Nightmare College Professor Stories you have

[Another Fan]

I had one professor for Econometrics that was really mean and condescending Was afraid to go to his office hours.  It was a hard class as is. Wound up failing it had to retake it.  Aah.  Don’t hold bitterness toward the man though today.

 

 

One professor I had for Personality Psychology was still one of the biggest crackpots I’ve come across in my life.  I needed a certain amount of 300 level courses and stupid me I took his class because he was rated highly on Rate My Professor.  I like Psychology though.

 

The class was just him talking about his life like 100% of the time.  He would tell weird stories as well like his friend burning himself to death as part of psychological studies or some clients of his that abducted their children.  Creepy stuff.  Only like 25% of the class attended his lectures usually.

 

His final was a nightmare as well as it was all based upon book readings never gone over in class.  Wound up with a D in the class.  

[Fr. Jerk]

I had a creative writing teacher who fell off a ladder doing housework. He ended being injured to the point of not being able to come in and teach. His replacement? A hippie-esque nut job who bragged about living in India and doing multiple day sleepless acid trips in other off the wall countries. 

 

He ended up giving everyone A's. Noice. Was definitely a blow hard. He also put out a CD (remember those?) of himself playing guitar, singing, and reading some short stories. A few months later I saw a stack of them for free at a record store (remember those?) I made sure to grab one. It wasn't bad, but it definitely wasn't good. 

 

Community college, you get what you pay for, ya dig?

Edited December 28, 2024 by Fr. Jerk

[LeviF]

Had an assistant professor who taught my required MATLAB course freshman year. She barely spoke English. She would start speaking in her native language when a student who was from her country asked a question. The week’s projects were due Monday nights. Insane stuff. 
 

Calc III was hard enough, but the prof who taught it at my school was legitimately a genius and it seemed like he thought teaching was a waste. If you could grasp the concepts from the text you were fine. I remember the final was four problems. A full half of the class flipped through it, got up and left without so much as putting pen(cil) to paper. It was probably the only final I ever spent all the allotted time on. 

[Toomstone.Part.Duex]

Had a strange English teacher at the trade school I went to.   He said he would sit and correct the grammar mistakes in the local newspaper every night.  Said he had a bunker in the woods fully stocked in case society collapses.   Was obsessed with Corvettes and rattled off the windshield angle of every year Vette created.   Would give us a SEVEN minute break.  He timed himself going down the stairs (one minute) and back up (another minute) and said he can smoke a cigarette in 5 minutes.  Hence the 7 minute break.   Even the other teachers knew that this guy was insane.  

[Low Positive]

And now from the other side. I once graded an exam where the students were asked why the US Senate didn’t ratify the Treaty of Versailles. One student wrote “The US Senate didn’t ratify the Treaty of Versailles because President Hitler didn’t take any Senators to the conference.” So close. I also had a student write “President Washington was lucky to have such well endowed advisors like Jefferson and Hamilton.” Now that’s a reference book that would tell us a lot. 

[Orlando Buffalo]

I had only two really bad professors, one who required you buy his textbook he read and then basically memorize it. It was a psych book and his theories were not relevant to class. Second one was a brilliant guy who could not teach. He went so far beyond the course outline during class I knew more stuff beyond the final than what was on the final. 

[boater]

In a online class....

 

I had one rip my writing apart. But what made it different was he got personal in the attack. Red Flags went up... luckily it was during the Drop/Add period and I dropped him like a hot rock. He sent me a scathing email after I dropped. In hindsight, his behavior was totally psychotic and I should have reported him.

 

At a well known university...

 

I took a graduate level class on how to conduct surveys. I had high hopes for it. All the adjunct professor talked about was LGBT. She covered very little of the material. She deliberately skipped the mandatory professor feedback survey at the end of the semester. I wrote to the Dean since she didn't do the feedback survey and gave him my opinion. The professor quietly disappeared.

[Johnny Hammersticks]

I was a graduate assistant throughout grad school, and each semester we were assigned to a different professor.  My final semester I was assigned to a female professor and the chair of the department.  Before I go on, for all the “would ya” degens like myself, she was not even remotely attractive and was married and had a few young kids.

 

My final duty of the semester was to help her organize a day long seminar where she brought in someone to do a training for counseling professionals in the area.  I organized everything, and things went perfectly well.

 

After the seminar, I was helping her pack her car full of stuff and when I was finished she asked me to join her for a couple drinks to thank me for my work.

 

Long story short, after some drinks she tried to get me to accompany her to a hotel room for sex.  She was very direct about it, complaining that her husband was boring in the bedroom, and needless to say it made me very uncomfortable.

 

I slinked away to the bathroom and left the restaurant and went home.  Seeing her at graduation was very uncomfortable, but I made it through and never said a word to anyone about it. 

 

 

[Bad Things]

The one that sticks out to me was this jerk Thermodynamics instructor that I had, who acted like the students should have already known everything he was supposed to be teaching us that term, including the lab equipment. 

The fat bastard made us all suffer that term.

 

I also had a Physics prof from Japan who's accent was so strong, you couldn't understand anything he was saying.  (At least he tried though.)

[boater]

1 hour ago, Another Fan said:

His final was a nightmare as well as it was all based upon book readings never gone over in class.  Wound up with a D in the class.  

D stands for done. It counts toward the degree, though you can't survive too many of them. I got one in Corporate Finance.

[Augie]

I had a calculus professor who was the Dean of the math department. He loved his math to the point that he made it impossible to understand. I got a D, which implied that I had learned something, but that was misleading. The only thing I had learned was how to get to the classroom. I had to take it over again with Father Eisenhower, a/k/a Easy Ike. I was giddy when I realized how simple the class was going to be. It took me a while to realize that this was the exact same crap the Dean had made seem impossible. 

 

I also took Sociology for Sports from the Dean of the Dept. I needed an elective, it sounded fun and not too difficult, and there were basketball players in the class. How hard could it be? Very, as it turns out. The lesson I learned was avoid the Dean of any Department! 

 

I had a finance professor who had everyone’s info on separate index cards. The card had your name, major, year and any other little notes she might make. She would have a person go up to the board and start a problem. A few steps in she would pull a card and say “OK, Mr Jones, please step up to the board and take over from there.”  Sometimes people did a problem differently than I did, and I couldn’t just “pick up” where they left off. She got called into the hallway one day, and I went up with another guy and we pulled our cards from her stack. Problem solved, I never got called on again.

 

I did have to change majors however, as I had two required classes left and she was the only person teaching them. Yes, I showed her! 

 

.

Edited December 27, 2024 by Augie

[Wacka]

Had a prof in Grad school that had a theory about  DNA  control mechanisms that I had never heard of before or since and I have  a PhD now in Molecular Biology.. He was already in his 70s about 45 years ago. The papers he had us read were from the 60s.  As long as you regurgitated what he taught in class, you were OK.

 

Not me, but when I was at UB, a Sociology prof spent the whole semester talking about how he hated Ford  (this was 1976) and how great Carter was . The students of all his classes signed a petition  asking UB to not have him teach that class ever again. That made the Rectum  (er Spectrum) the UB student paper.

 

Also not me, but a friend took an intro to Statistics course. He had heard it was super easy. He never attended a class except to find out when exams were and got an A on the final.

 

Had a good chemistry prof though. He write the book that the labs were in . One was we had to extract the oil  from caraway seeds. Took several sessions but at the end the whole lab smelled like rye bread. Another one was to make luminol. At the end we had to go one at a time into the elevator (the only totally dark place in the building) and mix the two chemicals together and see if it glowed.

Edited December 27, 2024 by Wacka

[Another Fan]

4 hours ago, Orlando Buffalo said:

I had only two really bad professors, one who required you buy his textbook he read and then basically memorize it. It was a psych book and his theories were not relevant to class. Second one was a brilliant guy who could not teach. He went so far beyond the course outline during class I knew more stuff beyond the final than what was on the final. 

I had a number of professors in college that made the class read their book if they got something published.  Sounds like an ego trip for them.  lol.  Your psych sounded a little like the professor I had.   I still remember being so mad that final in that nothing that professor spoke of in class was on the final!!

 

Contrary to you I only had a few really good professors.  

4 hours ago, boater said:

D stands for done. It counts toward the degree, though you can't survive too many of them. I got one in Corporate Finance.

There was a professor who made a remark once if you get a D it's like herpes in that you can't get rid of it.  I think someone asked him to fail them instead.  

 

The logic being if you get an F and retake the class...  the 0.0 would be wiped out from your GPA with the passing grade.

 

A D grade would get averaged with the re-taken class grade.  

 

 

Like you said though you can't have too many of them on your transcript to graduate.  I think where I went in the major you took you were only allowed 1 D.  

[ICanSleepWhenI'mDead]

On 12/27/2024 at 12:48 PM, Augie said:

I had a finance professor who had everyone’s info on separate index cards. The card had your name, major, year and any other little notes she might make. She would have a person go up to the board and start a problem. A few steps in she would pull a card and say “OK, Mr Jones, please step up to the board and take over from there.”  Sometimes people did a problem differently than I did, and I couldn’t just “pick up” where they left off. She got called into the hallway one day, and I went up with another guy and we pulled our cards from her stack. Problem solved, I never got called on again.

 

Captain Kirk would be proud of you - - you beat the Kobayashi Maru scenario:

 

https://www.startrek.com/videos/watch-star-trek-ii-the-wrath-of-khan-how-kirk-passed-the-kobayashi-marus-no-win-scenario

[Augie]

4 minutes ago, ICanSleepWhenI'mDead said:

 

Captain Kirk would be proud of you - - you beat the Kobayashi Maru scenario:

 

https://www.startrek.com/videos/watch-star-trek-ii-the-wrath-of-khan-how-kirk-passed-the-kobayashi-marus-no-win-scenario

 

I didn’t remember that episode of Cheers. 

[ExiledInIllinois]

On 12/27/2024 at 1:39 PM, Johnny Hammersticks said:

I was a graduate assistant throughout grad school, and each semester we were assigned to a different professor.  My final semester I was assigned to a female professor and the chair of the department.  Before I go on, for all the “would ya” degens like myself, she was not even remotely attractive and was married and had a few young kids.

 

My final duty of the semester was to help her organize a day long seminar where she brought in someone to do a training for counseling professionals in the area.  I organized everything, and things went perfectly well.

 

After the seminar, I was helping her pack her car full of stuff and when I was finished she asked me to join her for a couple drinks to thank me for my work.

 

Long story short, after some drinks she tried to get me to accompany her to a hotel room for sex.  She was very direct about it, complaining that her husband was boring in the bedroom, and needless to say it made me very uncomfortable.

 

I slinked away to the bathroom and left the restaurant and went home.  Seeing her at graduation was very uncomfortable, but I made it through and never said a word to anyone about it. 

 

 

Shoulda went to trade school!😉😜

[Augie]

12 minutes ago, ExiledInIllinois said:

Shoulda went to trade school!😉😜

 

All the jobs need to be done by someone. You are blessed beyond belief if you love what you do for “work”.  Loving your work is right up there with happy wife. 

[thenorthremembers]

Had a lit professor who had a crush on one of the guys in our class.  They spent the entire semester hipster flirting about Nietzsche.   SUNY Brockport education at its finest.

 

 

[Your Brown Eye]

My pathophys instructor at a local community college after a test asked if I wanted to stay and help clean up after a lab or test, but did it in a bizarre sexual way. He was gay, a nice guy though, but I did one of those half-hearted chuckles and left, I was worried leaving that he would follow me because it was a night class, we got out at I think 950pm so the halls were very empty and dark. He did not follow me though.

 

My other one was an Asian professor who taught graduate-level statistics and bragged how this class only had a 50% pass/fall ratio. He was extremely smart, and taught all of the hard classes in the program. When asked to slow down or questioned about a topic he would say "I don't understand, its right there *points at the projector screen* and continue to plow through the material at breakneck speed. The beginning started fine, simple statistics and I was doing just fine, then he got into deeper and deeper statistics needing programs and whatnot, where one question needed 45 minutes to finish and if you had one calculation wrong at the beginning (Easy to do since I am dyslexic with numbers), then the end product would be wrong, it was a nightmare. We had to memorize these very very complicated equations. But on the second exam I noticed that he would never look up from his laptop during exams, and we were allowed drinks and whatnot on our desks.

 

I BOMBED the second exam and was in fight or flight mode, because I needed this class and I had bombed the second exam and did very poorly on one of the group homework assignments. I knew I was never going to memorize all these complex equations so I went to Wegmans, bought a black and white Powerade bottle, and with a fine-toothed black pen I wrote all the equation formula's between the lines of the nutrition label, in-between the big letters of Powerade, anywhere were I could find an open space. On the third exam I nervously brought the bottle to the test, and sure as s*** this guy never looked up from his laptop, I was able to use the Powerade bottle and cheat through the test, anytime I needed a new formula I would take a sip and place my bottle down in front of me with the equation that I needed. Ended up going from failing that class to passing with an A- or something because the class was heavily weighted towards tests. He would show the test score up on the monitor and mine was always the highest, and I was worried people would start questioning it why only one person kept getting 90's while everyone would be getting 70s-80's or less, but no one did. First and only time I cheated that hardcore to pass a class. 6 years later, I left that field and went into healthcare so I went through all that stress and sleepless nights for nothing haha

[Just Jack]

On 12/27/2024 at 2:46 PM, boater said:

D stands for done. It counts toward the degree, though you can't survive too many of them. I got one in Corporate Finance.

 

What do you call a med student graduate that got straight D grades?

 

Doctor.