Teacher's Assessment

Been looking for something good to start off with....something i can bitch about at length...and I finally found it, or should I say, them: Profs (Professors, to the uninitiated). Disclaimer: This is NOT a rant against the prof community in general, hell, I owe most of my accomplishments so far to some fantastic teachers, and a good prof can inspire a love for a subject in a way nothing else can, not to mention how amazingly helpful most profs are, but against a few bad seeds, and the havoc they're capable of wreaking.

In spite of being at the 'No. 1 engineering college' in the country, some profs in this place have about as much maturity as a 16 year old teenager. A friend of mine recently scored 52.5 on an exam, the highest scored being 58, had done decently enough in the previous exams of the course, yet was handed a P. That's just one grade above F (Failure). Reason ? She didn't attend too many classes. As you can imagine, this is really going to mess up her semester grade point average. But that's still peanuts compared to what this other friend of mine had to go through, at the hands of the same prof: an F...something he's not capable of getting even if he tries to. And it's not the grade, but how it was given, that really makes me sick. Correct answers haven't been evaluated, and he's been given a big fat zero in an arbitary chunk of marks reserved for the professor's fancy: a chunk of size 20%

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't accountability supposed to be a two way street ? There are innumerable checks and balances to see to it that a student gets his comeuppance if he screws up in any way, but the aforementioned prof seems to be able to get away with bloody murder. There's no way to complain about the quality of teaching, no way to appeal dubious (to say the least) correction and on top of that, there's 20 marks that have been legally reserved to enable such a prof to reward his golden boys..the guys who ask doubts where none exist, who shower the prof with blatantly fake adulation which the prof still can't (or won't) see through (no reference to anyone i know, in case you think i'm talking about you ;-) )..and to punish those who 'don't show him enough respect'. Oh boy, if I had a dime for every time I heard that phrase...

The gal who got the P makes a good point: if someone can succeed in spite of going to your classes, does that say more about his/her supposed disrespect, or about your standard of teaching? The only thing that matters is how good you are at a subject, not how you got good at it. Do such profs, after all their accomplishments, have such fragile egos, that they'll take personal offense for everytime a student misses a class ? Common sense: If the academic day starts off at 7 : 30 in the ****ing moring, you're bound to miss a few classes. Besides, some classes are so boring, it's torture to expect one to sit through them 4 hrs every week. Too often, this point is brushed aside as immaturity, but I would rather not attend a boring lecture just because I'm supposed to, than attend it and have my interest in the subject killed off. And this has happened all too often. What is the point of attending some classes where all the prof does is a recitation (and that too, a bad one) of the prescribed textbook ? The truth is, classroom teaching may be sufficient for someone to do well in a subject, but it's not neccessary. And it's not fair to begrudge someone because he/she obtained the knowledge that was required from an avenue other than you. Maybe it's disrespectful to miss class after class, maybe the prof is right to be furious at a kid who does that, but the bottomline is that it's not the kid's job to respect the prof, nor the prof's job to like the kid. The kid is supposed to know the subject, and the prof is supposed to teach it, and assess how well the kid knows it. Period.