<p>Post #98. I can get used to it if the college is used to receive 1/3 less in tuition. How’s that for a fair trade?</p>
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<p>Sounds like the one-room school-house or how many homeschooling families operate.</p>
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Where would 4-5 lectures constitute half of a course?</p>
<p>I’ve known people who found physically attractive instructors a distraction. Should institutions be penalized based on the number of RateMyProfessors chili peppers earned by the faculty?</p>
<p>Bottom line: most graduate programs require a minimum TOEFL score to qualify for a teaching assistantship. This is an objective filter and it is good enough. Do a few bad apples leak through? Sure, but in my experience the number is not large. Some people do not like accents, just as some people do not like certain styles of teaching. This is an issue of preference, not basic communication.</p>
<p>It’s up to the student and parents to make this a priority item when picking a college. I was very concerned about the big lecture halls and the TAs running the recitations and brought up this point many times to my son, had him talk to kids at the school, go visit such classes and look at the Rate my Prof comments. He still wanted to go a school with a lot of foreign grad students teaching the intro courses. In his case, he has had only one, mainly because he is not a math.science kid and those are the departments that have the highest concentration of ESL professors and grad students.</p>
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<p>Well, that says it all. Score high enough on the TOEFL and you’re good enough to teach at an American University. </p>
<p>No wonder our education system has been in a downwards spiral. And, fwiw, I fully realize our declining system of education is not in its abysmal state because of the presence of foreign TA or professors. Yet, it is a sign that we seem to have forgotten that there is no system of education that can survive a lack of good and well trained professors. </p>
<p>We are paying for our lack of attention to this at the K-12 level, and are close to reach the same sorry state at the next level.</p>
<p>But yes, all you need is to pass the TOEFL!</p>
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<p>Or you at least someone that looks enough like you to pass the TOEFL.</p>
<p>Actually, it’s not just TOEFL you have to pass. TOEFL will get you into a graduate school. You have to pass a spoken English test given by the university to become a TA. And to be hired as faculty you have to give a lecture to students, among other things.
As a wife of a math professor “with an accent”, and as a person “with an accent” myself, I am following this thread with big interest. There is nothing my H can do after a certain point to get rid of the accent. Fortunately, formulas and equations he writes on the board are absolutely accent-less. 
He is serious about his teaching and makes sure the material is presented clearly and is easy to follow.
For some reason, students who come to office hours, ask for help, work hard and get good grades never say a word about his accent. The ones who don’t, bring up every excuse in the world, from declining health of relatives and pets to complicated social life, to H’s accent. :)</p>
<p>Foreign professors and foreign TAs are problems students have deal with mainly in STEM majors at research universities. As ucbalumus pointed out up thread, it is not a big issue at LACs, or CCs and non-research universities like Cal states. In California, if parents and students don’t want deal with professors with foreign accents, they can chose to go to Cal state instead of the UCs.</p>
<p>Post #108. There are plenty of professors with accents at Cal State. Check out the names of the professors on the Cal state systems. I once had a professors graduated from MIT, couldn’t understand a thing she said. I don’t like the condescending tone.</p>
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<p>“With an accent” is a catch-all phrase. There are plenty of Americans who speak with an accent. Think Texas or Louisiana. Or Boston. There are universities in Texas where almost everybody speaks with an accent, faculty and student body alike. </p>
<p>The qualifier should be … hard to understand accents. Henry Kissinger has one heck of an accent, but it is doubtful people would walk out of his lectures. Same thing for Peter Drucker. On the other hand, when you combine poor English skills and poor training, it becomes a real issue.</p>
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<p>What an elegant solution! And, one that seems to fit the direction chosen by the UC leadership in the past decades.</p>
<p>I find this a strange conversation. Do some of you think that it’s just impossible that a teacher could have an accent so difficult to understand that many American college students would have a great difficulty in understanding lectures? Or do you just think it’s rare? Does anybody want to argue that if a professor has an accent or other limitation (such as mumbling, say) that made it very difficult for half of his class to understand him, that this is OK somehow?</p>
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Hard-to-understand for whom?</p>
<p>I am uncertain if this includes someone with Noimagination for accents. As far as the argument, it is obvious that some seem find understanding the simplest of arguments a hard task. Or find pleasure in arguing for the sake of arguing. </p>
<p>Most people understand what hard to … understand means. </p>
<p>/sigh</p>
<p>You know you are in a college with some TAs with hard-to-understand accents if you are studying math in College Park, Maryland. ;)</p>
<p>It is an issue to me if my kids or I have a lot of professors and grad students that are difficult to understand in their instruction whether they have speech issues, a heavy accent, or just don’t know how to communicate well. It’s also an issue if too many classes are large lecture halls with grad students or undergrads teaching the recitations and they are not teaching the material well. That there may be a few such teachers or classes at every and any school is understandable but if this is the trend of the school, yes, I would not like the situation and if my kid were having trouble learning the subject matter because of this, I would want him to transfer. </p>
<p>I have dropped courses when when the professor was not up to par in my opinion. I don’t have time to waste with someone like that. I 'm not on a time constraint so it 's just the way I do it. And I would do advise the same for my kids if it were an issue to them. Really it’s the only way you are going to get a college to make the changes. </p>
<p>The RateMYProf has worked to get some professors out of the teaching chair and shore up their acts in some colleges. Pretty bad when you have empty classes because your rep is bad. I’ve seen it happen. Unfortunately, it has happened to some good profs who grade hard or whose standards do no agree with the students at a given school. But this does give the students power that we did not have in our day when I was a college student. The schools are not going to do a thing about these situations until you affect their bottom lines, and that is what students and parents paying, have to do.</p>
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Was that necessary?</p>
<p>As you put it, some students “might not have a fine ear for accents”. I don’t see how it is possible to have an intelligent discussion of hard-to-understand accents if we aren’t clear about the nature of the audience. Should universities cater to the median? Or the low end of the spectrum?
I think it’s rare, based on my personal experience. It does happen and is a problem in those cases.</p>
<p>There are a lot of bad lecturers. IMO, accented foreign instructors are a very small part of the problem that just happen to make a very appealing target for those with a xenophobic axe to grind.</p>
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<p>No, people just want a good education for the money they are spending on it. Don’t turn this into something it is not.</p>
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<p>If so…how do you explain the following by Dr. Google?</p>
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<p>Going by names of Profs can be highly misleading as they may not have an accent issue or be native-born Americans with “extremely foreign” sounding surnames. </p>
<p>This BS has impacted the online student evaluation process as I found from a few idiotic student entered comments on some Ivy Prof/instructor evaluation website about a foreign looking instructors who are actually native-born Americans or those with no accent issues based on my firsthand experiences sitting in their classrooms and meeting them in person. </p>
<p>In those cases…it seems the students who entered such comments were either entitled slackers who were angry at receiving mediocre/failing grades from Profs who don’t suffer fools/slackers gladly…or utter xenophobes who cannot stand having “foreign looking” people as their Profs/TAs.</p>
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<p>Going to a school outside of your region could cause you to have to listen to a different regional accent, even if the school is a LAC, CC, or a school catering mainly to a local-to-the-school student population. Also, some LACs may be more attractive to faculty and students of geographically and linguistic accent diverse origins, so they may result in more encounters with different accents.</p>
<p>In other words, going to a local school that attracts few faculty or students from outside the local region may be a student’s best way of minimizing encountering a different accent.</p>
<p>But I suspect that CC or the local not-very-attractive-to-those-outside-the-region college or university is not really what most students on these forums is looking for.</p>