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.
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...
Do you think that practice produces better learning?
Why?
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.
Most doctors I know don't know jack shit about organic chemistry. They're operating at a level of abstraction much much higher.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
Sounds like the administration was in a tough spot to me.
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.
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).
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
https://twitter.com/misandryinc/status/1577006428539482113/p...
> “Students were misreading exam questions at an astonishing rate,” he wrote in a grievance to the university, protesting his termination. Grades fell even as he reduced the difficulty of his exams.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
GPA inflation. Failed O-chem and ruined your chances of a top med school? Not to worry, how about a do-over!
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 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.
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
