Quality professors a must
By Daniel Feeney
Feb. 24, 2009 9:00 p.m.
As we head to class, we are preparing to receive a precious commodity: education. Each year we prove how precious this commodity is by doling out thousands upon thousands of dollars to pay for tuition, books, and room and board.
Enrolling in our classes, however, we demonstrate how we often do not hold UCLA, and ourselves, liable for ensuring we get the best education possible. By using Web sites such as BruinWalk to avoid poorly rated professors, we are failing to hold UCLA accountable for the occassionally bad, sometimes terrible, professors. In the future, UCLA must provide an improved system, whether it is BruinWalk, student evaluations or something else, of ensuring that professors are held responsible for actually teaching the class material.
Each quarter thousands of students head to the well-known Web site bruinwalk.com to check out what their potential professors will be like. Students carefully look at who is teaching their courses, attempting to avoid those professors whose descriptions on BruinWalk read, as one professor’s did, “WORST WORST professor I’ve had in any school.” The professor who is incoherent, who often goes off on pointless tangents, who includes material that he or she never lectured about on tests, the student’s worst nightmare.
Every so often students cannot avoid taking classes with the feared bad professor. At this juncture, students are forced to sacrifice quality education for the necessity of filling one of their requisite classes.
Paul Bioche, a first-year electrical engineering student, said one of his professor’s lectures “are so pointless that (he) stopped going.” Bioche also said the professor seems very intelligent, “but he just can’t teach.”
Instead Bioche said that he attends another professor’s lectures so he can at least learn and prepare for his classes next quarter, while only showing up for his professor’s quizzes and tests.
Being forced to potentially sacrifice a grade in one class in order to learn is not something that you should have to worry about with tuition over $7,000. Many students feel a frustration similar to Bioche’s, a frustration that led him to ask: “If you don’t learn anything from a professor and just learn everything on your own, then what is UCLA about?”
UCLA, as an institute of higher education, should be holding its professors to a much higher standard of accountability. While we are aware that professors with well-known names and impressive resumes are important to the prestige of the university, the primary function of this university should be to teach undergraduates. By allowing professors who cannot (or simply don’t try to) teach to continue lecturing, the value of a UCLA degree is being degraded and our money appears to be squandered.
I will be the first to admit that I do occasionally slack on my work if I think I can get away with it. But in order for us to get the most out of our education, we should pause to realize how important it is that we put our best foot forward in understanding the material. We often listen to friends talk about the easy “A” they got in one class, or we use BruinWalk in order to find a ridiculously easy General Education.
As tempting as it may be to use a class as a GPA booster, it would be far more productive in the long run if we took the classes that truly interested us or courses that are useful, regardless of their difficulty. Attending college would be a waste of four years if we looked at it as only a necessary waiting period for a piece of paper with a GPA to get into graduate school or to get a job. When we do not always take our classes seriously, when we are slacking off in our studies, we are wasting our time and our (or our parents’) hard-earned money.
Accountability is important with any purchase we make. We would not go to a car dealership, buy a car and simply accept that it has broken down on the way home. Nor would we bump the car into things and generally treat it in an offhand, uncaring manner. Just as we would not treat our car this way, we should not treat our education in such a fashion, failing to take it seriously enough or allowing it to fail us.
E-mail Feeney at [email protected]. Send general comments to [email protected].
