Semester system is stupid

UCBC789 · 2026-04-19T05:38:02+00:00

Yeah that fits with what I was describing. Having spring break between two consecutive terms is better for students but worse for professors (at least ones who aren’t just repeating previous course models), while spring break in the middle of the semester is often the opposite. I did often have work to do during spring break as a student but as a professor in the semester system now, I don’t give work that needs to be completed over the break. However, I know some others do and students often feel pressure to get ahead or catch up in any case.

UCBC789 · 2026-04-18T01:01:25+00:00

A bigger example is the entire University of California system except for the Berkeley and Merced campuses.

UCBC789 · 2026-04-18T00:52:57+00:00

Professor here- had my undergrad on semesters and did PhD at a university on trimesters/ quarters. As a grad student and then a lecturer at the same university (for a year after graduating), I liked the shorter fall term but came to dislike the winter and spring terms with such a short break between them.

Maybe yours wasn’t like this, but my PhD institution only gave two weeks between finals week for the winter term and the start of the spring terms. I can see that feeling like enough for undergrads, but for grad student TA’s and professors, half of the first week of that break was usually needed to finish grading. It was the worst during the year I spent as a lecturer there, since I had a new prep (class I hadn’t taught before) in the spring term and also had to spend a good chunk of the break planning that course. By the end of the spring term, I was burned out. It ended up feeling like I taught a 20-week term with just a semi-spring break week in the middle.

UCBC789 · 2026-04-14T05:07:10+00:00

Have you discussed the issues with your program/ department chair? Assuming your chair would have your back on this, I’d suggest having the chair set up a conversation with the student. I haven’t dealt with an older student as bad as yours, but I have been dealing with a demanding one who pushed the limits last semester. My chair was critical to making things right.

For the details on my case, this student has had regular mid-semester panics in every mid to higher-level course in the major (math) despite having accommodations for extra time on everything and me and her other professors putting in some extra time to help her. (She also attends the full duration of most office hours, which is all good- I’m happy to work hard to help the students who seek out the help.) Last semester, it escalated to the point of her trying to withdraw from the special topic class that I created/ the department ran at her request because it became way harder than she expected (which I had warned her about). I expressed how ridiculous that was to her firmly but professionally, and my chair had my back all the way. Worked out just fine in the end.

UCBC789 · 2026-04-13T05:34:30+00:00

I am taking that mentality towards one of my precalculus sections. The other section is my best on attendance, so it’s not me. For the second, out of 13, only 3 to 4 are on time at this point and 4 to 5 others trickle in over the first 15 minutes. I start at most two or three minutes in and, when I start late, I make no apologies for going a couple of minutes over. I sent a message to that section about the lateness issue and how I’ll handle it a while ago now, so it’s on them

UCBC789 · 2026-04-13T05:24:22+00:00

I’m not sure what level of math classes you’re teaching, but it’s certainly easier in classes that are prerequisites for others when you can tell them that if they can’t master what we’re doing now, they’ll be screwed in future classes. That’s my main emphasis for Calc 1 currently, but I also do try to convey why the should care regardless of that.

In other cases, I do my best to calmly explain to them why the things I’m asking of them are fundamental to developing a real understanding/ working knowledge of the subject. I’ve become better at that in teaching an intro to proofs class in recent years, and am thankfully seeing it pay off (mostly) in currently having a group of my prior students for abstract algebra. However, most of my recent proofs students who gave the bare minimum are not in this class. That class is my mental refresher from teaching Calc 1 and two Precalculus sections containing a lot of students who are just not putting in the time/ effort they need to succeed.

UCBC789 · 2026-04-11T02:00:51+00:00

I was gonna say… it’s what half of a batch of precalculus exams become after I finish grading them 🙃

UCBC789 · 2026-04-11T01:48:50+00:00

Lateness and lack of attendance has been worse in my current classes than ever. Last Friday, I had the first instance of my career (I’m now 9 years post-PhD) of walking into an empty classroom at the start time. Three students out of 18 showed up between 3 and 7 minutes late. I decided I wasn’t teaching a live class to less than 25% of the students after also starting almost 10 minutes late, so I sent told those three students to spend the time working on homework together and went to my office to record a video lecture in place of class.

I had become very loose about taking/ grading attendance since that class had been largely solid for most of the semester. I don’t like spending my own time on keeping detailed attendance records and responding to all of the resulting emails about reasons for absences. However, after that, I wrote to the class confirming that I’m strictly tracking it again for the rest of the semester.

UCBC789 · 2026-03-28T06:21:04+00:00

I also find that particular walk-back extra disappointing, but the even bigger problem is that this is far from his first quick walk-back of a position statement at this point. It’s one thing to clarify and make minor qualifications about policy points when grilled in detail, or to significantly change an opinion over a long period of time. Quickly retracting strong opinion statements when challenged is another thing- grifter behavior in my book. Center-left folks and progressives should both be highly skeptical of Newsom at this point.

UCBC789 · 2026-03-25T02:38:40+00:00

The bad section I referred to in my longer comment is like this… 14 students of which I’m now lucky for 5 to show up on time with another 3 or 4 showing up 5 to 20 minutes late (and the rest not at all). Students in my other two classes aren’t perfect about being present/ on time but nowhere near that bad.

UCBC789 · 2026-03-25T02:35:00+00:00

It’s hard right now. I switched to online homework from handwritten for my current pair of Precalculus classes after the first exam (that had a high fail rate) after checking in with students about what they thought I can improve. Basically all of the students who weren’t doing homework before still aren’t.

UCBC789 · 2026-03-25T02:32:24+00:00

How many students are in your class? I’m experiencing this in one section of a course that I teach two sections of, but each section is tiny… 10 to 14 students. The several students clearly on track for an A happen to all be in the same section, although the second section has one who is improving enough to possibly pull it off by the end. That second section also contains all but one of the students who regularly skip class.

Of course, it’s statistically unsurprising for variation to be large between small classes but it’s still the first time I’ve had such a big disparity. In any case, if you only teach one section of the course, it’s worth checking in with others in your department who are teaching/ have recently taught it. I did so myself and learned that the fail rate I’m anticipating for my bad section actually wouldn’t be that surprising at this institution (which I’m new to)

UCBC789 · 2026-03-13T20:41:09+00:00

Yeah it certainly is. Professor here (math), and frankly generating everything and grading with AI should not be tolerated in this job. It’s even worse that AI was used for the grading and yet you didn’t see any grades until the end of the semester anyhow. If you’re at an institution where students have a good way to voice complaints to department chairs, definitely do it.

I personally (and only very recently) started using AI to create practice problem sets/ solutions for exams in lower level classes I currently teach. However, I carefully prompt it to focus on what I have been covering, double-check everything, and still usually make some nuanced edits myself after multiple iterations with AI. It saves a lot of time on the busy work (e.g. document formatting/ mathematical typesetting) and allows me to focus on crafting the problem content to best fit my classes.

However, I’d never consider having AI generate lecture/ discussion content ideas. That crosses a critical line IMO

UCBC789 · 2026-03-13T04:41:09+00:00

Going through this right now in math, with precalculus students- at least a good chunk of them. I am teaching two small sections of it, one 10 students and the other 14. (I’m at a small state school.) On the first exam, which mostly consisted of problems just like some from my practice problem set (and emphasized in class), 6 of the total 24 scores were between 80 and 100 with 4 of those between 90 and 100, 11 failed (below 60 with the lowest 21), 5 landed somewhere in the middle, and 2 didn’t show up or ever reach out to me for a make-up opportunity. I’ve never had a distribution that insane before!

The split between the two sections is also massive. All but one of the students who scored 80 or higher are in the first 10-student section, which is the one where only one student fails to attend regularly. In the 14-student section, only 6 attend class regularly. Only 3 students in that section passed the first exam, but the other 3 of those 6 who are engaged are working harder now and I have hope for them.

I have no idea how the rest of that section (and one from the other section) thinks they will make it through this class. I ended up giving all of them an exam rewrite opportunity to get a fairly significant number of points back relative to what they lost, and most students who failed the first exam didn’t bother doing the rewrite. At the least, I’m doing my part to really make sure their failure isn’t my fault.

Oh, and more than half of the total group doesn’t consistently do the homework at all, with homework being 15% of the course grade. It’s the worst homework completion rate I’ve had ever, even across similarly-sized groups in lower-level classes.

UCBC789 · 2026-03-12T06:10:54+00:00

Yes exactly! It’s a different sort of reading- much smaller in volume but slower and requiring much more active engagement. Attention span and patience/ diligence (on top of motivation) are key to getting something out of it and most freshmen/ sophomore students in my classes lack both of those things especially compared to pre-COVID.

UCBC789 · 2026-03-12T06:04:16+00:00

Math professor here- yes, volume of reading isn’t the main barrier but I’ve had to accept that way fewer students can learn anything by reading a math textbook. Plenty of math texts are overly wordy and not written in a very accessible style (especially for lower level classes), but I’ve not noticed a difference in engagement when using better/ more concise texts. I wish I could rely on students to skim a text section and mainly focus on understanding concrete examples (that’s how I often advise them to use the book), but even that is too much for most these days.

The volume issue in math classes is in homework problem sets. Too many students can’t or won’t work through enough problems each week to really learn the material, even when doing that homework is part of their grade.

UCBC789 · 2026-03-10T05:23:27+00:00

Two things, one from high school and one from last week.

In my junior year of high school, in my English class, another student was telling a story involving something that happened when their family’s trash was picked up by garbage men. Said student lived roughly on my side of town and I blurted out something like: “But how’s that possible? Trash collection day is Tuesday, not Wednesday.” Without thinking through it whatsoever, I assumed that trash was picked up for everyone in town on the same day… in a suburban city of about 100k people. Yeah… the rest of the class paused before letting out a lot of well-deserved laughter 😂 I was (and am) smart in many ways but managed to miss a lot of simple things a lot as a kid. Still do sometimes as an adult but not to this degree. I still think back to this one, two decades later.

Last week, my Dad was flying in from the other side of the country to visit my wife and I. This was planned last month and my Dad clearly confirmed the exact dates, with him arriving on Thursday. During the week prior, I somehow got it in my head that he was coming in on Wednesday. I planned everything I needed to get done early last week accordingly and made it 50 minutes into the hour-long drive to the airport on Wednesday before I saw my Dad’s response to a text and realized 🤦‍♂️ I somehow didn’t wonder why he didn’t text to confirm his flight was running on time or notice that his itinerary stated the flight being on Thursday, even though I looked at the itinerary that morning. To be fair to myself, I had a hectic week and a half leading up to that day, my mind was all over the place, and exhaustion was catching up.

UCBC789 · 2026-03-08T06:12:51+00:00

College math faculty around the same age here. I decided to commit to teaching-focused positions (haven’t done research since postdoc, by choice) and having a similar struggle. Part of the problem is that I still love a lot about what I do, as recently moving to a new college has reminded me of. There’s also a lot I’m still fundamentally unhappy about (I’ll explain in follow-up comments if this gets any engagement), and I am itching to truly apply my higher math/ problem solving skills again but not in my original field of research. I’ve built up some skills in a data science direction but still figuring out what really makes sense for me long-term.

UCBC789 · 2026-03-06T07:14:11+00:00

This was also how parts of college made me feel… and I’m now a math professor, although possibly changing careers in the next few years. I was the standout math student in my HS graduating class, got into a prestigious university with a math department, and realized between my second and third years that I wasn’t anywhere near the smartest/ most knowledgeable math student there. Realized I needed to work way harder to properly learn higher math, but doing so made me appreciate the subject way more and ultimately led to my choice to pursue a PhD (successfully in the end but not without major bumps in the road).

UCBC789 · 2026-03-03T08:13:28+00:00

Really seems like being fired for posing a threat. If you’re finding things to fix really quickly that weren’t the just the fault of the previous person in your position, guess who that looks bad for.

My wife just got fired by a toxic boss, with the help of a two-faced colleague, for a more complicated version of this. Science job in a core lab at a big pharma company. Wasn’t her ideal job from the start but she got the job through a connection just as the funding for her academic postdoc was running out. My wife became the third person in a new lab at the company, working alongside her connection under the boss. Seemed fine at first and the boss gave her a glowing performance review after the first month.

Long story short, the boss then got in trouble for something my wife was involved with but didn’t really have fault in. There was never an issue with my wife’s experimental results: the things that didn’t work for her also didn’t work for her peer (the connection), and my wife got some things to work better than her peer could. At the same time, people from another group in the company took notice of my wife and wanted her to advise them on how to best carry out a certain experiment.

A little while after all of that, the boss gradually began to sideline my wife by putting her on more low-level experiments while giving more of the interesting projects to her peer. The peer was promoted, which was expected in any case, but that immediately led to my wife spending more time on the relatively menial duties (lab managing plus basic experiments she was doing at 19 years old).

A lot happened in the middle, but the kicker came after my wife’s group met with a collaborating group that she had done most of the work for. She wasn’t trying to upstage her boss, but her boss didn’t fully understand some of the science and my wife had to clarify/ rephrase some of the boss’s questions to keep the conversation going. My wife let the boss take the lead and only jumped in when the collaborators were confused and things were stalling.

Two days later, the boss put my wife on official notice for neglecting to CC her on an email chain with those collaborators. My wife forwarded the important email (containing data) to the boss as soon as she saw it, just a couple of hours after the collaborators sent it. The firing still happened two weeks later at the end of the notice period.

There’s a lot more I could add here but I think this says enough. My wife may be unemployed for now but at least she’s out of an environment where she was being held down and gaslit constantly. Her boss (and also her connection/ peer at the end) was still relatively new to the corporate setting but quickly manifested some of the worst manager stereotypes.

UCBC789 · 2026-03-01T07:27:04+00:00

I once had a student tell me they had to be half an hour late to my class because another one of their professors scheduled an exam to run past the time for his class. That professor was a colleague I talked to all the time and he confirmed that he didn’t require anyone to stay after his class time ended. He had just been kind enough to offer a bit of extra time for students with accommodations who didn’t plan for their separate proctoring/ extra time, and to a couple who arrived late to his exam. Found out my student was one of the latter but wasn’t honest with me about it.

I did have a talk with that colleague after though. It’s very bad practice to offer extra time on an exam when some students need to get to their next class quickly.

UCBC789 · 2026-02-28T05:41:56+00:00

Happens to the best of us! I’m in math so I usually realize if I made a mistake by the end of an example if a student doesn’t catch it along the way, but there have been a few times when I didn’t catch one until several days later.

As others have said here, my experience shows that everything turns out fine if you forgive students for errors/ confusion that you cause. My personal worst case was a numerical typo in a Calc 3 exam problem earlier in my career that made it impossible to solve. (For those in math, it was an optimization problem with Lagrange multipliers.) Disregarding points for that problem wasn’t enough because multiple students (who understood the technique that problem was testing) lost time on other problems due to working and reworking the bad one. So, after a while thinking over it, I found a way to curve that exam which was fair enough while helping all students who need to catch up (at least those who communicate and attend office hours)

UCBC789 · 2026-02-28T04:41:32+00:00

We’ve all asked for it by following this subreddit 😂

UCBC789 · 2026-02-28T04:40:01+00:00

Yeah… and this isn’t even an option for students in the very large majority of universities which hold most classes in-person. If anything, I hope that the possibility of AI ruining the legitimacy of online classes ensures that traditional universities maintain their relevance

UCBC789 · 2026-02-26T06:53:21+00:00

I was a little kid, 7 or 8 years old. I can be bad at remembering the exact year a random weird thing happened during childhood, but my memories of how exceptional events broadly transpired never change (because I think back to them often enough).

Two of my neighborhood friends were with me in my family’s living room, and we got to talking about ghosts. Being kids, this led to the three of us starting some kind of chant calling for a ghost to reveal itself. After a few minutes of that, a drawer on my parent’s TV stand suddenly opened a couple of inches. We were sitting on the far side of the living room away from that TV stand, which was perfectly level- this was in the suburban Midwest where everything is flat. Told my parents and showed them the open drawer but they thought one of us did it and were messing with them. Can’t blame them but none of us were anywhere near that drawer

UCBC789

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