Does Professor Quality Matter?

[Cardinal_Fang]

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Cardinal Fang, if someone is teaching so strictly to the test that it is the limiting factor, I agree that the material is not going to be well learned. Ideally, the test should be such that it requires using the knowledge from the course that is important. Not being able to pass such a test, means not knowing those principles that are necessary for that course to serve as another brick in the students’ learning foundation. I don’t know of any college professors that teach directly to a test anyways. The problem often comes when the kids don’t learn the nasty fundamentals that are needed and they show up on the test.

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<p>You keep saying that, but you don’t explain how it accords with the study, which found exactly the opposite:

However, our results indicate that professors who excel at promoting contemporaneous student achievement [in other words, professors whose students do well on the department-wide exams], on average, harm the subsequent performance of their students in more advanced classes.

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