NYU professor fired after students who got low grades complained about him | Hacker News Reader

NYU professor fired after students who got low grades complained about him

marketwatch.com

18 pointshintymad11 comments

Dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33093467 12 hours ago

Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33083095 1 day ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33070843 2 days ago

I known neither this professor nor this university nor chemistry but you can find advice on Reddit like this one which was written 11 years ago

"It depends on which professor you have. Jones is a crazy ol' coot of a professor who will make you enjoy orgo but then will rape you with the insane amount of work he assigns and his really really terribly worded problems. He also tests on things chapters ahead and his tests are really difficult"

https://www.reddit.com/r/nyu/comments/q1a1l/has_anyone_here_...

Hmm. It may be that he has already been warned by the administration due to complaints by students that were substantiated, and this was the straw that broke the camel's back.

This was posted a lot on r/Professors.

It seems like the teachings themselves were reasonable and the students just weren’t putting in the effort.

However, it also seems like he was kind of an asshole: in particular, he would call out by name the student who scored the lowest points on every quiz and make rude remarks.

It’s fine to be upset if students aren’t working, and not adjust your very-reasonable rubric even if 70% of the class is failing. It’s another to single out students and flat-out insult them

My experience with university is that one can easily get at least a B+ if one attends every class, completes every assignment, and attends every tutorial to ensure they understand most, if not every, basic concept. So, I never understood why students could complain that a class is too hard, especially for classes as fundamental and structured as organic chemistry. I'm sorry to break to the snowflakes, but Organic Chemistry is easy. Can't we just tough up? Or as my professor used to tell me when I was trying to explain to him that I got B+ for my complex analysis course because that class "was too hard": math is math. Don't look for excuses.

I'm sure most autodidacts can appreciate this, but I can't help but consider:

He is paid to teach - is he performing that role effectively if his students aren't learning?

Was his recent teaching (or attempts to teach) substantially different from what it was 5-10 years ago, when he (seemingly) was considered satisfactory?

Or were the students he was given this year academically weaker, and just too pissed off with the whole COVID / remote learning / student debt / etc. situation (none of which was his fault) to put up with a weeder course (which OC always is) where the professor was too idealistic / stubborn / whatever to lower the standard "as far as it took"?

There are comments from more than ten years ago complaining about the unfairness of exams being on matter which wasn't even seen, so it may just be accumulation of complaints and previous conflicts with university administration coming to a head.

Your emotional intelligence quotient is on the left half of the bell curve. So is mine, we can be friends.

I think it depends on the university. I found engineering and math classes to be brutal. Sure I made plenty of A's, but I had to do a whole lot more than show up and do homework. I had to put in long hours to pass the tests. I also made more than a few C's and it wasn't due to any lack of effort.

Aha! So it's just as I always suspected: everyone but me is a bad person. /s

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