This semester, I have a professor who likes to assign a backbreaking workload every week. There are two things wrong with this approach:

The first is that students stop taking the assignments seriously after about the first month of class if the workload is too heavy. What ends up being submitted afterwards is invariably halfhearted, since no one wants to put an unreasonable amount of work into a problem that they may not get the correct solution to anyway. This doesn’t affect grades at all, since the relative ranking of students is preserved even as the mean work quality decreases. The result is that the entire class seems to start falling behind on assignments.

The second problem is more fundamental for a course populated entirely by Ph. D. students: we need to write our dissertations. We don’t have time to waste on excessive coursework. The work is due sooner, so it takes priority of necessity, but that prevents us from getting our research done.

Not that anyone in my group is even giving me the courtesy of responding to my emails, much less actually doing work on the paper they’re placing their names on.