<i>"And how hard should organic chemistry be anyway?"</i><p>Heaven forbid, it should be as hard as is necessary to achieve the stated outcome. If someone does a course in organic synthesis and graduates from that course then a company hiring the person expects him or her to be able to synthesize chemicals to the extent or level that the course coverd.<p>Graduates need to know what they're taught and companies expect their prospective employees to understand the work that they need to do.<p>When I was a student I used to sometimes whinge about the 'tough grading' in certain courses and think I was hard done by when I either failed an exam or didn't do well in it.<p>The fact was that the education system made it hard for me <i>because</i> I either wasn't good enough and or I had not done sufficient study to pass the course.<p>Students shouldn't be allowed to reset the standard because they think it's set too high or that they consider the work too tough.
As a recent grad, this doesn't at all seem surprising<p>I had a class where literally half of the people in it cheated on the autograded assignments and got caught. Then after getting caught a bunch of them cheated again by just refactoring what they already wrote<p>There were two to three other classes where a group of 10-20 people banded together and started insisting out of nowhere that the class was "too difficult". We had one lecture where the professor was reviewing the exam material and this group literally wasted the entire lecture bitching about the class and yelling at the professor over zoom<p>I've found that you only hear about it being a "hard" class if a bunch of people get together and start insisting that it's hard. Which then puts pressure on the professor and uni to water down the class, which then makes it worse off for everyone else and dilutes the program<p>Sorry for the rant but this stuff still pisses me off to this day<p>edit: I feel like video lectures (and class group chats without uni oversight) enable this behavior. This and the sheer complacency on the part of universities for prioritizing "student well being" over actually teaching something
A point made in the article's comments — an experienced doctor working in prenatal diagnosis says he struggled with organic chemistry, has not found it relevant to his career, and found biochemistry in med school more approachable. He concludes with:<p>> It makes no sense that a course so peripheral to successful, high quality medical careers is a gatekeeper > to medical school applications at undergraduate programs throughout the country. [1]<p>I find it unfortunate how NYU approached this situation, and the idea that students can protest their way out of a rigorous education is troubling. That said, I think this MDs point is excellent and worth consideration in light of a story that might otherwise be more ammo for a meritocracy in decline argument.<p>[1] <a href="https://nyti.ms/3rqZIoZ#permid=120729762" rel="nofollow">https://nyti.ms/3rqZIoZ#permid=120729762</a>
This is how the united states fails - our education institutions fail to hold the bar and let the pillars of <i>real</i> education turn to sand.<p>Admittedly, initially in college I was a horrible student. But I got better, admittedly after re-taking a few classes. It cost me, but I learned from it. Not just maths but the lesson of having to grind and struggle to get better at something when it felt like I sucked and had zero intuition for weeks. The latter is what I still believe to be the true value and indicator of a college degree - willing to struggle at a hard thing you might knowingly suck at and keep going (fully knowing some people just master it in hours).
Forcing out a long-time (non-tenured) professor seems a bit extreme, but there are a lot of extreme circumstances:<p>- Professor Jones is 84 years old (according to his Wikipedia [0])<p>- Students are recovering from an unprecedented break/rift in their studies b/c of the pandemic<p>- faculty and administration are still struggling to adapt to the new technology and methods hastily adapted for pandemic education.<p>My reflexive assumption is that after 2 years of diminished educational experience, students are just unprepared to handle o-chem's traditional rigors. But maybe Professor Jones's instruction ability has also fallen in that time, especially if he's had to do ad hoc adoption of new educational software and processes. And I'm sure the administration is even more out of whack.<p>It truly sucks that, at least from what the story tells us, we don't have a good idea of where the deficiencies and room for improvement are, and educators are stuck trying to figure it out mid-flight while the academic machine continues to stumble forward.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maitland_Jones_Jr" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maitland_Jones_Jr</a>.
They make him sound like a mediocre professor, but it sounds like grading a class of students objectively which were setup to fail by a pandemic is what ultimately did him in.<p>It’s clear to me what the implications are. A generation of students won’t understand what they’re doing and they will be shoved through the system anyways because of some high minded sentiments about failing students not being the best way to ensure rigor.
> After retiring from Princeton in 2007, he taught organic chemistry at N.Y.U. on a series of yearly contracts. About a decade ago, he said in an interview, he noticed a loss of focus among the students, even as more of them enrolled in his class, hoping to pursue medical careers.<p>> “Students were misreading exam questions at an astonishing rate,” he wrote in a grievance to the university, protesting his termination. Grades fell even as he reduced the difficulty of his exams.<p>> The problem was exacerbated by the pandemic, he said. “In the last two years, they fell off a cliff,” he wrote. “We now see single digit scores and even zeros.”<p>We seem to be losing focus as a society on literally everything--from University courses to just driving around.
In the article, the professor says he noticed a decline in student attention a decade ago, and with the pandemic application "fell off a cliff".<p>We have a general crisis in education. Students graduating high school without core skills or knowledge, without motivation, without study skills, and with entitled attitudes about their performance. It's been building for a while and has reached crisis proportions.<p>More recently, it should be obvious that the "remote" education provided by colleges to sustain tuition revenue during Covid was a bad joke. The colleges should have held class in person or shut down until they could. They put their financial interests well ahead of their educational mission.
What do you do when an entire cohort fails? Bump the grades? That is what has happened in every low scoring class I have been in, but that hardly addresses whatever the core problem is.<p>Should it be an expectation that 30% of students will always get an A and only 5% will fail, no matter what?<p>That being said, I am amazed they fired someone so high profile.
In case anyone is thinking this sort of thing won't affect you because you've graduated... These students <i>will</i> become your doctors and your other medical staff in a decade. There will be no magic cure that prevents that from happening even if the problem were solved today. And it won't be.
This is a problem with private universities - student is a paying customer, thus student needs to pass the course. If student can't pass, then we have customer satisfaction problem and it needs to be resolved by firing the troublemaker who is making it hard for our customers. Who cares, that quality of our absolvents is poor?
Well, if you are going to lower standards to let them in…you have to follow through.<p>This is what ‘equity’ in education looks like.<p>Everyone is supposed to be fairly evaluated against the same metric.<p>If you want to fix ‘injustice’, you need to start in kindergarten, not the 13th grade.
Three data points:<p>- A friend who got a Ph.D. in Chemistry at Berkeley in the 1970's - in spite of <i>major</i> health issues - told stories about entitled pre-med students back then, aggressively telling him that they needed/expected $Grade in the course which he was a TA for, in order to get into their preferred medical school. (From a quick web search, Berkeley has a "top 10 in the U.S." chemistry program.)<p>- A kid I once knew got straight A's in the "weeder" organic chemistry classes at University of Michigan in the mid 1980's - in spite of being, in his own words, clearly less bright than the average student in his class. His secret? - nose-to-the-grindstone discipline. He studied organic chemistry 4 hours per day, 6 days per week, from the week before classes began until the week after the final exam. (Similar to Berkeley, U of M looks to have a "top 10 in the U.S." chemistry program.)<p>- One of my relatives spent her career as a pharmacist. (Which also required organic chemistry classes.) She wasn't able to pass that class at U of M - but their Pharmacy program had less-lofty academic requirements (vs. pre-med), so she was able to re-take organic chemistry over the summer at another university (2 or 3 big steps down the academic rigor rankings from U of M), and get a "good enough" grade to continue in the U of M Pharmacy program.
OChem tends to be the weed-out class for several majors, primarily Chemistry. You often take it as a college sophomore, and represents a fundamental shift in topics. Most high school and introductory chemistry is acid/base aqueous chemistry, which is relatively straightforward HAcid + BaseOH <-> H20 + Salt. You may do an organic reaction here or there, but only the the most basic like esterification. Making the fake banana flavor is pretty common, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isoamyl_acetate" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isoamyl_acetate</a>.<p>The article is paywalled, so I didn't read, but OChem is supposed to be very hard. Maybe he did grade too hard, or maybe whiners want a passing grade without doing the work and this is the first academic challenge they have truly faced.
> <i>The officials also had tried to placate the students by offering to review their grades and allowing them to withdraw from the class retroactively. The chemistry department’s chairman, Mark E. Tuckerman, said the unusual offer to withdraw was a “one-time exception granted to students by the dean of the college.”</i><p>I find that one interesting. You'd normally not be allowed to retry a class you scored badly in? Or what's the purpose of retroactively withdrawing?
Funnily enough, searching for this article on HN yielded this prior one from NYT: "How to Get an A- in Organic Chemistry"<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6659671" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6659671</a>
Out of curiosity, wasn’t NYU one of the universities that experimented with making the SAT optional, and this undergrad cohort would be the first (or one of the first) that is reaching Organic Chemistry that didn’t have to submit SAT scores to matriculate in the first place?
An observation from 2015: <a href="https://jakeseliger.com/2015/01/13/what-incentivizes-professors-to-grade-honestly-nothing/" rel="nofollow">https://jakeseliger.com/2015/01/13/what-incentivizes-profess...</a>
On a related note, what’s the point of NYU? I hadn’t looked at the rankings in many moons—holy heck it’s at #25 now. Tied with Virginia and Michigan, and ahead of Illinois and UNC? On what planet?
I feel really conflicted on this one.<p>This guy appears to be damaging peoples lives for a questionable at best cause.<p>On the other hand, if these are the same tests students had been passing for the rest of their career, maybe the answer is suck it up and try harder.<p>It seems like the real failure was firing over this when other actions seem more apropriate