michael_nielsen

In a better world, students would go to a professor's web page the same way they look at Nutrition Facts Labels. Is this professor an expert in this field? Is there data that confirms this?

Is "teaching quality" something we know how to measure well, let alone summarize in such a way? Can it be meaningfully summarized? Our attempts to summarize student quality certainly haven't done too well.

Ultimately, while I wanted to do physics, I majored in math because physics was highly prescriptive about courses (so you took lots of classes from people who were bad at what they did), while math was non-prescriptive, so you could just take classes from good profs

I taught for over a decade at a music conservatory where students come specifically to study with the best musician-teachers. My goal now is to encourage students in all fields to choose teachers more deliberately.