25 Universities with the Worst Professors

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Agree...just think where ISU would've been ranked had the poll provided "A's" and a case of Corona beer to all participants...:eek:hno:
 
I saw the headline and honestly, I fully expected ISU to be on there, not that high though. I had some truly awful professors while at Indiana State, to be honest. People who just didn't seem to care and it showed. Try sitting through a class with someone like that at 8 a.m. and see how much you learn. That was 15 years ago and I'm sad to see it hasn't changed. It should embarrass the university and the good professors at the school, nevermind the alumni. Pick on the source if you want but that's turning a blind eye on a real problem. The university needs to expect more from its professors.
 
4Q_iu said:
Any list that uses "ratemyprofessors.com" as the SOURCE of the data isn't worth reading. Seriously, RPI (Rensselaer {NY} Polytechnic Institute) is a really good school; the RHIT of NY if you will; actually it's a helluva lot BETTER than RHIT...
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Not sure how it is now, but when I was in school it was just getting off the ground and it pretty much only had bad reviews. I think the Princeton Review actually uses it in their rankings now, which is a bit scary.
 

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Anyone who uses RatemyProfessor.com as a reliable source is a joke. Should incoming Freshman use TotalFratMove.com to make judgements on what Fraternity or Sorority they want to be a part of?
 
It's like anything else in life - only the people who are pissed off go on and rate. If you has a good experience the chances of you going online and completing a review are very small.

We have the same issue with patient surveying in healthcare. The patients who had a bad experience give you low rating and the ones that had a positive outcomes usually don't bother.

Still, you try and limit the number of bad survey's that come in. If Indiana State is not taking steps to do this then they are missing the boat no matter how "stupid" the survey tool is. It takes a certain "type" of student to make negative ratings on RMP.com - usually they are low students who are spending more time rating professors than taking notes in class. Do a better job evaluating who you admit into IState.

Like these guys, how do they get into school at Indiana State?? http://www.wthitv.com/dpp/news/crime/three-accused-of-gunpoint-robbery#.UYE5LmS9LCQ
 
SycamoreStateofMind said:
It's like anything else in life - only the people who are pissed off go on and rate. If you has a good experience the chances of you going online and completing a review are very small.

We have the same issue with patient surveying in healthcare. The patients who had a bad experience give you low rating and the ones that had a positive outcomes usually don't bother.

Still, you try and limit the number of bad survey's that come in. If Indiana State is not taking steps to do this then they are missing the boat no matter how "stupid" the survey tool is. It takes a certain "type" of student to make negative ratings on RMP.com - usually they are low students who are spending more time rating professors than taking notes in class. Do a better job evaluating who you admit into IState.

Like these guys, how do they get into school at Indiana State?? http://www.wthitv.com/dpp/news/crime/three-accused-of-gunpoint-robbery#.UYE5LmS9LCQ
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Agreed.

I'll tell you why. Because Indiana State focuses on recruiting the WRONG students. I could elaborate but all you need to do is jump on Twitter and do a search for "Indiana State" and read through the Tweets. I wouldn't trust some of the kids bragging about getting full/partial scholarships to serve me fries at McDonald's. I see kids commonly state they're selecting between ISU, Tennessee State and some other random directional. Until the school quits the nonsense, ups the incoming requirements and makes it a real, bonafide alternative to IU, this is the sort of shit we're going to deal with.

Tanner STILL has not received anything from Indiana State. Guess what, Indiana State is now pretty much out of the picture unless his first choices don't come through -- he's likely headed to IU if he can get the costs down. IU has sent him mail religiously since he attended Summer Honors there. Attended the same at Indiana State a year later and hasn't heard from them since. I don't give a shit about the processes in place... they suck and should be changed/scrapped. The fact that Indiana State doesn't actively have a presense in Hamilton County is absurd.

As Dr. Charles Cooper told me in my freshman MIS class... GIGO and it's never failed me. Garbage in, garbage out.
 
We had 100's of these "back in the dayz," most who dropped out of school after their BEOG/Pell Grant checks arrived @ ISU Financial Aids Office...their parents REAP the government system of "freebies," and they continue the legacy after being "groomed" like a KY Derby racehorse for years.
 
I saw this article this morning and to be honest was a bit shocked that we were on that list. Then I realized the source used to conduct this survey was from ratemyprofessor.com which is by far the worst source to use when conducting a survey on which universities have the worst professors. I transfered to ISU all the way from Southern California in 2008 for mainly one reason the criminology department at the time was ranked top 15 in the nation and is still ranked up there I believe, also thought I could still play football but we'll save that for another time. I've had some great professors and some professors that I just couldn't stand at all, so yes I was one of those kids that would go on RMP.com and bash on a professor. Trust me ISU students are pretty cruel when something happens that they don't like or they don't get there way. So they go on and give horrible ratings to a professor who probably didn't deserve it begin with, just because the student probably received a grade that they earned by not showing up to class or not studying for test. It's funny because from the time I arrived in 2008(joke of a School) to when I graduated 2010(Respectable Midwest School) the school I believe made dramatic changes on campus and upped the incoming requirements. You could tell just by being in the classroom that the school was trying to recruit better and smarter, I hope this is still the case. I know now that to get into ISU you need a 3.2 Gpa out of high school which is a huge difference from 2.5 gpa. Slowly but surely ISU is getting there but Jason does have a point they need to start recruiting the counties just outside of Indy and stop with the recruiting of kids who could barely pass high school. Lastly the yahoo article needs to be taken off or find a better source.
 

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Jason Svoboda said:
Agreed.

I'll tell you why. Because Indiana State focuses on recruiting the WRONG students. I could elaborate but all you need to do is jump on Twitter and do a search for "Indiana State" and read through the Tweets. I wouldn't trust some of the kids bragging about getting full/partial scholarships to serve me fries at McDonald's. I see kids commonly state they're selecting between ISU, Tennessee State and some other random directional. Until the school quits the nonsense, ups the incoming requirements and makes it a real, bonafide alternative to IU, this is the sort of shit we're going to deal with.

Tanner STILL has not received anything from Indiana State. Guess what, Indiana State is now pretty much out of the picture unless his first choices don't come through -- he's likely headed to IU if he can get the costs down. IU has sent him mail religiously since he attended Summer Honors there. Attended the same at Indiana State a year later and hasn't heard from them since. I don't give a shit about the processes in place... they suck and should be changed/scrapped. The fact that Indiana State doesn't actively have a presense in Hamilton County is absurd.

As Dr. Charles Cooper told me in my freshman MIS class... GIGO and it's never failed me. Garbage in, garbage out.
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Boda it probably will not make you feel any better to know that the head of the Guidance Dept. at HSE is Nancy Herndon a ISU alum and a former captain of the Sparkettes. Isn't this a little like the chicken and the egg. Which comes first good students then good professors or good professors then good students?
 
I certainly had some good professors at ISU (engaged professors), especially in the fields I majored in, but not in entry level courses, not those general studies, or elective courses. As I said, it's easy to point to the source, but every school has that excuse and we still rank this high.

It's a problem. I'll give you a quick example. I took what I think was math 111 at ISU and failed it the first time through (obviously math is not my skill set). Couldn't even tell you now the name of the professor, but he was an old fart who struggled to make it in most days and was grumpy when he did. The next semester I took the course again with a TA and got an A. The guy was engaged, focused, really had a passion for teaching. One of those people you wish you could have for every class you take. Instead you pay a lot of money to sit in classes with people who just want to get through the semester as fast as possible. I say this and I come from a family of teachers, including a former ISU math professor. To put it simply, we should expect more and an article like this says something. Don't take it as a blow to your personal pride, take it as an example of what needs to be fixed at ISU.
 
To put it simply, I had several poor grades in college and looking back I am not going to be so self righteous to think that poor teaching resulted in my getting a poor grade - thats a cop out. I had some shitty professor experiences but any of the bad grades I got were my own doing and not anyone else - I am proud of that fact.
 

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How'd you come out in that East Asian Carp Fishing 201 Class?:smile:

BTW, some of you have no clue re: "bad professors" unless you attended ISU during the late 60's early 70's, when ISU was hiring any live body w/ a full beard off the streets and attaching the term "professor" to them. These were the "Intro to ____" classes @ ISU during the most rapid period of growth in college history, where classrooms were jam packed 300 seat auditoriums (Holmstedt Hall), poor audio & overhead video and virtually no 1st hand communication w/ your professor and accompanying 3 or 4 TA's.
 
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SycamoreStateofMind said:
To put it simply, I had several poor grades in college and looking back I am not going to be so self righteous to think that poor teaching resulted in my getting a poor grade - thats a cop out. I had some shitty professor experiences but any of the bad grades I got were my own doing and not anyone else - I am proud of that fact.
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It's not a cop out, it's an expectation that if you pay someone they're going to do the job to the best of their ability. I busted my ass in college both in school and working full time. Again though, ignoring the problem and saying it's all on the students to do better and acting as if it's about young people being coddled does nothing to address the issue and improve a university's reputation. All of the professors should be held accountable to the opinions of the students (customers) taking their classes.
 
bent20 said:
It's not a cop out, it's an expectation that if you pay someone they're going to do the job to the best of their ability. I busted my ass in college both in school and working full time. Again though, ignoring the problem and saying it's all on the students to do better and acting as if it's about young people being coddled does nothing to address the issue and improve a university's reputation. All of the professors should be held accountable to the opinions of the students (customers) taking their classes.
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By and large, all my professors at ISU were good to very good. Strangely enough, the farther along I got in my studies, the worse the professors were, although I wouldn't rate but maybe one or two as just bad. Some of my favorite, and best professors were from my freshman and sophomore years in the general ed portion of my studies. Dr. Meisenheimer for English, Dr. Layton for WWII, and several others were just flat out excellent. I even had some math professors that were very good, and I hate math with a passion.

I did have the Econ professor who would come into the office in Holmstedt Hall at about 3:00 a.m. and (I learned later) start drinking. He gave us a test one day, and the next class just ripped us up and down because our class had done so badly on the test and we were the dumbest people he'd ever had in class, yadda, yadda, yadda. Someone finally got up the guts to tell him that we hadn't actually done that chapter yet...crickets chirped...and we moved on...still one of my favorite stories.

All professors should take into account what students are saying about them, but students do not necessarily always want what is in their best interest. They'd rather get an easy A than a tough B, even though the tough B is better for them.

It's a conundrum, and there's no good way around it. Unhappy customers are many times more likely to tell people about their experience than a happy customer. It's that way in every service industry. ISU just needs to make sure it has some method of accountability for professors to make sure the job is getting done. Different styles of teaching will achieve different results and will be popular with different people. Of course, once they get tenure, a professor can show up and read Playboy at every class and it doesn't matter...
 
IndyTreeFan said:
I did have the Econ professor who would come into the office in Holmstedt Hall at about 3:00 a.m. and (I learned later) start drinking. He gave us a test one day, and the next class just ripped us up and down because our class had done so badly on the test and we were the dumbest people he'd ever had in class, yadda, yadda, yadda. Someone finally got up the guts to tell him that we hadn't actually done that chapter yet...crickets chirped...and we moved on...still one of my favorite stories.

Reminds me of a Geology prof. (Dr. Michaels) I had back in ISU '72...he had a similar problem w/ the bottle, and one day we went to class in the Science bldg. and saw a note attached to the door saying that class was "cancelled" because the prof. had died. Later discovered that scerosis of the liver had taken hold of him.

On the other hand, I'll never forget an incident during the Fall of '70 (surprised I can recall ANY of life that semester), while pledging Theta Chi. A good friend from E-ville Harrison returned to ISU w/ me that year, and prodded the "party animal" in me. We rarely attended class, and one day my buddy told me that he went to the classroom where his Macroeconomics class was supposedly held, but he left after a few minutes...thinking that he was in the wrong class after his Japanese professor began talking about "Gen. Motos" (General Motors)...:)...seriously!
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