> In undergrad, the professor who taught intermediate microeconomics told us about how law and business school admissions officers knew how tough his course was (it was the weeder course), and that doing well would be a feather in our cap.
The hubris and egomania of professors never ceases to amaze.
Perhaps this could have been true for the local community, but with 2800 colleges in the US with over 100,000 professors combined, there is no way any even extremely large admissions office could keep track of the retirements and new hires let alone the quality of a particular professor. Why would any office have such a position to keep track of professor quality? How could that add to the assessment better than an interview?
> The hubris and egomania of professors never ceases to amaze
You're assuming that they were unaware what they were saying wasn't true. It's possible they were fully aware it wasn't but said it anyways for professional advantage.
Professional advantage over other professors who are either more scrupulous or less convincing. All else being equal, a professor with students clamoring to get into their course will have more influence than one whose course no one wants to take.
I'll speak to my experience in the US Ivory Tower and STEMy R1s mostly: Professors are ranked and gain tenure nearly entirely based on their research output as it relates to grant funding. Classes are generally seen as a cudgel to scare nontenured Professors into getting more grant money. If you slack on the grants, you have to teach classes, generally. It is a very intentional vicious cycle. A Professor with a popular class is a bad thing, as it means they'll have less time to research and apply for grants.
Professors that like to teach generally go to much smaller colleges where the above comment may be true, but I don't have experience in those kinds of places and can't confirm or deny. It does sound really nice though!
I think that may be the experience in STEM, but not in humanities or social sciences. In this particular case, teaching was seen as a very important part of the job because it was at an elite liberal arts college. But even at R1 schools, humanities professors focus on writing/teaching, not grants as much.
In this case, the school was very small (1,400 students in total), so there was no competition between professors for enrollment. This was the weeder course for the major, so all majors had to take it. One professor taught it each fall, and it was always this professor — except when he was on leave.
In his defense, he was a senior professor at the top-ranked liberal arts college in the nation, which has a reputation for low grade inflation. I would believe that his grades would be taken seriously by econ PhD programs, but not JD/MBA programs.
The hubris and egomania of professors never ceases to amaze.
Perhaps this could have been true for the local community, but with 2800 colleges in the US with over 100,000 professors combined, there is no way any even extremely large admissions office could keep track of the retirements and new hires let alone the quality of a particular professor. Why would any office have such a position to keep track of professor quality? How could that add to the assessment better than an interview?