The University of Houston

Date: Oct 21 2018
Major: Other (This Major's Salary over time)
The good: UH is still accredited so you can get a degree. The math department is better than most of the other NSM departments, at least for the first two years of math. Higher level math courses have problems with consistency, and with quality instructors.

The bad: The University does not make any effort to provide a quality education to the students. Course evaluations are not part of a quality improvement or assurance program. Course evaluations are only viewed by the professor.

A few professors are so unprofessional they should not be permitted to speak to any students.

Many professors are engaged in research and are not interested in teaching. In these cases they rely heavily on student teaching assistants. TA's will create and grade assignments and tests without oversight from the professor, or the department. A third of you class time can be spent with a TA that may not even speak to the class for more than five minutes. TA that could not teach a class on tying your shoes outside of the university are inappropriately teach a university level course that awards credit.

Most professors, including the few that make a sincere effort to teach, are simply not prepared to teach a course. Most have never taught in an environment that is designed to develop their ability to teach, or to develop and improve a specific curriculum. The departments do not observe the professors, therefore corrective action of any form is impossible. The departments do not support faculty in any meaningful way, and do not make an effort to improve the courses of instruction. Therefore you can have an instructor that has been teaching for several years, but is no better at teaching than they were when they taught their first course ever. That said I ave had two courses taught by an an instructor that had just finished a Masters, and is teaching a university level course, but has never had even the most basic introduction to teaching, to developing a lesson plan, and they are not given guidance from the university.

Often computer science courses, that require the use of a computer during the class time, are placed in rooms without computers, without power outlets and without desks. TAs write assignments that are not proofread before they are given, so they contain many errors. When you write a program, it may work on 13 of 15 hidden bench tests, so it is impossible to know if the test case had errors, if it being graded correctly, or what if anything you did wrong. So there is no way to learn because you do not know what you did wrong or what the test even was. UH policy actually requires that the student be given the opportunity to view their graded coursework and see the test, but the TA refuses largely because they do not know any better, and the professor is there to do research, and not to teach.

Most professors are approachable with respect to their demeanor, but they are simply not good at teaching and do not have the support needed to to help them become good at teaching.