I notice that most comments here take for granted that weeding out in O-Chem is natural and good – that those dropping out of pre-med just are not strong enough to be doctors. Maybe even that a bad professor is a good thing, because the best students will still find a way to learn, while the others will weed out sooner.
I just want to point out that there is another way. An example is Xavier University of Louisiana, a HBCU. 50 years ago, the school sent only 2-3 students per year to medical school. Many prospective med students entered each year, but the rest had not been able to get through O-Chem (or some other “weeder” class.) People just sort of shrugged and figured they didn’t have what it takes.
But along comes this weird little man, and decides he is going to get ALL of them through. And he totally revamps the chemistry department: EVERY teacher will be excellent and teach in a crystal clear manner. ALL teachers of EVERY section of O-Chem will teach the SAME lesson, in the SAME way, using the SAME books, during the SAME week, so EVERY professor will be able to help ANY student, and EVERY student will be able to help ANY other peer. The lesson plans were standardized. Professors were no longer allowed to wander off topic, droning on about their own research. Students ALL were signed up for study groups and pre-test reviews.
Prof. Carmichael’s philosophy was that students aren’t weeds, they are precious resources.
Per the article, 20 chemistry professors at NYU wrote a letter protesting the NYU decision. That must be a sizable portion of the department. A TA for the class stated the complaining students weren’t using the resources provided. There is plenty in the article to critique how NYU handled this.
When I was in grad school 40 yrs ago, the science departments were being chastised by administration because their average grade given was a “C” while the rest of the university departments gave out an average grade of “B”. The sciences argued that “C” is an average grade, so get off our backs! They were being accused of being “too hard”—and this was 40 yrs ago!
A few thoughts. I didn’t have the “benefit” of professor reviews when I was a college student; just word of mouth. The worst professors were a combination of bad teachers and extremely tough graders. I only had one of those in my college career. The professor in the article sounds like a good teacher but a tough grader. This was a pretty common combo in my experience. My daughter said that great reviews of professors at her college usually means easy grading, not great teaching. The average score for the professor is directly proportional to the average (self-reported) grade in the class. Higher grades given, higher ratings received. There is a Physics teacher at her college that sounds like the professor that was just fired. Half of his reviews are excellent and the other half abysmal. He’s also on a list of teachers you should definitely try to have while you’re at the college because his lectures are so engaging. Tough grader. Good thing for him is he has tenure (also doesn’t teach premeds).
Worth mentioning, that he taught at Princeton until 2007 - and there were EIGHTEEN reviews total.
At NYU there were 183 reviews total (funny: 46% would take the class again).
I wonder to what degree the scores are an exaggeration due to the selection of students who choose to post a review at all.
If he had been teaching at NYU for 15 years (?), than one way to look at it is that maybe 95% (?) of the students felt no urge to ever review him either way - and 5% of the students were motivated to give him a low score.
Agreeed, the Princeton reviews are too old to count. But the equal mix of highest and lowest ratings at NYU is interesting.
Princeton has an internal rating system to rate my professor, which is widely utilized by most students as an alternative. I think students get access to grades one day earlier if they submit a rating. That internal system wouldnt retain info from 2007, though.
Keep in mind that many of them were joke posts, e.g. "I took this class in 1637 with Dr. Jones. Very solid class. Skipped many classes (busy playing Minecraft) and still scored first place in his class just by reading his textbook. "
Even taking out the fake reviews, I doubt the data is statistically significant. RMP has a very self selecting cohort. Of more value would be the NYU end of semester evaluations.
Dr. Jones’s course evaluations, he added, “were by far the worst, not only among members of the chemistry department, but among all the university’s undergraduate science courses.”
Specially if he had had moved from Princeton to NYU in 2007 (as one article states), there would be a wealth of multi-year information for NYU to draw upon.
@mtmind - unclear if NYU’s comment on course evaluations refer to that one semester (which we can assume would be poor), or to include how many years of his career at NYU.
In the former case… “Uhuh”, in the latter case “… and you waited 15 years!?”
Given that most facts are NOT known, it probably is not reasonable to pass judgement in favor of either side!
PS: Citing “Rate my professor” figures is of no value, IMHO. I’ve seen similar systems for HS teachers and too a large degree those were not representative at all of what my own student’s experiences had been.
Unfortunately, there is a lot left unclear by the NYTimes article. But is not at all uncommon for professors (especially tenured professors) who are horrible teachers to last far longer than they should. It is less common (although not unheard of) with contract professors.
I suspect what may have happened here is that this professor had a sort of de facto “repetitional tenure,” for lack of a better term. I wonder if he was such a big name in the field that prior to this latest student outcry he may have been considered somewhat untouchable? I’m speculating, but the outsized reaction to NYU’s decision not to renew his K supports this. Not every year-to-year professor who is let go for poor performance gets their own supportive hit piece in the NYTimes.
Only students who felt strongly would write reviews, so it isn’t surprising that reviews of professors are almost always at one extreme or another.
It takes two (the student and the professor) to learn. Even the best professor can’t make every student learn. That’s just a fact. Unfortunately, some students (and their parents) tend to blame their teachers/professors when they failed to learn.
Professors have different teaching styles. It’s up to the students to adapt to the professor’s teaching style in each class. Not the other way around. In college, a lot of learning is done outside of lecture halls. These students are adults and colleges aren’t extensions of high schools.
Organic chemistry may not be necessary for a typical physician, but that’s true of other professions as well. A typical engineer would probably never need all the physics s/he learned in college. None of us, whatever our professions are, would probably ever use all the math we learned in school. The reason we learned them in college is because we may need them and some things are nearly impossible to learn later in life when we need them.
This is rarely the case with competent professors, and it is rarely the case that effective professors receive reviews which are "by far the worst, not only among members of the chemistry department, but among all the university’s undergraduate science courses.”
I agree with this, but am left wondering why for the rest of the post you focus only on the student variable, and entirely ignore the detrimental impact that an ineffective professor can have on this mutually dependent process.
In what context? If students came to me to ask for help, but did not attend my lectures, go to any of my review sessions, etc, I would be dismissive and unresponsive as well. We don’t know the context so cannot assume.
Not sure it is the sign of the times, but there certainly are a percentage of students (and parents) from the days I was a student to this day who do not take accountability and look first to blame someone/something for their shortcomings. I have had poor, average and great/inspiring teachers/professors. The same has been true of my kids. Often the same professor will be effective for some students and less effective for others. However, in each case the stronger students will always adapt (the same way they will have to adapt to supervisors and colleagues in real life), whether it is through self study, study groups or making use of office hours (TA’s or professors).
Its interesting that a good portion of the complaints were about grades (reduction in mid terms, transparency). This portion of the petition also speaks volumes, " ‘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." My D is a TA in a weed out Chem course (and was one during the time classes had to be remote) at a well known flagship. She and her fellow TA’s found a pretty high correlation between students who complained about tests, psets and grades with those who did not attend class and small groups (virtual and real) and did not avail themselves to office hours. Probably the number 1 plea that my D gets to reconsider grades is “look at all the work I put in, I deserve more score credit”, notwithstanding the answer was completely off base. This is consistent with the TA that was quoted in the article, "‘I think this petition was written more out of unhappiness with exam scores than an actual feeling of being treated unfairly,’ wrote 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.’”
I am sure many of the students who signed the petition had legitimate grievances at the way Prof Jones taught the course or treated them, but at the same time, you can be sure a lot of the grievances were driven by poor grades.
Note also NYU’s suggested remedy for students “The officials also had tried to placate the students by offering to review their grades and allowing them to withdraw from the class retroactively” which is an outcomes based remedy vs an educational one assuming Prof Jones and NYU failed to deliver a satisfactory educational product. As outsiders, we do not have all the facts to authoritatively judge NYU or the students, but at least one NYU chem professor who had a front row seat made this judgment, “‘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.”
Maybe some good can come of this:
When applying to medical school, a question often asked of the applicant is to discuss a challenge they had in their life and how they overcame it.
This is often a difficult question to answer.
Luckily for these NYU students, they can say that they weren’t doing well in a class and they overcame their challenge by signing a petition to have the professor fired.
