Responsible Spending

By Neal Gough

College is a time in your life when people stop holding your hand through things, for many people it is the first time in their life that they are truly on their own both, academically and financially.  It greatly differs from high school as far as teacher interactions go, as one of my high school teachers that also taught at a college at night put it, here(high school) im paid to make sure you pass, there(college) im paid to make sure those that should fail do.

With this being said why are there still college professors giving out assigned seats.  This is beyond high school, in fact it is eerily reminisent of elementary school.  Even in high school I was trusted to pick my own seat.

This also goes with attendence, we pay good money to go to this college, and if we decide not to show up to class and fail that should be our business, not there is anyone out there that wants to pay money to do that, but there have been times when I have had to miss classes for extrenous circustances at work.  Some of us can’t miss work, because that is what pays for our class so its a catch 22 when faced with the dilemna of missing another class for work, a child or other circumstance, versus possibly being dropped.

When money is paid for a service (i.e. education) I think it should be the person paying that determines how much of their money is actually well spent, not the teachers.

Make instructor evaluations available to students

By Neal Gough

Every semester we are asked at some point to fill out an evaluation for the instructor that we have sat in class with for the last three months.  These evaluations are supposed to help “improve” the instructor.  Fortunately, they are all anonymous because hopefully students were honest whether they wrote good or bad of instructor.  However, even after all of these evaluations are filled out some instructors do little or nothing to change their method of teaching, especially for those that are tenured.  What this means is that even after students have voiced their opinions on the downfalls of the instructor’s methods, the students coming in the next semester are bound to meet some of these same problems.

These evaluations should in some way be made public to students.  Not necessarily that each individual evaluation form should be on the internet, but possibly some statistics on the number of students that passed, what grades they recieved and averages on some of the questions that students are asked to answer on the evaluation form.  Something should be out there for students to research their professors that is University monitored.

The only resources out there right now are third-party websites such as ratemyprofessor.com, that are only a representation of the students that choose to log on and voice their opinion.  These websites are not a complete representation of the instructors entire student body, or of there teaching ability in general.

Small biographies highlighting teaching styles and preferences would also be helpful since some students learn differently.  It may be beneficial for some to take a teacher that adheres closely to the book when instructing, while some students may want a more lecture based class.

In the end the students are the ones that create these evaluations, they should also have access to them.

SIUE Spam Mail

By Neal Gough

More and more since I started here I have been getting my teacher’s personal emails, or email accounts they have set up to answer student questions, on the syllabus that they hand out to us.  The reason many of these teachers give is that they don’t use their SIUE e-mail account because of the amount of spam that they recieve on it.  As one of my teacher said on Tuesday “you’re emails get lost in the pile of spam, so send them to my gmail account.”

SIUE is defeating the point of having an email account system by not regulating the amount of spam that get sents out over their accounts, especially considering that much of this spam is sent out by SIUE.  I personally have gotten into the habit of never checking my SIUE email account.  There have been a couple times that teachers have told me to check the account because they have forwarded assignments or announcements to it but for the most part it could disappear tomorrow and i would have no idea.

However, with the increased usage of blackboard the email account system has become even less necessary.  I know it is not realistic to abolish the email system completely but some changes need to be made to it to  cut down on the amount of useless mail that is recieved so that when important information is sent out to a SIUE email account, it does not get lost in the “pile of spam.”