[edw]

American colleges more resemble four-year all-inclusive resorts than they do rigorous institutions of higher learning.

Serving someone well doesn’t necessarily mean making them happy. Students — people who by enrolling at an institution in a course of study admit their ignorance of that domain — do not seem to me good judges of an instructor qua instructor.

[Y7ZCQtNo39]

Students aren't reviewing the quality of their campus on-site gym when they review their professor.

There's genuine concerns that should be reasonably heard. One example is slowness in grading homework/exams/etc. What happens is professors get backlogged, and you have multiple homework/exams and the student missed on understanding some concept they were later graded on. If the student had regular grade updates, they would know where they needed to focus more on the course material to master it. Instead, those misunderstandings snowball and you end up doing worse on a final exam since you didn't know what course concepts you correctly understood and missed.

I agree broadly with the wholistic assessment of what American colleges have become. But the review process is still germane-- classes are the core offering of college.

[edw]

I remember with fondness a professor of mine who drove mad some of my classmates by basically only grading papers on demand, due undoubtedly to some of what you’be mentioned undoubtedly.

Classes may be what students take when they go to college, but I always thought of them more as ice-breakers for the forming of relationships with instructors and fellow students and a way to foster a community of intellectual enquiry.

[dragonwriter]

> American colleges more resemble four-year all-inclusive resorts than they do rigorous institutions of higher learning.

I've been to both American colleges and all-inclusive resorts and, no, they don't.

[edw]

I’ll take your word for it, but the ads for Sandals resort I saw on tv twenty years ago sure seem a lot like what I observe walking through NYU’s campus every day.

[Fomite]

Answering emails from students while at an all-inclusive resort made this comment particularly funny.

And yeah, they really don't.

[whatshisface]

There is a universal baseline expectation that everything the instructor says will be correct, so the student's lack of knowledge isn't holding them back. What they have to evaluate is how good the professor was at teaching, and they are the foremost experts on that subject.