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Comment by Frost1x | Hacker News Reader

>This is bonkers, the entire point of orgo is to cull the pre-med students.

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.

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Part of it is to ensure that your medical students are not terrified by "chemicals". Plus, doing organic chemistry instills into you the idea that reactions may not be pure, and that enantiomers are both real and potentially problematic (see thalidomide). It is at minimum a way to get you to be able to ask critical questions when needed, even if there is already an infrastructure to answer those questions for you.

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.

All of this can be true or achieved without making a class so difficult as to fail 1/3 of the students.

Maybe? Weeder courses in CS based on SICP have similar dropout rates, and the push towards making the curriculum easier causes endless hand-wringing. We could argue that organic chemistry is less central to medicine than recursion and functional programming are to software development, but there is a similar "click" that is a reasonable signal of whether you are likely to parse more complicated concepts.

Humans are not all equally capable.

I don't believe organic chemistry is intentionally used to cull out medical students. Instead it is simply the difficulty of the course, which by-the-way matches the learning situation in medical school:

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.

Don’t forget you the student get to blow money on this as well. Then professors get to call you entitled.

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.

All gatekeepers of status, like university degrees have a problem with what to do with the losers. We could use IQ tests as a gatekeeper, which would be more efficient for everyone because it is nearly free and takes hours, but if we did this, the majority who failed would scream about how it's unfair and political pressure wouldn't allow it. This is why there are laws against using IQ tests for hiring.

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.

> Why not... filter pre-med students by simply limiting admission into the program?

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.

> Why not... filter pre-med students by simply limiting admission into the program?

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.

It's harder to gauge someone's ability when they come from outside the institution initially. Plus, since org Chem is not a freshman class typically, you give students some time to immerse themselves in the culture and standards of the school, and then give them a chance to prove themselves.

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.

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