Making the Grade

I just stumbled upon my rating as a professor on MySpace. The statistical sample is a little small for anyone to take seriously. But it amuses me, just as it does when I read my course evaluations, that students consistently say, both that they learned a lot in my class and that it was easy. My not-so-humble response is that degree of difficulty has a lot to do with how well the professor teaches. The hardest courses I took as an undergraduate were the ones presided over by professors who had already checked out or never really checked in to begin with.