An interesting week and slightly new plans

I've had stuff that I've wanted to post about all week, but given that I had two tests this week, this is the first chance I've had to post anything.

The first thing to mention is that I've altered my approach to getting into graduate school slightly. In order to make sure that I've got a competitive background, I'm going to hang out at UNT a few extra months and get a second BA in psychology before applying to graduate school. This will give me a chance to explore which schools I want to go to during the next year, and give me the opportunity to work on some undergraduate research projects, which will increase my likelihood of being able to go to a school I want. It will also give me a bit more time to prepare for the GRE.


In more interesting news: One of my class instructors was FIRED this over last weekend!

Let me set the stage for this. The first day of class, this cocky graduate student announced that he would be teaching quantitative methods in psychology (statistics), and that we wouldn't have any homework, and that we'd have our grades based entirely on three tests. That would be fine, except that he was totally vague about what to study for the exams ("just know the materials in the chapters"). He thought that reviews were tantamount to cheating.

On top of that, the only way he'd ever lecture was by going through the most poorly designed Powerpoints I have ever seen. He'd rarely try to engage the students to see if they comprehended the material, and if he did ask a question for someone in the class to answer it was a dumb rhetorical one that there was no point in answering if you were following along, and meant nothing to you if you were completely lost.

The first exam in September ended up with an average of 59 and a median of 54, in stats lingo that means more people did worse then the average then did better (I got a 91). A good portion of the class dropped at that point, but most decided to stick with it. Most of the students were hoping that the low grades who inspire him to change his methods since they clearly demonstrated that he wasn't properly presenting the material. He didn't.

After he stuck to his poor teaching method a group of students went to him complaining that he needed to change methods, show more examples and take more time to see that everyone was following along. He instead lectured them that they were just lazy kids who weren't applying themselves and were spending too much time in college parties then studying. In reality a few of the complainers were middle aged mothers who had returned to school.

When he didn't listen they went to the department, but thought all of their complaints were falling on deaf ears. Finally the department chair said he'd sit in on the class for a few minutes, which he finally did on Wednesday of last week, two days before our second test.

I took the test on Friday and figured I got another A, but I knew that it would be beyond the ability of most of the class. I was pretty sure that the instructor was going to be going to be skewered on Monday during class, until an email from the department chair went out to everyone in our class Monday morning. This email was offering everyone in our class a short window of opportunity to take an "I" in the class, and then be allowed to retake the class without having to pay tuition for it. I had never heard anything like that ever happening before anywhere.

During the hour I had between classes I went up to chair I read in near where my class is and saw a good number of students from my class discussing this email wondering if this meant our grades on this test had been even worse. While we were all discussing this another student showed up who announced that she had tried to meet with our instructor during his office hours that morning, but he had refused to discuss anything with her because he was no longer he instructor. When she inquired as to the details he asked her to leave.

About 5 minutes into the start time of the class a tenured professor finally showed up to tell us that he'd be in charge of the class from this point on, but had only known that for about 3 hours. He didn't have any details about anything, but he had been told that almost everyone failed the tests that they had already scored. He then told us to take the rest of the time off, to consider the "I" option and that he'd have a new syllabus for us on Wednesday along with our grades up to that point, and how scoring would work for the rest of the semester.

Well, Wednesday rolled around and he had the syllabuses as promised, but no grades. For some reason our former TA could not be reached, and all of our first test scores had only been recorded as letter grades instead of actual test scores. As of today we still don't have our grades, because apparently the TA had a death in the family. Man when it rains it pours.

With all this happening and the fact that the same people who run the undergraduate program run the graduate program, I think you can all see why I've decided not to get my PhD from UNT.