St Petersburg College

Date: Feb 27 2011
Major: Undecided (This Major's Salary over time)
Its my third year at SPC. If you want to take your gen.Ed classes here you'll be fine. However, don't take any serious math or science here. I'm not trying to be a hater, its just a fact. Your intro classes to chem, bio etc.. will be taught to you as if you already know the content, and are expected to already know everything. Lets face it, if you did you probably wouldn't of enrolled in a junior college. All of your basic classes; Comp 1&2, algebra, ethics, humanities, etc.. are well paced and fairly easy.

Be prepared to get screwed over in the grading. If theres a curve, I've never seen it. There are no + or - grades, you get a 89.8%, and you get a B. Professor was unclear about what they expected of you, your problem. Professor wants to change their own syllabus half way through the semester, tough crap. Professor wants to email you at the last minute and say

Oh yeah there's something else due Monday

, your problem.

From my first class to my most recent, I've heard this speech over and over again from the instructors.

I could of taught at a bigger institution, but I needed the flexible schedule that SPC offers

Yes, thank you, this means you have a lazy educator, phoning it in. Their quizzes and tests have usually been prepared by someone else and I swear to God every year I find errors on their tests that they never correct. You can dispute it and get your grade changed but, they never correct the problem in the system. Why? Because most of them can't use a computer. That's not a joke, it's a sad reality. Professors keep office hours? Good luck. If you do manage to actually find one when they claim they're there, be prepared for little to no help in a cubical the size of a shoebox. They always have somewhere else they have to be. Understand now, with a few exceptions, these teachers took this job because they didn't want to work that much. So now you're just bothering them. It feels like a plumber getting mad at you because your sink is backed up. What was your job again?

Confusion^2. Try having a chemistry lecturer who at best has a casual acquaintance with the English language, then a chem lab instructor who wouldn't know English if it bit her (Osorsis @ clearwater). If you can't have any decipherable communications with the instructor, you're doomed. Oh yeah, I forgot, that's your problem.

SPC has one gleaming bright spot. It's cheap, but remember you get what you pay for. The classes are over-crowded, the facilities are behind the times, the teachers (for the most part) are lazy and come and go as they are almost all adjunct professors. It's fast food education at fast food prices. They have created a perfect bureaucracy, no one has any authority to do anything really, and if you get the name of someone who is in charge, they never return an email or a phone call. Your problem now. It is not uncommon to find half a science class that is taking the class for the second or third time. You might think that means the students are idiots, but when there's that many, it means the work isn't being taught properly. Half of any class isn't that dumb, or they wouldn't keep trying. Dumb people quit. These students are just trying to understand the material with little instruction. If it were that easy, anyone could just read the book and take the final. Remember this is a public community college, not MIT.

I read the previous post about the financial aide personnel. I'll confirm her point, they are terrible. Slowest moving cog in the works. My first year I spent more time there than in class. As it turned out, it was a 2 month clerical error on their part. Or they just want to hold your funds and earn interest on it as long as possible (I have know proof of that, just a possibility).

My best advice; apply to better institutions. If you can't get in right away, take only your general Ed classes at SPC and keep apply for USF.