Below is seventh in a series of unedited writing of my grandson who is a college student in the US.
" One of the most important factors in whether or not you will succeed in a class is the Professor. This is the person who will hand down your grades, explain the subject matter to you, and answer any questions you might have.
Normally, if a student does poorly in a class, they did not study hard enough. However, there are bad Professors, people who are ill suited to teach, but for one reason or another, still continue to. You cannot really do much about a bad teacher, but there are some ways you can avoid them. Asking students who have previously had that teacher is one way to get a feel for the teaching style. Websites such as ratemyprofessors.com provide details and testimonies about professors at various colleges. You can search by name or by school. When registering for courses online, you can see who is teaching that course ahead of time.
Obviously, you must take everything you read or hear with a grain of salt. Just as there are bad professors, there are also bad students who complain when in reality, the grade they got was the one they deserved. But that is not always the case. If there are many different people who dislike that teacher, there may be a reason for it. There are some bad teachers at every school, just like there are some good teachers at every school. I use the word bad, for lack of a better term. When I say bad, here are some of the things I mean:
They do not explain things clearly
They do not understand the material
They do not encourage discussion
They lead discussions that are flat and unhelpful
The last point is a big ambiguous so I shall explain. I have had teachers who believe in one interpretation of a text. They refuse all others, so basically if you do not agree with them, they grade you poorly. Any discussion on it is thus flat and unhelpful and merely restates what they already believe. In this case, you would just have to play along and write what they want to read.
Those are some of the problems I have run into during my school career. I believe that with a bad teacher, you cannot do as well as you are able to in a class. You will also not learn as much. It is worth considering who the instructor is, when picking your courses.
(Note added by the blogger 3/8/2010: this article reminded me of my own experience in 1952 (yes, it was 58 years ago) when I took a course on Mechanics-Statics at MIT. The course had three one hour quizzes and one final examination. My scores on the three quizzez were 98,100, and 98. I was so confident of my performance and understanding of the course going into the final exam that I was sure I shall recevie a grade of "A". The three hour final was the last exams of the semester, there were five problems all of which appeared very easy to me. I finsihes the first four in half of the time and decided that this should guarantee an "A" grade for me. So I simply skipped the fifth problem, handed in my exam book , and went out to celebrate the end of the semester. When I finally received my report card, I got a grade of "C" which shocked me. So I complained to the professor. It turns out what happened was that the final exam was too easy for many people. Many person did all five problems and received a perfect mark on the final. These people by definition must receive a grade of "A" since they showed that they finally performed perfectly. The professor can only give out so many "A"s in a course. Consequently, anyone who received anything other than perfect got a "B". These are people who got grades around 90/100. By the time, the professor got to people who got 80/100 (i.e., four out of five problems), he had no choice but to give a grade of "C". All previous results in the course no longer count.
This was the only "C" grade I receive in all my unviersity and graduate studies and it taught me two lessons:
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