Have you guys ever wondered what your professor's grades were in college? What GPA did they graduate with...

My PI majored in physics and failed at least two classes. Hes probably the smartest guy I know so i think everyone has a few bad marks that they just don't tell anyone about.

I was once curious as well. Looked up his vita then. He was everywhere in the top 1%.
School, University, PhD/Doctorate and so on.
In everything. Kinda explains why he doesn't give normal student a second glance and just greet the 'good' students. Feels bad man when you say 'Hi, good morning!' out of behavior and he just ignores you.

I just walk straight past every lecturer lmao. Feels good to be a big fucking autist.

Why do you need to be such a dick

I have thought of that, though they'do never admit it I think most people have a few academic fuck ups, especially if they spend enough time in school.

I've thought about this a lot. I regularly check the resumes of the professors I have for classes.

What I have discovered is that almost always, the people teaching you were the best of the best of their classes.

I go to a like top 5 Canadian university, one that probably not many people internationally have heard of, and almost all my faculty has gone to schools like Berkeley, McGill, Stanford, Oxford, NYU, Harvard, and Princeton.

These people are more than likely like the people in your class that get perfect grades, are active in social activities, have multiple hobbies, were undergrad TAs, did lots of research... people that are unlike most of you.

It's also very surprising that it takes someone with such a good education to get a job at a uni like mine. It's good, don't get me wrong, and I realize not everyone can get a job at Harvard, but damn. It really puts things in perspective.

>It really puts things in perspective
it does honestly, and it's scary ):

tfw shit uni

>go to look up the cv for professor of my programming class
>is like 50 years old but doesn't even have a PHD, only masters
> has written like 3 papers in the past 6 years.
>all garbage, like worst of the worst.
>think maybe he started late because he is just so industry heavy in his background
>lets check out his resume.
> 80-90 he worked as "Head Programmer" for.......
>a fucking company in the middle of nowhere small town midwest.....
> called "Johns tree trimming services"

Yeah this is the quality of my instructors. jesus christ. It looks like he just faked all of his fucking experience completely!

I swear to fucking god my CE prof. literally said that he was unqualified for the job because he got shit grades in college and dropped out early

What uni is it?

>tfw I go to a community college where my chemistry professor has a PhD from MIT and practically every teacher has a PhD
>tfw I'm beginning to realize that my community college is harder than 80% of universities

I go to a school in the Princeton/Harvard/Stanford tier. We have professors here who regularly joke about how badly they did during their undergrad, but they generally have extremely impressive research credentials. The ones who did get perfect grades all the way through also joke about how they didn't have lives back then.

Perhaps the phenomenon you're witnessing is a reality where the best you can do when trying to rely on good grades is an "okay" but no-name school in Canada. There's nothing wrong with it, but it's pretty well-known around schools like these that grades aren't even close to being an accurate indicator of academic success.

>What I have discovered is that almost always, the people teaching you were the best of the best of their classes.
Do people actually bother putting their grades in their CV? If you're at the stage of having a teaching position at a university, nobody's gonna care about that anymore.

>mfw I want to be a prof
>mfw C+ across the board

I hate grades. I understand everything perfectly fine, I just get fucked over with small mistakes

My adviser got str8 A's all the way through her schooling.

What CC lad

>Doing TA in a uni in France
>Professor has less paper than me and stopped
publishing 20 years ago

I guess it all depends. Since the pay is so low in France the non prestigious university don't get good professors.

One of my profs told me he failed differential equations the first time.

You know you can always just ask them how well they did in school. I don't think I've ever had a professor who was opposed to talking about it. But if you're wondering because you're hoping that your shitty grades aren't so bad then you may end up feeling worse. It's probably fair to assume they had to be at least top 20% to get into grad school, and did well there to get a faculty job.

Grades don't matter once you graduate and get a new position, but they are reflective of work effort and motivation, barring some unfortunate events. Professors tend to have high work output since they were students. Straight A's isn't necessary though. Just mostly A's.

>Johns Tree Trimming Services

Most professors have their resumes online
And yes practically all of them graduated cum laude/summa cum laude

Compare it to top scientists in the field, Ones that teach probably had better grades on average, which probably means that ones with better grades are more attracted to academia than ones who don't.

I just looked at their website.
"Tree Trimming - What You Need to Know!"

I feel really sad for that prof actually, I gave him the nastiest course evaluation of all time and I feel so shitty about it. He is really a nice guy and he tries really hard but he is just completely worthless/dumber than a box of shit.

Oh his publications apparently he once wrote an article that was later published in the book in my pic.

To be honest, you should show this guy some respect. Even if he's not the smartest person in the world, objectively, he has contributed more to academia and society than you have thus far.

Even if you one day achieve something significant, something he can't even understand, you at least owe him a debt of respect for the role he played in your education. Don't be a dick. People can't control how intelligent they are, and this guy at least seems to be giving a genuine effort to make the best of the hand he's been given.

Why do students suck professor dick so hard, you're the one paying them for a service, if it sucks you give them a bad review like what that user did. It's your right.

The issue isn't 'sucking dick.' The issue at hand is common decency; my complaint isn't with a bad course evaluation, but instead with insulting a man who in all likelihood hopes for nothing other than your success by calling him 'dumber than a box of shit.'

Sure, he may not be the most talented; sure, his course may have sucked. The least you could do is show appreciation for his effort, and, even if you didn't like his course, maybe offer some constructive criticism to help him out.

>when you understand it but your grades are shit
>tfw last good math teacher I had was in year 9

Got a straight up D- on my final report card for AP Mathematics. Teacher I had for two years (Units 1-4) was more concerned with how we were practically lesser than monkeys mentally speaking.

My other maths class teacher at the time was like a fucking scanning machine and would correct me if I didn't explain anything as if I were a mechanical substitution for a textbook, and walk me through it in painful detail.

Sorry for the blogging, but really teachers who allow for the "big idea, small mistakes" issue to continue and can't intervene suck at teaching.

I attended a top 10 as well.

Some of the professors came off as completely normal. Like, if you met them you'd never guess they were a prof @ a top 10.

One math prof I had (PhD from ivy) wouldn't do any computations (like simple multiplication/addition). They admitted they can't do basic arithmetic & said those computations were uninteresting.

No that's not, people with good grades do better in life since they actually studied and can make a good career.

Could you elaborate on this please

I don't know about their grades, but I know that almost all of them got their PhDs in fancy US-based ivy league Universities.

I failled Geometry in HS and graduated with a 2.6 GPA, although I did have reasonable SAT scores Math 620 and CR 690. I went to a state uni and did really well by having no life and doing undergraduate research, and I now go to a tier 1 school for TCS. If you are in HS right now, the best advice I can give you is don't get discouraged by a shitty track record, most of those all A students in HS bust when they enter college because of lack of self discipline. As in, they never developed it independently. It may sound really cheesy but discipline is everything in STEM fields.

This is not all that uncommon, IMO. But, all showed potential in research from early in undergrad. Probably more so for professors who didn't go great in undergrad.

In one of my tech jobs, I ended up getting to know another professor (not my lab) who was helping us out with a new angle of the project. It was clear this guy is not only brilliant, but also very technically gifted. He had done a PhD at Harvard. Nice guy, but very intimidating.

Turns out, one of his students told me he wasn't a great student in undergrad. Had a low-3s GPA (maybe 3.1 or 3.2, a B+ to B average), but was an awesome researcher. He that he struggled in early intro classes at a very competitive undergrad, but ended up clicking later on and did better later on. His letters came from National Academy members who raved about him.

It ended up working out, he now has tenure at a Tier-1 school.

Only a handful of graduates go towards tenure track and I'm sure those were amongst the top of the class so I'm pretty sure they all got good grades.

Pretty sure none of them was consistently failing classes or getting 6/10 and ended up a professor.

The elaboration is trivial

This is an imageboard not an advanced mathematical textbook

Found the guy with a sub 3.0 GPA that spends all his time reading (probably bullshit) unicorn success stories of becoming a millionaire playboy superstar after graduating from Flyover State University with a 2.6.

Fuck that guy is attractive.

>Edward Vladimirovich Frenkel (Russian: Эдyapд Bлaдимиpoвич Фpeнкeль, Эдвapд Фpeнкeль; born 1968) is a mathematician working in representation theory, algebraic geometry, and mathematical physics. He is a professor of mathematics at University of California, Berkeley, member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,[1] and author of the bestselling book Love and Math.[2]

Yeah this is how my CC was

I go to UCSB now and the ochem was a lot more challenging at CC

>small mistakes
>C+

I don't think so

A lot of my professors told me they had rough times in college. One was a math major who didn't like it at all, so he fucked it up for like two years, destroyed his GPA, switched over to what he does now and then went to Harvard. Another spent 3 years getting a useless MA. Another spent 2-3 years out of college before returning for his PhD in a different field, with no idea what he wanted to do in life. Stuff like that.

Is this in the US?

do people just have money to burn?

It was partly at the University of Toronto, partly at UChicago, so both US/Canada.

I dunno. Some of them told me that there was a rush of retiring professors in the 70s-80s. But the impression I get from a lot of them is basically just: If you're good, you're good.

Or at least that that's how it went back in their hiring days. Nowadays the entire university system is retooling to use adjunct slaves and no one is retiring.

t. scared grad student

>t. scared grad student
Academia is fucked. Got 5 quality papers out before graduating including two Nature pubs and I'm applying for postdocs but no one I want to work with can really afford me...probably no shot at getting a faculty after that anyway, not even at some filthy CC.

Do I need to win a Nobel before anyone considers hiring me?

If you don't get fucked over by small mistakes, you go to a shit uni.

My professor who taught me Calc I & II, Abstract Math, and Analysis dropped out of high school because he hated it and just liked running (like cross country and stuff) and then once he realized that plan would get him nowhere he went to FlyOver University and then got mad degrees. Now he's a beast of a professor

I go to a top-5 US school, and we get fucked over for non-mistakes. In my department, TAs have complete arbitrage over grades, but there is no effort to make sure the TAs have any clue what they're doing.

An example: I'm currently in a complexity theory class. There was a question about whether or not a decision problem was in PSPACE; I constructed a simple Turing machine which used polynomial space to decide the problem. One component of this Turing machine was a counting sub-procedure (literally, start an n-bit counter at 0, add 1, do a constant-time check, add 1, until you reach 2^n). One of these genius TAs decided that this takes exponential space and docked points.

At this school, you can be 100% correct to the point that your answer is essentially equivalent to the known and proven results in the text, and yet you may be docked points because the TAs don't have a clue (and sometimes can't be arsed to read your answer).

>cum
Heh

the guy who taught me group theory got a perfect score on the math GRE

Was it in NJ?

Yea In my university the professor at the first day he/she would say I was an A student and keeps rambling how smart they are and what they published