If you’re referring to emergency situations and they can’t do these basic things, that’s far more worrying to me than how well my doc did in organic chemistry.
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“For his part, Jones maintains that the university acted abruptly and unwisely. He pushed back on NYU’s specific allegation that, according to the spokesman, Jones 'ceased the final grading of his current students’ work and left everyone in the lurch./ In fact, Jones said, he turned in his grades in May and wasn’t sure he would have access to the grading system after his contract wasn’t renewed. Speaking of grades, Jones said that 60 percent of the final marks in his last course were A’s or B’s. He also said that he had failed 19 of the 350 students in the class (most of those F’s, according to Jones, were later changed to withdrawals).”
In summary, it looks for his class:
60% received an A or B
34.6% received an C or D
5.4% received an F
He probably curved the final grade from the raw score. The final grade distribution for his class isn’t that severe, but my guess is that it is probably significantly worse than the grades that the other professors at NYU assign their classes and what most college students these days are used to.
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Per the above report from Clemson, that grade distribution was not odd for organic chemistry at that school. Perhaps true for other schools.
Maybe the NYU students were comparing their situation with peers from the following schools?
Oh, I agree that overll grade point averages are sky high now. I just think orgo may be an exception to that at many schools.
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That is info I learned in high school chemistry. Same with what are ketones. It’s sort of survey chemistry info. In contrast, for me (30+ years ago) O-Chem was almost entirely “Make this big thing from these little things”-2 semesters of this. I was asked about none of it on the MCAT, and have used none of it at any stage of my medical career. I am not bitter, because I was never pre-med (I switched to medicine later.) But if being a doctor had been my dream all growing up, I would be bitter.
Agreed. His tough grading scale effectively put on life support the dreams of becoming a doctor for the pre-mad section of the 40% of the class who received a C grade or lower.
I laud his intention of trying to push his students to be the best that they can be. However. I think the real teaching point that his students probably derived from his action is that you are stupid for not trying to game the system as much as possible. Never take a class that you know isn’t going to be easy, especially one taught by the toughest grader in the university. That’s probably not the right lesson you want your doctor to internalize.
There has to be balance between being tough but fair. His standard might be behind the times.
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They probably learned that lesson already during the college admissions process.
I don’t think they did. If so, they would have avoided his class like the plague.
@creekland, our observation is not that some folks come in unprepared and some come prepared. It is that 15 or 20 years ago, most of the people would come in prepared if there was heavy reading but now almost no one comes in prepared if there is heavy ready and they complain about it. To make our training effective, we needed to get rid of that requirement. So most of our training can’t involve advance preparation. [Note: It does mean that we can cover less in the two or three days we are at a company].
We also noticed that the average attention span seems to have declined. So, we work in 8 or 9 minute blocks and change up the mode of presentation (lecture, interactive conversation, video, poll, small group discussion, etc.). And we have found this to be important for outstanding teachers, not just average ones.
So I wouldn’t attribute this to different educational styles (though I agree with you that one needs to pay attention to that as well). Instead, I think there has been a secular change in the ways people get information, perhaps from the experience of being online all the time. If an old school teacher hasn’t accommodated that secular change, what was excellent teaching might not fly as well now.
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Or perhaps, during the pandemic, they became used to doing a minimum amount of work and getting rewarded for very little effort regardless of results, and expected that to continue.
I was thinking about this thread last night when my D was registering for courses for her last semester of college. As part of the process, she looked up every single professor teaching the courses she was interested in. There was a good amount of information available - was the class required, what was the reviewer’s grade in the course (so you can see if there were disgruntled students or even the ones with As are complaining), did you think the course was difficult, and then rating of the prof.
She nixed one of her options because the reviews were terrible. The class was reviewed as being an easy A but the comments ranged from “worst class I took as an undergrad” to “professor couldn’t communicate” to “I learned nothing.”
Which brings me back to this thread…if kids are writing terrible reviews of a certain professor, who is going to continue to register for their class? Yes, orgo is a requirement, but this wasn’t the only professor teaching. I can see why admins would need to be paying attention to professor reviews/rankings and where it may make sense to not renew a contract.
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I’d think the students who failed this particular class likely didn’t learn those things in HS.
I think Jones was the only one teaching orgo that year-350 students sounds to me like the entire complement of orgo students at NYU.
They may have learned those things, they may not have. Either way, it wouldn’t matter, because for a “Make this big molecule from these little parts” type O-Chem class, those facts aren’t really relevant, as explained in the following article by an experienced and decorated O-Chem prof: Should learning organic chemistry really be so difficult? A veteran instructor thinks no.
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If a school offers different versions of the same course in STEM, it probably has to offer different versions of any follow-on courses, because those follow-on courses would have to make some assumptions about what their students have already learned.
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I have heard of pre-med students taking a required course at another institution in order to avoid taking it at their school.
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In my 40 years of teaching HS chemistry, I had so so many students who were solid D students across the board who were hellbent on becoming doctors. While we like to have kids dream, when does reality have to set in? Almost anybody can attend certain state u’s (those with 80% admission rates, they’re out there) and major in biology, continue getting those D’s, and continue to perpetuate that misguided dream, while wasting money studying for something that was never going to happen.
Is that the purpose of weed-out courses, to finally inject some reality? I wanted to be a basketball power forward my entire childhood and early adolescence. At less than 6 ft tall, with no measurable vertical leap, that was NEVER going to happen, no matter how much I dreamed or wanted it to happen!
Another phenomenon I observed were memorizers vs. critical thinkers. I had many students who earned A’s in honors chem by simply memorizing the hell out of the material. Those were the kids who then took AP Chemistry and floundered, because they could not simply memorize their way through—they suddenly had to think critically. I used to love the kids who got B’s in honors chem because they could cruise through w/o working hard, then get to AP and realize they’d have to work, and discovered they had critical thinking skills and were getting A’s in AP Chem! Of course, that drove the memorizers crazy.
EDIT: Yes I know the last paragraph is off-topic. Chastise me if you must 
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I thought there were comparisons made to the other profs teaching orgo that year but maybe I misread that.
NYU is a pretty big school though so I would think more than 350 students are needing O chem.
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