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NYU organic chemistry professor terminated for tough grading

93 points by incogitomode 4y ago

kurupt213 4y ago
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.
mitchbob 4y ago
Archived: https://archive.ph/aVZOp https://archive.ph/aVZOp
dexwiz 4y ago
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 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.
- stop50 4y ago
  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.
  - dexwiz 4y ago
    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.
- faeriechangling 4y ago
  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.
  - yucky 4y ago
- chernevik 4y ago
  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.
incogitomode 4y ago
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. [1] https://nyti.ms/3rqZIoZ#permid=120729762 https://nyti.ms/3rqZIoZ#permid=120729762
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- faeriechangling 4y ago
  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.
  - forgetbook 4y ago
    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.
MattGaiser 4y ago
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.
SighMagi 4y ago
Look, these kids are paying customers in a for profit system. Actual education is beside the point.
fiat_fandango 4y ago
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).
- TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
  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.
  - fiat_fandango 4y ago
    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.
    - TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
      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 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.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
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?
faeriechangling 4y ago
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.
- yucky 4y ago
  Yup, and then some of them will end up killing patients due to these lowered "feel-good" standards. Thanks NYU.
  - Apocryphon 4y ago
    Standards that are more in line with the rest of the faculty? https://twitter.com/misandryinc/status/1577006428539482113/photo/1 https://twitter.com/misandryinc/status/1577006428539482113/p...
    - yucky 4y ago
      - Apocryphon 4y ago
        Certainly not someone who's yucky!
detaro 4y ago
> 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?
- anonAndOn 4y ago
  > 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!
  - detaro 4y ago
    So it's a special exception to let a student repeat a class they failed first try?
    - anonAndOn 4y ago
      Students can always repeat a class to get a better grade but this removes the stain of a failure on your report card.
  - Spivak 4y ago
    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.
    - chernevik 4y ago
      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.
      - Spivak 4y ago
anm89 4y ago
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
jseliger 4y ago
An observation from 2015: https://jakeseliger.com/2015/01/13/what-incentivizes-professors-to-grade-honestly-nothing/ https://jakeseliger.com/2015/01/13/what-incentivizes-profess...
hilbert42 4y ago
"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.
- whywhywhydude 4y ago
  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.
- forgetbook 4y ago
  What connection do you see between the company hiring and the course content? I don't think there is a closed-loop there.
  - hilbert42 4y ago
    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.
danso 4y ago
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. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maitland_Jones_Jr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maitland_Jones_Jr.
Apocryphon 4y ago
Funnily enough, searching for this article on HN yielded this prior one from NYT: "How to Get an A- in Organic Chemistry" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6659671 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6659671
puffoflogic 4y ago
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.
cetahfh14615 4y ago
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
- chernevik 4y ago
  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.
  - euroderf 4y ago
    Absolutely. And one of those classes was O-CHEM.
lamontcg 4y ago
> 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.
chernevik 4y ago
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.
rayiner 4y ago
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?
remarkEon 4y ago
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?
bell-cot 4y ago
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.

93 points by incogitomode 4y ago

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.

mitchbob 4y ago

Archived: https://archive.ph/aVZOp https://archive.ph/aVZOp

dexwiz 4y ago

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 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.

stop50 4y ago
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.
- dexwiz 4y ago
  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.
faeriechangling 4y ago
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.
- yucky 4y ago
chernevik 4y ago
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.

incogitomode 4y ago

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. [1] https://nyti.ms/3rqZIoZ#permid=120729762 https://nyti.ms/3rqZIoZ#permid=120729762

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
faeriechangling 4y ago
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.
- forgetbook 4y ago
  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.

MattGaiser 4y ago

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.

SighMagi 4y ago

Look, these kids are paying customers in a for profit system. Actual education is beside the point.

fiat_fandango 4y ago

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).

TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
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.
- fiat_fandango 4y ago
  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.
  - TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
    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 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.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

TheLoafOfBread 4y ago

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?

faeriechangling 4y ago

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.

yucky 4y ago
Yup, and then some of them will end up killing patients due to these lowered "feel-good" standards. Thanks NYU.
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  Standards that are more in line with the rest of the faculty? https://twitter.com/misandryinc/status/1577006428539482113/photo/1 https://twitter.com/misandryinc/status/1577006428539482113/p...
  - yucky 4y ago
    - Apocryphon 4y ago
      Certainly not someone who's yucky!

detaro 4y ago

> 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?

anonAndOn 4y ago
> 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!
- detaro 4y ago
  So it's a special exception to let a student repeat a class they failed first try?
  - anonAndOn 4y ago
    Students can always repeat a class to get a better grade but this removes the stain of a failure on your report card.
- Spivak 4y ago
  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.
  - chernevik 4y ago
    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.
    - Spivak 4y ago

anm89 4y ago

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

jseliger 4y ago

An observation from 2015: https://jakeseliger.com/2015/01/13/what-incentivizes-professors-to-grade-honestly-nothing/ https://jakeseliger.com/2015/01/13/what-incentivizes-profess...

hilbert42 4y ago

"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.

whywhywhydude 4y ago
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.
forgetbook 4y ago
What connection do you see between the company hiring and the course content? I don't think there is a closed-loop there.
- hilbert42 4y ago
  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.

danso 4y ago

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. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maitland_Jones_Jr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maitland_Jones_Jr.

Apocryphon 4y ago

Funnily enough, searching for this article on HN yielded this prior one from NYT: "How to Get an A- in Organic Chemistry" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6659671 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6659671

puffoflogic 4y ago

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.

cetahfh14615 4y ago

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

chernevik 4y ago
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.
- euroderf 4y ago
  Absolutely. And one of those classes was O-CHEM.

lamontcg 4y ago

> 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.

chernevik 4y ago

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.

rayiner 4y ago

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?

remarkEon 4y ago

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?

bell-cot 4y ago

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.