Pro­fes­sors Lynn Jacobs and Jeremy Hyman, edu­ca­tors and higher edu­ca­tion experts, recently pub­lished a list on The Huff­in­g­ton Post about “red flags” that col­lege stu­dents should look out for when encoun­ter­ing new pro­fes­sors. I tend to be wary of absolute state­ments like some of the advice that they offer while other tips rang true for me as well.

For one thing, Jacobs and Hyman advise stay­ing away from pro­fes­sors that are “bor­ing” and write that you can tell right away if a pro­fes­sor will be bor­ing or not. I feel that “bor­ing” is a very sub­jec­tive term and although it can cer­tainly describe many peo­ple (or at least their approach to teach­ing or pub­lic speak­ing), I think that it is a bit unfair to make such an absolute state­ment. Stu­dents respond to dif­fer­ent teach­ing styles—the pro­fes­sor that one stu­dent finds totally intrigu­ing very well may bore another stu­dent. I put off tak­ing a course with a pro­fes­sor that some class­mates said was bor­ing. When I finally took his class, I loved it! Fur­ther­more, the first class of the semes­ter is a bit of a throw­away class: per­sonal intro­duc­tions, going over the syl­labus, and real­iz­ing that the assigned class­room is either way too big or too small for the size of the class. Sorry if it’s bor­ing, but I would urge stu­dents not to judge a professor’s teach­ing style on that first class.
Jacobs and Hyman also cau­tion against pro­fes­sors who assign an “undoable amount of work—or none at all.” First of all, every col­lege has dif­fer­ent ways of orga­niz­ing courses accord­ing to level and it’s impor­tant that stu­dents pay atten­tion to the number/level of the courses as well as their titles; courses above a cer­tain num­ber (or let­ter, code, etc.) may be con­sid­ered advanced or upper-level and thus too chal­leng­ing for under­class­men. Dou­ble check before you register.

Also, some pro­fes­sors “front load” their courses in order to get the best work out of stu­dents before the inevitable avalanche of final papers at the end of the semester—my advi­sor actu­ally did this with all of her classes and it worked very well. It meant jump­ing into paper-writing ear­lier than other classes demanded, but her classes typ­i­cally closed with less ardu­ous assign­ments to bal­ance things out.

I would be sur­prised to find a pro­fes­sor who can get away with assign­ing noth­ing at all, if only because most uni­ver­si­ties have some sort of over­ar­ch­ing pol­icy that would not allow zero or barely exis­tent course­work. So if Jacobs and Hyman are con­cerned with pro­fes­sors who base the major­ity of the final grade on one big paper and the rest on everybody’s favorite phe­nom­e­non, par­tic­i­pa­tion, then I under­stand this con­cern. Again, I think that it is a mat­ter of how advanced the course is and its role in the over­all curriculum.

While I believe that it is per­fectly accept­able and even advan­ta­geous to stu­dents and pro­fes­sors alike to focus on an extended research paper in upper-level courses, stu­dents deserve ear­lier and more fre­quent eval­u­a­tions of their learn­ing in intro­duc­tory and sur­vey courses. If a stu­dent finds himself/herself in a class with only one major grade and feels dis­sat­is­fied with this for­mat, then I would sug­gest talk­ing to the depart­ment chair to find a suit­able sub­sti­tute for the par­tic­u­lar course.

Check out the rest of Jacobs and Hyman’s advice and let us know what you think—have you expe­ri­enced any of the sce­nar­ios that they present? What are your pro­fes­so­r­ial “red flags” What should not be con­sid­ered a bad sign?