But my BS is in Physics. I think they spent about 5hs/day teaching. That might amount to "rattl[ing] off factiods" in some programs of study, but is certainly NOT the case in Physics or Math. They also kept office hours, did lesson preparation, and had research projects going on. The research projects included students as laboratory assistants.
Come to think of it, even in my off-major courses, I would not accuse the professors of simply "rattl[ing] off factoids".
I've heard of courses held in enormous lecture halls, in which the professor has no interaction with the students. I've never experienced one.
“...I’ve heard of courses held in enormous lecture halls, in which the professor has no interaction with the students. I’ve never experienced one....”
My first undergraduate programming class was like that!
There was a couple of 100 people in the class. A professor did lecture. She used slides on an overhead projector. If you arrived a little late or even on time and got a seat in the back, you couldn’t read them!
[I’ve heard of courses held in enormous lecture halls, in which the professor has no interaction with the students. I’ve never experienced one.]
I remember my older brother saying that a low level class was in an enormous lecture hall with a video feed from another enormous lecture hall where the professor was actually speaking.
I started out at a large state university over 40 years ago and most of my freshman classes were like that. There were over 400 students in my freshman chemistry class. Once a week the class would be broken into smaller labs with a graduate student teaching assistant and that is the only time we could actually ask anyone questions. My freshman calculus class had 200 students and the professor barely spoke English.
I did much better in upper-level college and graduate school classes that were limited to 20 or 30 students.
Apologies - I painted with way too wide a brush.
I’ve been to 3 different schools, all part time, to get my degree. The community college was decent, though it did have a couple of those big room classes with 70-100 students. Cleveland State was mostly a horrible experience, with the huge auditorium classroom for Chemistry, and an instructor that barely spoke English.
Mixed bag on a couple of other classes. Calc 1 was great, great instructor, calc 2 was the opposite with an unapproachable professor that was always the last to enter the room and the first to leave. Then there was the special “group IV” required class that tried to teach the “urban experience” and blame the banks for the city of Cleveland not paying back the money it borrowed and therefore going bankrupt.
I switched to Baldwin Wallace for my last year and a half. All night and weekend school. Mostly good instructors and professors, with a couple of exceptions. Yes, even at a school connected with the Methodist Church, you had a couple of “those” instructors that would give you bad grades if you didn’t agree with their views on abortion and such.
Economics, accounting, and business law were my favorites, though I really wanted to do the engineering path. But I was already in a decent paying job and could not get the classes I needed to match my work schedule. So I did what I could.
Oddly, my degree has absolutely nothing to do with my line of work. But it gave me a marketable piece of paper to go with my real world experience and that was helpful when I decided to relocate 20+ years ago.