I believe there is a major misalignment of goals/incentives in undergraduate academia. As students we think the model is, we pay [quite a lot of] money to be taught useful knowledge in a rigorous way that means we will leave with real knowledge. Universities, on the other hand, seem to think the model is to churn out well qualified individuals in their field. There are two ways to accomplish that goal: doing the hard work of providing a real education to everyone; or doing the much easier work of filtering out those who don’t already "get it". This is why Universities don’t care that a class is reviled by all the students.
In my experience undergrads are almost universally seen as a nuisance by professors, especially at the most prestigious schools where professors see themselves as godly researchers. It also sounds like this class isn't even for students in the department, which usually means no one wants to teach it. Basically becoming a professor has almost nothing to do with ability to teach, so I'm not surprised when the least desirable classes to teach are taught by people who have next to 0 ability to do so.
> doing the hard work of providing a real education to everyone; or doing the much easier work of filtering out those who don’t already "get it"
I wonder how much of a problem this is in intro CS. Everyone knows that the camel has two humps, but are we inadvertently gatekeeping by not even trying to teach the low-scoring "hump" about the fundamentals of the discipline?
I thought it was common knowledge that this is the problem with intro CS. There are places that get much better results by making sure that either freshmen test out of the intro class or they all know equal amounts of nothing when they take it.
