What do students mean by "makes the course harder than it needs to be"?

Question

Something I hear from students about certain instructors is a complaint that the instructor "makes the course harder than it has to be" or some variation. I'm a postdoc and my students generally really like me. I hear them say this about other instructors and I'm just curious, what is going on? I read it on ratemyprofessor or reviews of other instructors, or overhead students saying this.

The easy explanation is "the student is lazy" but I don't buy this. I generally agree with the students that the instructors they dislike aren't great instructors.

It seems to be closer to saying "the instructor is unclear". What is an example of an instructor "making something harder than it needs to be"?

Answer 1

Presumably what they mean is that the explanations of the course material are able to be understood, but they are harder to understand than alternative explanations or modes of teaching which would impart the same material in an easier way. Asserting that a course is harder "than it needs to be" generally means that you think the same learning could be accomplished with less effort and difficulty if it were presented in a better way.

Answer 2

The fundamental reason is that the student is unhappy. But why they are unhappy could be one or more of the following, at least.

1. Instructor doesn't explain things clearly.

2. Instructor gives more detail than necessary.

3. Too much homework.

4. Homework not very useful.

5. Instructor won't take questions.

6. Instructor takes too much time with questions.

7. Instructor follows the book too closely.

8. Instructor doesn't seem to use the book.

9. Exams are too hard.

10. Exams are just wasting my time.

11. I hate group projects.

12. I hate solo projects.

You get the idea, I hope. Everyone that says this probably has a different reason. You can add your own. Stop when you get to 100, if you like.

Note that the statement about "harder than it needs to be" gives no information about why. That requires further exploration in the individual case or evidence from other student comments. If student comments have some consistency then they may have some validity.

Moreover, students aren't always the best judge of this in any case and their real meaning may just be "harder than I'd like it to be". Some things are hard. And in some fields (math, say) insight may only come through hard work.

Answer 3

This can also relate to the scope of the course. During my bachelors, my school offered two versions of introductory statistics: one for math/applied math majors or anyone looking to take further statistics classes, and one intended as a capstone intro for majors who need to know practical statistics. However, for a period of about two years, the capstone course was taught by a professor who disagreed with this philosophy, and taught the capstone intro like it was the advanced intro. This introduced a lot of complex proofs and caused him to run out of time to cover all the practical statistical tests that were supposed to be covered.

This prompted widespread student complaints that he made the course "harder than it needed to be," because in this case the "need" was defined by the fact that this course was developed for a specific audience/scope which he ignored.

Answer 4

"Making the course harder than it has to be" relates mostly to how the content is taught in class.

This can be due to a number of things on a course-wide scale or simply down to how individual lectures or topics are lain out.

Overall this may be due to poor perspective on the part of the professor. He/she never really overviewed the course content from the viewpoint of an incoming student who has all prerequisite courses successfully completed and then structured the lectures accordingly.

On a single lecture basis, it usually means a professor not arranging their lecture in a pedagogically appropriate way, i.e. building on the concepts already known to students and guiding them rationally and sensibly towards their next concept plateau.

But occasionally it also means the professor's delivery of the lecture leaves the students with misunderstandings on the concepts, their relative importance or offers ideas that run counter to the student's intuition or common sense. Here there are different causes, including:

1. The professor may have a natural insight into this concept and assume everyone else also has - though of course they don't.

2. The professor himself/herself has a poor grasp of the concept and is just trying to bang home some (often poor) textbook version of it with a hammer and tongs.

3. The professor's pacing, tone and volume is not proportionate to the importance or complexity of the current content.

4. The professor has very poor vocal projection.

5. The professor chooses an unorthodox (e.g. interactive) approach to a topic that doesn't lend itself to such teaching.

I would say that every professor has one or two of these shortcomings when they start out in their career. To my knowledge, no university insists on professors having to take a teaching course prior to starting lecturing themselves. Yet most learn from their mistakes and the advice of senior colleagues. Many take student observations seriously (after an initial sulk) and adapt their approaches accordingly. But some will maddeningly carry on regardless and neither colleagues nor university management will intervene.

Just one final point on "making courses harder".

The best way to teach something is the clearest way from the point of view of someone not yet familiar with it. Sometimes students (and adults no less) in the euphoria of achievement can forget just how lost they were before they "got" the concept. They then have the confidence to look at the concept in another way and find they can arrive at an understanding - actually quicker, providing you already know of course - by looking at it like that. Then they try explaining it another student in "their own" way - only to thoroughly confuse that student.

Sometimes it's well to remember that the first working out of something is necessarily elaborate rather than elegant. Lessons learned with a bit of work and worry are seldom forgotten - unlike the tricks of elegance.

Answer 5

Sometimes this happens when a student has prior experience, and success, in a subject from a high school course. In the US, Advanced Placement courses are marketed as equivalent to introductory college courses, but college instructors covering the same syllabus will take quite a different approach than high school teachers.

As an example: in single-variable calculus we teach the concept of the derivative as a limit of difference quotients, use the limit to prove theorems about the derivative, and ask students exam questions requiring this conceptual understanding. In a high school class, there may be more class time spent on the literal "calculus" of derivatives with the power rule, product rule, quotient rule, etc.

A student may have succeeded in this high school class, thanks to the extra time spent with in class with the instructor, and the focus on mechanics over concepts. They may find that the college version, comparatively, spends "too much" time on ideas that they feel aren't relevant since they weren't relevant in the high school version. From their point of view, the college instructor transformed a subject they found easy in high school into one which they currently find hard. Hence, "harder than it needs to be."

Answer 6

I've had something like this where the instructor was teaching a course in his field of expertise to a group of students completely new to the subject. But due to his extensive expertise and knowledge of the area he didn't cover the fundamentals well and just glossed over them, because for him it was so obvious it didn't really need explaining. He also used a lot of jargon he was familiar with but we were unaware of, as a result a lot of students got lost at the very start as he jumped into the more difficult stuff too early. He made the course more difficult than it needed to be by not taking the time to understand the level of the students he was teaching and jumping into material that was more advanced too early, using unfamiliar jargon and not taking the time to cover the fundamentals properly.

Answer 7

What is an example of an instructor "making something harder than it needs to be"?

I'll quote this example from personal experience, which is unfortunately not very understandable unless you are in physics.

Basically, when we study physics at high school level, we have parameters that we evolve forwards in time using known equations. For example, we could be asked to calculate a [force] that acts on [body] for [time] producing [acceleration].

Comparatively, in quantum mechanics, there are two basic approaches. The first is called the Schrödinger picture. You are given a physical state, which you evolve forwards using the Schrödinger equation. This is relatively similar to high school physics, since the operators never change, but the physical state does.

The other picture (and historically the one first discovered) is called the Heisenberg picture. In this picture, the physical state remains constant while the operators (corresponding to the things you want to measure, like position or momentum) change. There is still an analog of the Schrödinger equation, but it is for operators, not physical states.

Needless to say, for students brought up on high school physics, the Heisenberg formulation is significantly harder to grasp. It doesn't matter that the two formulations can be shown to be equivalent - the Schrödinger formulation is simply easier to understand on an intuitive level. A student who sees Heisenberg's equation of motion for the first time could legitimately go "what on Earth am I looking at? How can this possibly be a physics equation?".

When I first studied quantum mechanics, I had the misfortune of my professor using a Heisenberg picture textbook. I had all the prerequisites - linear algebra, matrix manipulations, strong elementary physics grades - and near the end of the course, I (like most other students) still had no idea what was going on. I had no physical intuition, no sense of what the math I was doing is supposed to represent. I still got an "A" for the course, but about the only thing I learned was that the professor's math is flawless.

If you teach quantum mechanics using the Heisenberg picture, I'd say you are making the course harder than it needs to be.

Edit: to add another example, consider this answer to a bridge question on Boardgames.SE (if you're not aware, bridge is a card game).

You don't need to be an expert on bridge to see why the author's teachers said not to let the author near novices. When the novice asks "what do I do with this hand?", the author is liable to respond with "well it depends on X, Y, Z, and more besides". Meanwhile the novice is looking for "the answer". With so many more things thrown on top, it rapidly becomes confusing for the novice, making the answer harder than it needs to be.

An analog in academia could be the student asking if X is true, and the teacher says "well it depends if Y, Y', Y'', Y''' are true, if none of them are true (and usually none of them are) then X is true".

Answer 8

When I was an undergrad, professors that I thought "make the course harder than it needs to be" were brilliant people who weren't good at teaching. They didn't use appropriate textbooks, or they skipped their own office hours, or they provided no feedback on assignments, etc.

As an example, I had a math professor who spent every class period delivering his lecture while faced away from the class, writing on the chalkboard. He didn't assign a textbook. He never made his lecture notes available online. He would not let students take photos of the chalkboard. We spent our classes frantically transcribing his notes, scribbling down anything seemingly-important from his lecture, and occasionally asking for notation clarification—Excuse me, professor, is that a 1 or an i? We students coped by comparing our notes and swapping textbook and youtube channel recommendations and, on the whole, we learned the material. But it was so much harder than it needed to be.

Answer 9

It could be because of the mismatch between reality and expectation, from my experience.

When I took Linear Algebra years ago, my classmates complained that they did not understand anything. However, it was not the fault of the instructor.

The instructor chose the axiomatic method of teaching Linear Algebra instead of the "cookbook" style. As for me, the course was indeed abstract and interesting, but not difficult. However, my friends did not think about it that way, blaming the instructor instead. They had friends from other universities, for example, who told them that Linear Algebra was easy like high school mathematics. Some of them had prior learning experience with "cookbook" linear algebra. That's why many of them expected that the course would be that easy.

All of our mathematics courses were taught in axiomatic style. Not just Linear Algebra. It is just an example.

Moreover, some people are not ready to embrace the axiomatization of mathematics. Some people don't even know about the existence of axiomatic systems. Some even refuse it think about it.

Also, the seemingly, deceivingly simple nature of the real world makes some people believe that we are trying to overcomplicate things. That is not true.

Answer 10

Because teaching is hard, and people who are experts in a topic often aren't actually very good at passing that knowledge on.

In my experience, the biggest failing is usually due to not getting the level of detail right for the audience, and that comes down to two factors.

1. If you don't focus enough on the things which are the building blocks for everything else they need to learn, they'll struggle to learn. An expert instructor will often gloss over important information, because to them, it's so basic that they forget it needs to be said.

2. If you focus too much on the things which aren't fundamentals, they'll be confused and overloaded. An expert instructor will often elaborate on more advanced aspects of the field because they find it interesting, forgetting that their audience don't yet have the grounding to keep up.

Getting that balance right is one of the most critical skills for anyone doing teaching / training work.

Answer 11

I guess a concrete example is fine:

The definition and theory behind the derivative is considered tricky, and complicated, by students. The list of rules on how to compute the derivative is considered easy.

Students tend to prefer this is how you calculate, and solve problems on the final over this is the theoretical reason why we actually care. Students are much happier with learning to be meat computers, rather than having an actual understanding of the theory.

I think this can explain the comments on the evaluation. So, one easy way out is to always follow up theory with a concrete example where this is used, and make sure this example is from some older final. Real-world examples are much more abstract than 'the final which is gonna be in 2 weeks from now'.

Answer 12

In a comment, @Garandy replied:

There's an art to teaching well that a lot of professors don't bother to learn or put into practice - making an effort to write clearly during presentations, having prepared slides when possible, utilizing real-world examples to illustrate theory, etc. Beyond that, though, there are professors that pride themselves on their class being "hard" and do nothing to make the content more accessible to students - often times because it was "hard" when they took it, and they can't fathom why their students couldn't all learn it as well as they did.