Posted on 10/30/2022 8:30:39 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Earlier this month I wrote about organic chemistry professor Maitland Jones. Jones, who is now 84-years-old taught at Princeton until 2007 and then retired and became an adjunct professor at NYU. He’s considered one of the leading teachers in the field and his textbook on organic chem is now in its 5th edition. But his class is not easy. In fact, it had become known as a weed out class for students who wanted to go into medicine. But last spring a group of his students revolted.
…as the campus emerged from pandemic restrictions, 82 of his 350 students signed a petition against him.
Students said the high-stakes course — notorious for ending many a dream of medical school — was too hard, blaming Dr. Jones for their poor test scores…
“We are very concerned about our scores, and find that they are not an accurate reflection of the time and effort put into this class,” the petition said…
“We urge you to realize,” the petition said, “that a class with such a high percentage of withdrawals and low grades has failed to make students’ learning and well-being a priority and reflects poorly on the chemistry department as well as the institution as a whole.”
NYU agreed to let students retroactively withdraw from the class so a low grade wouldn’t be held against them. Dr. Jones was eventually fired but he filed a grievance over that decision and said he’d actually been reducing the difficulty of his exams. From his perspective, some of his students had completely forgotten how to study and the problem got noticeably worse during the pandemic.
Today the NY Times published a follow up piece in which they interviewed a bunch of professors and students about what had changed in higher ed in the last few years. The story uses Dr. Jones firing as a jumping off point for questions about whether students have become too entitled or professors have become too stuck in their ways. As I read it, there’s a pretty clear agreement among many of the respondents that the students have in fact become more demanding of professors and less of themselves. From a student…
I’m a sophomore at a private university. Unnecessary weed-out classes that usually aren’t even important to your major should be completely removed from curriculums or taught in a different way. Students who don’t have the means to support themselves academically should not be weeded out. Young people have a stronger voice now and the petition at N.Y.U. shined a light on this longstanding issue. — Charles Booth, 19, Hoboken, N.J.
No offense to Charles, but I don’t think organic chemistry is unimportant to your major if you’re hoping to be a medical doctor. As for students who don’t “have the means to support themselves academically” I’m not sure what this means. Is he saying students who fail tough classes? If so, what’s the point of having grades or tests at all? If everyone just gets a pass and no one is weeded out, couldn’t that result in some really unprepared college graduates who actually can’t do the kind of work their degree suggests they can? From a former professor:
I taught digital media management to postgraduates at a private university, and over the last few years students stopped wanting to be educated and became buyers of credentials. That evolution created sides in a conflict: students and the administrators who collect their tuition on one side, faculty and our professional obsessions on the other.
Ultimately, I could not accept the mismatch of priorities. I left academia because of the changes I perceived in students and the administration that pandered to them.
I think that sort of matches with the previous comment from Charlies, i.e. it doesn’t matter if students can support themselves academically what matters is that they get the degree they paid for regardless of how they perform. Another professor:
I have extensive experience teaching undergraduate, graduate and medical students in both seminar and large lecture settings at a private university. I used the Socratic method, attempting to gently lead the students through the process of problem solving. I explained at the beginning that it was meant as a dialogue, not a harassment. About 15 years ago, I started seeing undergraduate students become resistant to this challenge. Ten years ago this discomfort had filtered up to the graduate and medical students. Now, questioning students in front of their peers is more or less considered unacceptable. It makes them “uncomfortable.” I consider myself a flexible, supportive instructor, sensitive to the needs of my students. I do not believe in so-called weed-out courses. I believe in learning. But part of this process is becoming adept at problem solving under challenging conditions. — Barry Goldstein, 70, Westport, N.Y.
No one can be uncomfortable. The classroom has to be a safe space even from learning in real time. Finally, this one is interesting. It comes from a student and starts out as a criticism of some professors but ends with what I think was meant to be a further criticism of stodgy professors but it actually comes across as an embarrassing admission about the students.
I am an undergraduate at a private university widely regarded for having difficult professors and curriculums. I think many professors at research universities tend to focus less on their teaching and more on publishing. I also find that professors are often resistant to changing their teaching styles when something isn’t working because for many, it doesn’t seem to be a priority for them.
In a post-Covid academic climate many of my peers, including myself, are just not accustomed to the kind of effort that has been expected for decades in pre-med and other similar weed-out courses. — Sam Nichols, 20, Ithaca, N.Y.
Again, I think he was trying to say that in the post-Covid world the kids just shouldn’t be expected to meet the expectations of previous generations. But why not exactly? If not now, when will it be okay to demand a lot of effort from those students?
Read the whole thing for yourself.
The world needs ditch diggers, too.
I say just turn the students loose in the lab with a test that only asks them to make one organic molecule. KCN comes to mind.
Student says pre-med are weed-out courses. If they’d given his name, no one would trust him to have earned his degree, unless it was gender studies.
Oops! I reread paragraph, saw his name, and it looks like I shouldn’t be trusted. 😕
Agreed. What we are seeing here: students who never should have been admitted are forced to come to grips with their demonstrated inadequacy, and it upsets them greatly.
Administrators also don't want to admit that if we only had people in college who actually belonged there, then the university system would have to massively downsize.
Organic Chemistry is supposed to be hard. Best advise i ever got on how to pass it, was “memorize the book”. Our tests consisted of a “road map” and some other questions. The “road map” was “starting coal, limestone and air, go through 26 steps to find the given answer.”
Miss one, you fail.
Potassium Cyanide? The penultimate weed out
Those students will not get a job or for long that requires chemistry.
If hired they will be fired soon after as they will not have the needed skills.
They act like restaurants, eager to tailor and modify any course on the menu (in the curriculum) that the student is not 1000% at ease with. “Have it your way!” said the Dean.
It's long been that way. College brochures depict campus life as Club Med. They tout the college's clubs, social activities, sports & recreational amenities, fine dining halls, and comfortable dorms.
And why not? Modern students are lucrative customers. It doesn't matter if they bring low academic potential, so long as they bring student loan money.
We had a physics instructor in college where half the students would end up flunking his class. We called him, Mean Gene the Physics Machine. I passed😅.
I remember that textbook...I loved organic chemistry! Did not end up in a related field...probably should have.
Lab was really fun...I once caused a column of fire to erupt from a drain. The instructor heard the “woosh”...I peered around the corner to find him staring at me with raised eyebrows. Apparently satisfied that I didn’t burn my face off, he just shook his head...lol.
My son is not afraid of hard teachers and is demonstrably smart. He scored in the top 1% of all students in Texas on the STAAR exams.
He had an English professor this semester that was a total ass. Despite asking twice for clarification on an assignment, he never got a response so did his absolute best on the paper. Got a lousy grade. As a college educated woman myself who majored in English, I asked for a copy of the assignment and his paper. It was well researched, reasoned, properly documented, and crisply written.
Then the flu came through our house. He contacted the teacher with the doctor’s receipt and note, saw an in-class assignment on the portal with a deadline for that day and did it anyway even though he was sick as a dog. He got a zero. By way of explanation, the teacher replied, “This was an in-class assignment.” By following the school’s own guidelines and not showing up to class ill and contagious, he got a failing grade.
I told him to drop the class. This teacher was power-tripping.
With that class removed, he was back to a perfect GPA.
Not all hard teachers are good teachers and not all good teachers make the subject matter hard.
One of my hardest teachers was Ms. Novak for biology. Her class was tough but masterfully structured. She broke down each unit in logical order, building from the basic cell up. My notebook was completely full by the end of the school year. I did not need to study for the Regents exams. I only missed 1 question on the entire test.
She was an amazing teacher and everyone in her class passed.
Your mental laziness is as sad as it is appalling. Choosing to be set up for servitude vs. having the power of free choice is tragic. But go ahead, play with your cell phones and waste your time with nonsense like Tik Tok instead of deciding to meet challenges. Fools.
I blame the parents and modern so called “parenting”
Where the parents are the kids’s BFF.
Where everyone gets a trophy.
Where all kids are going to be sportd/rock stars
Where kids are never told “no.”
Where the kids are inappropriately their divorced parent’s confidants.
Where there were never any house rules (bedtimes, chores, etc).
Where the sense of personal responsibility and empathy were never taught.
Where social media replaced social skills (no imposed limits on screen time).
Where eliminating contributing to the family and society obliterated a child’s sense of purpose.
Where needs and wants were viewed as equal.
When I took paleontology in college the class average on major exams would be in the 20’s for every single test. That’s not due to a bunch of slackers not putting forth any effort, that was how hard the test was.
The rest of the geology program was not a lot better. You were pretty much assigned your maximum grade at the beginning and nothing you could do would allow you to get a better average.
One late evening when I was sitting with a girl I was dating at the time doing a lab, I made the comment as we finished up “well, there goes another C” and she chastised me for being so negative. Noticing that neither of us had written our names on the papers I suggested we swap papers and turn them in.
She got her normal A- or whatever and I got my C.
I knew a girl in college that called organic chemistry orgasmic chemistry because the tests were so hard.
I taught digital media management to postgraduates at a private university, and over the last few years students stopped wanting to be educated and became buyers of credentials.
Imagine that. Colleges became giant financial rackets that charged ridiculous prices for an “education” that often turned out to be worthless … and people wonder why the students began treating it as exactly what it had become.
Students caused a top professor of organic chemistry to be fired from a university because his courses were TOO HARD.
They claimed, “Our grades did not reflect the amount of time and effort we put into the subject.”
This is the result of a society in which young people expect trophies and medals just for showing up at a school.
Science has always been a brutal master and success in technology advances is guaranteed to NOBODY no matter the time and effort invested.
Thomas Edison worked hard to create dozens of light bulbs that never worked until he finally created one light bulb that DID work. That success brought light into darkness.
Cyrus McCormick worked hard for a long time and finally created a grain threshing machine after watching his father fail FOR YEARS trying to create a threshing machine that worked. That success actually rescued the world from widespread starvation.
Success is the award for dedicated persistence to overcome failure.
“They claimed, “Our grades did not reflect the amount of time and effort we put into the subject.””
But they tried really really really hard...
Facts don’t GAF about your time and effort.
“O-chem has always been the undergrad class that weeded out those who didn’t belong “
My daughter wasn’t pre-med, but was bummed out when she received a C-, I told her I was happy she passed on the first attempt.
Organic Chem has made a lot of people cry.
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