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The original was posted on /r/professors by /u/muaddib8619 on 2023-10-05 04:33:42.

Like the title says. I teach at a big R-1 in a STEM school. Up until quite recently, in fact up until last year, I really loved teaching and looked forward to every semester. Yes, there were issues post-pandemic, but I didn’t feel those first few semesters like the grad students I usually teach were still trying and pushing themselves; the quality of their projects may not have been as good as pre-pandemic but it wasn’t far.

This year has just been a nightmare. The quality of work has taken a complete nosedive this year, and the principal reason I can figure is that students have stopped giving a damn. Like, completely. I had the same cohort last semester, and it was the same problem. Set a deadline for students to show up with work in class, and most of them show up with 20-30% of it done. Their final presentations were atrocious.

It’s only been 3 weeks so far but their first assignment clearly shows they don’t want to work this fall either. Some students clearly didn’t give even as much time doing them as I spent giving them written feedback: 80% of them clearly didn’t even give more than 30m to homework this week. Work ethic seems to have gone down the drain - I spent the last two weeks spending half of class time to exercises designed to prep them to deliver on this assignment and some of the work handed in read like the students were treating the whole thing as a joke.

Not to mention when I gave some not-very-harsh critique to one assignment that read like it had been cobbled together by ChatGPt (some of the sentences literally did not go together - these are masters students in their second year and some of them have the English skills of an 8th grader), the student went and complained to my program chair. The chair took it all well - he knows what the deal is - but honestly, higher education is in the gutter if this is the sense of entitlement at play: they expect As while not even attempting to put in the work for a C.

Anyway, rant over, but seriously considering quitting academia. I was never in it much for research, the service they force me to do is overwhelming, teaching was the only thing keeping me going.