Purdue has “standardized tests” for the big intro classes (at least in engineering). For example, all the calc courses have the same exams, regardless of professor. That actually was helpful to my daughter for one of her classes because she had difficulty understanding the prof, so she just watched a different lecture. (They recorded even before Covid). They also have a professor that everyone wants, who is super tough, but the kids call “the calc god”. My D was actually in his class but those that weren’t, were able to watch his lectures anyway.
In my D’s experience, bad profs are easier to work around in college because you can go to someone else for help - another prof, TAs, help rooms, etc…Not as easy when it’s a bad teacher in HS.
I’m not quite sure what’s been happening in this thread but there are a lot of flagged posts. I’ve hidden a number of them. If posts continue to be flagged, I’ll close and reopen when I’ve had a chance to review.
Meanwhile, if you find yourself engaged in an off-topic and unproductive conversation with one or two particular users, take a step back and ask if your reply is moving the thread forward. If it isn’t, probably best not to post.
That’s not what the letter said or what motivated it, though. The faculty argued that they should be the ones who get to evaluate contract professors and determine teaching methods, and implied that the professor used “proven pedagogical practices”; they did not argue (at least based on what was in this article) en masse that he was a good instructor.
Professors in the chemistry department have pushed back. In a letter to Dr. Gabadadze and other deans, they wrote that they worried about setting “a precedent, completely lacking in due process, that could undermine faculty freedoms and correspondingly enfeeble proven pedagogic practices.”
If we’re using the “far better position” argument, university administration and students are in a better position than colleagues – colleagues who rarely, if ever, sit in on a professor’s classes or run a comparative analysis of reviews – to judge instruction quality and results. The former also has less of a vested interest in reflexively defending a professor.
Your argument discounts that the faculty is the last guild, and as such, it bristles over any loss of control over entry and exit. This letter has been written N times before and represents the tension between administration and faculty as much as it represents anything specific about one instructor. The letter is a self-serving one motivated by faculty futures, not a selfless, unbiased one in defense of a professor.
That is what I mean by perpetually aggrieved. If a professor is fired for taking a dump in the corner of the classroom, we’ll quickly find faculty writing a letter about how due process wasn’t followed in firing him; how bylaws were ignored; and how the department is the only entity that should be entitled to fire a professor.
I’ve adjuncted at many colleges through the years and it’s the same everywhere. Sometimes these letters are warranted; other times they are mostly just academics being tedious and failing to see the forest for the trees. To wit, this faculty letter is more about process and control than it is about the quality (or lack, thereof) of one professor’s instruction.
Since neither of us have seen the full letter, I don’t think you can claim that. In any event, the majority of his colleagues disagreed with the decision. I disagree that students with no knowledge of a subject are best equipped to assess how or what is being taught, and most deans have no qualifications to do so.
Few complaints about his actual teaching, lots about the need to be particularly accomodating to the stressful times faced by those in BIPOC, LGBTQ and undocumented migrants groups.
Is this the actual petition or just a brainstorming document?
FWIW, I think there are some valid complaints if they are accurate.
Every class should have a clear grading rubric and students should get timely feed back on labs, exams, and assignments.
My D was a course grader for O Chem II during pandemic. All the lectures were recorded and released usually within the hour of the synchronous lecture being completed. The professor held virtual office hours twice/week, which were also recorded in case students had conflicts, and posted that day. The TAs for the course did the same. Not sure how labs were handled because that was outside of D’s job description. Prof and TAs conducted (and recorded) review sessions before every exam and the prof and TAs responded promptly to individual email questions. If there were a number of questions about the same problem, the prof would re-review in lecture. All graded material was returned to students within, at most, a week. HW and Quizzes, usually within 48 hours. (Graders had to commit to that before being hired). Basically how they ran the class when D took it in person.
It’s definitely not the same everywhere. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen as evidenced by what I’ve heard from students, including one of my own. Then there are others who have shared their experience.
I didn’t know about TX schools, that’s why I asked.
Personally, I think it’s a better system for STEM intro or core subjects where certain bits of knowledge need to be learned.
The use of shared exams, etc. is probably not really state-specific, but more school or department specific (or specific to instructors who choose to do that).
Shared exams may have to be given at special combined exam times, rather than regular class times (or final exam times determined by regular class times), to avoid leakage of exam problems from earlier class times to later class times.
Just to add to this excellent post. My husband teaches at a med school and has seen both ends of this. Professors hang on way past their expiration date and are hard to get rid of. During his early years my husband ran the histology course. You’d think the med students would know how to pass a midterm, but every year a big chunk would fail it. Nearly all got the wake up call, and passed the course in the end, but some just didn’t.
And was that the professor’s fault? That some did not pass even after the wake up call? The petition notes the students understanding that 30% of the class in Jones’ course were getting A grades, another 40% B grades. Presumably some got C and D grades among the remaining 30%. We dont know how many actually failed.
It would be hard to tell as lectures were given by subject, so one might cover the eye, and someone different the ear. Labs were actually the most important part of the course and they were also given by a variety of people. After every exam my husband would go through the results with a fine tooth comb seeing if certain questions were bad (everyone got them wrong) or if certain students were having problems (doing poorly in other courses as well) or if everyone in one section missed the same questions.
For what it’s worth for foundational courses like O-Chem, calculus, probably even a survey English course, I think the exams should be department wide ensuring that everyone is on the same page. There’s plenty of time in more advanced courses for profs to teach what they want.
Medical schools can’t accommodate every premed student from NYU (or elsewhere). According to this website:
the acceptance rate of NYU premeds to US medical schools is 32% (in 2017), which seems to be consistent with the fact that 30% of the students in this organic chemistry class were getting As.
Lots of evidence. It’s discussed in the article, and has been quoted here repeatedly. There are also the comments from the notes/petition (whatever it is) that indicate he was wholly inept at teaching during Covid and completely out of touch with the challenged faced by the students.
That seems to be a collection of comments by numerous students expressing the various concerns about the effectiveness of the teaching.
Virtually every single comment expresses concerns about the “actual teaching.”
Your interpretation of the numerous comments speaks volumes. A single one of the hundreds entries mentioned “BIPOC, LGBTQ+ and undocumented migrants groups” and a some others mentioned the challenged faced by various marginalized groups during COVID, but the vast majority involved his failure to adapt to teaching his class during Covid. Even with the few comments that you hone in on, the failure to consider the circumstances faced during Covid is very much a failure in “actual teaching.”
Those willpeachMD numbers cannot be right. They claim that NYU had 60,724 applicants to med school in 2017 (of which 19,351 were accepted for a rate of 32%.) This is larger than the entire graduating class of NYU!
I assumed our views of the petition would differ. I was appalled by it, but I knew you would like it.
Since the petition relates to Spring 2022, I wonder about the covid excuse. NYU was not remote by that time, few if any schools were.
I don’t think one can conclude the teaching was poor based on this petition, signed by a mere 25% of the class. Some of the complaints were just silly-stop sending out lectures on Friday night because students prefer to relax? Failure to consider time needed for “student self-care”? Adults in college are expected to be capable in time management