It certainly sounds like many of the students in this case were indeed lazy. And the administrators took the lazy, quick and easy way out.
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This suggests that there are not enough residents for the workload that they are given, so that the choice is either to have sleep-deprived residents, or have too many patients for residents, neither of which is good.
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What is your basis for saying this?
FWIW my D is an NYU grad and I know you don’t want to hear this but she received an excellent education there.
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When my daughter had admission offers from NYU, in addition to several other colleges, someone whose opinion she valued had counseled her that she “could do better”, given her stats.
That person was a previous NYU adjunct professor, and the spouse was current NYU faculty.
The adjunct’s own experience dealt with the oversubscription of a very niche course they expected to be teaching, while the spouse often came home frustrated with the administration questioning why ill-prepared students were earning bad grades!
In their mind, it felt as if the university was selling a product, and a strong concern was customer satisfaction.
(When reading the above comment, please be mindful, that this likely is NOT specific to NYU. We possibly would have heard similar insider-stories from other colleges - except that we did not KNOW any insiders.)
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Where does this happen? AAMC keeps track of all admittances statistically. There are a lot of 0s in the lower left quadrant for acceptances. Even if you look at the acceptances, who all likely have a really good story supporting their acceptance, it’s just 274 from the left three columns compared to 67,158 acceptances total.
Or are you talking about from “our” generation when getting in wasn’t so tough?
https://www.aamc.org/media/6091/download?attachment
Where my son does his residency leaving a case has nothing to do with hours worked in a week and everything to do with the calendar week itself. Like rotations, his schedule is planned out a year in advance. It doesn’t depend upon any individual case. I seriously doubt this system came about after the law change.
Regardless, I trust studies over anecdotes and overworked residents were making bad decisions so here’s an article about that from an observational study.
“After controlling for age, gender, specialty and other variables including time in patient care, the team found that after the work-hour policy was implemented, there was a 32 percent reduction in reports of significant medical errors, a 34 percent reduction in reported preventable adverse events, and a 63 percent reduction in reported medical errors resulting in patient death.”
…
The new study builds on previous work from researchers in the Division of Sleep and Circadian Disorders. Their previous studies helped to inform the 2011 decision by the ACGME and have explored the detrimental effects of extended work hours on both patients and residents.
“We’ve studied both extended duration shifts -; working more than 24 hours in a row -; and extended work hours -; such as working more than 60 hours a week -; and have seen evidence of harm not only to patients but also to resident-physicians themselves,” said senior author Laura Barger, PhD, an associate physiologist in the Division of Sleep and Circadian Disorders. “We’ve seen that working shifts of 24 hours or more is also associated with increased risk of being in a car crash after a shift.”
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The study you listed should come with this added:
“On June 25, NEJM published a new study comparing the rates of medical errors made by resident physicians working 16-hour shifts versus 24-or-more-hour shifts. Overall, they found that the residents working the longer shifts actually made fewer errors. However, when they controlled for how many patients each resident was responsible for, the results were inconsistent. At hospitals where residents already had high patient work loads, they made fewer mistakes with longer shifts. But when residents had lower patient work loads, more errors were made on longer shifts. As the number and complexity of patients cared for is a major factor in patient safety, these inconsistent results make it difficult to draw conclusions about work hours from this study.”
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Musing and wondering how those students would have done on the final exam from another U… Would love to know before deciding who was “right” in this situation.
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NYU is known to look for full pay students, both domestically and internationally. It charges more practically for everything (not just because it’s located in an expensive city). For examples, it charges significantly more for its meal plans than Columbia. It’s also well known to gap students who need financial aid. It finally announced earlier in the year that it would start to meet “full” need (by its own definition, of course). We shall see.
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My graduate student (not NYU!) was in awe with the amount of “negotiating” that was being attempted by a good percentage of the very capable/well-performing, and otherwise very likeable – but also high-strung – cohorts. It seemed the timing of every upcoming exam was being questioned, the inclusion of certain questions in exams that had not been explicitly mentioned in the test-preps, the management of certain courses, etc.
While one would naturally expect those frustrations being vented among students from time-to-time, it was becoming somewhat of a distraction during class time. Many people apparently have not yet mastered the “deal with it” skill - even as they approach 30?
I wondered if it was a reflection of what undergraduate college they had attended, while my grad student did muse whether it was due to how recently some had been in college vs. longer ago with some in-job years.
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This seems to be the right question regarding the meaning of the article in the OP. A single professor (on an annual contract) being let go itself is not indicative of anything.
I come from a family with a ton of doctors, and I was a pre-med myself until I realized how much I despised studying science. Organic chemistry played no small part in my decision not to attend med school!
While I appreciate that some have had potentially negative experiences with doctors in the US, I will say that the heightened emphasis on specialization, significant insurance restrictions on treatment etc may also be contributing to a perceived decline in the quality of medical care.
Anecdotally speaking (and I am prepared for the onslaught), I saw some quite incredible disconnects in specialists treating family members with issues involving multiple organs. It was almost as if one doctor was effectively saying that this is my part of the body and not fully coordinating with other specialists who were equally focused just on their part of the body. Having spent many nights in the hospital with family members, I had to intervene on more than one occasion to get them to coordinate. Again, that’s just my personal experience, so feel free to disregard.
But, back to the OP, I would not necessarily use this NYU example as an indictment of either that institution or medical students/doctors generally.
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One might expect that the University would not cave to less than 25% of the students enrolled in the class -what about the remaining 75% ? There is no indication the professor’s department or colleagues were consulted or reviewed the class, the exams, or the grading. He was a highly experienced professor and an expert in his field who successfully taught the same course for decades.
In short, this was arbitrary action prompted by some failing students-we could have expected more from NYU, or any university
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D18 already took Orgo. D21 will be taking it in the future. I’ll make sure to let her know that if she’s failing the course, to start a petition to dump the professor. Thanks for the advice. 
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The stats are only as good as the data being used.
If a student’s GPA is high but their OChem prof gave them an A because the professor is concerned about being fired, that grade isn’t legitimate.
There are repercussions for lowering the bar and it remains to be seen how patient outcomes may be affected.
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kinda of makes a point for tenure.
(can’t read article)
If they got a D instead of an F I don’t see the problem, but firing the professor who was a specialist in teaching this subject…
I hope the students all got a bump, not just the 25%.
And if they did poorly but sufficiently well enough that they can enroll in Biochemistry or another upper level class, and do very poorly, wil they ask for that professor to be fired, too?
This decision may taint (fairly or unfairly) the entire class (group) since it’d be impossible to know the grading. On the other hand, med schools wouldn’t really know this detail (university, professor, year) so the 25% failing may get away with it.
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Perhaps variation in grading and grade inflation across colleges is why the chart at https://www.aamc.org/media/6091/download?attachment suggests an MCAT (over GPA) bias.
An applicant in the top MCAT score range (>517) has a >50% chance of admission down to the 3.00-3.19 GPA range. But an applicant in the top GPA range (>3.79) has a >50% chance of admission only in MCAT ranges starting at 506. Median MCAT score overall seems to be about 501, while median of MD medical school matriculants is about 512.
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The article indicates that the students signing the petition never asked for the prof to be fired. NYU did that on its own.
The prof was on a year-to-year contract.
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thanks 
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Thank you to whoever changed the thread title from “Sign of the Times” to “Sign of the Times [NYU organic chemistry course].” Titles which describe the thread content are helpful for users scrolling through. I hadn’t pegged OP as a Harry Styles fan. 
I suspect (or at least hope) that there’s more to the story, since students who can’t handle organic chemistry really should be thinking of options other than medical school.
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I don’t understand why organic chemistry is needed for medical school. It acts as a weed out class which is really too bad, because the chemistry itself isn’t used. I don’t buy the argument that weeding based on this sort of “problem solving” ability is needed. The general public has this idea that medicine involves more complex problem solving than it does. Mostly it involves convincing people to take their pills.
Also the 80+ hour workweeks? The reason was a combo of hazing mentality plus wanting cheap labor. Most of the world trains doctors using humane schedules, and they turn out fine.
I say this as a doctor who did very well in Organic Chemistry, so it is not sour grapes. (I was not pre-med in college, and did O-chem for the love of it, but don’t believe that it made me a better doctor.) I also trained in the time prior to the hour restrictions. I don’t think 30 hour shifts made me a better doctor either.
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I think most would agree that grades ought to reflect the level of the mastery of the material. Ideally, for competent and capable students the “effort expended” pays off in a corresponding level of mastery, but this is where quality of the educational opportunity comes into play.
- Did the professor lay the groundwork to enable competent and capable students to master the material?
- Did the exams provide the students with an opportunity to demonstrate their level mastery?
- Did the grades accurately correspond to that level of mastery?
I don’t know the answers to these questions, and I don’t think anyone else here does either. Without answers we certainly don’t have enough information to conclude, as one poster did, that "the students in this case were indeed lazy.” Nor do we have enough information to question whether we want the kids who were unhappy with this class "to be our future doctors and medical researchers.”
It seems at least as likely that, whatever his past accomplishments, this 84 year old professor who had “retired” 15 years prior was no longer at the top of his game when it came to teaching a large sophomore lecture. And that he failed to adequately adjust his teaching methods to reach kids coming out of all the disruptions of Covid.
There is such a thing as an ineffective professor, and many of the complaints went well beyond the grades. When a professor can’t figure out to effectively Zoom a class during Covid or craft test questions that the students understand, then it seems worth considering that professor may have had something to do with the breakdown.
But again I don’t think we have the information to say it is solely a failure of the students or solely a failure on the part the professor. I suspect that both probably deserve some of the blame.
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