A professor's cheat sheet

Professors are inconsistent. If you are lucky, you have professors who make appropriate use of Web resources, assemble a reasonable reading list and are open to feedback.

If you are me, your professors are unable use computers, assign entire books to be read in a two-day period, don't accept constructive criticism, struggle with their English and hate redheads like me.

This inconsistency is the result of the dozens of undergraduate departments at Penn which do not have many standards for how courses must be organized.

Academic departments must make guidelines to ensure that their courses accommodate a modern undergraduate education. The department chairs can start by comparing notes with each other, since some departments at Penn have great standards for undergraduate teaching.

To make things simple, this cranky columnist has assembled a cheat sheet for the equally cranky bureaucrats at this University.

n Syllabi -- Advanced course registration began on Monday. At the stroke of midnight, thousands of Penn students tried to sign up for courses with little more information than a vague course description.

It is absurd that most undergraduate departments at Penn don't have syllabi available online. In the College Faculty Handbook, a timeline for course development specifies that syllabi be completed before Advanced Registration.

So, where are they?

If students were able to view syllabi during course registration, we could waste less time "shopping" for courses at the start of the next semester. Students could also use uploaded syllabi to find cheaper books before the start of the semester.

Most departments at the Wharton School maintain Web sites where all syllabi are accessible to all students. If a particular syllabus isn't available, an older version is uploaded.

Other departments at Penn should get with the times.

n Feedback -- There is nothing worse than realizing in the middle of the semester that your class is a train wreck.

In theory, students can vent in end-of-semester evaluations or complain to department heads. But what if students just want to give pointed suggestions to professors before the class explodes into a phalanx of teary undergrads?

In the Marketing Department, students volunteer to collect feedback for professors. Even better, the Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Department has anonymous evaluation forms which students fill out in the middle of the semester.

It just makes sense.

n Books -- Many professors have a nasty habit of creating Godzilla-sized reading lists.

Economics professors tend to make students buy hardcover textbooks and then refuse to assign specific textbook readings. History, Sociology and Political Science professors are notorious for assigning gargantuan reading lists littered with obscure, overpriced books written by their peers.

For example, the books for my 100-level history course cost me $214 for 2,531 pages of text, not including another few hundred bulkpack pages.

Sometimes, we have been told to read an entire 300-page book between two class periods. Other times, we read only a small portion of a book and never pick it up again. This obnoxious waste of student time and money is rampant in undergraduate courses, especially in the humanities.

Departments must compel professors to create sensible reading lists.

One solution is for professors to promote online subscriptions for their textbooks. For example, the Web site SafariX.com has partnered with publishers to offer online versions of popular textbooks for less than the retail price -- which would have saved me more than $300 this semester. Better yet, departments could cap the amount of money students could spend on books in any given class.

With so many departments and so little communication between them, too many professors have become out of touch. Academic departments at Penn can't afford to remain oblivious to good ideas.

If departments start actively exchanging ideas and encouraging student feedback, we can develop a leaner, more flexible and more fulfilling undergraduate experience.

Anything less cheapens our degrees.

Eric Obenzinger is a junior history major from New York. Quaker Shaker appears on Wednesdays.

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