If you go to your doctor and say &quot;I have a cold, fix it&quot; then you are going to be disappointed no matter how good your doctor is. (&quot;With proper treatment, a cold will clear up in a week. Without, it may take as much as seven days.&quot;)<p>If you go to your teacher (at whatever level) and say &quot;I want to become expert in your field without either working very hard or having a great deal of natural talent&quot; then you are again going to be disappointed no matter how good the teacher is. (&quot;There is no royal road to mathematics.&quot;)<p>If you go to your doctor and she says &quot;I know what&#x27;s wrong, and you can fix it by taking these drugs and doing these exercises&quot;, and you don&#x27;t take the drugs or do the exercises, it&#x27;s hardly the doctor&#x27;s fault if your condition doesn&#x27;t improve the way you want it to.<p>If you go to your teacher (at whatever level) and say &quot;I want good grades without actually mastering the ideas and facts&quot; then yet again you will be disappointed.<p>In your little list of facts, you may notice that step 3 says &quot;The teacher fails to significantly improve the student&#x27;s understanding&quot;. But improving a student&#x27;s understanding is a two-person job. A student who does nothing beyond turning up to most of the lectures is not likely to do well in their examinations (exception: in some fields, some outstandingly able students may be able to do this, but by definition most students are not outstandingly able). And if that&#x27;s what the student does, it&#x27;s not reasonable to say that the teacher is failing at their job.