the trick is to keep breathing

I do have to say, as a fairly new science professor at a major university... (and this is not all aimed at you; some is a response to the tenor of the comments that your post has gotten)

Writing good tests is REALLY FRICKIN' HARD. My class just recently finished a midterm. I spent several days working on this test. I took various iterations of the test several times. My TAs took iterations of this test several times. I had charts of how long it took us to answer all of the questions. The students had 3x as long as it took either of us to work the exam.

I worked very hard at making sure that the points on the questions and the time it took to answer the questions were consistent. Same with the subjects covered by the questions and the time spent in class on various subjects. It covered both straight memorization, and concepts/understanding.

Mean on the exam was around 50%. 75% of the class didn't finish the exam. Not because I'm evil, not because I didn't try to write a good test - because it takes a whole lot of experience to figure out where to draw the line between an exam that is way too easy and doesn't really test understanding of the material, and an exam that kills the soul of your students.

There's a good chance your professors are people like me - who are putting huge amounts of time and emotional energy into these classes, who are not getting sleep trying to put together the research and the teaching without neglecting either, who are tearing their hair out trying to reach out to all the students with a huge number of different backgrounds and different issues with the class.

When I see people complain about how all those university professors don't care about their teaching, it really doesn't ring true for me. In my department, there is one professor who doesn't really care about teaching. All of the rest of us care a lot. It's why we're in a university instead of in industry - we'd get paid a heck of a lot more for many fewer hours of work if we went to work for a company instead of putting ourselves into academia. But then, we wouldn't get to teach.

And sometimes, our students make us so happy and proud. And other times, they make us want to cry. But either way, we do care, and we do try.

Just sayin'.