Professors are fond of disappearing: one of my professors took two weeks away to go get his Dutch citizenship, for instance. One of my professors went to America for a conference. Etc.
Classes tend to start late. The standard class period runs for half an hour, from, for instance, 11:15 to 12:45. There is a train that leaves at :39, though, so a couple of my professors have arranged to have us begin class on the hour, so that we might get out in time to catch this train. Unfortunately, the professors still tend to arrive at :15, so the lecture just ends up being 15 minutes shorter.
Professors tend to exhaustively go over the solutions to the assignments. I have never found myself able to pay attention to this kind of thing, so this is just wasted time for me.
The couple of first-year courses that I have are rather prone to violent revolution. One confusing assertion can touch off a ten-minute free-for-all. Comments flow more freely horizontally than vertically. (By this I mean that students talk more among themselves than they do to the professor).
The handouts tend to be too long to cover, even without interruption. When this is combined with the previous three issues, the results can be disastrous. With 27 minutes left in the lecture to-day, I noticed that we were on slide 3 of 35. I pointed this out to my neighbour, who bet me that we would reach slide 16. I bet her that we would reach slide 12. We reached slide 12.
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