of the day and, in many cases, like I’ve wasted my time.
This is why I advocate that the university start vetting its professors better. It would be in the university’s best interest to start reviewing its professors’ teaching styles and sitting in on classes occasionally. I know this idea sounds eerily like high school when administrators would sit in our classes twice a year, but at least it produced decent teachers. They were concerned that their students actually learned something because their jobs were at stake. The university also needs to take student evaluations more seriously. I personally know of very poor professors who have received multiple poor evaluations for numerous semesters in a row only to continue teaching many important classes. These are classes that should be interesting and engaging, but instead students end up learning nothing at all. Students should be challenged and forced to think and expand their minds, not complete tests by copying and pasting what’s written in the book.
USC is the state’s flagship university, and as such, we need to lead the state in every category, including professor quality.