NYU Chemistry Professor Fired After Students Said His Class Was Too Hard

https://reason.com/2022/10/03/maitland-jones-jr-organic-chemistry-nyu-fired/

by siva7 • 4 years ago

80 151 4 years ago

lvl102• 4 years ago

NYU is not an elite institution. It’s a local school with mediocre students.

nicolas_t2• 4 years ago

My only contact with NYU alumni was someone who had a master in ITP at NYU and was very proud of it. It's supposedly described as an art school for engineers and at the same time an engineering school for artists. I can't judge her art but I can definitely say resolutely that she was not an engineer nor did it bring enough engineering knowledge to talk to engineers in her role as a PM.

The running gag among the team was that she would confidently say utter non-sense while making it sound technical. Enough to fool non-engineers but extremely funny to the actual engineers that worked with her.

speed_spread• 4 years ago

That's sad. Sounds like she didn't know that she didn't know.

barry-cotter3• 4 years ago

It's supposedly described as an art school for engineers and at the same time an engineering school for artists.

By detractors or publicity? Because as insults go that’s just brutal.

Wowfunhappy• 4 years ago

This appears to be mostly reporting on this New York Times article https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/03/us/nyu-organic-chemistry-... so I think that should be considered the original source.

hikingsimulator• 4 years ago

I guess it was posted to avoid the paywall discussion that would arise from posting the NYT -- the FAQ discourages that.

tromp• 4 years ago

According to The New York Times, 82 of Jones' 350 students signed the petition last spring; it alleged that too many of them were failing and that this was unacceptable. The students cited emotional and mental health complaints to make the case that Jones ought to make the class less difficult.
"We urge you to realize 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," the petition read.
The Times article suggests that throughout the pandemic, Jones made a number of accommodations for struggling students. He reduced the difficulty of his exams, but students were still failing them.
"Students were misreading exam questions at an astonishing rate," said Jones.
The article does note that the petition never called for Jones to be fired. But the university evidently decided that the best way to resolve the situation was to turn him loose.
His departure is certainly a loss for NYU's academic caliber. After all, Jones is a lion in the field of organic chemistry, publishing 225 papers in his 40-year career. He literally wrote the textbook, "Organic Chemistry," which weighs in at 1,300 pages.

It's sad that professors are strongly incentivized to lower difficulty and grade generously until a large majority of students pass, without having mastered the material the professor is supposed to be teaching them. No professor ever got fired for making things too easy or for imparting too little knowledge.

deliriumchn• 4 years ago

This is very sad to read to be honest. My prof. was an old school guy who was author for few very in-depth books about organic chemistry.

He was very, very demanding and his class was very hard, our median scores were around 20-30% lower than in any other class, but in the end, I can def. say that after two years studying with that dude, it was my strongest subject, I could literally spit pages of text about anything in his exams in the end.

It was very hard, but it was very worth it and very fun to actually understand whats going on inside large chemical reactors.

Ofc, there are some teachers/professors that are making things too hard with no purpose (like robot-reading walls of text in a super speed mode and then demanding you to remember them on exam word by word), but some of them just have high standards and its a good thing

Freak_NL• 4 years ago

[…] I could literally spit pages of text […]

Impressive, but probably figuratively or in a manner of speaking.

unyttigfjelltol• 4 years ago

Perhaps, but for most students the grade is the important benefit. An 'F' is a career-altering problem.

Early in my schooling I personally emphasized learning over grades and consistently encountered a high level of disapproval and administrative friction. The students who complained in this scenario aren't wrong, but it's the system that requires reform, not the professor.

WithinReason2• 4 years ago

I feel like and old man saying this but I remember the pass rate for the C++ exam at my uni (in Eastern Europe) was 42%. There was no petition, we learned to code.

ryandrake• 4 years ago

For me, first year Physics was the weed-out. I vaguely remember the professor's speech on the first day: "I know you all want to be engineers, but in order to do that, you need to pass PHYS101 and this is a difficult class. There are over 1,000 people in this auditorium. By the end of the semester, it will be closer to half of that. There will be no retakes. There will be no curve. There will be no appealing of grades after the fact. If you are struggling with the subject matter, my office is open, but not after your grade is issued. [And so on and so forth]" I think a few people just walked out after the speech in fear rather than even try.

It looks like none of that would even remotely fly today.

wirthjason• 4 years ago

I’ve never taken organic chemistry but I always hated classes where the discussion after getting test results went like this:

“Aw man, I got a 40.”

“That’s great, most people got 20s, that’s the highest score”

gregshap• 4 years ago

I always loved the classes that had at least a couple of exams like that

sweettea• 4 years ago

Why?

If a test is supposed to measure your mastery of material relative to others', and point out your areas of potential improvement, a test with a full range of scores from 0 to 100% seems most effective. A test with a range of 0-40 is, agreed, less effective; but still better than a range of 80-100: an overly hard test merely points out that everyone has room for improvement.

nicolas_t2• 4 years ago

Exactly, a well designed hard test is great. Besides being a test, it's also a learning opportunity. By confronting your limits, you get to learn aspects of the material you didn't know. Past years tests like this are also great when studying the material (assuming that the teacher is decent and renews his tests every year)

civilized2• 4 years ago

It's kind of interesting that libertarian Reason Magazine feels the need to comment on this. Isn't this just Capitalism Working Great, serving the student/parent-customers who are paying the bills?

I know there's more nuance to this - you can disagree with what a firm does in a free market economy and assert it's bad for society. But it seems like, from a libertarian perspective, the focus should be on how this is bad for the university, and will reduce its signaling value to employers or something. Because if the customers want a diploma mill, and there's no self-interest downside to the university becoming a diploma mill, then in a libertarian worldview it's generally quite right and good that the university becomes a diploma mill.

jamesblonde• 4 years ago

That's what some of my students believe, but is wrong in socialized education countries. Here, the government are my paymasters. They pay me to train students to become engineers. And they set the bar. And students need to reach that bar.

So, we are not in-hoc to the students. They are not consumers paying for a service. They are in a privileged position that they are receiving an education, an investment, and it is their responsibility to reach the desired standard.

That said, we also have some (not that much) pressure to pass more students, as the university makes more money.

civilized2• 4 years ago

That sounds really, really nice, genuinely. In the US though, I fear we would fail just as badly on this front with fully government-funded universities. We have pervasive cultural problems and I worry the government would institutionalize them rather than acting as a bulwark against them.

In many localities, government-funded K-12 has the exact same problems exemplified by this orgo prof's firing, except the taxpayer is compelled to fund the dysfunction. The silver lining is the charter school movement, which at least sometimes allows families trapped in bad school systems to escape to a better culture, but even in the charter system there is a good amount of exploitation masquerading as education.

I think the "enlightened" libertarian view might be needed here - if your university becomes a diploma mill, it ceases to be useful to employers. Eventually, students realize it no longer provides the signaling value it once did and go elsewhere. And gossiping about the failure of standards hopefully accelerates this process.

WithinReason2• 4 years ago

It does seem like a failure mode of capitalism, but something I wonder about is if more capitalism could be used to fix this by basing the university's earnings on the student's earnings after getting their degree instead of pre-paying for education. Basically the students would owe X% of their earnings above Y salary for the first Z years to the university.

choko• 4 years ago

It seems like you have a characterized and absurdist view of libertarianism. Libertarianism is primarily about maximizing individual liberty, not the ultra-capitalist, amoral view you seem to have. Libertarians aren't anarchists (ignoring the various fringe anarcho-whatevers that espouse a government type that is impossible).

hwers• 4 years ago

Hey as a european where I doubt anything like this would ever happen maybe I should take the perspective on this as a good thing for me in the sense of a lot less future competition

spywaregorilla4• 4 years ago

Should the US view it as a good thing that Europe's economy is crumbling under an energy crisis so less future competition for us? I think no.

yonaguska• 4 years ago

Unfortunately, our leaders(American) are very pleased at the prospect.

https://youtu.be/GK3u8up_HLA

propter_hoc• 4 years ago

I read the New York Times article on this yesterday and discussed it with my wife (neuroscientist). Our discussion went like this:

Wife: "This is bonkers, the entire point of orgo is to cull the pre-med students. When I took orgo they showed the planned curve and explicitly said: one-third of you will fail."

Me: "Yeah, we had classes like that in electrical engineering as well, it was understood that that was the point of the class. It is hard to avoid the implication that Gen Z is really spectacularly entitled."

Wife: "It's the explosion effect. They have learned they should feel entitled to good things, like being treated well no matter their identity or background or whatever. But they also are entitled for other areas where entitlement is not justified."

I thought that was a pretty insightful thought!

spywaregorilla4• 4 years ago

Are you millennials? Because if so, welcome to the generation of older folks complaining about the younger folks.

qeternity• 4 years ago

I find this bizarre. Nearly all of the systemic issues faced by Millennials are because Boomers feel entitled to a house that appreciates massively, and retirement account that only goes in one direction, etc.

Boomers have massive economic entitlement. Gen Z have massive social entitlement. And Millennials are caught somewhere in the middle not feeling entitled to either, but struggling nonetheless.

looprtq• 4 years ago

One can go back to the ancient Greeks to find that pattern, but does it hold?

If one subscribes to the theory that culture moves in cycles (hedonistic Weimar Republic, WW2, conservative backlash in the 1950s, left backlash in the 1960s, conservative backlash in the 1980s/1990s, woke backlash in the late 2000s), then sometimes the complaints are valid.

Gen-Z has an unprecedented cancel power, anonymous reports, controlling speech of Gen-X. It has never been like this before.

Certainly Gen-X disliked their older generations, too, but they didn't have the tools or the self-righteousness to openly intrigue against them.

Gen-X is too soft to fight back, to the detriment of our society.

Frost1x• 4 years ago

This is bonkers, the entire point of orgo is to cull the pre-med students.

But why? Seems silly you use the mechanism of education as a filter and make a course obnoxiously and unnecessarily difficult for that purpose. Why not... filter pre-med students by simply limiting admission into the program? The earlier you make people seriously consider things the less time they waste and headache they endure. How many practicing medicine today actually use organic chemistry regularly? Most don't at least from the pool I've worked with (surgeons, internal medicine, pharmacists, nurses, etc.). Pharmacy is the closest but most rely on database systems outside of hospital pharmacists or active researchers in drugs.

ironSkillet• 4 years ago

It's harder to gauge someone's ability when they come from outside the institution initially. Plus, since org Chem is not a freshman class typically, you give students some time to immerse themselves in the culture and standards of the school, and then give them a chance to prove themselves.

My undergrad math program was the same - there was a difficult abstract linear algebra class that was the gate to being a pure math major.

what-the-grump3• 4 years ago

Don’t forget you the student get to blow money on this as well. Then professors get to call you entitled.

The mental gymnastics that go in colleges are bonkers. I’m paying for my education, tell me exactly how hard, and what’s required, but don’t set up the ‘product’ to fail.

tsbischof2• 4 years ago

Part of it is to ensure that your medical students are not terrified by "chemicals". Plus, doing organic chemistry instills into you the idea that reactions may not be pure, and that enantiomers are both real and potentially problematic (see thalidomide). It is at minimum a way to get you to be able to ask critical questions when needed, even if there is already an infrastructure to answer those questions for you.

It is sort of like learning C but programming solely in Python: you can get your job done, but when one of your abstractions breaks it is worthwhile to be able to at least identify the root cause and talk to the right people.

mcphage2• 4 years ago

Why not... filter pre-med students by simply limiting admission into the program?

That would be a much narrower window into what the students are capable of. Instead, you offer them a challenge, and let them succeed or fail on their own merit. You'll find some students who don't look great on paper have the grit and determination to make it through the class, and some students who look outstanding on paper wilt when put up to a challenge.

fallingknife3• 4 years ago

All gatekeepers of status, like university degrees have a problem with what to do with the losers. We could use IQ tests as a gatekeeper, which would be more efficient for everyone because it is nearly free and takes hours, but if we did this, the majority who failed would scream about how it's unfair and political pressure wouldn't allow it. This is why there are laws against using IQ tests for hiring.

So we use university degrees which take 4 years and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars instead, because then we can say it's about putting in the work. And for some reason people are more accepting of someone else being more successful because they are perceived to have worked harder rather than just because they were born smarter.

But now we have another problem, the customers of the university who have spent all this money are being denied the status that they have purchased for such a high price. So they are pissed now and claim the system is unfair. And the universities respond by dumbing down their degrees to the point where everyone who gets in will pass.

And now we have yet another problem. A gatekeeper of status can't be widely available, or it doesn't confer status. So we will have to find a new gatekeeper, and then the cycle can repeat.

viraptor4• 4 years ago

Why not... filter pre-med students by simply limiting admission into the program?

While this shouldn't be taken as support for the filter courses - they at least provide a bit more equal opportunity for the students. When you have students coming in from various backgrounds, different schools, different level of preparation, you want to give them a vaguely even starting point to a test like that. Doing the filtering post-admission helps.

lettergram3• 4 years ago

While I somewhat agree…

For people who disagree with this, I ask them the following:

“Think of the average person in generation / group <insert>. Would you want them defending you on trial for murder? How about fixing your break lines?”

Young 20 somethings can do that today, but far fewer than a generation ago.

Regardless, I actually think it’s far simpler.

If I pay $60k/year, I can’t fail out. If the uni does fail me, they lose future revenue from donations and potentially my enrollment for future years.

rad_gruchalski2• 4 years ago

If I pay $60k/year, I can’t fail out.

That's some serious entitlement right here. Why can't you fail? What's the point of education then when all one needs to do is to pay some money and do their time?

iakov• 4 years ago

If I pay $60k/year, I can’t fail out.

Can't fail? Not even on exams? So a mere sum of 180k USD guarantees a degree? I hope not.

atonse• 4 years ago

I never took orgo but had friends that did and even I remember how hard it was for them, it’s one of my memories from college.

reaperducer4• 4 years ago

Yeah, I read this in the Times over the weekend, too.

It's one thing for art or philosophy students to want an easier class. This is doctors. I don't want someone doing surgery on me who couldn't handle the workload and took the easy way out.

Everything described in the article sounded just like my experience at two different colleges, and I wasn't in for something as important as medicine.

If you can't handle the work, then maybe it's time to look at yourself and think that maybe you shouldn't be a doctor. There are plenty of other professions out there.

voisin9• 4 years ago

I don’t think anyone suggests that med school should be easy, but the difficulty should be in the core stuff that the end practitioner will need day to day, not something tangential to the practice.

viraptor4• 4 years ago

I don't want someone doing surgery on me who couldn't handle the workload

So this is a problematic one. Currently the workload in a few areas of medicine is not sustainable. Those who pass also can't handle it. There's a threshold where instead of people toughing it out, we'll need to adjust the system so it's not necessary that much.

Cthulhu_2• 4 years ago

They have learned they should feel entitled to good things, like being treated well no matter their identity or background or whatever.

Yikes? Everyone should be treated well, that's the default. I'm not saying the class should be simplified, but identity and background should not be a factor (educational background maybe, but that's assessed before people can attend uni).

anon848736282• 4 years ago

I think they meant that is a "good" as in "acceptable" thing to feel entitled about, vs a "bad" or "unacceptable" thing to feel entitled about. (So there is a good or bad sense of entitlement). Not that "being treated well" is one of the "good things in life".

A rather confusing way to state it.

kristjansson• 4 years ago

So basically stack ranking with a 33% attrition target?

… I know, I know, it’s not exactly the same, but the logic is analogous. Hurting people so that an outcome matches some prespecified distribution is just lazy.

Of course we should have hard classes, and of course some people that try a hard thing will fail, but they should fail on their own merit.

melling• 4 years ago

“They weren't coming to class, that's for sure," said Jones. "They weren't watching the videos, and they weren't able to answer the questions."

dvt• 4 years ago

Not sure why this is getting downvoted. Stack ranking is the laziest and, other than perhaps random sampling, the most idiotic way to "cull" a class. The only reason people are okay with it is the cycle of abuse: "I had to suffer through this, so, by golly, the next generation will have to as well!" You also see this in software engineering hiring processes ("well, if I had to whiteboard memoization, so will the new kids!").

The counter-example is trivial: suppose you have ten "Einsteins" in your class, but due to your dumb-ass stack ranked curve, you "cut" 4 of them. Congratulations, you just set back human progress 300 years.

For the record, UCLA was equally-idiotic when it came to grading. Technically, getting an A+ (4.3) was possible, but they were virtually NEVER given out. Why? Who the fuck knows -- I asked multiple times what I could have done better. I only ever got a handful of A+'es (and basically had straight A's).

As an aside, I wish I could nuke the entire educational system. It's corrupted by lazy and complacent professors (that clearly suck at their job: see the reproducibility crisis, p-hacking, etc.), a veritable swamp of administrators (syphoning six-figure salaries across the board), and bloated sports budgets. All while issuing unforgivable loans to record-high numbers of students.

kwhitefoot3• 4 years ago

I'm pretty confident that when I studied for my Applied Physics B.Sc. in the mid '70s that probably a third of all students in all disciplines in that university (Exeter, UK) either dropped out, failed to graduate, or barely scraped through with a pass degree.

A significant minority dropped out after the first term, unable to cope with the need to push themselves instead of simply doing as they were told as they had done at school.

fleetwoodsnack• 4 years ago

Disagree. I think calling this exchange “pretty insightful” is self-congratulatory, and the supposed insight speculative and conclusory.

Generational reductionism aside, one has only to browse a few online forums dedicated to pre-med studies to note that organic chemistry continues to maintain its reputation as a “weed-out course” in practice and in reputation.

It doesn’t strike me, based on their own words, that the current generation of students have any misapprehensions about the difficulty of the subject matter.

The link between feelings of entitlement to basic social decency (which isn’t particular to any generation) and entitlement to academic success also wasn’t substantiated beyond the nominal misapplication of the words “explosion effect,” which isn’t a rigorous term appropriately derived from any science or art with which I’m familiar.

Care to explain? I followed the benefit of the doubt through a few biological, psychological, sociological, and historical searches and found nothing that would apply to your conversation; unless you meant to reference quite literal chemical and physical explosions, which doesn’t follow in that context either.

palmetieri2000• 4 years ago

To summarize your point: "30% of class signs petition = Gen Z is spectacularly entitled"

I see your prestigious ye olde education really heightened your critical thinking skills.

anotherhue• 4 years ago

I see versions of this all the time. My suspicion is that we’ve take the ‘customer is always right’ concept too far out of business and into unrelated (notionally) fields.

By definition these students take this course because they do not understand the subject, how can they then be qualified to determine how hard it should be?

The article also implies some poor manners from the professor which is an entirely different issue.

sn41• 4 years ago

This is a wrong analogy, I feel. A student being a customer is not quite right.

I think the analogy of a sports coach and a mentee is more appropriate. The purpose of the coach is to train the youngster to become competitive enough for the league. It's not to certify that "you are great, the game is rigged", just because the mentee pays the coach.

barry-cotter3• 4 years ago

The purpose of the coach is to train the youngster to become competitive.

And sometimes that’s not possible. If you’re 5 foot nothing you’re not making it to the NBA. Some people couldn’t pass organic chemistry with a decade to succeed at it. People are not equal in their capabilities.

dlubarov• 4 years ago

I think we can agree that there is such as thing as a too-hard class, though? If I deliver a graduate level math lecture to a group of middle schoolers, they simply won't gain anything from it.

Teachers should aim for a certain optimal difficulty, such that most students are challenged but not lost. It sounds like this teacher was losing too many students, so not much learning was happening (at least relative to time invested).

delaaxe• 4 years ago

So there are no bad teachers?

jonstewart• 4 years ago

84 year-old untenured professor’s annual contract not renewed…

etempleton2• 4 years ago

Grade inflation is very much an issue right now at all levels of academia and this is the primary issue. Parents or students complain and leadership or the teacher capitulate. It was only exacerbated by the pandemic.

Of course there is the chance this professor is unfairly hard or has lost his touch as a teacher, but this has always existed. Half my friends who took organic chemistry failed or barely passed it the first time. The mentality then was to study harder and try again.

DoingIsLearning• 4 years ago

It was only exacerbated by the pandemic

No, it was exacerbated by ever increasing tution fees.

You don't see this 'costumer' pressure on professors in fully funded public universities elsewhere in the world.

You are being given the privelege of access to higher education. However if you suddenly have to fork multiple years worth of savings to access it, it is likely that your level of demands (even if not legitimate in this case) is increased.

Ekaros2• 4 years ago

Other issue is that there is just too many people with degrees. In past just passing meant that it was good enough filter. Now the GPA must also enter into picture, which drives demand for grade inflation lot higher. If this aspect didn't exist, I doubt grade inflation would either...

etempleton2• 4 years ago

This issue also persisted in public school where students were passed along. That has nothing to do with tuition.

d0gbread• 4 years ago

Maybe the mindset has shifted but I'm unclear why that's a bad thing. The pass rate at my university was similar. If this has been constant (that so many people have to fail and retake) why does the curriculum stay the same? The goal is to learn the material.

If you're training for a marathon you don't sign up for a marathon, fail, then sign up for another. You slow down and work up to it in successful chunks.

Organic chem seems like the defacto class that people struggle with, but the same was true at my institution for physics and other classes.

Maybe instead we should be looking at a different or longer track for that material, or even earlier education that is producing students that might not have the math and science foundation out of high school?

sn9• 4 years ago

I haven't heard of grade inflation being a thing in the sciences where you are objectively right or wrong.

Or if it is a thing, it's not nearly as big a problem in other more subjective fields.

johnkpaul2• 4 years ago

I have an NYU chemistry degree and I took quite a lot of organic. I wasn’t pre-med and had planned, at the time, to get a PhD with research in organic chemistry/material science.

Even though my classes were with this guy’s predecessor’s predecessor, everything described about the challenge of this class and the complaints from premeds was exactly the same ~20 years ago.

Organic Chemistry 1, 2 and 3 at NYU have always been considered challenging and “weed out”. I was and am very proud of my moderately successful academics in chemistry from NYU and find it a bit sad that the expectations given to me are changing.

Ekaros2• 4 years ago

When I start to think about. Organic chemistry is in subset of courses that actually train people for their work, that is being in chemistry. So everyone should expect certain level of competence from those passing the course.

Now to use it for filtering med-school students seems the broken aspect.

shbooms• 4 years ago

Organic Chemistry 1, 2 and 3 at NYU have always been considered challenging and “weed out”.

It seems this "weed out" culture around orgo is very much an established thing in the world of the sciences/pre-med which is a little strange to someone like me that is not in that world. How come one particular subject is used so universally to weed people out as opposed to just weeding out the bottom x% of people with lowest overall GPA's? Is orgo so much more important to scientists and medical professional compared to other subjects such as biology, anatomy, etc?

johnkpaul2• 4 years ago

It’s “weed out” from the perspective of medical schools, not chemistry path people.

It is a challenging subject for many, but the people who aren’t premed have an inherent interest to work through the material, imho.

I think that if the MCAT removed all organic chemistry, organic would lose all the “weed out” categorization

ldoughty• 4 years ago

I don't teach chemistry... And I certainly don't have a bag sitter (I hope) towards students... But I still sympathize with the professor...

You get 16 weeks or so to teach students a topic... Some topics are MUCH harder than others (learn Microsoft office suite, vs get the Linux+ certification).

I think schools need to do a better job splitting difficult courses, but I think there's a fundamental dislike of course series, since that raises costs to get an education, and in more specialized areas, it would be hard to get enough students to take the second course if people only need or take part 1.

Cthulhu_2• 4 years ago

Reminds me of this one teacher we had, he was teaching err. Database abstractions and data modeling and the like. I don't think he was a very good teacher, very uptight and "just so" and whatnot, kind of old fashioned. I heard through the grapevine that he was actually fired at some point, citing incompetence. He sued, basically saying "prove it"; the school couldn't and had to hire him back.

I mean I didn't like the class but it was just the one, it was manageable enough.

TheLoafOfBread• 4 years ago

Students are paying to get a diploma, not to learn something. Customer must be always satisfied, that's the reason why private universities are destined to produce useless and unskilled absolvents.

diceduckmonk• 4 years ago

Lots of mention of the word orgo here but the terminology may not be colloquial everywhere. Before college, I hung out on the premed forums and then told my peers about “orgo”. They were confused and corrected me that I meant “ochem”.

kwhitefoot3• 4 years ago

When writing for a general audience we should all avoid local or subject related slang.

dekhn2• 4 years ago

both terms are widely used. sneakers and tennis shoes, soda and pop.

rabite• 4 years ago

I remember when I wanted to be a mechanical engineer. After a statics and dynamics class, I realized I was just not mentally fit for the job, and decided to be in the Internet advertising industry instead. Stupid me, the right answer was to sue and demand a degree in something I couldn't have managed to perform at. These younguns are geniuses.

ojr• 4 years ago

His book is 1300 pages and $200, an example of an unaffordable college book that will cause some students who can’t afford $200 books in the beginning of the semester to fall behind. The system only wants student who can afford expensive textbooks unlike a public highschool where the textbooks are free. I’m an idiot in higher level academia standards . I’m a Senior Software Engineer in real life though.

dekhn2• 4 years ago

The $xxx I spent on my expensive science books in college have paid for themselves many times over. Not just in job opportunities- the chance to see summarized, organized information that represents the state of the art in 10+K of human years of knowledge gathering.

nemo44x3• 4 years ago

This is what equity is. The gradual decay of elite institutions into mediocrity. NYU and others aren’t actually a signifier that you were among the brightest of your cohort but rather just a brand now.

The end result is our brightest and cheated and our entire nation suffers for it.

dendriti• 4 years ago

Any university should be able to hire and fire teaching professors at will if they're not doing a satisfactory job. Clearly this professor wasn't. I don't feel like anyone was cheated.

nemo44x3• 4 years ago

I didn't say they can't. But they are not a respectable university any longer nor are they considered elite. You have to assume that affirmative action has thinned the talent at the university to the point the student body can no longer get through the rigor that separated the smart kids from the elite kids. Because the university is graded on the quality of student and the quality of student continues to decline, these once elite universities are fading.

ankaAr• 4 years ago

I'm not seeing how is the failing rate on his course. Only that near 30% of the students signed the letter. It is maybe that number?.

30% failing rate is not bad, yes, the education community must to do something about those students concerns (maybe opening a pre orgo course or offer some tutors), but if that is the failing rate is not bad.

What I'm saying is that when you are teaching the failing rate is something you must to lower, not lowering the quality of your course, but being flexible with your teaching system.

I'm not seeing why you should remove the teacher here. And that is bad.

viraptor4• 4 years ago

There are comments jumping to conclusions, but the article is so thin about the details, that maybe we should step back a little. We don't know what the whole complaint contained. We know there were other issues ("and multiple student complaints about his dismissiveness, unresponsiveness, condescension, and opacity about grading").

Maybe it was only about the pass ratio. Or maybe he was a terrible teacher. They show his academic success as something to consider, even though it means nothing about the teaching abilities.

I've had a bad teacher at uni at one of the "hard/filter" courses. Many people failed. But I'm sure some of them did because the teacher was a dick to them.

kwhitefoot3• 4 years ago

He's been teaching there since 2007. Has he been a bad teacher all that time or is it simply that the students this year are especially poor at organic chemistry (or academic work of any kind)?

viraptor4• 4 years ago

Yes, that's exactly the kind of context we should know before having an opinion about him or the petitioning students.

subroutine• 4 years ago

This article is so upsetting. The worst students among a cohort of underperforming zoomers (as compared to historical cohorts) were offered a free redo (retroactive withdrawal) of the course without consequence. And that wasn't good enough, so they pressed until the uni fired this prof (who had previously won teaching awards).

I'm sure they celebrated their great victory and validation, by further slagging this prof on tiktok.

Where is my cane...

carrychains• 4 years ago

The students were not petitioning to have him fired and were reportedly surprised with that outcome. The petition also seems to have circulated before the redo offer. This is on the uni.

lo_zamoyski• 4 years ago

Isn't this the logic of affirmative action extended to encompass a greater number of categories and cases?

If the premise is that we require doctors to meet certain criteria (putting to one side the soundness of the criteria or the means by which students are assessed in relation to those criteria), then it doesn't matter why someone fails to meet those criteria, only that they do. This would be because we prioritize the good of the patient over professional ambitions. However, to soften standards would mean prioritizing professional ambitions (or actually, the desire for social status) over the good of the patient.

That seems to correspond with the culture of radical individualism (emphasis on radical; respect for the individuality of others wanes with increasing egocentrism) and obsession with status that we are often accused of having today.

dang• 4 years ago

NYU organic chemistry professor terminated for tough grading - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33070843 - Oct 2022 (83 comments)

madmax96• 4 years ago

There is a funny notion that professors work for students. They don't. They hardly even work for the university. It is more correct to say that they are affiliated with the university.

At top universities, professors bring in grant money or else they lose their job. The university takes a portion of the grant before any of the money is spent. Then, the professor pays the university from the remaining money for their graduate student's tuition and stipend, to use university technology, and rent for research space. Next, the university only pays professors for 9 months out of the year. So, another chunk of grant money finances the professor's salary for the remaining 3 months.

Top universities scrape billions off research grants annually. These grants are won by faculty members. They dwarf salaries. Faculty members bring in more cash to the university than their salaries are worth.

In reality, professors finance the university. Students are mistaken if they think they are their professor's employer.

rahimnathwani• 4 years ago

This guy was an adjunct.

foxyv3• 4 years ago

I wish colleges wouldn't hate on failing a class so much. Failing a class is an excellent learning experience allowing students to realize the extent of their knowledge and ability. Failure forces reassessment of priorities. Instead, colleges make it a black mark against a student to be avoided at all costs.

I mean, how hard is it for these students to just take the class again with their added knowledge? Why not just overwrite the previous grade with the new one? Why do they run these classes in series so that anyone who fails pretty much loses an entire year? Why is it such a huge deal that they had to fire a teacher over it?

It's not like colleges aren't getting enough money. Especially NYU! Acadamia is so gung-ho about research and papers but so freaking lazy about teaching. Just look at what they pay TAs and associate professors!

throwaway2016a• 4 years ago

In most colleges your grade on your transcript will get overwritten by the new grade if you take the class again. And your GPA will be adjusted accordingly.

Don't forget that NYU credits (if the Google results I found are accurate) are $2,020 and Chemistry is usually a 4 credit class. You don't get refunds for failed classes so that is a $8,000 loss. And it might delay graduation. It has real consequences.

But it also sounds like the professor was bad at writing exam questions. He was failing people at a statistically improbable rate.

I used to teach at a university and we generally aimed for a bell curve. And if too many people were on the A side of the bell curve the odds are your class was too easy and if too many people were on the F side it was too hard. Either way when taken as the statistical aggregate it is usually the professor's fault not the student's.

foxyv3• 4 years ago

I had a lot of professors that seemed to hate students and take pride in making them fail horribly. They took pride that their bell curves were way to the left. I learned the least in those classes because they were designed to not teach anything.

Sometimes classes are too easy because they teach really well. I had an astrophysics professor who spent a lot of time learning how to teach subjects. His classes seemed remarkably easy, yet we covered WAY more material than the 30% mean bell curve ones. He was just REALLY good at presenting the material and cementing knowledge using interactive learning and other really cool teaching methods.

decafninja4• 4 years ago

But NYU does not. At least not when I attended many years ago.

Your final grade is the average of all the times you took the class.

So if you got an F, then an A, your grade on the transcript and GPA is a C.

Like you said, other colleges may overwrite instead of averaging. I envied my friends that went to schools like this.

BrandoElFollito• 4 years ago

I was a student, and then an academic teacher in Europe in the late 90's. I mention Europe because the students were not any kind of "customers", but just plain students.

I had classes where the teacher was a pain in the ass, at the middle or top of the medieval structure which was academia (this is one of the reasons I left). Their classes were very hard to show how brilliant they were. Usually the courses were crap.

As a young teacher, I had all the more complicated graduates. By that I mean ones where physics was just a compulsory step but they build not care less.

I was quite lax: if they learned the basic stuff, they passed. The better ones, who cared about the grade and made efforts had very good marks.

And then there were the ones who did not even open the book and expected to pass because I wild not fail too many people. I did, had discussions with the dean, sometimes my decision was reversed.

Weather a class is hard depends on many things and on the students. I had very hard quantum mechanics because they are, well, hard. I will not blame the teacher for that.

NYU Chemistry Professor Fired After Students Said His Class Was Too Hard

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