The students are semi-literate.
Organic chemistry was the great winnower of premeds. The material is very complex on many fronts. It was supposed to be hard, and it was supposed to weed out those that couldn’t grasp the concepts.
Besides the factors above about lack of work and inability to study as well as semi-illiteracy, I found that some students were just too damn stupid to grasp the material. I taught one fellow who was very eager to learn and pass the course (foreign language), but he started failing early in the course. I tutored him twice a week during office hours and found he was unable to understand the most simple concepts no matter how many ways I explained them.
I later taught in a college in which I was provided the IQs of all the students. Not surprisingly their grades tracked fairly close to their IQ scores.
So it’s impossible to make a course too difficult?
This article failed to reveal any evaluation of this prof’s policies and practices other than the student petition. We have insufficient information.
Who knew the movie “Idiocracy” was actually a documentary of the world to come.