Just weeks ago, students registered for their winter courses, and right now, many are still deciding to drop or add new courses to their term.
As they peruse the schedule of classes, a wildly popular resource is the Student Media Web site bruinwalk.com.
The site hosts a system that allows students to rate professors they’ve had and view the comments and rankings left by previous students.
While the site is a helpful resource if used reasonably, bruinwalk.com ratings should not serve as a student’s ultimate benchmark for picking courses or professors.
On the first day of my first quarter at UCLA, I filed into Dodd 147 as an eager undeclared student, excited to become a full-fledged Bruin.
An eccentric professor entered the room and began the class by telling us to drop the course if we needed guidelines such as grade percentages and syllabi. The course turned out to be a whirlwind of tangent upon tangent that ended up circling back to a highly complex and nuanced explanation. The course was wonderfully disorganized and we took our finals on blank computer paper.
To this day I have yet to have a professor as challenging in such a unique way as this professor. The class was intricately engaging and the workload was certainly manageable. The equally skilled teaching assistants cleared up any difficulties that arose from having this particular professor.
And yet, bruinwalk.com rates this professor at a mere 4.85 out of 10.
If I had heard of bruinwalk.com at freshmen orientation, I would have been swayed to not enroll in the course.
At a school such as UCLA, known for its academics and research-frontier professors, it is usually safe to assume that any professor knows his or her material.
As Kuan Tseng, a fourth-year East Asian studies student said, “They should all be educated professors that teach well if they’re at UCLA. “
He added, “Even if a professor is difficult, sometimes you just have to go for it and try hard.”
As for the ability to teach well, there is less certainty. Of course, an education does not always come with sound teaching skills. Many of the most educated professors ““ stereotypically in the sciences ““ are not especially adept at lecturing or engaging student interest. On bruinwalk.com’s 10 “least effective” professors, eight of them teach either mathematics or science.
But these are courses students must take, so it makes little sense to spend four-plus years shuffling requirements around in hopes that a poorly rated professor will retire or suddenly stop teaching the course he or she has been teaching in the exact same way for the past 10 years.
Bruinwalk.com does host many relevant services other than professor ratings. The site’s textbook student-to-student store is a great place to shop for a bargain, and the classifieds and housing listings are also helpful resources.
Unfortunately, many students do not use these resources with the same mind-set as the professor ratings. For instance, few students would live somewhere (regardless of how enticing its listing may be) without seeing the apartment for themselves. And yet, they blindly follow the advice of their peers when choosing professors.
A better resource may be making the ratings gathered via in-class evaluations available to students.
These are clearly more complete, as nearly all students fill them out, and they may thus eliminate possible response bias that may occur with Bruin Walk’s rankings.
It goes without saying that there is no bruinwalk.com for the post-graduation world.
Going out of your way to find the easiest or most accessible professor for every class is to diminish the value of the undergraduate experience. Save for word of mouth, there is little means to decipher which coworker should be avoided or which project should be abandoned.
To survive courses with difficult, even obstinate, professors is to emerge a student skilled not only in the material studied, but at effectively managing and interacting with all types of individuals.
If students are still shopping for classes to drop and add, they should use all the resources they have, bruinwalk.com included. But they should remember that the best resource they can have is that of sitting in on the first class and deciding for themselves.
Is bruinwalk.com your sole source of guidance when picking professors? E-mail Makarechi at kmakarechi@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.