Is This Professor Good?

So, getting into college is one thing… but once you get here it’s a whole new ball game. Now instead of worrying if your SAT scores are high enough or your personal statement was personal enough, you are worried about your classes and which professors are the best. And since you are paying top dollar to be here, you should be taking the best classes from the best professors. But how can you tell from the class descriptions and a strange name alone, that you are making the right choice.

To be quite honest, this isn’t something that I personally worried about until I experienced what it was like to have a “bad” professor. On the positive side, the quarter system makes classes seem to go by very quickly. So if you find yourself sitting in a classroom when all you can think about is how horrible the professor or TA is, try to do the best you can, seek outside help from friends, on-campus tutoring programs (like OASIS), other TA’s and the 10 weeks will be over before you know it.

Now for those of you are already worried about getting the perfect professors, please understand that it is going to happen at some point… you will get a professor that might be incredibly brilliant, but have little to no skills in teaching to your learning style. My advice to you is this: find out what kind of learner you are and what kinds of things make a “good” professor in your mind. Do they read off power point presentations during class? Do they have students practice example problems during lecture? Does the teacher promote student involvement in class? Do they only talk for the class time without writing down a single note? These are the questions that are going to help you figure out the things that teachers do, that do and do not work for you and your learning style.

There are three main types of learning styles (auditory, visual, or haptic). Though you might fit into one of those styles perfectly, we each are different in the way we learn information. So if you were to ask me what classes I thought were good and which professors I recommend, I would be giving you that information based on my own learning style and what works well for me. That may or may not be the same things that work for you… Hopefully are you staring to understand how simply asking "is this professor good?” should turn into a lot more than a yes or no question. If someone does respond with a yes or no, it then becomes your responsibility to ask further questions to be sure that this person has a similar learning style to yours; otherwise their yes or no answer could lead you astray.

If you want to get accurate information and a recommendation worth following, you’ll need to do a little work yourself. First, find out what kind of learner you are and what works best for your learning style. Then when asking for recommendations instead of asking “is this professor good?” ask instead “what did you like or not like about this professor?” or “how does this professor lecture?” or “do they encourage class participation?” These questions should require a little more than a yes or no answer.

UCSD conducts surveys at the end of each quarter in every single class where students evaluate their course and the professor teaching the course, this is called CAPE (course and professor evaluations). You can access the CAPE for each class when you are looking at the schedule of classes or are registering on Tritonlink. There is a link for the CAPE results on the very right hand column, I believe next to the link you can click to see the text books required for the class.

From my experience I do much better with a human interaction experience. When talking with a fellow student it is a lot easier for me to tell what the teacher will be like and what the students thought of being in that class. You are able to ask any questions you want, helping you to understand if that professor’s style would work well with your learning style. This is also a great icebreaker to make friends in your classes. On the first day of the quarter (after your first quarter) it’s a good conversation starter to introduce yourself and ask if your neighbor has taken this professor before, and or what other classes they are taken or are currently taking. Don’t be scared to make friends in your classes, you’ll appreciate it when you’ve got a lot of insight on different professors and can make a much more informed decision when registering for classes the next time around!

Stacey H.
Transfer Orientation Leader