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Education

NYU Organic Chemistry Professor Terminated For Tough Grading (nytimes.com) 319

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: In the field of organic chemistry, Maitland Jones Jr. has a storied reputation. He taught the subject for decades, first at Princeton and then at New York University, and wrote an influential textbook. He received awards for his teaching, as well as recognition as one of N.Y.U.'s coolest professors. But last spring, 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. The professor defended his standards. But just before the start of the fall semester, university deans terminated Dr. Jones's contract. 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."

Marc A. Walters, director of undergraduate studies in the chemistry department, summed up the situation in an email to Dr. Jones, before his firing. He said the plan would "extend a gentle but firm hand to the students and those who pay the tuition bills," an apparent reference to parents. The university's handling of the petition provoked equal and opposite reactions from both the chemistry faculty, who protested the decisions, and pro-Jones students, who sent glowing letters of endorsement. "The deans are obviously going for some bottom line, and they want happy students who are saying great things about the university so more people apply and the U.S. News rankings keep going higher," said Paramjit Arora, a chemistry professor who has worked closely with Dr. Jones.
"In short, this one unhappy chemistry class could be a case study of the pressures on higher education as it tries to handle its Gen-Z student body," writes NYT's Stephanie Saul.

"Should universities ease pressure on students, many of whom are still coping with the pandemic's effects on their mental health and schooling? How should universities respond to the increasing number of complaints by students against professors? Do students have too much power over contract faculty members, who do not have the protections of tenure? And how hard should organic chemistry be anyway?"
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NYU Organic Chemistry Professor Terminated For Tough Grading

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 03, 2022 @10:40PM (#62935647)
    Once they start removing good teachers to please students that doesn't reach a minimum. The whole system will crumble soon with more and more "Gen Z" students will start to complain about everything and each time learn less and less. In the end their diplomas will worth nothing. I think it's fair we know their names just in case on day I need a good doctor and some of those are about to give a treatment to my or anyone else I know, what would be a big NO and get away from here, because I want a real professional. If this persist and spread, will be the end of good education... and such probably countries like China will have the upper hand, with really good professionals.
    • by drnb ( 2434720 ) on Monday October 03, 2022 @11:02PM (#62935705)

      Once they start removing good teachers to please students that doesn't reach a minimum. The whole system will crumble soon with more and more "Gen Z" students will start to complain about everything and each time learn less and less. In the end their diplomas will worth nothing.

      Its been happening for decades. A friend teaches CS at what one would think is a good school, a University of California campus with pretty competitive ratings. The dean won't let him give low grades to students who don't even turn in required assignments, assignments that add up to a significant portion of your grade as stated in the syllabus. He is made to offer end of the quarter extra credit work to offset bad test score and assignments never turned in. If the student's tuition check clears its almost impossible to flunk them. The university is now setup to accommodate those merely looking to get their ticket punched.

      • by DNS-and-BIND ( 461968 ) on Tuesday October 04, 2022 @12:58AM (#62935879) Homepage

        "The children now love luxury; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are tyrants, not servants of the households. They no longer rise when their elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize over their teachers. I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on the frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words. When I was a boy, we were taught to be discrete and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly wise and impatient of restraint."
        -- attributed to Hesiod (8th century B.C.)

        The 2,500-Year-Old History of Adults Blaming the Younger Generation. [historyhustle.com]

    • by v1 ( 525388 ) on Monday October 03, 2022 @11:05PM (#62935711) Homepage Journal

      Unfortunately, this is SOP in many gradeschools and high schools today. (public ones) Teachers pressured to pass enough students to keep the average GPA of the school up. teachers heavily pressured to give the jocks on the teams passing grades to they can stay eligible and bringing in money. (more a college thing)

      In this case though I think it sets a bad precedent. Unless this specific course from this instructor is required for something, the students almost certainly know what they're getting into, and are choosing to do so. If that's the case, and they're STILL complaining about the tough grading, too bad!

      Hard teachers can push you hard to learn. We had one of those in history class in my high school, and his class was NOT optional, every student had to take it at some point to graduate. His tests were brutal. As an example, his true/false and multiple choice were scored 'right minus wrong', meaning scoring started you at 0 and you got +1 for a right answer and -1 for a wrong answer. (it was possible to get a negative test score) In a 5 option question, if you couldn't narrow it down to one of two answers, statistically, you were better off leaving it blank. Only answer a T/F question if you are more than 50% confident in your answer. "Matrixes" with a row of people and columns of events, check every box where a person participated in an event. Basically a big block of true/false questions. History has always been my nemesis, I can't memorize things like that. I spoke with him in private after the intro. I told him, "I'm going to fail every test". He said "well, then you better do really well on your written assignments!" And I did. I got an A or A- on every single assignment. And my best test grade was a C-, most of them were D or F. And I passed the class. Despite being the hardest class in the building, he was a respected teacher.

      There's a place for complaining about bad instructors. I had one in college that would frequently get to the end of his content for the day before the class was over, and would say he was just going to tell a story or explain something else "that wouldn't be on the test". You'd see pretty much every student close their notebook and kick back to listen to the story or whatever. EVERY SINGLE THING he said during these "extras" showed up on the final. We were pissed. There wasn't room for us all in the dean's office when we marched down there after the test was over, half of us were overflowed into the hallway. Deal with that, not with teachers that are just giving you a little "tough love".

      • by sfcat ( 872532 ) on Tuesday October 04, 2022 @02:59AM (#62936041)

        EVERY SINGLE THING he said during these "extras" showed up on the final. We were pissed.

        This happened a lot at my school. Nobody ever complained. But it was CMU CS in the 90s. The students were all so smart; it was tough to challenge us and we didn't complain when a professor did. Once, I had a math class where the teacher messed up part of a question (a typo). Turns out because of the way the question was phrased, it accidently was something humans had not yet solved. Only our TA thought he had solved it. Our next assignment was to find the two holes in his proof. Our OS class involved writing a functioning OS. The OS final required that you had to write a device driver for an write-once optical disk (note this was a paper test). I never once had a multiple choice test in college. Every test (in my major) was open book and open notes but the tests were so hard they didn't help at all. So perhaps your school wasn't so tough and putting those extras on a test isn't such a big deal. Life isn't fair. But what doesn't kill you will make you stronger. But instead of learning a lesson about that, you complained to the manager/dean. If the dean cared about your education, he would have told you all to go back to your dorms and pound sand.

      • by ei4anb ( 625481 ) on Tuesday October 04, 2022 @05:50AM (#62936363)
        "his true/false and multiple choice were scored 'right minus wrong'"

        In Europe we often wonder at US multiple choice exams. Here, for history, we have to write several paragraphs for each answer and there is always a multi-page essay question.
      • I had a prof in grad school who was "not happy" with the quality of the work being submitted in the late 70's. Due to space constraints, Purdue was doing Saturday class for some grad classes and his was one. He was also pretty pissed people were not showing up on Saturdays. As I recall, he gave 2 people F's that semester, probably ending their graduate school experience. He was a fantastic teacher. I think too bad that colleges are bending to the trend of everyone gets a trophy. No wonder most papers have
    • I am sure this is the correct reaction, but to be fair the teachers have to grade similarly to each other or the grade means nothing and the institution simply cannot function.

      I remember a year 1 semester 1 class in univ where we were separated into 3 groups each with their own TA for a mini test. One week I scored a -30%. Presumably it was something like a 3 point question, and I made 4 mistakes. No one in my group scored over 0% for weeks until the professor fixed the issue.

    • Observation (Score:5, Interesting)

      by ElizabethGreene ( 1185405 ) on Tuesday October 04, 2022 @12:16AM (#62935835)

      Given the whims of the calendar, I would wager that many of these students took High School chemistry via Zoom, popped the AP exam to skip CHEM 101, and were missing the fundamentals of bonding and reaction mechanics when they hit the day-one-wall of OChem.

      * - The day one wall is 10~15 pages of reference data** that you more or less have to memorize or it's practically impossible to keep up.

      ** - Why in god's green gravy they don't just say this on day one and hand you the 10-15 pages is baffling. It's the secret sauce for Ochem. Put the frog on the plate and serve it on the first day; don't surprise them with it after the add/drop window has closed.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 03, 2022 @10:46PM (#62935659)

    The current fixation with physical reality being determined by one's self-image, and the insistence on its correctness both socially and among the physical sciences, is extraordinarily dangerous. And even saying so is enough to cost me my job, for failing to be "inclusive". James Damore being fired from Google for citing clinical facts and peer reviewed journal articles about gender differences was typical, not the exception, in workplaces following these fads.

    Unfortunately for its advocates, the pending Republican landslide in Congress and deeply conservative Supreme Court are flushing the gains of the radical gender movement. Because the LGBTQxyzpdflmnop crowd identified with the BLM and gay marriage crowds, we're at risk of losing decades of progress in those civil rights as well as the "Bruce Jenner should compete in his new gender" crowd.

    • This is unfortunately a very contagious problem. Empirical reality has been under assault for some time, and it is far from exclusive to one end of the political spectrum. Elections results are now held to be fraudulent by a significant plurality of the electorate, not because of any meaningful evidence, but because supporters of the losing candidate just "feel" it wasn't right. A disease isn't killing anyone, despite all evidence to the contrary; that's inconvenient, so it can't be true. People will seize
      • by sfcat ( 872532 )
        You are right, but only one side has control of the universities. Somehow if you are a college professor assaulting reality that is worse than someone who works at a gas station I think. Something about ignoring the ideals of academia.
      • Exactly the problem of today. Karl Rove's post-modernist argument there is no reality, only subjective "personal realities" sounded nuts to people in the 2000s and how they can create personal realities; with phrasing that made me think of the "personal relationship with Jesus" people I know (who never read their "friend's" book.) Now all we think in is narratives; the news says narrative as much as "alleged." Narrative is the word for this century. Maybe reality will come back or maybe it'll be canceled

    • Rarely have a read a post as spot on as this on Slashdot. Whatever you think of him, I was quite frightened when in Matt Walsh's "What is a Woman?" documentary that some people being interviewed literally got offended and upset at the word "truth".

      Asserting that there was a simple truth that existed in the world outside of one's feelings and biases was an offensive idea to them.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      James Damore would have flunked Psychology class because he didn't understand the sources he cited. The people who wrote them have come out and said as much.

  • DOX the posers! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dogcar3604 ( 1482103 ) on Monday October 03, 2022 @10:47PM (#62935661)
    Organic Chemistry should be the hardest course in University. Because it is. Wow. Just, wow. The _reason_ these posers took the course from this instructor is solely for the fame and glory of taking the hardest guy out there. Looks good on the application. ...then to whine because they didn't get Participation A's for signing up. PLEASE tell us who these undergrads are so we can avoid them in the future!!! I want to have nothing to do with anyone in the medical industry who thinks this is a good idea. The Internet is forever. It will be interesting to see how these 82 applicants of such low integrity will fare when it comes time to go on to grad school and med school. I can't see them going far in life. Here's hoping they get what they 'deserve'.
  • by drnb ( 2434720 ) on Monday October 03, 2022 @10:48PM (#62935663)
    I've talked to doctors about classes. They have indicated that Chemistry is the first culling of those students who are unprepared to do the necessary work. In particular notoriously hard organic chemistry classes. So pre-med students complaining about hard chemistry classes, what a joke. Those that got a reprieve will just fail later in the program after racking up even more loans or spending even more of mom and dad's money. Better to have them fail out early.

    Now these students are not useless, just in the wrong place. Their careers as high school biology teachers await. They can do a lot of good there. Flunk them out of pre-med and get them over to biology and teaching credentials as fast as possible.
    • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

      What makes you think that those later programs aren't going to do the same thing?

      • by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Monday October 03, 2022 @11:56PM (#62935801)

        What makes you think that those later programs aren't going to do the same thing?

        Putting the wash-out filter later is a waste of time and money.

        It is best to let students know as early as possible that they aren't cut out for their current objective. Then they can switch to something that better matches their talents.

        O-chem has long been a filter for pre-med students. It appears to be a good filter because a student's grade in O-chem is a good predictor of how well they will do in medical school. Just like med school, it has tons of memorization.

        Disclaimer: I hated O-chem.

      • by drnb ( 2434720 )

        What makes you think that those later programs aren't going to do the same thing?

        Different levels of difficulty. I had a HS Bio teacher who was absolutely awesome. In regular and AP. He washed out of med school when he was in college.

    • by ET3D ( 1169851 )

      I think it's kind of the point to keep them so they can pay more. It doesn't matter if they fail later, they still supplied the university with more money.

    • My university, decades ago, had just such courses for computer science, the department every student and their parents thought of as the future. The culling was quite brutal, and dominated by Asian students who rote memorized rather than learning to deduce from principles. The results were fascinating to the next generation of computer scientists.

      • by drnb ( 2434720 )

        My university, decades ago, had just such courses for computer science, the department every student and their parents thought of as the future. The culling was quite brutal, and dominated by Asian students who rote memorized rather than learning to deduce from principles. The results were fascinating to the next generation of computer scientists.

        Its very different today. In the 80s/90s the professor who generally taught those culling CS classes at my Uni was tough. but we learned a lot from him and he was one of our favorites. In 2000s as dean he was the guy telling professors to lower standards and create tons of late quarter extra credit for student who screwed up exams and didn't turning in assignments. Of course the extra credit was easier than all the assigned work they failed to do. Post 2000's it was hard to get less than a C in CS if your t

    • >Their careers as high school biology teachers await. Let's not disparage high school teachers like that. High school teachers can have every bit of talent and brains as doctors. It may be a shock to you but many people CHOOSE to be teachers because they like the idea of teaching.
    • Now these students are not useless, just in the wrong place.

      This. Many people don't know what they are in for when they apply for something. We had an academic ranking system at our universities when I was growing up. The university has a number of places to fill, and they select the students who applied for those places based on their overall high-school grades and worked their way down until nothing was left. Students did the opposite, they selected universities and courses based on what they wanted to do and if they don't get their first choice they get their sec

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Organic Chemistry is hard and you should not get a free pass. Life will require hard things of you that whining will not solve. This is the Prof you want. You grow by surrounding yourself with smart people and working outside your comfort zone.

    • Re:WTF (Score:5, Insightful)

      by caseih ( 160668 ) on Monday October 03, 2022 @11:25PM (#62935763)

      Reminds me of a professor I knew at my uni who taught undergraduate organic chem classes and labs. She had a reputation for hard pop quizzes. She had a habit of walking up and down the aisles of the auditorium, and would make comments about the students' work as they wrote the quiz, which some perceived as critical. Made a lot of students uncomfortable so they'd tend to sit away from the aisles so she couldn't walk past them and see their work. The smart ones caught on to what she was doing and purposely moved to the aisles where she could observe them because they realized she wasn't criticizing them; she was instructing and correcting them. Those students succeeded in the class. The ones who were put out by her didn't do nearly as well.

      Sad to hear how the some of the current generation of students are so ill-prepared for life in general and are demanding they be spoon fed, and even worse institutions are so afraid of them now that they'll bend over backwards to accommodate. Is this primarily an American phenomenon or is it happening in other places too? When students in Iran are being brutally killed for protesting in favor of basic human rights it kind of puts this sort of pettiness it into perspective.

      • Re: WTF (Score:5, Informative)

        by toutankh ( 1544253 ) on Tuesday October 04, 2022 @01:17AM (#62935905)

        Is this primarily an American phenomenon or is it happening in other places too?

        Freshly retired university staff here (both research and teaching). My impression (which is just that, and I'm curious to hear other perspectives) is that there is a bit of a global trend, at least in Western democracies. But more importantly, it's harder to resist that trend in the US because of tuition fees. In the EU, where education is mostly free or cheap, this aspect of financial pressure is absent. There are however other forms of financial pressure: universities basically need many successful students to attract more funding , at least in Austria where I was the past few years.

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by airport76 ( 7682176 )
          I have some karma to burn (and, really, I don't give a shit about it), so here it goes:

          My impression (...) is that there is a bit of a global trend, at least in Western democracies.

          Absolutely, and in all boils down to one word: empowerment.

          When you empower students you are making life harder to professors. When you empower citizens, you make life harder to government. When you empower customers, you make life harder to companies. And viceversa. Empowering one side over the other changes a delicate balance. Take it too far, and the whole system can collapse.

      • If your students have a hard time understanding whether you’re heckling them, criticising them or teaching them, you’re not a great teacher. I had a prof like that in uni, with a reputation for being “tough” and running a difficult class; a reputation he clearly enjoyed having. Sadly, a lot of the students who flunked his course certainly had the mental capacity to master the material.

        As a Gen X, I’d also hesitate to say that Gen Zers are “ill prepared for life”;
        • The point of the story is the guy is a stellar professor - "8 of the coolest" - with a long standing reputation of being the toughest. DON'T TAKE HIS COURSE IF YOU AREN'T IN IT TO WIN IT. Take the other section. There are still 27 faculty in Chemistry. This reflects very poorly on NYU.
      • Yes, back in my day I had to walk to school, uphill, both ways!

        Unlike this current lazy generation that just wants tiktoks and vapes!

  • by Saffaya ( 702234 ) on Monday October 03, 2022 @10:52PM (#62935681)

    For example, I'll quote those: "Mr. Benslimane, now a Ph.D. student at Harvard. “I have noticed that many of the students who consistently complained about the class did not use the resources we afforded to them.”"

    "“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.”

    After several years of Covid learning loss, the students not only didn’t study, they didn’t seem to know how to study, Dr. Jones said.

    To ease pandemic stress, Dr. Jones and two other professors taped 52 organic chemistry lectures. Dr. Jones said that he personally paid more than $5,000 for the videos and that they are still used by the university."

    My $0.2:
    Organic chemistry is tough, requires work, and also that you have dutifully acquired previous lessons.
    It build layers upon layers of understanding of the mechanics of reactions.
    A shaky foundation will definitely undermine success in that field.

    • Organic chemistry is tough, requires work

      I always thought some of the hardest majors in college seemed to be mechanical engineering - and organic chemistry.

      It's just a hard subject and I know friends with that major did a TON of studying.

      I this were my school I would be really mad that such a great resource had been removed. Removing a professor of this quality substantially reduces the value of an organic chemistry degree from that school, but more importantly removes my access to such an obviously skille

    • >they didn’t seem to know how to study

      This moves the problem to grade school. Are they just teaching memorization and computer lookup now? If you don't teach someone how to teach themselves you failed at schooling. Our future civilization is doomed.
      • I can only speak for myself, as someone who flunked out of university over a decade ago.
        Yes.
        I was homeschooled until 10th grade-ish, then Highschool, then University.
        I just never encountered any problem that was not instantly obvious until second year university. I had literally no idea how to learn, and did not really even comprehend that was that even a thing that you could do. It seems really stupid looking back on it now. I remember the end of my homeschooling in particular. At that time I did not even

      • by Ambassador Kosh ( 18352 ) on Tuesday October 04, 2022 @02:46AM (#62936013)

        Organic chemistry has always been taught as pure memorization. That is the problem with the course. Almost nobody remembers it even a few months after passing it. The course really does need to change so it is not just memorization.

    • I won't pay to get through the NYT paywall, but could you clarify one thing: Was it a core curriculum course for their majors, or were students knowingly taking an elite version of the course as an elective? That really decides the ethical context.

      Universities don't tend to prioritize teaching ability in hiring hard-sciences professors. The priorities are fundraising, fundraising, fundraising, prestige, research ability, and maybe priority #17 is teaching. And even within that low priority, the emphas
      • Organic chemistry is typically a required course for pre-med programs and more elite nursing programs. You do have a point that teaching is often not the primary demand of the senior faculty, that their research and ability to gather staff and funding are critical. As I think back to college, I was blessed to have some excellent and unorthodox teachers, leaders in their fields, who I wish were still alive to teach new generations.

        • Me too. For this instance, if it's a general course for undergrads, it seems the obligation would be more on the professor to bring the class along than on the class to meet the highest standards. Either that or the university should investigate its admissions process, because either the prof went off the deep end or the university let in a lot of inept students with unrealistic goals.
      • Organic chemistry is a required weeder course. It is based almost 100% on memorization and designed to cut people out of degree programs. It is pretty famous for having very little knowledge retention even a few months after the course and almost none after a year. I have taken organic chemistry and most of it was pointlessly difficult.

        The course really does need to be changed. If the information is actually needed the course does not achieve the objective and if the course is not needed there are other poi

        • Good points. I remember there was always that competitive argument between engineers and bio people about which is harder, and the bio people would always be more convincing: Engineering accomplishes a lot using relatively simple tools, while bio is the extreme opposite.

          While that kind of effort speaks to their credit as students, it's gotta be an enormous waste of time and energy that would otherwise go to thinking about the material. The analogy that comes to mind is that most mathematicians are medi
  • China's insidious plot to destroy America via TikTok is working!

    College kids now have a 30 second attention spans, don't know how to read, and can't focus for longer than 4.5 minutes.

    • by ET3D ( 1169851 )

      It's not the Chinese, it's classically American. The US has consistently been moving towards teaching less. A teacher's chance to keep a job doesn't depend on their teaching, but their gender, race, political opinion and how much they placate the students. Students are not really there to learn, but to make the school money and advance its prestige.

  • The Whineocracy (AKA Whingeocracy) came before the Idiocracy.

  • by Miles_O'Toole ( 5152533 ) on Tuesday October 04, 2022 @12:08AM (#62935823)

    The lesson is this: a degree from NYU is now worth about as much as a roll of toilet paper, and should probably be used for a similar purpose. If NYU is willing to terminate an honest-to-god legend in order to kiss the ass of underachieving students, no prof in any faculty is safe. Gold stars and "Participation" awards for everybody. Real academic accomplishment...not so much.

  • Even Gen X wasn't immune to the attempt. Decades ago I had a high school history teacher that ran afoul of a group of straight-A students after they all received B's on his first exam. The problem? It was the first time they had run into a history class not based entirely on rote memorization. You could get a B by just memorizing the book, but an A required the apparently superhuman ability to synthesize basic concepts. They went to the administration demanding his head, because they "obviously" couldn't ha
  • Just award an "A" to anyone who complains. I mean, that's really the bottom line.

  • A core curriculum should be forgiving because the point is to teach the class rather than burn away weak students, but there should also be clearly-labeled elite classes whose purpose is competition.

    So this story all depends on context. If a professor is being a totally unnecessary hardon in a basic organic chemistry class, that's one thing. If students with big dreams signed up for a course with a tough reputation specifically because they wanted the prestige of it and then complained when they couldn
  • Seriously, what are those countries doing right that the US cannot?
    • Germany has more sense than to expect nearly half of the cohort to do a university education, so they don't spread the resources ever thinner as more enroll. Even there however education spending is being pared down by retiring full time professors being replaced by more junior staff.

      Finland is a largely homogeneous society that doesn't have political activists playing on the alleged unfairnesses of the system to gain them kudos; instead the education system seems to have been allowed to make interesting ch

  • by bradley13 ( 1118935 ) on Tuesday October 04, 2022 @12:55AM (#62935877) Homepage

    I don't know anything about this specific case. However, I am a prof who teaches a "weeder" course: first-semester programming, pass or go study something else. I fail around 40% of the students each year.

    The administration is just weird about weeder courses. "Of course we want to keep our standards up", but "why do so many students fail - can't you teach the course better?" I have re-vamped the course so many times, trying different approaches, different books, etc, but: it makes no difference. Some people simply cannot learn to program.

    Actually, I can be more specific about the administration: lower-level administrators, the ones who actually work with students, are all for maintaining standards. After all, our graduates - and the people they go work for - are our long-term advertising team. Upper level administration - the people who live for spreadhsheets and spend their days playing politics - are all about student numbers. Gotta have more students. Upper level administration measures their success on short-term financial goals.

    Bottom line: Amlost no one is served by handing passing grades to people incapable of doing the work: it's bad for the students, it's bad for their future employers, and it's no fun for the teachers. However, upper-level school admin is served by passing out grades like candy. They want short-term financial success, and who cares if it means that students go out to fail in their careers?

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      I am surprised you fail only 40%. That must be the "non-programming programmers", essentially.

      Other than that, fully agree. Giving students a worthless degree is immoral and robs them of critical years they could have spent learning something that actually works for them.

    • I agree with you overall but I still think organic chemistry courses need to change. I have taken a CS weeder course and those that failed just could not manage to structure their thoughts so that they could program. With organic chemistry the problem is that the course is mostly pointless memorization. Organic chemistry courses are pretty famous for having almost no information retention even a few months to a year after the course is complete.

      I think organic chemistry is due for a pretty major revamp to f

    • by gTsiros ( 205624 )

      "Some people simply cannot learn to program."

      what, exactly, do they fail to understand, internalise or use?

      Examples are ok.

      Is the literature you use(d) available online? (I think it is called "syllabus" in the States? I'm greek)

      • by bradley13 ( 1118935 ) on Tuesday October 04, 2022 @03:50AM (#62936113) Homepage

        "Some people simply cannot learn to program."
        what, exactly, do they fail to understand, internalise or use?

        This is an old discussion that has been on Slashdot many times. Here's a quick summary: Programming requires the ability to think abstractly about information and processes. How do you structure information? How can you decompose a process into simple steps that you can write in code? People who cannot work abstractly, cannot program. Usually (but not always) they are also poor at math, because mathematics requires similar skills.

        Of course, like any human ability, this is a continuum. You have the talented, the hopeless, and those in the middle. The talented only need motivation and praise. The hopeless need to realize that they are in the wrong place. I spend most of my time with those in the middle. They may - with help - be able to become competent programmers. A few of them actually turn out to be very talented - they just have never been exposed to this way of thinking.

  • But all I can say is that the school administrators must have some idea of what the general standard of equivalent universities is, and perhaps they should just insist that the professor stuck close to that.

    On a lighter note, I've been meaning to re-watch Real Genius, and IIRC it supposedly used Caltech for inspiration.

  • by Etcetera ( 14711 ) on Tuesday October 04, 2022 @01:27AM (#62935917) Homepage

    Conservatives have been pointing out for 12-20 years now that elevating feelings, effort, specialness, self-esteem, and what we now call 'equity' over standardized testing, impartial evaluation, and historical expectations would rot away the upcoming generation.... led astray by an insular academy that is too obsessed with its own ideologies instead of maintaining its basic purpose.

    This is the result: Firing a teacher because O Chem is too hard for the next generation of doctors.

    I love that the comments in the NYT article are mostly aghast at what has happened here, but we didn't get here overnight and the left has quiet a mea culpa ahead if it wants to actually understand what's going on. Baby steps.

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Bullshit. This has nothing to do with conservatives. Stop trying to own topics that you people do not own. What I rather see is an increased anti-science, anti-education, anti-truth stance in conservatives. Unless you claim that the right-wing ones are not conservatives? There would be some merit to such a claim, as the right these days certainly does not have any respect for traditional "conservative" values such as honesty and integrity.

      This is one of the things any smart person can see. What any smart pe

      • by sfcat ( 872532 )
        You are right but that is completely irrelevant. This issue absolutely has to do with politics. The other side being bad doesn't make you good. This is a real problem for those on the left. The mess of the education system is absolutely on their heads. And it absolutely turns young democratic parents into republicans faster than anything other than brainwashing. So if you want to win elections, you will help clean up this mess. Otherwise the other side will do it and I'm sure you won't like their met
    • Have you actually taken an organic chemistry course? They are pretty similar across the USA and they are known for being pointlessly hard. Honestly go talk to chemical engineers, chemists, doctors, etc. and ask them how much they remember and use from their organic chemistry courses.

      These courses are famous for having very low knowledge retention even a few months after the course and almost none after a year. They are taught with an extreme focus on memorization and little focus on understanding.

      While I ag

    • Huh, so when a business runs itself like a business and tries to please its customers, somehow this is a liberal thing and bad and conservatives are against business now? Really trying to understand WTF the coservative viewpoint is these days. It no longer seems to be pro business.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by drinkypoo ( 153816 )

      Conservatives have been pointing out for 12-20 years now that elevating feelings, effort, specialness, self-esteem, and what we now call 'equity' over standardized testing, impartial evaluation, and historical expectations would rot away the upcoming generation.... led astray by an insular academy that is too obsessed with its own ideologies instead of maintaining its basic purpose.

      Conservatives have been deliberately compromising the quality of education in America [newrepublic.com] to avoid creation of an educated proletariat [theintercept.com], because they know they cannot otherwise win elections [washingtonpost.com].

      Anything else you might have had to say about conservatives and education was ignorant at best, or equally likely a deliberate attempt to degrade education, because that is literally a Republican value.

  • This makes me think of regulatory capture, where industry execs to and fro between lucrative jobs on business boards and roles in regulators making things nice for said businesses in the hope of more lucrative positions on those boards.

  • Those students will go on to burn something down, blow something up, or disfigure something important (hopefully themselves).

  • Combined with lack of customer insight (massively displayed here) this is the ages-old ailment of capitalism. That is exactly why some things that should not be for profit, ever. Education certainly is a key area where profit-orientation is a very, very bad idea. There are others.

    • Unless your institution is fully endowed so that students are almost unnecessary, in order for it to continue it must attract students. Once academic standards become negotiable and a factor used to attract students: 'come here and you'll get your degree almost regardless' at ANY institution, it will be very hard for others to resist the temptation to do likewise. The result is the pandemic of grade inflation and devaluation of degrees, and as with any moral collapse in a society, there are no easy ways bac

  • Looks like, as a species, we are looking for an optimum in a field composed of many dimensions.

    One such dimension is the specialization: So far we were moving from generalists to specialists. However it seems to be a maximum there, when a person becomes to specialized to be able to grasp a picture big enough to make sensible decisions in its own field.

    Another dimension is the stress we can put on an individual: To little stress is a path to sloppiness, to much stress leads to the scarcity of fit candidates.

  • In any class there will be a spread of student scores. There will often be one or two who score lower than the rest, either through inability, goofing around or external factors outside their control.

    However, when an entire class does badly (and I can speak from the experience of being in one where we did) then that reflects on the quality of the teaching. Especially so when the class is tested by an outside agency, that has no skin in the game of awarding high marks to reflect well on the establishment,

  • by Ambassador Kosh ( 18352 ) on Tuesday October 04, 2022 @02:30AM (#62935983)

    As part of getting a degree in chemical engineering I had to take organic chemistry. I did pretty well it in but many aspects I found pointlessly hard. I don't mind hard courses but most of the difficulty in organic chemistry was pretty pointless. There is far too much focus on memorization instead of actual understanding. It is often designed as a wipeout course. I have even been involved in discussions about how organic chemistry courses should be changed with school administration because it has been long recognized as a badly structured course.

    The base issue is that retention even 6 months after organic chemistry is abysmal. It is pretty clear that almost everyone remembers the information short term and then forgets it and very little actual learning was done. This is unlike most engineering courses which have decent retention even years later.

    It is a course that is long past the time to restructure it based on actually making sure the students learn the necessary information and can remember and apply months and years later. It needs to be changed with the understanding that we all have a device with us to look up basically any fact at any time but just looking up information is not the same as understanding how to apply it. I expect the course will still be extremely difficult but in a more useful way.

  • by gosso920 ( 6330142 ) on Tuesday October 04, 2022 @02:36AM (#62935991)
    Professor Gorden Newell threw another shutout in last week's Chem. Eng. 130 midterm. Once again no student received a single point on his exam.
  • by Bruce66423 ( 1678196 ) on Tuesday October 04, 2022 @02:56AM (#62936033)

    Let the trustees of the university require the sacking of most of the senior academic staff who allowed this attitude to emerge and endorsed this sacking, and offer the sacked professor the job of rebuilding the institution.

    More broadly, the accreditation boards for universities need to develop some serious teeth and start shredding universities where grade inflation is obviously happening. And employers need to start noting the colleges whose products are demonstrably not worth the accolades they've gained, and start having rude conversations with their academic deans.

  • It's difficult, but surely the course is the course? If you pass or fail it, it's on you. You can't be graded 'harshly' for it? You either interpret the NMR correctly or you don't. Let's pass everyone with wishes and rainbows.
  • Bullshit tests (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) * on Tuesday October 04, 2022 @04:15AM (#62936167) Homepage Journal

    I happen to be good at Organic Chemistry but I've seen tests that are entirely unfair.

    I could construct a test that would take someone with 90% mastery of the subject and ensure they get a 40% on the test.

    Organic has a reputation as a "weed class" and an obstacle to the "wrong kind of student" getting past it. The problem is if you have a premed kid, 90% is fine and the test should reflect 90%.

    And some professors absolutely relish their role in limiting passing grades to those who have a talent for going on to a PhD in Organic. They love being assholes.

    Did this professor do that? It sounds like maybe - "they all misread the question". But maybe not.

    I am no fan of Academia in the modern incarnation nor of coddling students but that doesn't mean this action was inherently wrong.

  • I once had a physics professor who had high standards and reputation. But he was apparently unable to teach these standards to his students. His exercises where ridiculously easy while his exam questions where all trick questions where you had to put some thinking in for a time you didn't have. Failed 90% of class on a regular basis. He seemed to cater to nerds - people who do physics for fun and sports not who just wanted to pass his course for an entirely different area like computer science.
    On the other

  • So, NYU basically sells degrees? Good to know, for future reference. Yes, I know that economy is tough.

  • by MMC Monster ( 602931 ) on Tuesday October 04, 2022 @04:56AM (#62936257)

    I am a physician in a rural area. The hospital I'm at can't hire enough physicians, of pretty much every specialty. And it's located less than 100 miles from New York City. I can't imagine how bad it's like in the middle of nowhere.

    As for how much I need Organic Chemistry in a normal year? Roughly zero percent. For the life of me I can't remember a single thing I learned in the class. I'll go so far as to say it's the most useless class to me as a practicing physician.

    Yes, it was used to weed out people from medical school. But the fact is the U.S. needs *more* medical schools, not less. It's the choke point in the system. You get more medical schools, you'll get more physicians.

  • ...when you don't do favors for rich kids.

  • by Banner ( 17158 ) on Tuesday October 04, 2022 @08:19AM (#62936669) Journal

    This is what happens when a school cares more about money than about education.

  • by Brooklynoid ( 656617 ) on Tuesday October 04, 2022 @10:00AM (#62937089)
    There's one quote from the article that says a lot about what's going on:

    “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.

    Test scores are not (and should not be) a reflection of "time and effort". They're a reflection of how well the student learned the material. It sounds to me like the petitioners want a participation trophy for trying hard.

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