The Professor Bias

Psychology and its derivatives in various sciences which usually include the term “Behavioral” give a lot of attention to decision making biases… in normal language: why we don’t make the optimal decisions.
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In the very many years of going to school I realized that there is what I call the “Professor Bias”. This means that a professor has the WRONG impression that his or her course is the most important one that students have at a particular time or even in all of their education. Most severe cases of “professor bias” imply that the teacher strongly believes that the students take only his or her course and no other.
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This bias leads to an overload for students and that it’s not necessary a problem in itself, but in most cases it leads to an overload with less important, less interesting and even less useful study work. From both my learning experience and teaching experience I know that studying something one doesn’t enjoy or finds it useful leads to only one result: failure. Failure can come in many forms. Some fail by dropping out of school, other by becoming “brain dead” and losing all innate human qualities like creativity and empathy.
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The “professor bias”, as most of the other decision making biases, is in most cases unconscious. The people who have it don’t know they do and they see nothing wrong in emphasizing on their course. When students don’t respond in acknowledging that the course is the holy grail of their life, the teachers often get upset and try to force the students to do what he or she thinks it’s right for them. It makes perfect sense, but it’s still wrong. What can be done is not to convince teachers that their course is totally useless or that it might be interesting for only 5% of the students. Educational programs come in packages (more courses together) and there is the key – in managing these packages.
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Now there may appear the “manager bias” which in my view means that the program manager only looks at the name of the courses and maybe at some of the broad topics covered by a course. This is the beginning of the problem. If one looks at the curriculum presented for an education program everything makes perfect sense. For example if you want to become a researcher (scientist) in business administration of course it makes perfect sense to learn about philosophy of science and research methodology, statistics, management foundations and many others. The problem is when during those courses you find at least half of the content to be uninteresting and un-useful.
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Another side of the professor bias is that a lot of teachers assume that the students are 101% rational and they are there to learn what he or she has to say. Again, it’s nice, but totally wrong. If you give a lecture at 4PM students might have something else on their mind especially if it’s on a Friday. Another example is when one has a heterogeneous audience and teaches something rather specific. When the teacher goes into the “technical” details, for example matrix algebra, the people who don’t understand will just switch off.
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This is one aspect of the big conflict between “should” and “do”. What a teacher should J do is to know that every time he or she goes into a classroom he or she has to gain the attention of that audience, even if it’s the 10^th lecture of the same course. But, as we all know: should is not equal to “actually do”.