NYU Chemistry Professor Fired After Students Said His Class Was Too Hard
reason.com
reason.com
I mean, how hard is it for these students to just take the class again with their added knowledge? Why not just overwrite the previous grade with the new one? Why do they run these classes in series so that anyone who fails pretty much loses an entire year? Why is it such a huge deal that they had to fire a teacher over it?
It's not like colleges aren't getting enough money. Especially NYU! Acadamia is so gung-ho about research and papers but so freaking lazy about teaching. Just look at what they pay TAs and associate professors!
Don't forget that NYU credits (if the Google results I found are accurate) are $2,020 and Chemistry is usually a 4 credit class. You don't get refunds for failed classes so that is a $8,000 loss. And it might delay graduation. It has real consequences.
But it also sounds like the professor was bad at writing exam questions. He was failing people at a statistically improbable rate.
I used to teach at a university and we generally aimed for a bell curve. And if too many people were on the A side of the bell curve the odds are your class was too easy and if too many people were on the F side it was too hard. Either way when taken as the statistical aggregate it is usually the professor's fault not the student's.
Sometimes classes are too easy because they teach really well. I had an astrophysics professor who spent a lot of time learning how to teach subjects. His classes seemed remarkably easy, yet we covered WAY more material than the 30% mean bell curve ones. He was just REALLY good at presenting the material and cementing knowledge using interactive learning and other really cool teaching methods.
Your final grade is the average of all the times you took the class.
So if you got an F, then an A, your grade on the transcript and GPA is a C.
Like you said, other colleges may overwrite instead of averaging. I envied my friends that went to schools like this.
Schools are run too much like pressure cookers sometimes. I hated the stress so much, despite loving the subjects. It seems like a lot of the students come out pre-burnt and still ignorant anyways.
Slight tangent, but I feel the same way about leetcode too. Solving leetcode problems is actually quite fun - if you take out the timed pressure cooker “your career and future depends on it” environment of an interview.
Even though my classes were with this guy’s predecessor’s predecessor, everything described about the challenge of this class and the complaints from premeds was exactly the same ~20 years ago.
Organic Chemistry 1, 2 and 3 at NYU have always been considered challenging and “weed out”. I was and am very proud of my moderately successful academics in chemistry from NYU and find it a bit sad that the expectations given to me are changing.
Now to use it for filtering med-school students seems the broken aspect.
It seems this "weed out" culture around orgo is very much an established thing in the world of the sciences/pre-med which is a little strange to someone like me that is not in that world. How come one particular subject is used so universally to weed people out as opposed to just weeding out the bottom x% of people with lowest overall GPA's? Is orgo so much more important to scientists and medical professional compared to other subjects such as biology, anatomy, etc?
It is a challenging subject for many, but the people who aren’t premed have an inherent interest to work through the material, imho.
I think that if the MCAT removed all organic chemistry, organic would lose all the “weed out” categorization
By definition these students take this course because they do not understand the subject, how can they then be qualified to determine how hard it should be?
The article also implies some poor manners from the professor which is an entirely different issue.
I think the analogy of a sports coach and a mentee is more appropriate. The purpose of the coach is to train the youngster to become competitive enough for the league. It's not to certify that "you are great, the game is rigged", just because the mentee pays the coach.
And sometimes that’s not possible. If you’re 5 foot nothing you’re not making it to the NBA. Some people couldn’t pass organic chemistry with a decade to succeed at it. People are not equal in their capabilities.
These people should have never been allowed into the program if this course is that important. Filter better. The NBA raises the bar on anyone trying to get in that’s “5 foot nothing”.
Organic Chemistry is only “that important” if you’re going to study chemistry, medicine or possibly biology. If you can’t pass it you’re not going to make it. Weeder courses exist to fail people who wouldn’t have made it sooner rather than later. You can do it at community colleges or open enrollment universities with no admissions standards like CUNY.
Teachers should aim for a certain optimal difficulty, such that most students are challenged but not lost. It sounds like this teacher was losing too many students, so not much learning was happening (at least relative to time invested).
Of course there is the chance this professor is unfairly hard or has lost his touch as a teacher, but this has always existed. Half my friends who took organic chemistry failed or barely passed it the first time. The mentality then was to study harder and try again.
No, it was exacerbated by ever increasing tution fees.
You don't see this 'costumer' pressure on professors in fully funded public universities elsewhere in the world.
You are being given the privelege of access to higher education. However if you suddenly have to fork multiple years worth of savings to access it, it is likely that your level of demands (even if not legitimate in this case) is increased.
If you're training for a marathon you don't sign up for a marathon, fail, then sign up for another. You slow down and work up to it in successful chunks.
Organic chem seems like the defacto class that people struggle with, but the same was true at my institution for physics and other classes.
Maybe instead we should be looking at a different or longer track for that material, or even earlier education that is producing students that might not have the math and science foundation out of high school?
Or if it is a thing, it's not nearly as big a problem in other more subjective fields.
If the premise is that we require doctors to meet certain criteria (putting to one side the soundness of the criteria or the means by which students are assessed in relation to those criteria), then it doesn't matter why someone fails to meet those criteria, only that they do. This would be because we prioritize the good of the patient over professional ambitions. However, to soften standards would mean prioritizing professional ambitions (or actually, the desire for social status) over the good of the patient.
That seems to correspond with the culture of radical individualism (emphasis on radical; respect for the individuality of others wanes with increasing egocentrism) and obsession with status that we are often accused of having today.
> "We urge you to realize that a class with such a high percentage of withdrawals and low grades has failed to make students' learning and well-being a priority and reflects poorly on the chemistry department as well as the institution as a whole," the petition read.
> The Times article suggests that throughout the pandemic, Jones made a number of accommodations for struggling students. He reduced the difficulty of his exams, but students were still failing them.
> "Students were misreading exam questions at an astonishing rate," said Jones.
> The article does note that the petition never called for Jones to be fired. But the university evidently decided that the best way to resolve the situation was to turn him loose.
> His departure is certainly a loss for NYU's academic caliber. After all, Jones is a lion in the field of organic chemistry, publishing 225 papers in his 40-year career. He literally wrote the textbook, "Organic Chemistry," which weighs in at 1,300 pages.
It's sad that professors are strongly incentivized to lower difficulty and grade generously until a large majority of students pass, without having mastered the material the professor is supposed to be teaching them. No professor ever got fired for making things too easy or for imparting too little knowledge.
He was very, very demanding and his class was very hard, our median scores were around 20-30% lower than in any other class, but in the end, I can def. say that after two years studying with that dude, it was my strongest subject, I could literally spit pages of text about anything in his exams in the end.
It was very hard, but it was very worth it and very fun to actually understand whats going on inside large chemical reactors.
Ofc, there are some teachers/professors that are making things too hard with no purpose (like robot-reading walls of text in a super speed mode and then demanding you to remember them on exam word by word), but some of them just have high standards and its a good thing
Impressive, but probably figuratively or in a manner of speaking.
I have no barns nor granaries to hoard;
John Dryden, The Hind and The Panther (1687)
Every day with me is literally another yesterday for it is exactly the same.
Alexander Pope, Letter to H. Cromwell (March 1708)
His looks were very haggard, and his limbs and body literally worn to the bone
Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby (1839)
If we were not perfectly convinced that Hamlet's Father died before the play began, there would be nothing more remarkable in his taking a stroll at night, in an easterly wind, upon his own ramparts, than there would be in any other middle-aged gentleman rashly turning out after dark in a breezy spot -- say Saint Paul's Churchyard for instance -- literally to astonish his son's weak mind.
Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843)
He is a fortunate man to be introduced to such a party of fine women at his arrival; it is literally to feed among the lilies.
Frances Brooke, The History of Emily Montague (1769)
I look upon it, Madam, to be one of the luckiest circumstances of my life, that I have this moment the honour of receiving your commands, and the satisfaction of confirming with my tongue, what my eyes perhaps have but too weakly expressed — that I am literally the humblest of your servants.
George Colman and David Garrick, The Clandestine Marriage (1766)
Early in my schooling I personally emphasized learning over grades and consistently encountered a high level of disapproval and administrative friction. The students who complained in this scenario aren't wrong, but it's the system that requires reform, not the professor.
The parent does raise the question of what is appropriate difficulty. Orgo should probably be difficult & rigorous for ChemE's, maybe less so for pre-meds. I think many schools have different course offerings for different majors for that reason.
In my school it seemed the thermodynamics prof would give a "gentleman's C" to the kids who tried somewhat, and an A to the ones who really put in the work.
Yes, I agree that an industry that murders nearly a quarter million Americans annually through fully preventable medical errors needs to train their professionals to work with less rigor. YOLO, baby!
Is a C life and career altering? Maybe for some highly competitive paths like med school. And what if you got an F and then a B, not an A?
While at NYU, I failed a class. Then I retook it and got an A. The only major difference was that the first professor was extremely strict and demanding while the second professor was very laid back.
My low graduating GPA (which I take full responsibility for one way or another) haunted my career even as far as after 10 years of industry experience. Doors were closed or slammed shut because of it on more than a few instances - for example, I failed to acquire any internships at all because of GPA, and that subsequently made the search for my first full time job extremely painful.
Are you forbidden from retaking the course/exam. If you get a C on your 3rd try, is that F still visible?
When I was at university you where in principle allowed to retake a course/exam as many times as you needed to pass.
The primary objective of students wanting to get into medical school is to get a high GPA, what specific courses they take and what they learned don't end up mattering at all. Very little of what they learn during the 4 years of undergrad will end up applying during medical school, residency, and their careers.
Or at least that was the case when I was at NYU.
If you failed with an F, then retook it and got an A, your grade is C.
Now, other schools don’t necessarily follow this model.
It looks like none of that would even remotely fly today.
The best/worst was the 'Choose your Grade' exam. The professor has written up four exams for the final. One was a D grade, one a C, one a B, and the last was an A. Each exam being progressively harder. You got to choose your grade by choosing your exam. If you passed, you got that grade, if not, you got an F. All were open book, no time limit, but you had to stick with your choice. I remember talking with the TA grad students about grading the exams and even they were stumped by the difficulty of the A exams.
Looking back, it was marvelous. I was so proud of passing that B level exam.
To be fair, it was a 'weeder' class, and it did sort the students out.
Maybe it was only about the pass ratio. Or maybe he was a terrible teacher. They show his academic success as something to consider, even though it means nothing about the teaching abilities.
I've had a bad teacher at uni at one of the "hard/filter" courses. Many people failed. But I'm sure some of them did because the teacher was a dick to them.
The end result is our brightest and cheated and our entire nation suffers for it.
> You have to assume that affirmative action has thinned the talent at the university to the point the student body can no longer get through the rigor that separated the smart kids from the elite kids
Oh, do you? So affirmative action has pushed out the elite whites and now mediocrity reigns?
It's actually pushed out mainly elite Asians. Just look at acceptance rates and the scores required to get in based on race and sex. Asians of both sexes have to far surpass everyone else and white males in particular have to as well.
Because of this, the student body is made up of more and more people that may be quite smart, but are not elite. They don't belong in these institutions and the institutions can no longer be considered elite because their student body no longer is.
The evidence is things like this story. The student body has weakened in intellectual ability enough to the point that this institution felt compelled to lower their standard, which also means American universities have lost some standing globally.
I can only expect that the students coming from these institutions are not at the level they used to be.
You get 16 weeks or so to teach students a topic... Some topics are MUCH harder than others (learn Microsoft office suite, vs get the Linux+ certification).
I think schools need to do a better job splitting difficult courses, but I think there's a fundamental dislike of course series, since that raises costs to get an education, and in more specialized areas, it would be hard to get enough students to take the second course if people only need or take part 1.
I mean I didn't like the class but it was just the one, it was manageable enough.
30% failing rate is not bad, yes, the education community must to do something about those students concerns (maybe opening a pre orgo course or offer some tutors), but if that is the failing rate is not bad.
What I'm saying is that when you are teaching the failing rate is something you must to lower, not lowering the quality of your course, but being flexible with your teaching system.
I'm not seeing why you should remove the teacher here. And that is bad.
I had classes where the teacher was a pain in the ass, at the middle or top of the medieval structure which was academia (this is one of the reasons I left). Their classes were very hard to show how brilliant they were. Usually the courses were crap.
As a young teacher, I had all the more complicated graduates. By that I mean ones where physics was just a compulsory step but they build not care less.
I was quite lax: if they learned the basic stuff, they passed. The better ones, who cared about the grade and made efforts had very good marks.
And then there were the ones who did not even open the book and expected to pass because I wild not fail too many people. I did, had discussions with the dean, sometimes my decision was reversed.
Weather a class is hard depends on many things and on the students. I had very hard quantum mechanics because they are, well, hard. I will not blame the teacher for that.
At top universities, professors bring in grant money or else they lose their job. The university takes a portion of the grant before any of the money is spent. Then, the professor pays the university from the remaining money for their graduate student's tuition and stipend, to use university technology, and rent for research space. Next, the university only pays professors for 9 months out of the year. So, another chunk of grant money finances the professor's salary for the remaining 3 months.
Top universities scrape billions off research grants annually. These grants are won by faculty members. They dwarf salaries. Faculty members bring in more cash to the university than their salaries are worth.
In reality, professors finance the university. Students are mistaken if they think they are their professor's employer.
The running gag among the team was that she would confidently say utter non-sense while making it sound technical. Enough to fool non-engineers but extremely funny to the actual engineers that worked with her.
By detractors or publicity? Because as insults go that’s just brutal.
NYU organic chemistry professor terminated for tough grading - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33070843 - Oct 2022 (83 comments)
Wife: "This is bonkers, the entire point of orgo is to cull the pre-med students. When I took orgo they showed the planned curve and explicitly said: one-third of you will fail."
Me: "Yeah, we had classes like that in electrical engineering as well, it was understood that that was the point of the class. It is hard to avoid the implication that Gen Z is really spectacularly entitled."
Wife: "It's the explosion effect. They have learned they should feel entitled to good things, like being treated well no matter their identity or background or whatever. But they also are entitled for other areas where entitlement is not justified."
I thought that was a pretty insightful thought!
Boomers have massive economic entitlement. Gen Z have massive social entitlement. And Millennials are caught somewhere in the middle not feeling entitled to either, but struggling nonetheless.
They both have the same sense of entitlement. They both have the same obsession with money. They both have the same persecution complex.
And they love to blame each other for everything rather than face up to the fact that life isn't fair.
There's that obsession with money I mentioned. Moreover, Who cares? Lots of generations had less money than Millennials do now and still did great things.
Are you under the impression that Millennials are entitled to a certain amount of money? There's that entitlement complex.
Who told you that life is fair?
All I said was that these facts have an impact on each group’s psyche and world outlook. Is that controversial to you?
You should realize: your problem with boomers is that they exist and act like human beings. It might be time to let this one go.
;)
Hope you don’t mind, but I am saving this lovely little nugget of wisdom.
To turn around and now call Gen Z the entitled one seems stupidly forgetful.
If one subscribes to the theory that culture moves in cycles (hedonistic Weimar Republic, WW2, conservative backlash in the 1950s, left backlash in the 1960s, conservative backlash in the 1980s/1990s, woke backlash in the late 2000s), then sometimes the complaints are valid.
Gen-Z has an unprecedented cancel power, anonymous reports, controlling speech of Gen-X. It has never been like this before.
Certainly Gen-X disliked their older generations, too, but they didn't have the tools or the self-righteousness to openly intrigue against them.
Gen-X is too soft to fight back, to the detriment of our society.
But why? Seems silly you use the mechanism of education as a filter and make a course obnoxiously and unnecessarily difficult for that purpose. Why not... filter pre-med students by simply limiting admission into the program? The earlier you make people seriously consider things the less time they waste and headache they endure. How many practicing medicine today actually use organic chemistry regularly? Most don't at least from the pool I've worked with (surgeons, internal medicine, pharmacists, nurses, etc.). Pharmacy is the closest but most rely on database systems outside of hospital pharmacists or active researchers in drugs.
My undergrad math program was the same - there was a difficult abstract linear algebra class that was the gate to being a pure math major.
The mental gymnastics that go in colleges are bonkers. I’m paying for my education, tell me exactly how hard, and what’s required, but don’t set up the ‘product’ to fail.
It is sort of like learning C but programming solely in Python: you can get your job done, but when one of your abstractions breaks it is worthwhile to be able to at least identify the root cause and talk to the right people.
My organic chemistry course was excellent until the half-semester, whereupon the professor's well-organized and insightful presentation ceased. Instead we were confronted with a plethora of memorization with little organization. The change in teaching method and learning was obvious to everyone in the room. We questioned it and the professor said apologetically "That's the way it is! It's hard! I'm sorry!" Within a week a large part of the class dropped and many of the remainder became more reclusive and protective about their study.
So much must be memorized in medical school that the process alters the way students think. I watched an excellent scientist fall away from science (but become an excellent memorizer) in medical school. Once a brilliant researcher, now a doddering encyclopedia of (sometimes incorrect) facts. Sad.
That would be a much narrower window into what the students are capable of. Instead, you offer them a challenge, and let them succeed or fail on their own merit. You'll find some students who don't look great on paper have the grit and determination to make it through the class, and some students who look outstanding on paper wilt when put up to a challenge.
So we use university degrees which take 4 years and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars instead, because then we can say it's about putting in the work. And for some reason people are more accepting of someone else being more successful because they are perceived to have worked harder rather than just because they were born smarter.
But now we have another problem, the customers of the university who have spent all this money are being denied the status that they have purchased for such a high price. So they are pissed now and claim the system is unfair. And the universities respond by dumbing down their degrees to the point where everyone who gets in will pass.
And now we have yet another problem. A gatekeeper of status can't be widely available, or it doesn't confer status. So we will have to find a new gatekeeper, and then the cycle can repeat.
While this shouldn't be taken as support for the filter courses - they at least provide a bit more equal opportunity for the students. When you have students coming in from various backgrounds, different schools, different level of preparation, you want to give them a vaguely even starting point to a test like that. Doing the filtering post-admission helps.
For people who disagree with this, I ask them the following:
“Think of the average person in generation / group <insert>. Would you want them defending you on trial for murder? How about fixing your break lines?”
Young 20 somethings can do that today, but far fewer than a generation ago.
Regardless, I actually think it’s far simpler.
If I pay $60k/year, I can’t fail out. If the uni does fail me, they lose future revenue from donations and potentially my enrollment for future years.
That's some serious entitlement right here. Why can't you fail? What's the point of education then when all one needs to do is to pay some money and do their time?
Isn’t that what education is? Paying someone money and putting in the work?
The people who fail usually should fail. When I was doing CompSci most people would fail discrete maths 2-3 times until they managed to get it. It's a good thing that they failed the first few times. I don't see how that's bad, they didn't understand it at first.
Yes. That's what it is. But it isn't "paying someone money and feeling entitled to finish because I paid the money".
Well orgo is hard... no not really, its a first - second year class? The students are setup to fail. Do I think the professor is the root issue, no just look at replies in the this thread, 'its been that way for 30 years, blah blah'.
I am paying you to teach me orgo, not to fail me at orgo. Teach it in a passable way and then test the students outside of the class, like the MCAT or LSAT where you are not commingling the selection criteria on the whims of a professor.
Is this really that hard to see?
If one student fails, it’s that student’s failure. But at some point, once (x)% of the class fails, it is a systemic failure of the institution itself.
Can't fail? Not even on exams? So a mere sum of 180k USD guarantees a degree? I hope not.
Not “I’m guaranteed a degree”
Im saying once you fail out, $180k in debt, most peoples lives are effectively over.
You have to go get a job making $40k-60k a year and pay $10-12k per year for the next 10-20 years.
After taxes, food, housing.. you’ll basically have to live with your parents, will have trouble starting a family, etc
But now the market has figured that out, so there is a massive value premium on STEM degrees, and shifting to a history major is no longer a viable option, which is why there is now pressure to dumb down STEM degrees.
It's one thing for art or philosophy students to want an easier class. This is doctors. I don't want someone doing surgery on me who couldn't handle the workload and took the easy way out.
Everything described in the article sounded just like my experience at two different colleges, and I wasn't in for something as important as medicine.
If you can't handle the work, then maybe it's time to look at yourself and think that maybe you shouldn't be a doctor. There are plenty of other professions out there.
But I don't want my doctor to only understand the core basics of medicine. I want her to understand how to diagnose any crazy thing I might show up in her office afflicted with.
Everything is a trade off. If organic chemistry keeps your family doctor from diagnosing you with confidence, they can pass you to a specialist whose practice needs organic chemistry more regularly.
So this is a problematic one. Currently the workload in a few areas of medicine is not sustainable. Those who pass also can't handle it. There's a threshold where instead of people toughing it out, we'll need to adjust the system so it's not necessary that much.
Yikes? Everyone should be treated well, that's the default. I'm not saying the class should be simplified, but identity and background should not be a factor (educational background maybe, but that's assessed before people can attend uni).
A rather confusing way to state it.
… I know, I know, it’s not exactly the same, but the logic is analogous. Hurting people so that an outcome matches some prespecified distribution is just lazy.
Of course we should have hard classes, and of course some people that try a hard thing will fail, but they should fail on their own merit.
The counter-example is trivial: suppose you have ten "Einsteins" in your class, but due to your dumb-ass stack ranked curve, you "cut" 4 of them. Congratulations, you just set back human progress 300 years.
For the record, UCLA was equally-idiotic when it came to grading. Technically, getting an A+ (4.3) was possible, but they were virtually NEVER given out. Why? Who the fuck knows -- I asked multiple times what I could have done better. I only ever got a handful of A+'es (and basically had straight A's).
As an aside, I wish I could nuke the entire educational system. It's corrupted by lazy and complacent professors (that clearly suck at their job: see the reproducibility crisis, p-hacking, etc.), a veritable swamp of administrators (syphoning six-figure salaries across the board), and bloated sports budgets. All while issuing unforgivable loans to record-high numbers of students.
Knowing from experience that 33% will fail is not the same thing as explicitly planning for 33% to fail. We don't have enough information to call this "stack ranking", IMO.
One of the calculus professors at my undergrad institution was reportedly asked on the first day of Calc I class whether there would be a grading curve.
He asked how many of the students were planning to be engineers. Roughly 3/4 of the hands went up. Then he said "I drive on bridges and fly in airplanes all the time. There will be no curve."
A significant minority dropped out after the first term, unable to cope with the need to push themselves instead of simply doing as they were told as they had done at school.
Generational reductionism aside, one has only to browse a few online forums dedicated to pre-med studies to note that organic chemistry continues to maintain its reputation as a “weed-out course” in practice and in reputation.
It doesn’t strike me, based on their own words, that the current generation of students have any misapprehensions about the difficulty of the subject matter.
The link between feelings of entitlement to basic social decency (which isn’t particular to any generation) and entitlement to academic success also wasn’t substantiated beyond the nominal misapplication of the words “explosion effect,” which isn’t a rigorous term appropriately derived from any science or art with which I’m familiar.
Care to explain? I followed the benefit of the doubt through a few biological, psychological, sociological, and historical searches and found nothing that would apply to your conversation; unless you meant to reference quite literal chemical and physical explosions, which doesn’t follow in that context either.
I see your prestigious ye olde education really heightened your critical thinking skills.
I'm sure they celebrated their great victory and validation, by further slagging this prof on tiktok.
Where is my cane...
I know there's more nuance to this - you can disagree with what a firm does in a free market economy and assert it's bad for society. But it seems like, from a libertarian perspective, the focus should be on how this is bad for the university, and will reduce its signaling value to employers or something. Because if the customers want a diploma mill, and there's no self-interest downside to the university becoming a diploma mill, then in a libertarian worldview it's generally quite right and good that the university becomes a diploma mill.
So, we are not in-hoc to the students. They are not consumers paying for a service. They are in a privileged position that they are receiving an education, an investment, and it is their responsibility to reach the desired standard.
That said, we also have some (not that much) pressure to pass more students, as the university makes more money.
In many localities, government-funded K-12 has the exact same problems exemplified by this orgo prof's firing, except the taxpayer is compelled to fund the dysfunction. The silver lining is the charter school movement, which at least sometimes allows families trapped in bad school systems to escape to a better culture, but even in the charter system there is a good amount of exploitation masquerading as education.
I think the "enlightened" libertarian view might be needed here - if your university becomes a diploma mill, it ceases to be useful to employers. Eventually, students realize it no longer provides the signaling value it once did and go elsewhere. And gossiping about the failure of standards hopefully accelerates this process.
“Aw man, I got a 40.”
“That’s great, most people got 20s, that’s the highest score”
If a test is supposed to measure your mastery of material relative to others', and point out your areas of potential improvement, a test with a full range of scores from 0 to 100% seems most effective. A test with a range of 0-40 is, agreed, less effective; but still better than a range of 80-100: an overly hard test merely points out that everyone has room for improvement.