NYU organic chemistry professor terminated for tough grading
nytimes.com"And how hard should organic chemistry be anyway?"
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.
Graduates need to know what they're taught and companies expect their prospective employees to understand the work that they need to do.
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.
The fact was that the education system made it hard for me because I either wasn't good enough and or I had not done sufficient study to pass the course.
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.
It seems to be a pervasive attitude.
Today a group of my colleagues received their grades on a linear algebra test. The class average was below the failing mark. One of my acquaintances remarked: "The professor is going to have to do something about these grades, they can't fail the whole class!"
Maybe it's the class that should do something about the grades...
It is trivially simple for an educator(edit: typo) to write a test that every student fails, curve the grades into a normal distribution, and place blame on students while showing a normal distribution of outcomes to administration.
Do you think that practice produces better learning?
This is why external standardised testing matters. Low grades could either mean bad teaching, a test too hard, or lazy students.
Standardised tests mean that if just one class does bad, it’s probably bad teaching, if the whole country does bad, it’s a more widespread issue. If any individual does bad, it’s their own issue.
Or, this is why evaluation other than rote testing matters.
In specific situations, professional testing is relevant. The Bar, the USMLE, etc. In many more situations, quality is driven by accomplishing goals and solving problems that are by definition nonstandard.
Every practicing physician and lawyer passed their professional exam, yet, some remain more effective than others. Standardized testing is a high-pass filter. You can enforce a minimum, but cannot evaluate maxima. In this situation, a whole class did bad on an exam they all took, and there is still no way to infer whether it was the students, the instruction, or both. Lots of energy spent, very little effective training and credentialing accomplished.
Despite my comments above, some examiners can be bastards. Deliberately setting examinations to fail students is counterproductive and demoralizing (sometimes to the extent that potentially good students leave the course).
In practice, examiners who do this are usually inexperienced and they soon learn to discontinue the practice for all the obvious readons. That's why in this instance I'd be inclined to think the students are at fault as this NYC prof has long and extensive experience (he'd have learned not to so long ago).
I don't mean to assume malice where incompetence will suffice. You're correct that its generally inexperienced instructors, and in this case was a very experienced instructor.
Is it possible then, that this very experienced instructor, experienced a difficult time adapting to teaching in a new setting, and failed to adapt their examination?
The solution likely isn't for pandemic students to be told they have experience they don't have, but the structure in place created a situation where an entire class experienced the fallout from their professor's failure. In this case, the professor was fired. In many more, students bear the same punishments (both to their academic records and actual learning), while inexperienced instructors are simply told to do better next time.
Why shouldn't students have the same option to do better next time?
Clearly, I'm not fully cognizant of all the details in this case so I can only comment in general terms and obviously they can be wrong if I've not access to sufficient information.
It's quite a while since I was at university and back then there would have been very little chance of a professor being fired that easy or on those grounds.
That said, back then, the system was very fair. Students were treated with respect and often given benefit of the doubt. There were appeals mechanisms in place if students failed and they could do so if they thought they had good reasons to appeal, and so on.
Looking in at much of academia these days I see a volatile, messy quixotic buisness and I'm glad I'm not there. (It's still not fully clear to me how things have gotten so off the rails in recent years.)
In direct answer to your question I'd repeat what I said above with respect to my university experience. The system should be fair and flexible and students should always be given a chance to do better next time.
I also don't mean to make this so big as to have you throw up your hands at it--that reaction is how systems fail.
There is still very little chance of tenured professors being fired. This exception occurs notably in the case of a longtime, but untenured instructor.
When you say the system should be fair and flexible, it really is as easy as giving students a chance to do better next time. If every student fails the final, let them retake the class and use the second grade in transcripts. If they're unable to retake, refund their tuition or give them a voucher for when they can schedule.
I'm restating other comments so you don't have to hunt them down because its a point worth making--students have no recourse against their colleges, the companies they aspire to move into, or the federal government barring declaration of bankruptcy on their loans. If we want a highly competent workforce, we need to help students train.
I'm glad your university experience worked out well, and aknowledging survivor bias in that and resisting the urge to say "glad its not me" can equip you to help future generations of students, a role that is filled by people who become your reports in your career and your children in your personal life.
"...students have no recourse against their colleges, the companies they aspire to move into, or the federal government barring declaration of bankruptcy on their loans."
I've quoted all that because each part is relevant.
1. Students had no recouse against the uni or colleges in my time either, it's just the system was fair and worked reasonably well. If the uni or colleges clamped down because you'd screwed up big-time then you could do nothing about it.
2. If you had a cadetship with a company etc. then you were essentially in it's hands, you had no recourse against it but there were rules as to how those arrangements were managed.
3. When I first went to university, fees were trivial when compared with today (I recall having to pay a little over $400. Some years later, the government made fees free and one got there solely on one's merit (there was no buying one's way in). Two decades later the government reversed the decision and the fees went up to tens of thousands of dollars overnight and students became indebted. That fucked the system up big-time.
4. My university time wasn't all plain sailing, there were many ups and downs but they were my fault or related to my situation, they were not the fault of the university.
5. The single biggest difference was that back then people didn't have the sense of entitlement that they do have today. One's situation was what one made it, no one owed one a living and one was responsible for oneself. One either put up with life or one changed it. As that was the accepted norm there was far less trouble and volatility associated with education back then as compared to now.
Also, it was not the norm for everyone to go to university, only a small percentage of the population did so.
2 & 3] So, the students now bear the risk/burden of their training costs, where in the past they were heavily subsidized by the University capping costs ($400), the fed paying what remained (made fees free), and in some cases the company taking on an obligation to hire (cadetship).
5] Spot the strawman. How are students entitled when they are the ones paying tuition and shouldering risk of failure, while institutions in return offer no obligation to train (university), no obligation to hire (company), and no escape from debt (fed)?
Again, I'm glad your experience worked out well, and I'm glad we agree that the conditions students operate in today are materially different. You certainly have the option of throwing up your hands at the entitlement of the youths, but it seems to me that the entitlement here is on the part of institutions that now expect access to a highly trained workforce with no part in supporting the training.
If your goal is that only a small percentage of the population be highly competent in their field, then by all means support the norm that only a small percentage of the population be supported in training.
(edit: additional comments below)
I'd like to reiterate that I am not advocating for lowering standards here. I want a highly competent workforce, in and out of the medical field. At no point have I asked that students be given unearned passing grades. What I am asking for is that students be supported, financially and otherwise, in their attempts to learn and earn passing grades.
I've really no issue with students, essentially they're the same as they have always been. My criticism is with the era, things have gotten a lot rougher and less certain for students since my time.
The fixes are obvious, but then I'm not in possession of Aladdin's lamp.
I think students (demographically) have changed as well as the conditions they operate in. As you've pointed out, even attending a higher ed is much more common. There are not only more students, but also more students from different backgrounds. Motivationally there is likely similarity to how they have always been, but the challenge of training a student population of increasing size and diversity remains.
"...as well as the conditions they operate in."
I'm in no doubt that's true. I'd only add that I'm glad I went through the education system when I did even though it wasn't perfect.
It did occur to me that my ask is being delivered to someone in no position to say yes. Thank you for helping me organize my thoughts though.
That's why I favor rational ongoing debate, it helps organize ones thinking. I couldn't guess how may times I've changed my opinion after listening both sides of an argument.
I think the relative reward for completing higher education in any field was greater than today. Being college educated provided such a clear advantage that it was a no brainer to put up with some academic arrogance.
Very true, see my reply to forgetbook.
your comment incorporates so much ... fail
>It is trivially simple for an educator to write a test that
while it is not trivial to write any test, it is trivial to have the test cover the material that was taught and not the material that wasn't, and that's how tests are written
> every student fails, curve the grades into a normal distribution,
then the bulk of students didn't fail under the normal meaning of grading on a curve (unless you clarify, do you mean the students had a normal distribution of "learning some material", but even the highest cohort didn't learn enough of the material to constitute getting credit for having taken the class?
> and place blame on students while showing a normal distribution of outcomes to administration.
what blame would there be to place on students if a normal distribution is shown to the administration? unless as above, all the students are failed and blamed for failure?
> Do you think that practice produces better learning?
testing students on material taught produces better learning, yes. Grading on a curve is more fair to students than not grading on a curve, as it simplifies the task for the professor to write the exam by better smooths any unevenness in the relative difficulty of the questions across different material.
I'll imply numbering:
1] Tests are written in many different ways. There is no regulatory body controlling pedagogy across institution at the college level. At best you can assume an invisible hand of the market for hiring graduates influencing student enrollment decisions, and you'll be introducing too many confounding variables to continue a productive discussion of individual tests.
2] I mean the bulk of students fail the test before the curve is applied. If even the highest cohort didn't learn enough material to constitute getting credit, I would hope they are not simply curved into a passing grade relative to each other and passed along. I would hope they are able to retake the course, learn the material, and demonstrate that learning.
3] The blame for poor performance necessitating grading on a curve to avoid bulk-of-class failure being placed on students for failing to learn, rather than an educator failing to teach.
4] Testing is not what produces learning. Testing attempts to measure competence. Receiving feedback from testing enables students to use the measurements in their learning, but the data point 'we all failed' hardly seems useful. // Grading on a curve evaluates student performance relative to each other. Grading without a curve evaluates student performance relative to the test. You can argue either is more fair if you want, but simplifying the task of the professor writing the exam is hopefully not the goal of college education. Hopefully the goal is to train students into highly competent graduates, who can perform across uneven difficulty in different material.
(edit: testing attempts to measure learning -> testing attempts to measure competence)
"At best you can assume an invisible hand of the market for hiring graduates influencing student enrollment decisions"
Yes it's done that and more. For instance, in many universities humanities courses have taken a hit because they're not as lucrative financially in either students numbers or in other ways. My profession is technical but I'm not in favor of nuking the humanities (especially so core subjects, history, philosophy, languages etc.).
What's really been lost from university education is the once-important notion of learning for its own sake—and of student life—the spirit of Gaudeamus igitur. Those notions were there but dying during my time quite some decades ago, today they've been completely subsumed or swallowed up by financial considerations. That, I think, is a shame.
In an era where financial considerations dominate, the whole issue of grades, passing examinations is crucially important because it's coupled more tightly than ever to one's livelihood than in the past. Hence, it's little wonder we're now seeing these issues looming much larger in students' minds than ever they've done in the past.
(In my time student protested and demonstrated and often did so violently (anti-Vietnam war rallies, 1968 student riots etc.) but from my recollection there was none of the angst about courses/grades that there is here today (except of course for usual level of time immemorial complaints that have always been part of the background noise of universities.)
Forgive me for being suspicious of any invisible hand based argument.
I hope you'll be glad to hear that in my time, learning for its own sake is/was still seen as important, in humanities as much as any other area.
Freedom from the domination of financial considerations may be based more on individual conditions than systemic ones. There were certainly students worried about money in the 70's--it sounds like many of them are more accurately described as would-be students who simply didn't have the opportunity to attend at all. I do not fault today's would-be students who do have that opportunity for seeing their performance as tightly coupled to their livelihood.
(edit: to clarify, suspicion of an invisible hand argument means "if we can't articulate the cause, how are we purporting to know the effect?")
"Forgive me for being suspicious of any invisible hand based argument."
So am I, it's generally wheeled out in the absence of any other sufficiently-developed argument or alternatively as shorthand for one that's too hard to articulate. You're right, if we can't articulate the cause then we've little hope of moving forward.
I also don't fault today's students who consider their studies tightly coupled to their llivelihood, especially so in fields such as engineering.
Whilst I'm glad to hear that learning for its own sake is still seen as important the demise of humanities subjects at many universities in recent years doesn't overfill me with confidence that it will remain so.
Damn near fifty years ago, I had a multivariate calculus teacher who thought it was amusing to provide tests where the curve peaked about 49%. I was lazy and neglectful of doing the homework problems, so I don't blame him for my own performance. But it didn't seem like a good way to run a class.
I should say that he did not curve on 50% and grade on 90%: I think that a 50% was probably a B- or a C. But it was a while ago.
"provide tests where the curve peaked about 49%"
Fucking smart Alec, he'd have deserved it if students had let his tires down.
The only possible saving grace would have been if he'd demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that multivariate calculus would provide the means to get such precision, ipso facto the class results (complete with workings out). Even then, it's a ratshit idea of the worst order.
It is/can be entertaining to be a smart Alec. Many people in higher education roles view themselves as researchers, and teaching (not just students, but the work of teaching itself), as beneath them.
"...work of teaching itself), as beneath them."
Smart Alec yes—so long as no one's hurt. It's easy to understand how teaching is considered beneath them as it's distraction. It seems to me that a possible (or partial) way of ameliorating the problem would be to teach students from the outset that the principal role of a university is educate and that if they which to do research under the auspices of a university then they must expect disruption as routine.
Whilst I understand that being disrupted is irritating, the fact that they consider teaching beneath them seems shortsighted. I am not a teacher but on ocassions I've had to teach and I quickly discovered that there's nothing to hone one's own knowledge more than to teach. When teaching in front of a class, 'knowledge' that one's thinks one's clear about in one's mind quickly distills into either actual knowledge or embarrassing garbage.
One wonders then why teaching isn't more highly valued with this lot (whenever I've had to teach I've considered it a privilege and it boosted my ego to boot—especially when in debate with intelligent students who ask interesting questions—some of which yours truly couldn't answer).
>Maybe it's the class that should do something about the grades...
Why?
I completed medical school back in 2012. Here's the unfortunate rub with this particular class--organic chemistry is a requisite for medical school and probably shouldn't be. The class is mostly pre-med students and very few chemistry majors. It seems that once upon a time some administrators decided that students should complete 2 years of chemistry and organic chemistry happened to be the most common second year course available.
Physics courses, at least at my alma mater, were separated in to physics for physics majors("honors physics"), physics for engineers, and physics for life sciences. A similar structure would be a great compromise to maintain the quality of education for those continuing on to perform organic synthesis versus those who want to be physicians. I was exposed to exactly zero organic chemistry in medical school or beyond.
Maybe there should be an entire pre-med degree. Or at least half of it, fully focused on the subject. Some other countries just straight up admit to med-school and those who don't pass examinations end up doing things like chemistry, and rightfully treated as such students.
"Maybe there should be an entire pre-med degree."
I think there's something to that (but also it is applicable to some other professions). Trouble is it would change the complete order of things (having a 'higher' high school as a prep or similar). Unfortunately, it'd never happen as too much is already tied up in keeping in place the artificial dividing line that separates high school and higher education (think economics, whingeing employers, etc., etc.).
I always thought the point of organic chemistry was to be a weed out course for med students.
Most doctors I know don't know jack shit about organic chemistry. They're operating at a level of abstraction much much higher.
"Here's the unfortunate rub with this particular class--organic chemistry is a requisite for medical school and probably shouldn't be"
I've not studied medicine but I've some organic chemistry knowledge thus I've come across this bane of contention previously from others. It doesn't take long for organic chemistry to get bogged down in technical details that I reckon wouldn't be needed by most medical professionals. For instance the angle formed between a benzene ring and an amine group after bonding. That's useful info to chemists but to few others.
But where to we draw the line and how do we determine whether it's actually relevant? I'll make an observation on that question at the risk of encroaching upon your profession with an example (please bear with me I'm not a professional pharmacologist).
Let's start with a well-known example: the metabolism of ethanol by the liver. If I put on a chemist's hat then I'd not be expected to know much more than that the liver employs enzymes to partially oxidize ethanol to acetaldehyde thence from there to acetic acid and finally water and carbon dioxide.
However, if I specialized in the area then I'd need to know much more such as the Gibbs free energy for each metabolic stage and calculating that suddenly becomes very complicated, it'd require me to know much more about the liver's physiology and its enzyme processes. If so, then I'd posit the level of knowledge I'd require would be more than would be expected of you if you were, say, a general practitioner.
Viewing it from your side, you'd have to know enough basic organic chemistry to make sense of the various stages the liver goes through to reduce ethanol to H2O and CO2 such as the basics of Gibbs free energy as ethanol's metabolism provides the body with energy thus you'd have to have an overview of how enzymes go about their work—alcohol dehydrogenase/ADH for instance.
This is where drawing lines gets complicated. If we treat an enzyme as a black box that does various things then we can map out an overall picture of how the liver does its job and perhaps that's all the average practitioner needs to know (I'm not familiar with the extent of that requirement). However, if you are required to have a thorough understanding of how enzymes work then a much greater knowledge of organic chemistry would be required. For instance, the chemistry of alcohol dehydrogenase/ADH and it's complicated, so too the final stage of ethanol's elimination wherein acetyl coenzyme A is involved.
From an outsiders' perspective, it doesn't seem reasonable to me that to do their job that those on the first line of medicine would need chemistry to a depth required to understand how acetyl-CoA works at the molecular level. That would seem a waste of time.
On the other hand a basic understanding of organic chemistry seems necessary to have a cognizant overview of the workings of the liver.
Looking in from the outside it's a difficult call. My own doctor usually writes prescriptions in a drug's proprietary name, on occasions he asks if I want the cheaper generic version to which I always answer yes, he's then been been known to ask me for its chemical name having forgotten it (for some unclear reason he seems to assume that I know more chemistry than he does).
Perhaps this is an indicator that many if not most doctors practice drug/pharmacy medicine at a much higher level than that of molecular chemistry—if so then it would seem that having to have detailed knowledge of the subject at this low level is unnecessary.
Apologies if that seemed a little short on in depth. I intended more but omitted some relevant stuff for brevity (there's more to discuss about this topic but there's practical limits to that on HN). Also, as my profession is electronics, my emphasis may seem a little off not having the same familiarity with the issues as you would have.
I appreciate your effort in this post. I am a practicing physician and also a person who majored in biochemistry, rather than the more pre-med focused biology/chemistry major offered at my institution. My opinion is that organic chemistry is a great window into the complexity of biologic chemistry that happens to be the foundation of medicine.
Is it necessary for all physicians to peer through this window in order to practice quality medicine? Perhaps not. But does it give us an appreciation, and humility for, the astounding complexity of biologic systems that underpin all clinical interventions? Ideally so. At some point during pre medical training there should be - to be blunt - a filter that separates adaptable and bright students from those who hazily wish to pursue medicine but do not have the capacity to do so at a high level.
There are many career paths for those who can not adapt and learn at the high level which has been traditionally been required to complete medical school. We can, as a society, either lower the standards or maintain that high level of requirement that has been the badge of "MD." My bias of course, having completed 13 years of education after high school, is to recommend that we do not lower the standards of the MD process. The system, as it has evolved to date, has plenty of opportunity for those who desire less rigorous training, for example nurse practitioner and physician assistant tracks. There is still a place in this world for highly trained and motivated individuals who wish to be the best in their field. Signed, a professional who benefited from the strong institutions that create medical doctorates.
The position you've put about medicine is essentially as I've come to understand it having viewed it from the outside.
Had I wanted to do medicine I've no doubt that I'd have thought twice about it given the long and tenacious path I'd have had to have taken to get there. My interests were always in basic science and engineering, so I was never in the position of having to make those awkward decisions.
That said, it wasn't a completely black and white process, at one stage I started pharmacy but changed my mind, that may be obvious from my earlier comments.
I've no doubt that filtering is needed to weed out the less motivated but as I've said elsewhere, I've concerns about how it's done. If good people are weeded out because of say their circumstances then society loses the benefit of their input.
My opinion about organic chemistry is that it is a tremendous subject and I have an abiding interest in it. I think this puts me in a good position to appreciate the dilemma medical people face when confronted with the subject. As you know it can get complicated quickly and getting to grips with it can take a lot of work and time—time that many cannot afford to commit.
Thanks for your thoughtful comments.
While I agree that we shouldn't lower the standards of the MD process I am not convinced that proficiency at organic chemistry is predictive of physician quality. I'd rather see physicians studying computer science than ochem as tech seems more relevant to the future of medicine. To that extent I'm always willing to entertain reform.
"I am not convinced that proficiency at organic chemistry is predictive of physician quality"
Reckon that's true from the very small sample of my own doctors. It would be nice if we had anecdotal info from MDs who reckon it was actually useful and the reason for why it was.
I appreciate your thoughtful response. Some of the concepts you mentioned, such as Gibbs free energy, are covered in intro physics, intro biology, and biochemistry courses that are also required as a physician. I believe one biochemistry class as an undergrad and one year of biochemistry instruction in the first 2 years of medical school.
A simplified organic chemistry course could cover the theory of SN1/SN2 attacks, orbitals, some ochem principles, some medical-focused examples of organic chemistry, and some basic mechanisms. It would not require students to creatively solve synthesis questions on exams or memorize long lists of reactions. To that extent maybe even the first of the two part classes is enough.
I never heard of anyone talk about organic chemistry as anything other than a filter class for pre-meds. It's a bit of academic hazing to wash out weaker pre-meds from the undergrad program. Maybe because it effects the university's match rate. Students care about their undergrad's medical school match statistics when they apply. From what I remember hazing does wash out the weaker students who don't have as high of general intelligence or work ethic.
My school had weed out classes in my program, but it had nothing to do with graduate admissions or competitive rankings.
The point was that it's better to have a student struggle and make adjustments earlier rather than later in their education. Regardless if that adjustment is "spend more time studying" or "change from STEM to something easier", it's better for it to happen in a students first year than fourth year in college.
The system seemed to work well to me. Lots of smart kids who didn't have to work very hard in high school learned early that they were going to have to work harder in college. Other kids realized they were better changing majors. Everyone who was still in the program their junior year had the confidence that they could graduate.
"Lots of smart kids who didn't have to work very hard in high school learned early that they were going to have to work harder in college."
Some don't learn early either. I was smart enough to coast along for quite a while doing little and then I suddenly had to apply myself (it was a bit of a shock). I had to relearn how to apply myself and it was harder than I anticipated.
Of course, this never applied to truly brilliant kids (they're the ones I envy). It also doesn't help when one's parents kept pointing to a couple of brothers who lived several blocks away from my home and saying to the effect 'why can't you stop mucking around and just apply yourself like them'. (They were in different classes to me and a year's difference separated them. Trouble was my mother and theirs used to associate with each other (mother's club and all that stuff), so such comparisons were easy.)
It turned out later that it wasn't that they just had normal brains but with lost of application to study—but more. Some years later (perhaps a decade or so) I opened the pages of Scientific American and started reading a fascinating and informative article, it was then that I turned to the author's name only to realize that I knew that 'bastard'. Also a check of the references showed that he had a string of publications about the subject in other advanced publications.
As they say, that's life.
My experience in medical school is that your success is based on your ability to memorize large amounts of information that is of low conceptual difficulty in short periods of time. This isn't a trait that is selected for in passing ochem. Furthermore, ochem is the last time in your undergrad or medical school training where you'll be faced with that level of conceptual rigor.
You could just as easily ask all the undergrads to train for a marathon and see who has the discipline to follow through. It would probably be more relevant because at least its health-related.
I think overall we want our doctors to have high general intelligence so we'll continue to demand o-chem. We all have our biases against the kids who couldn't pass o-chem.
"We all have our biases against the kids who couldn't pass o-chem."
Do you think that really true? I know some people who struggled with it who took it (or had to take it) as a major. Others, found it easy because they were good at remembering many details, yet others loved its systematic order.
I love the subject but the amount of detail drives me batty at times (one only has to thumb through a copy of Merck to be overwhelmed by the number of processes, etc.)—and I don't have a photographic memory.
However, I don't see that as a major issue in the long run, for if one is heavily involved with some of its specialized threads/areas then it all makes sense at that level (well sort of for much—duh, some—of the time).
Unlike physics where the rules seem clearer and more straightforward, the detail in o-chem throws people (especially those who don't have a good memory for detail). From my experience, this can become an acute problem around exam time when other subjects are competing for attention. Some people do much better in that situation than others, it doesn't mean that they're not good students, or haven't tried hard enough—or that they even dislike the subject.
It seems to me it's the nature of the beast that is actually the real culprit. Perhaps that ought to be taken into account when teaching the subject (for instance, we could offset o-chem exams from others by scheduling them to be held at a different time of year).
Just a thought.
"It's a bit of academic hazing to wash out weaker pre-meds from the undergrad program"
In undergrad chemistry my lab partner was a med student whereas I was doing science and engineering. In essence, there were unavoidable common core threads for everyone.
I'm not saying that's good or bad but it was problem for my co chem student not because he was doing poorly but because he was overloaded (his workload was definitely much heavier than mine).
His experience is the reason why I'm not in favor of that approach because it also filters out good students who do badly for other reasons. For example, some students have family commitments and don't have as much time available for study. Others have less time because they have to travel long distances to lectures.
Take my situation, for a part of my studies I used to travel the better part of 200 miles round trip by train and bus each day. I'd leave home when it was dark and also arrive home when dark—that was nearly 6 hours traveling per day.
Making up time studying on the train wasn't an option as I'd just fall asleep. If I'd been doing medicine and that weeding out process adopted then I'd not have stood a chance.
Edit: at a different period when I eventually managed to get closer to uni my flatmate was also a med student and he too always had a much heavier workload than I did.
If I'd been a med student under those conditions, I reckon I'd have wanted to ditch organic chemistry if given half a chance.
> "And how hard should organic chemistry be anyway?"
For christ's sake, Organic Chemistry has a mechanism that's solidly based on theory of chemical bond and structural chemistry(chirality and what not). And for the empirical part? We've got more than a hundred years of experience. How the fuck hard could it be for an undergrad-level course? What's wrong with the students?
That's how it was (and things were) when I was doing organic chemistry.
To answer your last question I could suggest some answers but they'd only be inflammatory. Here, the real problem is that it's not that my answers would be inflammatory but why they'd be considered such (as opposed to being just options or ideas, whether right or wrong, in a much wider rational debate).
The real issue is that illogical, unfounded and ill-informed opinion has stifled rational debate, it having the loudest voice—and that nowadays there's no longer any moderating mechanism that's able to pull it back into line.
Organic chem 1 and 2 are prerequisites for medical schools. A lot of colleges actually make the courses as hard as possible to make sure that the med school acceptance rate for their graduates is very high.
What connection do you see between the company hiring and the course content? I don't think there is a closed-loop there.
Tough question, but it boils down to the type of subject matter that's been taught.
I'll use myself as a illustration: I've done a wide range of subjects in my time and I'll use two instances. One was philosophy which included political philosophy the other electronics (which was separate from science, physics, chemistry, etc.).
Philosophy covers a vast field: analytic Phil./logic requires mathematical precision whereas political Phil. requires a different type of thinking altogether much of which is subjective in nature. If I were to be employed in this field an employer would be mainly looking for my ability to assess and judge situations, etc. but that would have had precious little to do with any course materials. Here, an employer is looking at the worldly skills Phil. has taught me which is very different to my electronics courses.
An employer who was employing me for my electronic skills would expect me to have perhaps basic but very specific skills as taught in the course. If given a spectrum analyzer or oscilloscope, my employer would expect me to know what they were and how to use them. If I'd not used those models previously, any reasonable employer would give me operations manuals and a little familiarization time then set me to work on some electronics project. Essentially, in electronics there are certain specific skills that one must be taught and be familiar with or one cannot do the work.
In essence, in some professions there's a very tight coupling between one's education and one's work, especially so in engineering, chemistry, etc. and less so in others.
So, it varies, and is loosely coupled at best, even looking from a macro-level.
The problem I see is that while students have enormous incentive to match a company's standard, companies have very little incentive to be a part of that process.
A student pursuing a degree in a larger pursuit of a career is faced with a founder's dilemma. They shoulder all of the risk of failure, and have no recourse. It isn't a company's problem if they aren't trained properly, nor is it a professor's. When starting a company founders are able to seek funding and declare bankruptcy, but students are expected to take out loans that cannot be defaulted on.
If the macro-level goal is a highly trained, highly effective workforce, then why aren't students supported in pursuing training by any of the institutionsthey interact with on that macro level?
The point you raise isn't unique to the medical profession (although it's likely at the sharp edge), but it's endemic in other professions too. It's a much bigger cultural issue involving employees' attitude to work, long term job security and employers' indifference, etc. Huge topic, too complex to make much sense of here.
A related problem is the continuing education issue/ongoing skills etc. It's always been a bit of a joke from a workforce-wide/global perspective. Again, the reason why that's so is also involved and complex.
As a recent grad, this doesn't at all seem surprising
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
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
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
Sorry for the rant but this stuff still pisses me off to this day
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
When I was in college, in the 80s, some professors and courses had campus-wide reputations for difficulty. Of one the student course review said "if you take Professor X you'll learn more from your B- than you will from any other class you take".
It turned out that these were generally the most interesting and rewarding courses, and these professors the ones most concerned about their students learning. They were pretty well attended. Everyone knew from Day One what they were in for, and everyone did the work. Those that didn't want to do that work found other courses.
Absolutely. And one of those classes was O-CHEM.
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:
> 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]
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.
Cool nobody needs to learn algebra because no one uses it. Learning itself has no value, sends no signal. Gates are bad let everyone in. Struggling is bad and an indication that something in the world should change.
Would you evaluate entrance to your roofing company based on a worker's ability to solder circuit boards?
You are confusing the necessary with the sufficient and ignoring that competence is correlated across diverse tasks.
So yes, I could hire someone based only on seeing them perform at a high level in an unrelated task.
How do you think I confuse necessary and sufficient?
There are lots of necessary tasks entailed in a job, and I could test someone on one of those tasks (if it were suitable in an interview context). But there are other things I could ask someone and their performance on that task would be sufficient to hire them. The retort that only necessary skills should be interviewed against isn't a great argument.
Thank you. I meant to address relevant vs irrelevant tasks (soldering =/= roofing, organic synthesis =/= medical diagnosis or performing procedures), but yours is a good point.
(edit: typo) To bring this back to organic chem as a questionably relevant prereq to med school, there are obviously specialties where chem is more or less relevant. I care very much if my pharmacist and anesthesiologist understand chemistry, and less so if my orthopedic surgeons do. To the extent that performance on an unnecessary task is sufficient to hire, the USMLE is a better gate into practicing than an individual med school course grade, and the MCAT is a better gate into med school than organic chemistry. I'm clearly lost in the sauce, both those gates occur after and include concepts from/building on organic chemistry.
That said, organic chemistry is uniquely known as a gatekeeper to med school, more than biology, physics, math, anatomy, and other prereqs. Why concentrate difficulty and training on that component in particular?
Ah, the ol' whiteboarding/Leetcoding in tech interviews debate.
What would be a correct handling of the situation? If organic chemistry is as unimportant to medicine as claimed, and you had a bunch of students whose education was spoilt by a pandemic, and a professor who wants to flunk a bunch of them out, what to do?
Sounds like the administration was in a tough spot to me.
Admit that the failure to learn was caused by a failure to teach, strike the grades from the record, and give priority enrollment for a repeat section in the next term?
The instructor operates with the assumption that they'll be teaching the same class next term, so the friction for instructors to teach for a repeat class roster is low. The administration operates with the assumption that students will be enrolling for that class, so the friction for administration to enroll a repeat class roster is low.
It is possible to educate our students to a high standard, without effectively punishing them for failing under faulty leadership.
I haven't even yet suggested the idea that tuition would be waived for the repeat section, because while that argument could be made, the argument I'd like to highlight here is that whatever tough spot the administration percieves requires little more than a willingness to accomodate failure as a part of learning.
This is how the united states fails - our education institutions fail to hold the bar and let the pillars of real education turn to sand.
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).
Exactly. I see a lot of people on HN are often bashing European public universities, but advantage of those universities is that you are essentially judged by a third party which does not have any monetary reason to let you pass. You either know, or you are kicked from exams.
I think the bashing comes in when the topic of rigor / how good the university is comes up. For instance, how do you equitably discriminate to only allow smarter people into universities with an intentionally elevated amount of rigor?
This is inherently discriminatory since ironically enough the root of all inequality is endowed intelligence. The value of giving away free resources of high value is going to get messy, it's why the competition for scholarships to top universities is incredibly fraught with fraud.
The "how good is university" is based on some arbitrary metric, which does not tell anything to the student, but works on foreign students see PolyMatter The Chinese Student Crisis - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQWlnTyOSig
It has even lower value for Europeans, because even if some university in Paris would be THE BEST in the world, it still will have only a national character. For example some guy from Poland is not going to study there, simply because when you are 20 years old, then you can barely speak English on A2, but at that case, to actually understand and learn, you would need to speak French on B2 (of course, we can find rare exceptions).
So in the end you are choosing your school from less than dozen national universities (could be less or more, depends on size of your country) and then you will decide by their program - Do you want to study agriculture university with a program on genetical engineering of plants? Do you want to study technical university with a program of computer science? etc.
All those universities are national (public), there are also some private universities, but you will go in those if you are mandated to have diploma (i.e. some governmental positions). The problem with private universities is that non-governmental employers are not taking them seriously and they will look at you as on somebody who accidentally bought his diploma with his newspapers.
Depending on funding system they have quite a lot reasons to pass people. Namely that they are also paid for each graduate by state.
>This is how the united states fails - our education institutions fail to hold the bar and let the pillars of real education turn to sand.
That’s why we should be providing college for free (to the student, it will cost us all money in the form of taxes). If you fail Ochem, it won’t be thousands of dollars lost (yes maybe thousands from society, but the burden is not on the individual). It might set you back, but not monetarily. If there’s a lottery, it should be in the form of selecting who goes where and not a lottery ticket that oddly resembles a tuition bill.
Of course someone is going to say some version of “we can’t afford that, it’s absurd, people won’t respect their education if they don’t lose something, it decreases competition…” but then I guess we’ll have to let the US fall. Guided instruction needs to be as close to free as possible for people and failure to learn something shouldn’t cause monetary anguish, just more time spent trying to learn.
This is why I’m a big proponent of increased funding for my local community college. I will gladly (and do) pay more in taxes to increase funding and decrease tuition. The day they ask if it should be free on the ballot, I will excitedly fill in “yes”.
We really need to shift away from charging people money to be successful. It has made our society very sick.
I'm not sure the economics of paying for everyone's tuition, but I don't think this is the issue here. NYU has a $6 billion endowment (~100k/student, projecting modestly from Wikipedia's numbers) and costs nearly $40k in tuition after aid. They're flush with money, and so is the average student (or their family at least). Harvard of all places is known for grade inflation, so I don't think low standards is a money problem.
Forcing out a long-time (non-tenured) professor seems a bit extreme, but there are a lot of extreme circumstances:
- Professor Jones is 84 years old (according to his Wikipedia [0])
- Students are recovering from an unprecedented break/rift in their studies b/c of the pandemic
- faculty and administration are still struggling to adapt to the new technology and methods hastily adapted for pandemic education.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yup, and then some of them will end up killing patients due to these lowered "feel-good" standards. Thanks NYU.
Standards that are more in line with the rest of the faculty?
https://twitter.com/misandryinc/status/1577006428539482113/p...
> 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.
> “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.
> 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.”
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".
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.
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.
Should it be an expectation that 30% of students will always get an A and only 5% will fail, no matter what?
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 will 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.
This is what ‘equity’ in education looks like.
Everyone is supposed to be fairly evaluated against the same metric.
If you want to fix ‘injustice’, you need to start in kindergarten, not the 13th grade.
Three data points:
- A friend who got a Ph.D. in Chemistry at Berkeley in the 1970's - in spite of major 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.)
- 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.)
- 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.
Archived: https://archive.ph/aVZOp
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, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isoamyl_acetate.
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.
Per the article, he's been teaching this for decades, and his textbook is in its fifth edition.
Frankly these students are lucky to have this guy for a professor.
The article notes that he's seen a decline in student application for a decade, and the pandemic just collapsed application entirely.
Calling them whiners is too harsh even if it’s technically correct. This was a class setup to fail by COVID. If they took no action, they were going to be crushed when in normal circumstances they would have succeeded.
OC is hard because carbon is unlike any other known element: it has too many possible combinations. Anorganic chemics has a few hundred combinations, but carbon has more with hydrogen alone.
Correct. OChem represents a shift from atom based thinking to electron arrangement based thinking. You kind of learn this before with orbitals and simple stuff like Cl's 7 electrons+ H's 1 electron = 8 electrons, a full shell! That is why halogens make great acids. But this is only the simplest form.
OChem is much more about how electrons move during reactions. Carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen are simple atoms, but their electrons can be arranged in so many ways. Concepts like electrophilic and nucleophilic are introduced to help model these interactions. You can memorize OChem reactions based on atoms, but its much easier to comprehend once you start looking the electrons in the bonds as the important bit and atoms are just a place to put them.
> 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 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?
> what's the purpose of retroactively withdrawing?
GPA inflation. Failed O-chem and ruined your chances of a top med school? Not to worry, how about a do-over!
Which is stupid because who cares if you get it in one or ten tries? Allowing retaken classes to replace old grades should be the standard.
Doctors don't get do-overs.
Coming up in a culture of "get this right the first time" makes all kinds of sense for a medical training track.
No it doesn't, what? How do you think learning works? I couldn't remember what 7 times 6 was on my 4th grade test and now it's impossible for me to know it. I get that it's hard to see because it's so normalized but it's ridiculous that our education system is based on fixed time intervals. God help someone who needs to take a little more time on the material before mastering it, guess you just fail. And when we create a system that punishes anything less than perfect forever we end up selecting good test takers rather than good doctors.
So it's a special exception to let a student repeat a class they failed first try?
Students can always repeat a class to get a better grade but this removes the stain of a failure on your report card.
I went to NYU, albeit many, many, years ago.
I also failed a class - a bonafide big fat F fail.
I retook the class and got an A. However my final grade for the class was a C, because NYU policy (at least back then) was to average out your grades.
Plus the primary reason I failed my first attempt was because my professor was a hardass strict ex-military Lt. Colonel who gave no mercy. On my second attempt, my professor was a sweet old man approaching retirement who gave open book + open notes multiple choice exams.
Meanwhile I had friends at other schools - Rutgers, for example, who also failed classes and retook them. However for them, their final grade was either their best grade, or most recent one (I don’t recall). So if they failed, then got an A on the retry, their grade would be an A.
I think we were given one chance to withdraw from a class, before it finished. I don’t remember why I didn’t for the class I failed - I might have used up my chance already because I recall I was doing terribly that semester in general.
Granted this was many years ago. I’m not sure what NYU’s current policies are.
I remember severely regretting choosing NYU over Rutgers because I graduated with an abominable GPA, partially because of this averaging of grades.
>You'd normally not be allowed to retry a class you scored badly in? Or what's the purpose of retroactively withdrawing?
You can take the class again for a better grade, but the bad grade stays on your record and factors into your GPA. Retroactively withdrawing eliminates the bad grade.
Look, these kids are paying customers in a for profit system. Actual education is beside the point.
Funnily enough, searching for this article on HN yielded this prior one from NYT: "How to Get an A- in Organic Chemistry"
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: https://jakeseliger.com/2015/01/13/what-incentivizes-profess...
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.
This guy appears to be damaging peoples lives for a questionable at best cause.
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.
It seems like the real failure was firing over this when other actions seem more apropriate