It seems your question presupposes that 1) these students were primarily concerned with grades rather than learning, and 2) because they complained about the quality of the instruction, these students may be ill-suited for medical school. While certainly the dominant narrative here, I don’t think the information we have supports either one of these assumptions.
I would hope that medical schools (NYU included) would prefer potential applicants to have had received a sound education from teachers who were capable of actually reaching the students even in challenging times, and that the students had ample opportunity to master this important material. It sounds like that may no longer have been happening with this particular professor.
I am certainly trusting the traditional gate keepers less these days – when I see a graduate’s resume, or a doctor hired by the Physician group we use, I feel compelled to vet the person further because I can’t implicitly trust the fact that s/he is a board certified physician.
For a job candidate, even if s/he is from Harvard, I would ask questions on basic fundamentals. They often don’t get this stuff.
For a Physician, I certainly look at all the places they have trained.
It’s certainly true that admissions to elite colleges these days are far more competitive than they were. Kids today may be exposed to certain subjects (e.g. calculus) earlier than kids in earlier generations. They also have greater and faster access to information. However, I don’t think there’s any concrete evidence that they’re better prepared or smarter as a result. If the state of our K-12 education is any indication, the opposite is probably true on an aggregate basis.
Our higher education still has a deservedly great reputation. That reputation, however, is, to a great extent, based on the fact that our universities are still able to attract talents (both faculty and students) globally, not because our current pool of domestic students is better. As we look more inward as a society, as standards are lowered across the board, the fear is that we’ll become less and less competitive globally, if the current trend continues.
I think so, because we can be much more selective with respect to international students, who are still attracted by the reputations and the resources of US universities. And similarly with international faculty. However, I have to say that attraction is less strong today and the trend isn’t as favorable.
Requiring even once renowned professors to provide competent instruction that actually reaches today’s students isn’t an example of “standards [being] lowered across the board.” It is an example of teaching standards being raised so that the students have and ample opportunity to master the material.
Teaching a diverse student body with a wide range of educational backgrounds in 2020 during Covid requires different skills than did teaching mostly rich Prep school kids 40 years ago.
As for qualifications (including innate ability, work ethic, and potential) I’ll take these kids over those kids.
I wonder why your experience differs so greatly from that of the professors in the 6k comments on the NYU article in the Times, or from the many academics I know, all of whom are concerned about diminishing standards. Perhaps they all teach at different types of schools or in different regions. I know of no one who thinks college students presently are meeting higher standards or exhibiting more competence than those of 10 or 20 years ago.
For a more light-hearted moment, here’s a short video clip I saw the other day: https://twitter.com/i/status/1577328516969947138
Not everyone is able to learn and the passage of time doesn’t necessarily guarantee that all of us have become smarter.
I think there must have been a lot of cheating going on in this class. The covid online course instruction years have made it very hard to assess exactly what students learned…I believe there was ample opportunity for many students to cheat…especially in harder courses(whether that be math, science or languages - Photo Math anyone…or Google translate?)
And now you are seeing the results. Students at college that are ill prepared for rigorous courses they face.
Not medical school - they are ill-suited to be doctors. The petition shows that they have no idea what it means to be a physician. It’s actually laughable. Every line item in that petition is the antithesis of being a physician.
It’s not the fault of today’s students, but they have been trained in grades 3-12 that it’s the tests and grades that matter, not the learning. Around the year 2000, our country went all in for “school accountability” and state testing mandates and shifted to an education model that teaches to the test. Colleges became more competitive, and test scores and GPAs mattered more.
Medical schools put too much emphasis on grades and this generation knows how to play the grade game. Pre-med majors mostly prioritize grades over learning out of necessity. If they are given an option of taking OChem with a professor who gives impossible tests and is a hard grader, but guarantees you’ll learn a lot vs a prof who is an easy grader and doesn’t demand as much, but turns out students with less knowledge of the subject, they are going to take the easy grader. Pre-med students seek easy As so they take advantage of Rate My Professor sites, word of mouth, test banks, and other tactics to find classes and professors that make getting a high GPA easier. They also tend to take less credit hours, the minimum science and math courses, and look for easy GE classes instead of challenging ones.
I don’t blame the students for putting grades over learning. If they don’t, they’ll lose out. Medical schools need to reevaluate their admission policies. I think we’d have better doctors if medical schools rewarded students who maximized their undergraduate opportunities instead of encouraging them to do less just so they can attain that 4.0.
@TexasTiger2, you must have information about these students to which I am not privy. Perhaps you can bring us up to speed?
For example, you wrote of those who signed the petition:
Are you referring to the Spring 2022 petition mentioned in the Times article, signed by almost a quarter of the class? Because the Times did not provide a link to the petition, and it hasn’t been linked here either.
Care to provide a link? That way we can better understand why you deem the petition “laughable” with “every line . . . the antithesis of being a physician.”
I’d like to take your post in a positive light, but I’m really struggling to understand how you and others can support such strong indictments of these students based on the information we have. Maybe you and others can help me out?
Part of working as a doctor is showing up. Per the above article, Jones states that only 30% of the enrolled students appeared in class. Yes, that is disqualifying from being a doctor, in my opinion. If you don’t show up for class, you don’t deserve to complain about the class, or to pass. Some may pass anyway if they are very smart, but most will struggle.
Agree the trend towards seeking “credentials” vs knowledge is a troubling one. To a great extent this has been exacerbated by the rising cost of a college education where there is an expectation of a “return” for many families and a high GPA becomes a threshold requirement for certain jobs, professional and graduate schools. On the other hand, the fact is these jobs/schools are highly competitive, not everyone who wants to be, gets to be a doctor (or work for MBB, Goldman, or go to Yale Law), and therefore, the level of knowledge/competency needs to be measurable across all aspirants.
No question that there is always gaming of whether to take the easier grading prof in the less rigorous section vs the tougher grader. To me, this has to be addressed within the department to at least ensure consistent grade distributions so we do not have 1 prof giving out 90% A’s and another 15%. An interesting way that my D’s school handles grading of a large weed out class is that each TA grades the same question(s) on each test so that the final grade is a composite score from each TA – hard*** TA 1 grades everyone’s Q1 and Q2 and softy TA 2 grades everyone’s Q3 and Q4. This takes care of the uneven grading issue because of who the grader is.
I do think that many employers and highly selective professional and grad schools look much more deeply into the makeup of the GPA, and look at other factors (test scores, internal assessments, LoRs, application essays/statement of purposes, etc…)so I do think there are plenty of filters to weed out the truly incompetents.
The first 3 years of my teaching career were spent at a Catholic parochial school. A common position of the parents of struggling students was “he/she works so hard, why aren’t the grades higher?”.
Just because someone puts in the the time, that doesn’t guarantee mastery of material. There is no direct correlation between time spent studying and GPA.