University | 12:05 pm | April 3, 2012 | By Antonia Woodford

Princeton Review ranks top 300 U.S. professors

seideman_sterling-2
Photo by Blair Seideman.

Think your professors are the best in America? A new book out today from the Princeton Review “The Best 300 Professors,” names America’s top professors — and only two Yale faculty made the cut.

Paul Bracken, a professor of management and political science at the School of Management, and Karen von Kunes, a senior lector in the Slavic Languages and Literatures Department, made the book’s list of 300 professors from 122 colleges and universities across the country. The book’s ratings are based on reviews from RateMyProfessors.com.

Bracken teaches courses such as “Problem Framing” and “Business, Government, and Globalization” at the School of Management and has been rated the best professor in Yale’s executive education programs, according to the SOM website. Von Kunes teaches elementary, intermediate and advanced Czech, as well as courses such as “In Kafka’s Spirit: Prague Film and Fiction,” taught in Prague over the summer.

How does Yale stack up with other schools? Harvard also had two professors make the list — including economics professor Gregory Mankiw — and Princeton had one. The Princeton Review also counted up how many “best professors” it found in each state, and concluded that New York has the most (25 professors), followed by Massachusetts (20) and California (19).

The academic disciplines with the most “best professors” in the book are mathematics, psychology, English, history and biology, according to a press release from the Princeton Review.

Comments
  • yalengineer

    People actually use RateMyProfessors.com?

  • inycepoo

    This might just be the most useless, inaccurate, and ineffective “ranking” that PR, or any similar institution, has ever pushed out. Who the hell at Yale uses that godforsaken site to rank teachers? The selection bias and a whole host of inaccuracies that this brings about is astonishing. Unbelievable.

    And the sad part is that applicants and their parents may take this as an indication of which college is better than the other. Ugh.

  • penny_lane

    Wow, can you say sampling bias? What a load of crap.

  • eli1

    List sounds about right to me. When you bring baked goods daily, give everyone A’s, and keep each class to a casual 25 minutes, you definitely deserve this honor. KVK is a Yale legend and no one can tell me otherwise. Also, I can’t look past the most obvious snub. There is no way Pak Indriyo should be left off this list.

    • phil13

      Maybe that’s the myth you’ve heard, but the reality in KVK’s classes is a little different. She really works hard for the students to make it possible to actually learn a ridiculously complex language in four semesters. Some people end up getting Cs in her classes when they come in with expectations like that. Czech is not easy, but it is really interesting and even fun with KVK. Read some reviews on OCI if you want to know what she’s like from students who’ve actually been in her classes.

    • phys84

      KvK writes all her own textbooks, and is a pioneer in teaching this hard but beautiful language. KvK actually figures out simplified, correct paradigms to help us sift through the hundreds of word endings or variations in spoken and literary Czech. It’s hard enough for language teachers to make even Spanish approachable, much less a language with sounds and root that don’t exist in English, and 7(!) declension cases.

      Also, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve never had baked goods in her class. I’ve had more baked goods in my physics classes than in Czech.

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