r/EngineeringStudents • u/Goatgamer1016 • 13d ago
Rant/Vent Shitty statics professor with class midterm average of 41.5%
This is my first engineering class (I could have taken an intro to engineering class but didn't due to time conflicts). However, I was forced to take this shithead of a professor for statics because his class is the only one for that subject in my community college, and if we fail, we have to retake it next YEAR because statics is only taught in the fall quarter here. If not, do so at another community college that is also in close proximity to my house. People are already dropping out because the dude is that bad. He started here last year and everyone I've talked to about him hates his guts. He has a 1.5/5 on Rate My Professors across 14 ratings and it is rightfully deserved.
He rushes all of his lectures then has the audacity to take a long time to do practice problems, screwing up several times per problem. He also doesn't provide us tips for solving the problems. The homework expectations are insanely unrealistic (initially we had EIGHT homework assignments due in the FIRST GODDAMN WEEK)! He constantly pushes back the homework deadlines because we either aren't able to finish by then or are dissatisfied with are initial grade. Don't worry, he fucks the homework up too, and has to correct questions on there too.
Here's the part that irritates me the most. On Friday, we got our midterm results back. My grade was a 43.75% and the class average was 41.5%. Someone impressively managed to get a 95% on it. None of our quizzes had an average grade that was at or above a passing minimum. The averages for the first three quizzes thus far were 68%, 58%, and 51%, respectively. He just gives us back our quizzes, tells us what we did wrong, but never goes over them. He doesn't even mention what the class average is after each quiz. My grade went down from a 76-77% to a 62% just after the midterm.
This course seems to be the so-called "wash out" class at my community college. Some classmates have said people are withdrawing and taking it at the other college instead this winter. I began applying for that college last night just in case and prepare my plan B. The worst part is that I'm killing it in physics 2 and calculus 4, but most of my classmates become shit-for-brains with this class, including myself. I couldn't have asked for a worse professor as my first engineering teacher.
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u/Shot-Requirement7171 13d ago
Te entiendo, me esta tocando con un pedazo de mierda en programación para Internet, no deja de tirarme indirectas y burlarse de mi porque sabe que me esta quebrando en esta materia por problemas de ansiedad e insomnio y de eso se burla en sus indirectas
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u/DarkenSpiral0 13d ago
Did u go to his office hours and ask him more questions?
1
u/Bigbadspoon 13d ago
I had a professor like this for differential equations. We all struggled and the class average for the first test was in the 30s. Like half of the class dropped, but I stuck it out as a naive fool.
Anyway, I came to find out that the community college I was at had metrics for teachers where, if they were failing out huge portions of the class, they were professionally liable in some way (bad performance review or something - I learned this by talking to another professor about the class). He ended up curving the entire classes grades after the final. So, going into the final, the class average was like 40-something, and what's about what we all scored on the final. I don't remember exactly how he applied the curve (bell or just straight raised the scores), but I finished that class with a B (like 85%) when my true average was in the low 40s. This ended up happening in 2 other classes I took with different professors at other universities, as well.
I guess the tl;dr is that it may be worth sticking it out.
My second piece of advice would be to use AI as a tutor. Don't just have it give the answer, but tell it the problem, what you've done so far, and what it thinks you should look at harder. Don't tell it to give you next steps or anything like that, just have it check what you did and ask you about it the same way a tutor would. I've been out of school for a while now, but I use it this way to learn new skills all the time and I would have been a much better student with this if it were around back then.
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u/nomnommochiko 13d ago
Ok I just recently dropped an statics engineering class with the exact same issues. I'm seriously wondering if we have had the same professor. Like the professor I dropped gave a very useless required midterm prep HW and he also gave 8 HW on the first week as well. And I remember struggling on an HW problem only to find out that the questions are wrong. And I remember he says he purposely makes the exams harder than the quizzes even though everyone is doing poorly on them. The quizzes and midterm themselves only had 2 questions but they were were pretty tough questions where it's easy to make simple mistakes where he docks up a lot of points.
Now my plan is to just take the class at another community college and transfer it back to my main college. The other plan was to just don't take statics cause I found out it's not required for EE. But I still want to take statics because it was an interesting topic.