The Contribution of a Professor on your GPA

Abhinav Sawhney

Often one may wonder why there's so much commotion a day or two before classes for the next semester are opened. Is it really that important to do a certain class with a certain professor? Aren't all professors in college equally capable of teaching a certain course? So the question is, why do professors play such a big role towards our final grade? If they do then is the current grading system in colleges fair on all students?

Hopefully I will answer all these questions in this post. Different professors employ different approaches towards teaching a course. Some approaches may be more effective on students than others. As a student you can only hope that your professor will be effective in communicating his point to the class. In colleges, especially research oriented ones like Georgia Tech, not all teachers are at the same level when it comes to effective communication. An individual may have a phD in Math but may not be fluent in the language and hence the knowledge can not be shared as effectively as one may like. A lot depends on the luck of a student when it comes to teaching abilities of a professor.

As exams and assignments for different classes of the same course vary, so does the level of difficulty. Some professors tend to have much easier quizzes and exams than others. This is unfair on the students that have to work twice as hard to get the same grade or even lower. So if GPA's are to mean anything in college there is a serious need to standardize the exams or level of difficulty across a course.

Another area where the professor plays a major role in the grade you get at the end of the semester, is the different policies in place for being late or absent. For example a professor may have a policy that your final grade drops by one if you miss more than three classes. In another class such a policy may be non existent. In some cases this policy may exist for an 8am class and also for a 1.30 pm class, obviously the latter are at a huge advantage. Yet again some students are at a disadvantage.

So with so many discrepancies between the professors I think it is fair to say that the GPA system that we have in place today is not at all efficient. It is a measure of how favorable a certain professor was towards a certain class as opposed to the performance of a student in that class.

The link below takes you to a website that actually demonstrates how different professors have hugely varying average GPA s for a certain course. Now I will let you as the reader decide whether a student who gets an A with a professor with an average GPA of 3.8 is at the same level as a student who gets an A with a professor with an average GPA of 1.8.

Click here and make your own choice.