I would like to start this blog by stating that I love Pepperdine and I am very happy with my overall experience here. I have met many amazing people and had many great experiences.
When I was asked to be a blog writer for Pepperdine, I was tasked with writing about my experience in its entirety. The assignment or job as you could call it, was to write about both the good and bad aspects of the program. This was to get a picture of what a true “day in the life” of a student was like. This will be my first semi-negative blog posting, and I am actually a little bummed out writing about it. I usually try to see everything in as positive a light as possible, but I feel that it would be “not telling the whole truth” if I left this post off of my blog as it has definitely been a part of my experiences. Before writing this, I spoke to many other students and found that many of them have had similar experiences.
To put the problem simply: There is a huge discrepancy in the workload and overall difficulty in the same classes based upon which professor that you have.
The primary issue with this is that it makes grades lose a lot of their significance. It is possible to have two students, with the same overall ability, put in the same amount of effort and get different grades due to who their professor was. Although students try to “ask around” or check “ratemyprofessor.com”, many times students end up taking a particular professor because they need the class at a certain time.
For example, some professors often times let their classes out a hour and a half early while others sometimes only give one break to attempt to fit in more material. Some professors provide study guides for exams while others don’t. Some professors have quizzes everyday while others “don’t believe in quizzing”. Some professors allow midterms and finals to be taken “open note” while others don’t believe in even clarifying exam questions. The number of chapters a student is responsible for on midterms and finals differ greatly depending on the lecturing style of the professor. Some professors set their classes up for people with an interest / background in the subject, while others provide more of an introductory approach. Some professors would never round a grade not matter how close it was, while other professors (quote) “Have a little Santa Claus in them” when it comes to grading. The list goes on and on to say the least...
Now I do not want to be misunderstood here at all. I am not saying that classes are necessarily too hard or too easy, just that the workload and overall difficulty varies too much from professor to professor. The problem I’m proposing may or may not have a feasible solution.
One idea that I have thought about, would be having structured tiers of required classes. For example, all of the students have to take a 2 session long finance course. It is a requirement and an integral part of our core business foundation. But the well known differences in the difficulty of the professors should be acknowledged by the program. Pepperdine could create a Finance 614 A class and a Finance 614 B class. The A class would be designed for students with a background and interest in pursuing finance and would be taught by the more difficult professor. The B class would be designed for students whose main emphasis would be in subjects like marketing or organizational behavior, and be taught in a more introductory approach. This idea would allow students to be pushed harder in their areas of emphasis and lessen the workload for what they considered less important to their professional development.
I know that this blog posting probably won’t change anything in terms of our program here, but it is a frustration that many students here on campus have to deal with on a regular basis.
