August Spies

There is no way, absolutly no way, that a few misspelling should mark you down to D. Pure bullshit. And I agree, what kind of idiot doesnt' understand the word learned?

Writer@Large

I agree ... especially when the "misspellings" aren't true misspellings, but dialectal variations (color/colour). If the worst thing my students did was spell like Brits, I'd probably dance on my desk.

--W@L

Celsus

Hi Bree,

It looks like it could well be a clear-cut case of bias. What exactly does the system of writing/grammar/spelling have to do with a class on leaders (which seems admittedly braindead as well)? Would foreign students coming from British English systems be penalised as well? It sounds ridiculously pedantic. Of course, it is important for the writing to be of a better standard than highschool writing, but what she is penalising is the system of writing, and not the standard in this case.

If you are consistently using British spelling, punctuation, etc. then you could put forward a case that you are just operating by a different system (and no system is without exceptions, although British punctuation is far more consistent than American).

That said, "programme" is an import. "Program" existed in British English but was eventually uprooted, thanks to the bloody French.

Joel

Sol

I recently read this book and couldn't agree more with your assessment.

Shadowy Man

How could she possibly know you had an excellent grasp of the concepts if your writing was completely unclear?

trunks2k

A lot of people did this with several of my classes last year. Mainly Computer Science and Biology. Computer science was just because EXACTLY what is said in lecture was on the class website. Lecture was a complete waste of time because the notes supplied to us on the internet by the proffessors were very well done and extremely clear.

Biology was just because the prof was an idiot and a bitch, NOBODY liked her. There is/was a site on the internet that someone set up so students could rank teachers at my school and make comments. Out of a scale of 10, where 10 is the highest rank, her average score was .8. And she had more people rank her than any other proffessor! That was only because the scoring of the teacher was broken down into several sections, one of which was "workload" which was nothing to complain about. Even my TA for biology hated her, we showed her the site and she agreed pretty much with what everyone said about her. AFAIK that prof ended up getting let go by the end of the year

Here are some nice quotes from the reviews:


Here are some choice quotes from some of the students:

edit to add more quotes.

And my personal favorite:

Loren Pechtel

Originally posted by trunks2k
A lot of people did this with several of my classes last year. Mainly Computer Science and Biology. Computer science was just because EXACTLY what is said in lecture was on the class website. Lecture was a complete waste of time because the notes supplied to us on the internet by the proffessors were very well done and extremely clear.

As far as I'm concerned, most classes at high school and above do not need teachers and should not have them. The VCR can lecture as well as a teacher can.

Instead, what you need is someone you can ask questions of.

Even my TA for biology hated her, we showed her the site and she agreed pretty much with what everyone said about her. AFAIK that prof ended up getting let go by the end of the year

A lot more need to be.



As for not speaking English, it happened to me once. Technically he could speak English. Between his accent, the audio system (there were too many students for the room, so half of us got a different room with the lecture on tv), the room acustics and his tortured sentance structure I could just barely figure out what he was saying and I couldn't do it in realtime--by the time I figured out one sentance I had missed the next one. (A tape recorder didn't help--I simply couldn't understand the tape.)

Add to this that this was a 400-level course but the first day of class he got stumped by a question any CS-102 student should have been able to answer. Three times it was asked, twice he rambled back to his lecture without answering it, the third time someone else piped up with the answer. (I strongly suspect that the student who asked the question did so only because they had gotten confused--I see no way anyone could have gotten there without knowing the answer.) That was the last question asked, also.

pz

Waahh. You guys are making me cringe.

Silent Dave

Of course, all my college professors were delightful human beings.


Dave

pz

Perhaps this is a state that is only true of college professors in Minnesota and the Dakotas.