The University of Louisville

Date: Jan 17 2012
Major: English (This Major's Salary over time)
I've attended Jefferson Community College and Indiana University Southeast on top of the University of Louisville so I have decent perspective on this university's shortcomings compared with schools in close proximity to it. The number one complaint, above and beyond everything else, is that this highly populated campus is impersonal. The faculty and staff don't convey the same warmth and true caring as the other schools. This trait affects the quality of classes that, at the very least, I can speak on subjects like accounting, English and computer information systems. In general teachers don't want to teach. They expect students to do everything of importance on their own time. This translates to reading entire textbooks and doing just as well on an exam if the student had skipped every single lecture or attended each. These are the same teachers supposedly tethered to "highly competitive" and "good" programs such as the business school. I will never forget how my accounting teacher kept insisting accounting is something that couldn't be taught. The class average on all four exams that semester was 65%. Mine was about 85%. Why? I spent time watching videos outside of class of people who actually COULD teach accounting. Novel thought.

Let's keep going. Out of four English classes I attended three teachers seemed to go out of their way not to go over the syllabus or omit important information under the flimsy and frankly overused expression "you're all adults". I can accept this much. What I can't accept is the exams failed to effectively measure whether or not a student had read the mountain of reading materials expected of them. Spending dozens of hours reading only to have all that time wasted since the questions were on obscure passages or parts never clarified in class is not a good feeling. Indeed, It does not help that the lectures consist of little more than the teacher asking the students' to give opinions, providing very little for a note taker to carry on to exam day. Then there's a humanities-related class where our teacher flat out changed the format of the test and assignments on the syllabus on a last minute basis—so students would walk in on test day only then to find they must write five essays over a once free weekend (so much for fun time), or write one long in-class essay. This type of thing does not fly with me. I've never seen anything close to it at the other schools.

The campus is so packed full of people that it's very difficult to find a place of solitude. People on bicycles clipped me more than once and never stopped or apologized. The cafeteria food is very poor. I developed chronic depression at UofL but never found a place to complain to the administrators about some of the issues presented in this review. They did provide free counseling services, which is nice, but who wants to attend a university only to wind up needing emotional counseling? Not me. I could go into the less than ideal parking situation, especially the unorganized mess the campus was on the day they gave out the H1N1 vaccination (couldn't they have planned that even a little better? Serious?), but I won't bother.

Very little in life gets me angry. This school is unfortunately one of those things (I never got a bad grade at UofL, so no, my agitation is not at my own failures). I could have said much worse than I've said here, but I'm airing on the side of calm so as not to alienate readers from my review. I am convinced they spend more money on spreading the myth of the university's greatness and less on giving the student a quality and worthwhile experience. IUS provided more competent, friendlier teachers, efficient staff, great food and aqueduct facilities for a lot LESS tuition. Something smells here… and the fact that UofL continues to ignore these blaring shortcomings is baffling.
I've said enough to convey the point. Farewell all.