August 22, 2005
IDEAS AND OPINIONS
Legend's View:
Student apathy lowers quality of educationFor a campus environment similar to the one described above, what’s a few more dollars per class?
For many students, the few extra dollars mean students are paying larger amounts of money for teachers they may not be learning from.
In every department, students gripe about teachers they aren’t satisfied with – teachers who do not perform at a level which is equivalent to the amount of tuition the students are paying.
This has resulted in students dropping out of classes and losing credit and money to teachers who are not up to par.
The complaints that have traveled from student to student tell of teachers who take vacations for weeks at a time in the middle of the semester, leaving students with substitutes that entire time, learning close to nothing.
Some talk of classrooms that have, at the beginning of the semester, been filled with students eager to take their classes, with the students soon learning only that they have ended up with teachers who are ruthless when grading, rude to them, and unhelpful.
These students drop out to avoid poor grades, only to pay for the same class a second time, with a different teacher, hoping for different results.
So what are students doing to fix this problem? Absolutely nothing.
Why? Because, regretfully, MCC students are apathetic.
Students are here for two years and then move on to universities they very much want to be at.Students don’t leave high school aspiring to graduate from a junior college; so when they wind up here, they come to school, take classes, and then leave without missing a beat.
So when a teacher comes along who isn’t up to par, students just move on and assume nothing can be done about it and fork over more money to the college to pay for another class and another teacher that perhaps should no longer be teaching.
How is this going to improve the quality of our education? If this cycle continues on without any intervention from the students, the administration will never know about what’s going on and the problem will never be fixed.
The procedure for filing a complaint against a teacher is explained in the MCC Catalog. All students should know these steps and follow them whenever it is appropriate.
The students pay the high tuition, so it is the students’ responsibility to keep the teachers in check.
If teachers need to be reported to the administration, students should not hesitate to do so.
Students should be getting their money’s worth at this college; so if an instructor is not teaching at a level he or she should be, and no one has reported it, it is the students’ fault the instructor is still teaching at the same, low quality.
We have only ourselves to blame. The students need to step it up a notch and start holding the teachers accountable for the quality of our education.
Why not get what we are paying for?