<p>Serious question. I'd love to know what you guys think.</p>
<p>For me, it has to be the fact that the quality of your professor hugely affects your performance (and consequently, your grade) in the class. I'm a junior now; have been at a huge state school for six semesters now and it is sort of ridiculous that how well you do in school depends on what professors you end up with (not what classes you're taking / what you're majoring in).</p>
<p>I took a supposedly "extremely difficult" stochastic optimization class last semester, but my professor was just SO DAMN GOOD that I ended up with an A in it. He made the dry, abstract and mathematical material seem so interesting with fantastic explanations, concept clarifications, gave us many pitfall prevention tips and helped everyone out when necessary. </p>
<p>On the other hand, I am now in a bunch of relatively easier classes and I end up having to teach myself almost all the material because the professors are too busy focusing on their research to care enough about the classes they are teaching. They quite literally read off their horrendously-made powerpoints in a dry, monotone voice for entire 75 minutes. 60% of the lecture is sleeping and the rest 40% are fooling around on the internet. The smart ones just don't show up.</p>
<p>I've had my fair share of excellent, dedicated professors and the plain bad ones. You could do really really well in "hard" classes if you've got great professors. You could also do really really badly in "easy" classes if you get stuck with a bad professor. This is what I hate most about academics in college.</p>
<p>Your turn. Go.</p>