If you could change one thing about college classes

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Hey guys, I was curious how you feel about college classes and professors. If you could alter one area of your academic career, what would you change? I'm going to use your responses to help formulate a research topic for my summer project.The ultimate goal is to help educate faculty on students with aspergers so we can make our campus more diverse and tolerant.

Dear Professor,

Stop wasting the entire lecture period explaining one, small detail to the one student who just doesn't "get it" (and who likely never will), when there are dozens of other students who do understand and who are getting frustrated with hearing the same answers to the same question from the same person over and over again.

Sincerely,

Fnord

More hands-on work and have the Teacher actually mentor the students.

Don't just sit there and read Power Point to us.

Dear Grad Student,

We who put forth the effort to show up early and prepared for your power-point presentations deserve for you to be prepared to start the lecture on time, and without any displays of arrogance or contempt from you regarding us lowly undergrads, who have paid good money for a good education and not to witness yet another one of your smarmy and condescending ego trips.

Sincerely,

Fnord

No group work. Hate it.

OMG I COMPLETELY agree! This makes me lose interest in class so quickly I have to find other things to occupy myself. In my bachelor level science class a student actually said in seminar "why do we need birds anyway?". An entire half hour of the hour long seminar was spent with my professor gently explaining that all life is important and the effects of creatures and plants are often not realized until they become extinct. I take my classes online, so when my husband walked by he said to me "why are you playing mahjong, looking at Facebook AND taking a quiz rather than focusing on your seminar?". To which I replied "because people in a bachelor level class can't understand why we need birds" his jaw dropped open and he said "oh, no wonder" and walked away shaking his head. Sorry for the rant but I become extremely frustrated when this occurs.

If I have a question like that I take it to the teacher or tutor separately from the main class.

Dear professors:

The whole testing method needs to change, now that a significant number of people can Google things from their pocket. If everyone would get 100% if you allowed Google on a test, then it's time to change your questions- as soon as people graduate, they can just Google anything they don't know how to do, without an hour time limit. Stop encouraging rote memorization; start encouraging people to apply the knowledge that they have.

This problem generally can be fixed in the sciences by having a rather extensive formula sheet. This goes double for basic physics.

I would do a couple of things.

1.) Give new students and prospective students a full breakdown of employment expectations and hiring rates for your major, complete with subsequent year-by-year updates. Most students entering college have no idea how their degree will affect them in terms of employment, and just go with what they find interesting, and I think that colleges should really provide more information and support to let students know what their chances of getting hired in a particular field will be after they get out.

2.) Eliminate or dramatically reduce "fluff" classes that don't pertain to your major. If I'm going to be an engineer, why do I have to take 3 geography classes and two British literature classes? Or if I'm going to be a psychologist, why do I need to know how to do an energy balance for physics? In my opinion all that those extra classes really do is make students stay in school longer, waste student's money by making them pay for those extra classes, and they take up time slots that could be used for far more effective and relevant courses.

Thanks for your feedback everyone. It seems most of us desire a fair,simple & pragmatically structured environment . My biggest concern would be a professors inflexibility, it makes it hard to change anything, if they will not change the way they view students.

1. Having instructors giving two s***s about how each student learns differently. Not all of us can comprehend multitudes of verbal information at once.

2. Instructors should not be assigning essay like homework assignments if it's not a writing class.

I'm a criminal justice major and I'm wondering how math is pertains to my degree. I should not have to go up to MTH 111 (Calculus or something) in order to get that degree, especially if I have dyscalculia. That really irritates me.

As an engineering major, I have nearly my entire schedule planned out due to fluff. They require me to take six courses which don't pertain to engineering at all, plus many engineering-related courses that only pertain to niche subjects within the broader field. Most people don't deal with polymers, ceramics, electrical circuits, composites, and metals in the same job, but we have to take separate courses on each one anyway.

Calculus and physics (for me) I can understand; some of the upper-division classes I can understand; but having a tight schedule due to them requiring that I take every engineering course under the sun is ridiculous.

This applies to engineering, but may be similar to other fields:

The school is tied to ABET accreditation for the engineering programs and to maintain accreditation, they require all those classes for your field even though you will likely go into only one of the more specific fields. Plus the school will assume that you will pursue a professional engineering license after graduation, and the tests for that will include questions in all those areas.

Actually, for the professional engineering test it's just in whatever area you're in. The FE exam covers all the other garbage though! A lot of engineering fields don't even require licenses really...I know that at my previous job, there were about 10 full-time engineers with 20+ years experience, and none of them had their professional license. Someone higher up just signs off on all their stuff.

On the contrast, I want more group work. I want to initiate interaction with classmates, but don't know how. Giving me a structured form of interaction really helps.

Group work is how I met my best friend.

This. Although it would be nice if professors understood that some of us find it torturous to find a group on our own. Group work is great, but it would be appreciated if the groups were assigned and at least the beginning of the work was done in class, so the other members don't leave you out/leave you to do all the work on your own.