Day 82 - March 29

Today, Monday, we had our big International Marketing presentation.  I don't think I've mentioned on here how incompetent the professor is in that class, and also how terrible she has managed to make it.  This is very disappointing to me because I really like marketing and this was the class I was looking forward to the most.  Our professor is an Indian woman who's research focuses on Japanese banks and does not have a degree in marketing, has never worked in marketing, and I don't think even has a degree in business at all.  Most of the time a good professor can get by with only one of those three, but she has none of them and its painfully obvious. 

Here is what our 1 hour class that meets three days a week consists of:  she puts up a powerpoint on the projector, says, "please have a look at this slide," or "here is a slide, please read it," and then proceeds to stand there silently for a couple minutes until she thinks we've finished reading it.  Then, she will ask, "so what does this all mean?"  Silence from the class as she stands there looking around while we all think, "I don't know, maybe we would know if you actually TAUGHT us instead of just having us read off slides."  Now, instead of responding to this awkward silence with instruction, she simply asks another question, usually along the lines of, "well, how do you think this might affect the [shipping] company?"  Once again, awkward silence as no one in the class knows how to respond.  From here, she will attempt to evade the situation by saying some very general statements that are usually just paraphrased from the current slide, and then she will move along to the next slide and repeat the process.  This is why, even though there is mandatory attendance imposed by the school, on average only 12 people show up for class out of the 30 students actually taking it.

When it comes to group presentations, a half-competent professor would at least have some idea how to treat the situation fairly.  Since there are five groups in the class, we are spending the last five days of classes doing one presentation a day with commentary after each one.  Now, since the first group gets screwed and the last group gets an extra two weeks to work on the project, not to mention gets to see where everyone else before them has failed, even a half-assed professor would take measures to make that more fair.  Usually, this comes in the form of randomizing when the groups present and giving preferential grades to the ones who went earlier.  Well, Professor Billore is horribly incompetent, so she just said, "group one presents first and group five presents last," and when asked if she would be giving preferential treatment to the earlier groups, she responded with, "oh (surprised), I guess maybe I could think about that."  The class heaves a sigh of frustration, especially my group since we are group one.  To top it all off, our topic was how Japanese Banks have handled expanding abroad.  Remember how this is her research topic?  Remember how incompetent she is and how our group is going first?  She tore us to shreds in the commentary.  Many of my responses to her (obviously biased) critiques subtly pointed out how inappropriate her comments were, which she didn't seem to notice but most of the class did.  Its pretty much unanimously agreed that she is the worst excuse for a professor that any of us have ever had.  If I had the time I would talk to the Dean about her, but I dislike the situation so much that I just can't wait to get away from it.

As an aside, I have seen two other groups present at the time I am writing this, and she gave them very constructive feedback in a very nice way; the complete opposite of what she did to us.