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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I do think LAC claims of "only being taught by professors" is nonsense. Who cares? I'd rather be taught by active, impressive researchers pushing the bounds of their field even if they are grad students. Why would I want some professor who couldn't get a tenure job at an R1 to teach me?[/quote]

Grad students are learning how to be scientists . They are not scientists yet, and besides circumscribed techniques…cannot train other scientists. [/quote]

This is a very narrow minded view of academia and it is clear you do not have a degree in the sciences and likely have not spent years interacting and working with grad students and PIs. For grad school in the sciences as well as med school, the see one-do one- teach one method of teaching younger students is the central theme of learning, and works . Grad students and post docs play a pivotal and important role in labs not only with actual techniques in the lab but also with helping how to focus research questions and have discussions that may help the undergrad focus their research question. PIs can work with undergrads directly as well, and they typically do. Science teaching has worked this way for generations, and is successful. Visiting professors also work well, and the top schools bring in guest lecturers from the top of industry, including humanities areas(head of the Met, etc), then the full professor integrates the knowledge shared into the themes of the course. Incidentally at St Andrews the lectures are all by different experts in the field who teach one class then do not come back. The US way of having a main professor(and sometimes grad TAs running recitations, depending on course), plus guest or visiting lecturers on occasion, gives a more cohesive education and the chance for students to go to office hours for more detail or review, with the main professor well aware of the details of all topics covered. At St Andrews there is not a main professor bringing it all together, nor often a grad student. I am not stating it is bad or wrong, just different, I much prefer the collaborative and layered US way of teaching, at least the way it was done at my elite schools, incorporating each level teaching the "younger" level, therefore enriching their own education as they step into higher roles.
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