Last semester, a friend of mine raised his hand in one of our engineering classes to ask the professor a question about the lesson.

“What is entropy?” my friend asked.

The professor turned to his student and responded, “Well, what is anything, really?” and continued the lecture.

The prior semester, another professor shared with my class the story behind how he got “stuck” teaching that course. These classroom experiences are not exactly what you’d expect from a world-class engineering school.

The 2011 rankings of international engineering programs by the Shanghai Jiao Tong University ranked this university’s engineering school 11th in the world. But the inconvenient truth that undergraduates quickly discover is that these rankings mean very little relative to their actual experience at the school.

What we find is many of our professors would rather devote their time to research and have little to no investment in our success as students. Most do not take the time to explain complex subjects in understandable terms, instead leaving us to teach ourselves by reading lengthy textbooks or watching Khan Academy videos. Although my classroom experiences have left much to be desired, the issue is not professors’ teaching abilities or qualifications but their priorities and incentives.

Being a public research institution, the engineering school prioritizes research above all else. And to some extent, this research is what provides its prestige. But the school also has a responsibility to deliver high-quality teaching. A balanced focus on teaching and research optimizes the success of the school.

During my two years here, it seems an almost exclusive prioritization of research has upset this balance at the expense of undergraduates. Professors are more likely to be recruited for their ability to research than for their ability to teach. This imbalance manifests in a professor’s incentive matrix. Professors can make more money by winning lucrative research grants than by being proficient instructors. So, when faced with that tradeoff, professors tend to choose their research over their students.

What the engineering school needs to remember is having devoted professors yields more informed undergraduates, who become better graduate students, who make better researchers — and that leads to a better team of employees overall. Employer satisfaction with recent graduates would increase, which translates into increased corporate investments.

If the engineering school wants to improve the quality of its undergraduate education, professors and officials need to favor high-quality teaching as much as high-quality research and create an incentive matrix that reflects this principle. Professors who are passionate and effective at teaching should be able to maximize their own utility by focusing on teaching rather than having to be distracted by research because “that’s where the money is.”

Additionally, the engineering school should pioneer new teaching methods and lead other engineering schools by exploring innovative approaches to education that yield better prepared students. An example of such pursuits on our own campus can be found in the cell biology and molecular genetics department, whose Teaching and Learning Center has implemented curriculum innovations and developments and has tracked their success by measuring student learning differentials.

The engineering school ought to follow suit with its own such programs, reinforcing this imperative for other research-driven departments at the university. We need to inspire professors to start investing in the success of their students. The only way to do that is to reward them for their excellence in the classroom — a metric that is a function of student progress and satisfaction.

Osama Eshera is a junior bioengineering major. He can be reached at eshera@umdbk.com.