What to Do if You Have a Bad College Professor

By Zy Mazza

Bad professors have many different incarnations like 50 Shades of Poor Teaching. There’s the clueless grad student on a Fulbright without the foggiest clue of how to conduct a classroom. You have the nose-in-the-air, “I’ve been published”, “bow to me, peasants” type who insists you call them Dr. as opposed to Mr./Mrs. Then there’s the tenured grump who spew knowledge at you without ever learning your name.

First things first. Figure out which one you’ve got.

Nail down your professor type

So syllabus day has come and gone and you are less than enchanted with your professor. You need to assess your situation. What about your professor is off-putting? Attitude? Instruction- style? Lack of respect toward students? Lack of knowledge of the subject? 

Ask yourself a few questions: Am I going to be tempted to skip this class to avoid dealing with them?” Is the class mandatory to my major/minor?

Use the first 2-3 sessions to gauge the situation. If the teacher is poor simply because of bad attitude, perhaps you’ll still benefit academically from the class. But if the teacher is bad because of poor instruction methods, you have almost nothing to gain and may need to take more drastic measures.

Figure out if you can get out of the class

Thanks to the format of every university ever, some classes are mandatory and cannot be swerved. In the case that you have an awful professor for a mandatory class, make haste with getting back on the enrollment web page. There are usually multiple sections of a given class. See if another professor’s section is still open and transfer quickly. Failure to do this simple task has sentenced me to 4 hair-pulling, teeth-grinding months in the classes of magnificently awful professors.

If there are no other open sections, email the professor of a closed section and explain your situation. Don’t be vicious or bad mouth the professor you have. If anything, blame your need to transfer on an outside circumstance, like a changed work schedule—there’s no shame in fibbing. They may make an exception and let you into a full class. If not, you have to weigh the pros and cons of dropping the class and waiting until the next time the class is offered. (Please bear in mind some classes aren’t offered every semester before making this call.)

If all else fails, you can also talk to your academic advisor or equivalent to see if they can pull any strings. They might be able to help you out if there seems to be clear evidence that you aren’t compatible with your current prof.

Making due with a bad professor

If you conclude there is absolutely no way around this professor and you must remain in their class to graduate on time, here’s how to deal.

Get friendly with your fellow students. Think of it as forming a labor union against a corporate oppressor. Few things bring students together like a bad teacher. If, for example, the professor is bad about posting assignments to the class webpage in a regular, uniform manner, students can remind each other of what is due and bounce ideas off one another for how to go about the assignment. If the instruction method is poor, you can form study groups and pour over the textbook together, in essence becoming each other’s teachers. At the end of the course, you can band together to leave a collectively bad evaluation for the professor, so that the university can take action and not brush it off as being a lone, disgruntled student’s complaints.

Another course of action is to try to befriend a bad professor, which I have done before and it has been immensely helpful. Getting on their good side makes them more apt to allow you to withdraw if you feel you need to, and there is a chance they will take it easier on you in the grading. No promises here, but I’ve seen it happen.

If you have put in a solid effort to deal with a bad professor and feel it has been to no avail, don’t hesitate in petitioning for a withdrawal. Especially if you feel your grade is in jeopardy. Don’t wuss out of withdrawal because the teacher is intimidating. You gotta do what you gotta do, and GPA is forever.

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