Who was your worst teacher? Why?

I had a policy law professor who actually got removed from my department after my class had her, because so many of us complained to the dean.

To start off, she didn't actually teach any lectures; she just arranged guest lecturers for every single class, and watched and commentated. Our grade was based on a midterm, final, and term paper. The midterm was 150 multiple choice questions, and when we got our graded papers back, we noticed something was a little bit off.

You know how with easy multiple choice questions, there'll always be one choice that you just know is obviously wrong? Then maybe 2 that might be right, and then there's the correct answer. For example:

Which of these options is a mammal?

A) Black Bass

B) Gray Jay

C) Moose

D) Costco

Well, she'd marked the nonsensical "Costco" type answer as the correct one for about 1/4 of the questions. For about another 1/4 of the questions, she'd picked one of the "seemingly plausible but still wrong" answers. Only about half of the midterm was graded correctly. After the exam, we cross-referenced the answers to the readings, our recorded lectures of the guest speakers, and even emailed some of the speakers to ask them what they thought the right answers were. We were right; her marking was wonky.

She refused to adjust the marks or regrade the tests, but she said that she was charitably going to structure the 300-question final to include the 150 questions from the midterm with the exact same answers she'd marked down in the midterm. Easy to study, right? We should at least get a 50% with barely any effort. A total giveaway to compensate.

Nah.

She marked that final with the precision of a damn German train. She could have been a fact checker for the New York Times. All of her dumbass answers that she had told us were her ~correct interpretations~ that would be marked correctly on the final, were marked accurately as wrong. So, almost all of the class ended up automatically getting a D on the final because 50% of our answers were wrong.

And the icing on the cake: our term paper. She assigned us to do these big, intensive research papers on certain public stakeholders: specific NGOs, charities, public departments, gov. institutions, etc. We needed six live sources (interviews/primary research) from our institution to pass. You couldn't pick your own, she picked one for you. Only thing was, many of the institutions she picked were defunct or bankrupt. Many had less than six staff, let alone staff willing to be interviewed. Some declined repeated requests for interview. How are you supposed to interview six current employees of an organization that doesn't exist, or only has two staff? An all-around disaster.

/r/AskReddit Thread