<p>I know that roughly 66% of Harvard’s incoming class had international experience. I wonder, is part of their desire for freshmen who are knowledgeable about diversity, difference, and travel related to having international scholars, the best from all over the world? It would make no sense to offer a brilliant scholar to provincials who can’t understand even accented English, let alone French.</p>
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<p>You are very atypical of most Americans I’ve observed abroad when faced with language barriers in foreign countries. Seems like a common default was for them to expect everyone to speak and understand English or their mangled foreign language in question and if the local officials/workers aren’t comprehending due to language barrier, to yell louder and sometimes throw a temper tantrum worthy of a toddler. </p>
<p>An attitude I find worse than the Prof/TA with supposed “foreign accent” problems as to even be allowed to teach, they have tests and processes to ensure language proficiency before they are allowed to step in front of the classroom. </p>
<p>The increasing prominence of the “foreign accent” complaints by undergrads within the last decade and half is also interesting as this issue was likely worse 25+ years or more ago when they didn’t have such tests/processes. </p>
<p>If you don’t want to listen to profs/TAs that can’t speak English, go to a LAC.</p>
<p>^^It would be pretty hard for a LAC to have the types of labs and opportunities available to students at large research facilities. But, your comment highlights the point that this is predominantly a STEM issue.</p>
<p>QuantMech: "f the student prefers not to speak with department administrators, or doesn’t think of talking with them (a freshman, say), it is still plenty early to change sections in a multi-section course–or in an extreme case, to drop the course and take something else instead.</p>
<p>Dietz: The point, mom had not only a right but also an obligation to herself to quickly find an alternative. This, regretfully is not something available to most college students. To simply ask them the suck it up is not ‘harsh’, it is blaming the victim.</p>
<p>Students definitely have alternatives. They can walk right out of the class. Every college has drop/add dates. Colleges expect some students to walk out. My kids dropped several classes. I agree wholeheartedly with QM; something should be said to someone before the final exam. The student bears some responsibility here. Has any professor on this thread suggested a student just suck it up?</p>
<p>And I, too, would like to know what level of university this is a problem. Hunt reported his own experience in one undergraduate class at a top school some years ago. That isn’t a very high incidence imho. I am willing to believe it happens. I have no first hand knowledge. Usually my kids dropped because they didn’t like the reading list or found the professor abrasive for some reason. Students really have the power here, not the professors. They can’t teach to an empty class.</p>
<p>ETA: Hunt’s professor didn’t have an accent but was a mumbler. It isn’t exactly the same thing. It is still a good reason to drop the class imho.</p>
<p>My freshman year at a southern state university I had a professor with an almost unintelligible accent. I had no idea where he could be from - Boston. I did not drop the class. A lot of my adult life, as a southern expat, I have been singled out for having an accent. I’m really relieved to be living again where I talk normal.</p>
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<p>My main issue is the students who made such complaints I’ve encountered all admitted to never bothering to doing anything more than kvetch and whine about “it’s not fair”. </p>
<p>When I asked them if they’d asked the instructor to repeat and clarify what they said in lecture*, go to instructor’s office hours to discuss the issue, go to the departmental chair/undergrad dean or other ways outlined by commenters like Blossom…the answer was always a resounding NO with some more kvetching about how they “shouldn’t have to do all that” in a whining manner. </p>
<p>A factor along with other demonstrated behaviors witnessed by classmates why their complaints are viewed as little more than feeble attempts to excuse their lack of initiative and self-inflicted mediocre academic performance by most classmates in their course/department. </p>
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<li>In one summer lecture course at an elite U with 300 students, many students…including yours truly had no issues raising our hands to ask the instructor to speak up when the voice was too low. </li>
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<p>If the student is in the engineering degree program they most likely do not have the option to drop. They are presented with a schedule before they begin the program. Classes are laid out in the sequence they must be taken. The large scale ‘weeder’ classes are often offered at only one time during a quarter. So, if you wish to graduate from the engineering program within 4 years you need to take those weeder classes in sequence. Drop Chem 2 or Physics 2 and you are not at least one quarter behind. </p>
<p>I was referencing the comment
. Which sounded a lot like - figure it out and suck it up. I don’t think the poster is a professor.</p>
<p>Cobrat:
Well, I happen to know of at least on kid who went to the head of the department with a list of issues. Said kid forwarded the email sent by the head to others in the department - said kid was BCC’d and subsequently sent me a copy of the department head’s message. Part of that message - 'this kid is not just a whiner, he pulled an A+ in the first of the series and is in the top of the current class. Kid also knows this will most likely not have any effect on his current situation but hopes it will make a difference in the future." So the lesson - if your a top student it’s not whining.</p>
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<p>And, a ‘voice to low’ is an easily corrected issue - would you or any of the other 299 classmates have raised a hand and said “could you please speak with out the accent - a majority can’t understand you”.</p>
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<p>Most engineering major friends and colleagues cited forming study groups and making frequent use of Prof/TA office hours, tutoring centers, asking for advice from upperclassmen in their department, etc were critical to their ability to survive and even excel in engineering college. </p>
<p>My scientist child took some of the large weeder classes. I am pretty sure he always had options for professors, that is more than one section available. He was always trying to figure out which teacher would be the best choice. Again, what sorts of universities are we talking about where students don’t have choices of sections? I totally understand that engineering leaves not much leeway for dropping a class entirely. Are there really colleges where the majority of stem classes are taught by teachers with accents? Please give some examples.</p>
<p>And if so, why are the science majoring kids, who are bothered by the accents going to those schools? Why? Is that their only option?</p>
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I think all the professors are saying to go through the appropriate channels and complain. It isn’t all that unusual for inadequate teachers to be replaced. Way back on page one vamominvabeach told how her husband reported an unintelligible teacher and the Dean almost immediately took over the class for the rest of the semester. </p>
<p>I’ll give you one example: UCLA. My then-pre med niece (now in med school) often had no choice but to take whatever section she got in - or risk not getting the class at all and falling behind in the sequential science classes. </p>
<p>She also complained of one professor who was very hard to understand, but she dealt with the situation by working very, very closely with the assigned TA, often meeting her outside of office hours to make sure she understood all of the material. </p>
<p>My point is that college students should be a bit proactive about the education their parents are paying lots of money for. If that means going to the TA for extra help - or bringing up the issue with department head or the dean, so be it. They’re not children. And it’s in their best interest that we not helicopter them and fly to the rescue in a situation that really should be their problem to face. </p>
<p>Well I guess we have to teach them how to face it. Some parents on this thread don’t seem to understand there are options in the situation in which the OP’s friend’s daughter found herself. Even though many clearly do. And have explained what they are over and over. Shout out to Blossom! : )</p>
<p>With regard to the comment by dietz199, my university runs 4 sections of introductory physics and 4 to 6 sections of introductory chemistry every semester, with several different instructors. We offer 40+ sections of the first calculus course, and 30+ sections of the second calculus course. So there are a lot of options to switch out of a section, if the student wants to do that, while remaining on sequence.</p>
<p>In my own college experience, there were significant numbers of foreign born instructors (both faculty and TAs, and from non-Indo-European as well as Indo-European first language backgrounds). There were some who were better or worse than others. However, even the thickest accents were not incomprehensible, and (when coinciding with the worse instructors) were not the main reason why they were worse than other instructors.</p>
<p>So while the problem described in this thread may certainly exist, it is probably a lot less common than student complaints make it seem. Probably similar to other common exaggerated complaints like “not being able to get the classes needed to graduate on time”.</p>
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<p>But how many of the students complaining about instructors’ accents or other instructor quality issues are willing to switch to the 8am sections that have plenty of space that also may happen to have better instructors? (Or they complain about not getting the course they need to graduate, even though there is plenty of space in the 8am section of that course.)</p>
<p>Just out of curiosity, I checked the schedule for Fall 2014, and found that of the sections of chemistry, physics, and mathematics that I mentioned earlier, none of them meet at 8 am. (The earliest is at 9 am.) O tempora! O mores!</p>
<p>I think that there are universities where enrollment is “impacted” in some majors, where students might have much less flexibility in selecting sections of courses. It’s a little late for this year’s high-school graduates to double-check this issue before picking their college, but current juniors should probably check this out, when they have narrowed their college choices.</p>
<p>DH graduated from UC Berkeley back in the late 1970s with his degree in engineering. Even back in the Dark Ages of the university, right there by Sather Gate, some of the engineering professors and TAs spoke unintelligibly, as English was their second language. When I met DH, he would do this amazing and hysterical stand-up routine of the professor speaking in really awful English principally to the chalkboard. (Yes, all you youth: professors used to have something called chalk, which if one’s nails hit it, produced this gawdawful sound.) It would bring down the house at our cocktail parties, but the message was really about a struggling student trying to get through college. So, really nothing has changed in the past 30 or more years. The prof got to Berkeley because he was a scholar in his field. You don’t get tenure at Berkeley because of your fine teaching–or your pitch-perfect English prose. You make tenure because you rock as a scholar. It’s all about the research. </p>
<p>Fast forward to the 21st century when DD1 attended Berkeley. As a humanities major, she never once complained about a professor’s accent. Her challenge as a first- and second-year Golden Bear was finding a seat in the 500-seat auditorium for the class in which 750 students were registered. My counsel so she got to know her professors amidst the cast of thousands? “Go to Office Hours EACH AND EVERY WEEK. Even if you have to make up a question, get to know your professors.” She loved every minute of her years. Go Bears! </p>
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<p>However, it does appear that students rate most of the regular faculty reasonably well, at least in one particular department:
<a href=“https://hkn.eecs.berkeley.edu/coursesurveys/instructors”>https://hkn.eecs.berkeley.edu/coursesurveys/instructors</a>
Note that the faculty who have a lot of different courses (i.e. regular long term faculty) tend to do better in the surveys than those who have just one or a few listed.</p>
<p>Research may be pre-eminent in tenure decisions at research universities, but if you cannot explain to other faculty why your research or results are important, that may make it harder to convince them to give you tenure. However, it is possible that someone who can explain an advanced topic to other faculty or graduate students may not do as well explaining introductory topics to frosh, particularly if the course is one for non-majors.</p>
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<p>My California relatives and I may be the exception to the rule. </p>
<p>Seemed we all eagerly registered for as many early morning classes as possible so we left our late afternoons/evenings free to work part-time, study/do homework, participate in ECs, attend campus events/party, or hang out. </p>
<p>A nightmarish undergrad schedule for me would be classes in the late afternoon and evenings. </p>
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<p>You don’t have to explain anything orally, it is all in the publications.</p>