Its the beginning of the new school year, and that means we've spent hours on ratemyprofessor.com carefully picking and choosing the best professors, or unfortunately being stuck with the toughest of the tough.
I hope my professors know that I'm not a super human. Every college course requires at least 1-3 hours of studying outside of class each day. So, if we take say 5 classes, thats at least 5 hours a day, but more than likely it will be 1ish hours, and theres only 24 hours in a day....I hope they know that making tricky test questions doesn't make us learn more, nor does it encourage us. Its completely unnecessary. Making homework and lecture seem doable then creating a test that is ultimately nothing what you taught doesn't make you a good professor. All it does is discourage us as students.
Heres to the professors that walk in on syllabus day and say "This class is hard, 50% of you will drop, the others will make C's, a handful of you will make B's, and 1-2 will make A's". I have never understood why professors do this. I thought the whole point of being a professor was to see your students succeed? So, why would it be a professors goal to fail students? The goal should be to see most of the students succeed not fail. I understand that not everyone will pass and the course is hard, but the results should for no reason be that drastic. If the students fail, the professor failed.
Don't you absolutely hate being .5 or .2 or even .6 away from being a whole letter grade higher at the end of the semester? We beg professors to give us that little bump to save our GPA and they usually say "it looks like you lacked somewhere in the course" or "It is what it is". No. This is anything but fair. Nothing pisses off a student who works and studies hard day and night than to be told that they didn't work hard enough. Bumping your student up by .5 to save their GPA is not going to do you any harm? Give us what we deserve. Some professors may say "well this is life, theres no second chances" I get it okay, you're trying to teach me about life, but trust me we have life hitting us hard at the same time, so make this about school, you don't need to teach us about second chances. If life didn't give out second chances, no one would have made it as far as they have. Come on, try to have a heart sometimes.
Also, please don't assign us hours worth of homework if its not going to help us in what we actually need to know. We have 1039042904 other priorities to take care of instead of doing busy work. I love learning, don't get me wrong, but at a college level, its better to learn what you need to know that everything you don't need to know.
If we take time out of our day to come to your office hours, it means we care and are truly trying to do well in your course. So, please take the time to appreciate that and answer our questions. Don't hit us with the "look at your notes...read chapter 5 again...look at example problems" If we could find it in any of the sources you gave us, we wouldn't take time out of our day to come ask you. So, genuinely please help instead of pissing us off.
For the professors who do give fair tests, teach entertaining lessons, and help students out, you have no idea how much we appreciate you and all you do for us throughout the semester! Thank you for understanding us, and giving us opportunities we normally wouldn't be given! Its because of professors like you that we remain sane.
We don't want to dislike you or your course, so don't make us! Everyone loves a fair professor and a fairly structured class. We may be in your class purely because we need it or because we are interested in it. Either way, we would all love to walk out at the end of the semester having learned something we didn't know before. All we want is for you to help us succeed.
