You know that professor that everyone loves, the one who gives fair exams and compensates any unexpected difficulties with a slight curve or a makeup exam? This is not about those professors.

This is about the professors that don't teach well or give fair exams, the professors that slack throughout the entire year and are upset when students express frustration but toss the legitimate concerns aside because "they know best." This is about the professors who accidentally fail half of the class and think they can make up for it by simply bumping everyone's grades up and forgetting about it before they pass them along to the next professor.

You might think that the professor is being kind by doing this, but I disagree. There is nothing worse than struggling through a course for a semester and scraping by with the best grade you can manage, built solely off of Yahoo Answers and Khan Academy to guide you. I guarantee you will have at least one of these professors before graduating, if you haven't already.

By the time you've finished the course, you have maybe half an understanding of what just happened, and a lot less money in your pockets depending on how much tuition costs. Hell, your course may as well have been taught by a dog, and it probably would have been much more adorable and less stressful.

You might think, hey, at least I have an A instead of a C now and my GPA is much better. That's true, but that's also the problem with measuring intelligence in terms of numbers--which is a problem I'm not even going to tackle right now. The problem here is that you've finished the course, sure, but you still have basically no idea what's going on.

If grades are supposed to reflect how knowledgeable a student is on the material, that D turned B is nothing but a huge lie. Best case scenario: you've just lost a large chunk of time and money on these useless lectures. Worst case scenario, that was an introductory course, and now you have no idea what any of your new professors are talking about either. Either way, you're screwed.

And maybe the worst part of this is that it will never stop happening. Because the professor just curves all of the failing grades, nothing actually looks wrong. The students are passing, the grade distribution looks fine, and the professor continues teaching with no trouble.

And it is kind, that they curve the grades, that the blow to the students is at least softened a bit. But that does not make it okay. And I did not come to university and pay thousands of dollars to have a professor teach me less than I can learn from Googling around a bit.

At the end of the day, this course may not even impact you very much. You may even get used to teaching yourself the material, and eventually it will become an accepted reality as you slog through the course with little to no guidance.

The only thing I ask of you is this: Please don't ignore the problem. Students are the only ones that can do anything about this, and it is up to them to give feedback on professors so that either they or the university can take action to prevent it from happening.

So next time you have a professor like this, do the right thing and write a scathing report. And hey, even if nothing changes, at least it was cathartic.