If any of these students do make it into med school, I’m glad they’re willing to speak up when they see something happening that shouldn’t. Most people just keep quiet and discuss among themselves how sad it is that people are getting hurt by it.
I know a doctors IRL who has told me they wouldn’t let their dog be treated by a couple of their co-workers. It’s a scary thought. FWIW, my son is not the person who told me that. It’s made me realize how much I want to ask others “in the know” before I proceed on important things though.
The context is that he was fired and his dismissiveness, unresponsiveness, condescension, and opacity about grading were cited as reasons, so the onus is on you to prove the alternate reality you’re suggesting. The default here already has plenty of evidence to support it.
What evidence do you have that the students who complained and the administration who listened to them were all in the wrong? Do you think NYU didn’t do their due diligence on this and randomly conflated a host of unjustified complaints with justified ones? That these complaints just fell from the ether? Were his horrific reviews also taken out of context?
As I said, previously, that there are some entitled students out there and that this is a bad professor are not mutually exclusive propositions. Defending the professor to the hilt despite evidence to the contrary doesn’t somehow strengthen the former claim.
Just to clarify, according to the article, the petition never asked for the Professor to be fired. Many who signed it were very surprised that this was the outcome.
As I said, we cannot assume. There are plenty of people supporting the professor saying the students did not go to class and did not take advantage of the resources provided.
I find myself falling into that genre far too often though I try to stop myself when I notice that I’m doing it. There are several strands of this conversation that remind me a bit of an Inside Higher Ed article, The Admiring Ignorant that I read probably ten years ago.
The author is an English professor. It is a thoughtful article about teaching. The most relevant passages to the “sign of the times genre” are the opening section and then the reflections later in the post quoted below.
“I had so much respect for my own professors,” I tell myself. “Yet these students seem to be mocking my efforts.”
It’s easy to understand why those who have been doing this for their entire lives might get frustrated, isn’t it? It’s depressing, to think that the college experience now is so degraded, compared to how we remember our own college years, a time of discovery and the excitement that comes with acquiring knowledge.
My good friend — and former teacher — Bob Cowser Jr. has written in one of his personal essays that memory is “a dream we dream about the way things were, no more true and no less fantastical than other kinds of dreams.” Certainly, as I continue to teach young adults and begin to creep toward middle age, I’ve noticed that my own memory has sort of cleaned up my past, often to the detriment of the students who inhabit my present.
The student who had “so much respect” for his own professors, in fact, consistently fell asleep in his first English class — a survey of British literature that met at the ungodly hour (for an 18-year-old) of 8 in the morning. He once handed in a research paper without a works cited page because, you know, he had better things to do than edit his own paper before handing it in. He even showed up for a late-afternoon psychology lab after spending the early afternoon working on a six pack of Milwaukee’s Best and proceeded to giggle like an imbecile every time the untenured, undoubtedly overworked instructor said the phrase “sexual arousal.” The topic for the day was — you guessed it — sex, which meant that the juvenile snickering went on longer than even Beavis and Butthead would have found tolerable.
Yet if you had told me then that my behavior demonstrated disrespect for my professors, I would have been shocked. And saddened, too. Because I wasn’t exaggerating before — I had such profound respect for my professors…
This is a difficult job, and it’s hard to hold onto idealism even without the type of self-mythologizing sense of nostalgia that, I’ve noticed, so many people my age frequently tend to embrace. Students don’t say, write, or do frustrating things out of hostility (most of the time); they’re not trying to make my job and, consequently, my life more difficult. These are people who have elected to go into significant debt in order to benefit from whatever knowledge I have to offer. They are occasionally ignorant — just like me. Unlike me, they haven’t yet learned that there is no shame in admitting ignorance, when one is trying to learn. But that’s O.K., really. They don’t need to ask for my insights; their presence on campus asks for them. As I prepare to enter the next phase of my academic life — moving beyond my 12-year “grad student/ assistant professor apprenticeship” — I hope that I’m able to keep this truth in mind, and thus resist fatigue and bitterness.
As someone who has had similar moments of frustration with college students, I found the whole post fun to read.
We ran into almost the opposite – one of my professors ( pharmacy math) gave too many "A"s and ran into flack from administration for being too easy a course. They thought there should be course curving etc. His response–“They better ALL be A’s or people will die.”
Competency of professors can’t just be measured by reviews of some students. An incompetent professor can be highly rated if s/he gives everyone in the class an A. On the other hand, a tough grader would almost certainly receive poor reviews from some students.
Most students can distinguish between an excellent teacher who is a tough but fair grader, and a horrible teacher who gives everyone an A whether or not they’ve mastered the material.
And students reserve the worst reviews for horrible teachers who neither help the students master the material nor provide grades and evaluations which are commensurate with that mastery.
Also, I don’t share your extreme cynicism about college students at top schools. While many are generally more concerned with grades than would be ideal, I don’t agree with your repeated implications that that they are just trying to game the system to get a grade with as little work as possible. Perhaps your low opinion of them is a projection brought on by the emphasis you seem to personally place on the desirability of constantly measuring their performance?
I realize that metadiscussion like this might be off topic, and I apologize if it is, but assuming that students are lazy, entitled complainers doesn’t seem like a great way to make College Confidential a welcoming place for people who are going to college.
You keep using the word “mastery”. Doesn’t that have to measured? Otherwise, how do you know if a student has “mastered” the material? That’s what the exams are for, aren’t they? If a student got single digit score (or even zero), as some of them did, while others in the class got passing grades, doesn’t it mean that that student was hopelessly far from “mastering” the material? Should s/he be given a pass or a high grade so s/he could go on to a medical school?
We all know that there’re too many premed students. Organic chemistry is a so-called weed-out course for these students, so the grading is supposed to tough. Even with tougher grading, I don’t think students who can’t comprehend exam questions and scored zero or single digit on exams should go on to medical schools. Do we really want a physician who can’t comprehend questions or a medical researcher who failed miserably in an introductory organic chemistry course?
I don’t think anyone said that. I do think that some users, including myself, have said that the description fits a subset of that age group. And as someone on this thread that is amongst the closest to college age, I’ll stand by that characterization based upon my real life experience interacting with this cohort on a college campus.
Now if someone addresses a real user on this site as a “lazy, entitled complainer,” then that would likely violate Forum Rules.
Sorry about that hideous looking link, but it’s what I get when I ask the NYT to let me share it.
I’ve never understood the idea of weeder courses. Don’t you want all your students to master the material. Is it so important to sort everyone into winners and losers?
Not everyone is capable of mastering all material. That is just a fact of life, like not all of us will be Olympic athletes or opera singers. The minimum bar for doctors to pass is quite high. Most college students can’t meet that bar. That is not shameful, just reality. Most can’t become astrophysicists either. That is ok, and does not mean we need to lower the bar of required performance for such professionals.
In some fields, performance matters more than people’s feelings.
The popularity of rate my prof, requesting schools publish the grade distribution curves, apps such as profesy, social media posts on sites such as Reddit etc etc indicate it’s all about the grades with as little work as possible.
In fact I just looked up a Reddit for one of my kids schools and it’s filled with requests for easiest class for this or that. One actually says “rlly just wanting a class with a teacher that understands most ppl are there to fulfill a credit”. I guarantee there will be a hundred posts like this once the spring course schedule gets released.
That hasn’t been my experience with rate my prof. My D has shown me some of the comments for her professors and there are plenty that are rated both super high as professors and super high for level of difficulty. And vice versa where easy classes are rated very low because the profs haven’t been good.
Mastery first needs to be developed, and the professors play an active role in that development. Tests then can measure mastery if the test results meaningfully correspond to the requisite level of mastery. Not all tests accomplish this, and not all professors adequately prepare the students for the challenge.
That is wholly dependent on how well the test measures mastery. When a relatively significant portion of otherwise seemingly competent and qualified students are getting zeros on tests and are oftentimes not even able understand the questions (as the professor claims here) that strongly suggests that the educational process has broken down, and the professor has failed miserably in equipping the students with the tools necessary to master the material, and/or measuring their level of mastery.
The other possibility — the one popular here — is that this professor and his tests are beyond reproach, and all these students are ill-prepared, lazy snowflakes who don’t deserve anything but a zero. That seems somewhat far-fetched to me as a primary explanation, given that similarly situated kids and comparable schools seem to be able to survive Organic Chem without this sort of breakdown in the educational process.
If students have been adequately prepared, and if the test results meaningfully correspond to the requisite level of mastery, then they should get the grade they get, even if it keeps them out of medical school. In this case it is not clear that either of those things happened.
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All the more reason to insist that those teaching courses can competently reach today’s students, even if that entails hurting the feelings of an 84 year old long-retired professor and his supporters.
THAT info clinches it - it’s the students, not the prof. I’m surprised that NYU students should differ so much in their ability to do the work from Princeton students. If his rating on Rate My Prof was 4.5 from Princeton students (and 4.5 from an orgo prof screams out “Take this guy’s section”), then he’s a great teacher. It was the NYU students, not him, and the administration just made a big mistake.
Yes that’s true. But if you’re premed, you’re picking the easy class with the bad Professor and not the best professor who’s a tough grader. If you pick the latter, you probably don’t get into med school. If you look at UT Austin, there’s an OChem teacher who gives all As - on RMP 99% would take again, 3.3 level of difficulty. As the first review states “His classes are always the first ones to fill up …… makes ochem a breeze”. The other professor 68% would take again, 4.3 level of difficulty. Most don’t get As. Everyone wants the first professor, gets filled immediately. People don’t care if they learn the material - they just want the A.
Other than reducing the difficulty of the exams to accommodate these new students, the professor presumably has been teaching and testing his students consistently in this course which he has taught for decades. Do you have any evidence to suggest that he treated these students differently and inadequately?
How do you know these students are competent and qualified? Or perhaps that they just aren’t sufficiently competent or qualified?
So it’s the professor’s fault if some of these students couldn’t master the material or couldn’t measure up? Success is never guaranteed and no one is guaranteed to be able to master the material in a class.