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Comment by prklmn | Hacker News Reader

I just graduated from a very large university and the number of professors assigning homework this way was alarming. With prerecorded video lectures, assigning homework like this, and using questions from test banks for tests, professors are getting paid to do next to nothing.

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> professors are getting paid to do next to nothing

Speaking from the part-time professors perspective: occurring in parallel to this is a steady growth in course section sizes. 30 students used to be the norm for some courses, but 80-90 is the new normal just a few years later. Some of these tools are designed to help manage this. But the actual process of planning and delivering a lecture, providing individual feedback on written assignments (like exams), etc. is suffering.

Teaching effectively to a large section is harder than you might think, especially when teaching is only a fraction of your job & you have no TAs. But half-assing it is actually not too hard I guess. And you are seldom rewarded for the former. Thankfully for me and for my students, it is mostly a side hobby for me and not a living.

I know let's hire more administrators!

That seems to be the plan, instead of hiring more professors they grow class sizes, cut corners, and hire more admin.

Which is really the deans and provost growing a power base that is dependent on them. They do not want to be dependant on a large group of influential professors. Better to foster a workforce of neutered adjuncts overseen by administrators who are not technically competent, and so design administrative regimes that avoid addressing issues of technical competence at all. The IRB is a prime example of this: people with a high school education provide administrative oversight of researchers working at the outer limits of human knowledge. It's insanity.

Are you saying that you think IRBs are a waste by design, or that the way IRBs are typically implemented makes them so as a side effect?

Engineering here had 200+ student enrolled on each class years ago, all managed by early 199x tools. It's doable and still delivered on education quality.

"you dropped 150 grand on a fuckin' education you could have got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library" - Will Hunting

>> professors are getting paid to do next to nothing

That's not true. They're getting paid to publish research in third-party journals you have to pay to read.

>I just graduated from a very large university

Likely that was the mistake. I've been to both a small and a large university. If you care about education, go to the small one. Much more likely the professors will put in a lot of effort to teach properly. Fewer students per class also motivates them.

To be fair, temporary adjuncts are being paid next to nothing.

The full professors don't have any such excuse, though.

The full professors at many large universities have to split their time between research and teaching. Both of which can be full-time jobs on their own. The consequence is that many great researchers are mediocre teachers (or only good for teaching smaller courses in their specialty), and many great teachers abandon the time needed for research (or aren't good researchers) which doesn't bring money and prestige to the school. So they get booted.

You're left with underpaid adjuncts, under qualified TAs, and research professors that don't want to teach another-goddamned-section of Calculus 1 (as one of my profs referred to it).

Not to mention that "research" can be further split into myriad activities that take up substantial amounts of time. Personally, I'd contend that writing grants and writing scientific code could also constitute full-time jobs (this might explain why a lot of scientific code is spaghetti; most researchers have to balance coding with publishing- and coding loses in this battle). Regardless of how many full-time jobs the modern researcher is expected to perform, the end result is the same: lower quality science furnished by 80 hour weeks and emotionally wrecked postdocs.

> writing grants

this is the kind of crap that administrators (as a class in society) force on faculty and then use it as justification for "our role is necessary" and "see, they couldn't be that busy".

I think the reason scientific code is spaghetti has more to do with different incentives than time management. you don't need scalable production quality code. you need a minimal working example of something even its a kluge. correct and ugly and novel will win over optimized and pretty and commented and non-novel...

I don't know whether or not the incentives or the time management contribute more towards the messiness, but I will nitpick one implicit assumption you're making here, which is that scientific code is "correct". There has been at least one well-publicized incident where scientific code is both messy and very much incorrect. I also think that, while optimization isn't necessarily something that researchers should focus on, pretty code / documentation / comments / systematic testing are elements that researchers really need to emphasize, because these practices ensure that the likelihood that their simulations / analysis pipelines aren't spewing out nonsense is substantially decreased. Furthermore, these practices would make code reviews a lot easier- it's much harder to make sense of your code when every other variable is named "i", "j" or "k" and this seems to be a common practice in some fields at least.

You know that is a very good point actually. I have talked with some bioinformaticians who have trouble reproducing others work because the dataset was unavailable or the code was not provided.

Personally, all the academic code I've used has been written by EE people or Applied Math people and had nice enough style/documentation/accessibility for me to have minimal issues.

The full professors are there to do research. I can understand the motivation for having professors teach advanced subjects, but having them teach intro classes is just silly. It's worse for both the students and the professor. Teaching and research are completely different skill sets after all.

>The full professors are there to do research.

Contracts vary. In both universities I attended (one mediocre, one in the top 5), in most departments, professor salaries were purely for education (9 month salary - get paid extra if they teach in summer), even though all the expectations for tenure, etc are research.

They are expected to do research, but the funds for that come from grants, not from their salaries.

So the contract was: Their salary was a 9 month salary, and they get to pay themselves the extra 3 months by getting grants for research. This is why many professors will say they can supplement their income by "up to a third" of their salary via grants. Which, BTW, also means that when you look up a public university professor's income (usually accessible to the public), you are seeing their 9 month income, and if they are active researchers, they get paid more.

So no, the university typically does not pay them to do the research. They pay themselves via grants. The university pays them for education, even though they always act as if they don't.

>I can understand the motivation for having professors teach advanced subjects, but having them teach intro classes is just silly. It's worse for both the students and the professor. Teaching and research are completely different skill sets after all.

All fine and well as long as the university does not try to attract students for undergrad by highlighting the great research they do, and indirectly imply that they will get an education from the best in the field. If their prospectus merely said "Come join us. You'll get a great education taught by adjuncts and outsourced to other companies", then your point would have more merit.

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