[throwaway2037]

    > Instructors and professors are required to be subject matter experts but many are not required to have a teaching certification or education-related degree.

I attended two universities to get my computer science degree. The first was somewhat famous/prestigious, and I found most of the professors very unapproachable and cared little about "teaching well". The second was a no-name second tier public uni, but I found the professors much more approachable, and they made more effort to teach well. I am still very conflicted about that experience. Sadly, the students were way smarter at the first uni, so the intellectual rigor of discussions was much higher than my second uni. My final thoughts: "You win some; you lose some."

[ninetyninenine]

This is universal. I’ve had largely the same experience. There’s several reasons for this.

1. Stupider people are better teachers. Smart people are too smart to have any empathic experience on what it’s like to not get something. They assume the world is smart like them so they glaze over topics they found trivial but most people found confusing.

2. They don’t need to teach. If the student body is so smart then the students themselves can learn without teaching.

3. Since students learn so well there’s no way to differentiate. So institutions make the material harder. They do this to differentiate students and give rankings. Inevitably this makes education worse.

[lamename]

It's simpler than that. "Prestigious" universities emphasize research prestige over all else on faculty. Faculty optimize for it and some even delight in being "hard" (bad) teachers because they see it as beneath them.

Less "prestigious" universities apply less of that pressure.

[seniorThrowaway]

It can also be different within the same university, by department. I graduated from a university with a highly ranked and research oriented engineering department. I started in computer engineering which was in the college of engineering but ended up switching to computer science which was in the college of arts and sciences. The difference in the teachers and classroom experience was remarkable. It definitely seemed like the professors in the CS department actually wanted to teach and actually enjoyed teaching as compared to the engineering professors who treated it like it was wasting their time and expected you to learn everything from the book and their half-assed bullet point one way lectures. Unfortunately or fortunately, depending on your view, it also meant having to take more traditional liberal arts type electives in order to graduate.

[datadrivenangel]

I did once have a Physics lecturer say " When I took Quantum Mechanics back in my undergrad, I got an A but didn't actually understand anything" and then in the same lecture 20 minutes later: "What part of this do you not understand?" when the entire class was just blankly looking at the whiteboard.

[SoftTalker]

At least at the undergrad level, it's not impossible to get an "A" without actually learning anything. Especially Freshman/Sophomore level classes. You just cram for the exams and regurgitate what you memorized. Within a few months time it's mostly gone.

[stackedinserter]

Seriously, what so non-understandable in first 20 minutes of QM?

[brookst]

Probably depends on how it’s explained, no?

I could make arithmetic incomprehensible, let alone QM.

[vonneumannstan]

They never implied it was the first 20 minutes of the entire course

[datadrivenangel]

This was about halfway through the semester.

[falcor84]

That's been my experience too, and I think it actually makes perfect sense from an evolutionary perspective - if the students are smart enough to learn well regardless of the level of the instruction, then the professors don't face any pressure to improve.

Taking this to the extreme, I think that a top-tier university could do very well for itself by only providing a highly selective admission system, good facilities and a rigorous assessment process, while leaving the actual learning to the students.

[keiferski]

Universities don’t pick professors because they are good teachers, they pick them for their research publications. The fact that some professors end up being good teachers is almost coincidental.

[bsenftner]

For the most part, most universities, that is true. I was dissatisfied with the quality of my undergrad college education, and had the resources to try other universities. After two state schools, I figured out that Boston is The University City with 700,000 college students in the larger Boston area when I attended Boston University, MIT and Harvard. I found Boston's over sized undergraduate population created a credit sharing system for all the Boston area colleges, and if one wanted they could just walk onto anther campus and take their same class at your university. So, of course, I took at the classes I could at Harvard. I was formally an engineering student at BU, but as far as the professors at Harvard and MIT knew I was a student at their school. What I found was that at Harvard, and about 75% of the time at MIT, the professors are incredibly good, they are the educational best self actualizing as teachers. Every single Harvard professor took a personal interest in my learning their subject. I saw that no where else.

[keiferski]

Yeah at that level you’re basically optimizing for all around excellence, and it’s hard to be a leader in your field without also being deeply interested in it at all levels — and being reasonably charismatic.

I’ve only taken classes at state schools, and my experience was that I’d often get a professor that was clearly brilliant at publishing but lacked even the most rudimentary teaching skills. Which is insightful in its own way…just not optimal for teaching.

[SoftTalker]

This is true for research universities. There are many excellent teaching colleges where professors are hired to teach, and don't do research.

[infecto]

Sounds more like the unfortunate differences between teaching professors and research professors. Unfortunately some research schools force professors to teach N credits per semester even if that is not their speciality.

Your approach sounds too elitist for myself. I think you simply figure out the core skills of your professors. Maybe some teach undergrad well, others only advanced degrees. Maybe some should just be left to research with minimal classrooms etc.

[lukan]

I rather think it is a elitist concept of "I am a highly respected professor at a elite uni, how dare you bother me with your profane questions!"

I was at a Uni aiming for and then gaining "Elite" status in germany and I did not liked the concept and the changes.

I like high profile debates. As high as possible. But I don't like snobism. We all started as newbs.