Did an NYU professor get fired because students hate organic chem?
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Difficult/opaque lecture style, very high difficulty tests, openly mocking students in a 500+ person lecture if he deemed a question not intelligent enough, and on top of all of it, forced to buy a textbook he co-authored (homework questions taken from the required book, refreshed every year).
For some reason this story seems to happen more often in chemistry than other disciplines. In my experience as a Biomedical Engineering major, my chemistry classes were by far the most difficult, almost like it was the point - just difficulty for difficulty's sake. And I had plenty of other hard classes, including AI/ML, Diff EQ, and a course on the physics of blood, but each of those professors, while rigorous, were also fair and kind, willing to help students understand the material, and definitely never refusing to answer what they believed to be a "stupid question."
I even remember conversations with friends about how the chemistry department seemed to have a very high number of massively egotistical professors who mistreated their students. My chem major friends confirmed it was like this all the time.
All of this is anecdotal, but soft-confirmed by multiple friends and friends of friends at the time. When this story broke I was honestly not at all surprised.
(Having taught a few sections of this kind of thing myself, I'm not entirely unsympathetic. It's a long, painful day when you're waiting at hour 5+ of a lab session, watching someone fumble around hopelessly with gel rig or something, knowing that they're never going to make it and that this result is going to make or break their grade for the quarter...)
I had an O-Chem professor who explicitly set a curve and gave incredibly difficult exams, such that only a few people in the 100+ person class could get an A. It was almost like he was transparently trying to reduce the student population.
But what cynical advantage does the school gain from weeding out premeds? Besides tough love for the students who won't cut the mustard, what is their motivation for weeding out premeds?
> But what cynical advantage does the school gain from weeding out premeds? Besides tough love for the students who won't cut the mustard, what is their motivation for weeding out premeds?
Teaching these pre-med courses is expensive and hard. They're huge, require armies of TAs, and the educational experience blows (that's a scientific term) for both professor and student. Aside from the raw economic incentives (professors in this area tend to bring in far more money from research than teaching even the largest classes), believe it or not, a lot of professors actually want to teach their subject well. They love it. They do not love giving Biochem 101 lectures to a an audience of 100-1000 uninterested, uninspired undergrads who are only there because the AMA is making them jump through a hoop.
Just to be clear, though: I don't think I'm suggesting anywhere that this is "cynical" behavior. Everyone is acting rationally given the rules of the game. Even the O-chem professor from my own life was acting in an extreme form of rationality -- I assume he didn't make the course hard out of some cynical motivation, but because he had a huge class and he wanted to provide a useful measurement of talent. One way to do that is to make it really, really hard and spread out the curve.
(But he might also have been forcing the pre-meds into a different section by reputation.)
Sure, but what we would expect due to this is pre-med courses that are all of roughly equal difficulty (perhaps with slightly harder classes earlier in the degree), but with none of them being exceedingly difficult, or being perceived as a singular "weed-out" class. A "weed-out" class is one that's badly taught, even by comparison with other classes in the same program. If better-quality teaching is not feasible, it probably needs to be split into two modules - O-Chem I and O-Chem II, taken separately, with other material being slightly reduced/compressed to compensate.
I disagree, a weed-out course can be well taught and still weed out most students who take it. If a course requires a level of dedication and memorization ability that most students don't possess, then it will weed out lazy, disinterested and unintelligent students no matter how good the instructors are. You might claim that a lazy and disinterested student is still the fault of the professor, but it's not the professor's job to babysit a 19 year old and make him to spend Friday night studying instead of getting drunk in a frat party.
Honestly, a doctor incapable of thinking is not who I want for my doctor. A doctor incapable of thinking while under stress is not who I want for my doctor. How do you test for those qualities? Many colleges use O-chem. Hence it becomes a "weed out" course.
We'll just have to wait and see whether this professor went above and beyond what's required for a "weed out" course or whether NYU just killed their premed program.
Sure, but this applies to the whole of pre-med as a discipline - it sits solidly within the STEM overall area. It's not like other classes in the program are any less reality-based.
And if Biochem 101 doesn't weed them out, those 100-1000 uninterested uninspired undergrads will be dumped on the next premed course after biochem, moving the problem further along the process and subjecting even more premed instructors to the glut of subpar students. Better to get those students retracked into a more appropriate major sooner than later.
> Teaching these pre-med courses is expensive and hard.
Well they get paid for it, don't they? Either from the government or student loans, most schools aren't doing it for free. From a cynical money perspective, the short term incentives of a school is to never flunk any student who can pay for more classes. But that's not what's going on.
> Well they get paid for it, don't they? Either from the government or student loans, most schools aren't doing it for free.
No, they don't get paid nearly enough to justify the time of the people involved. With weird, rare exceptions, anyone teaching one of these lecture courses at a major research school (i.e. any public school) makes most of their salary -- and earns far more money for the school -- by doing research. Maybe it all pencils out in aggregate (e.g. the teaching staff is a loss, but at N=250 students you break even, or whatever), but I suspect that isn't true in general.
Teaching these courses takes up so much time that you barely get anything else done for a whole quarter/semester. That's hard when you have a lab of people to manage and an active research program. Schools usually manage it by indenture, coercion, voluntary mutual sacrifice, or all of the above.
There are different reasons for investing in it despite this fact, but the big one is the unwritten rule that "this is a University, and this is what we do". Sometimes you take a loss to support the wider team. In this case, it's pretty bad marketing to have a university without a pre-med pathway, just like it's bad marketing to have a gym without a climbing wall (or whatever the fad is these days).
So you're right, there are only so many slots for medical school, and you don't even need to be pre-med to qualify. Unless you're just ambitious, ultra-focused, and well prepared enough to do pre-med into med fresh out of high school, you have time to gain experience and decide what you really want.
https://www.blackenterprise.com/auto-mechanic-becomes-a-doct...
Aside from anti-trust, an executive order or education department policy to force medical school admissions to be tied to e.g. the 50th percentile of MCATs based on existing difficulty could also be a solution. Enough bullshit about building schools in third world countries, undergraduate research, or personal statements. It is not the role of the professor or institution to determine whether a student is "qualified" to pursue a profession. That should be left entirely to the market, not the ivory towers of academia. It is ridiculous that we are importing healthcare professionals from overseas while local staff are being overworked and there are not enough residency positions despite the demand. There is rot in the system, all the way from academia to insurance.
I find it interesting that the apparent thesis of the petition is "This class is too difficult" as opposed to "This specific professor is not good at teaching". Has there been a noted decline in his skills in the past few years, or has the content or style of his lectures changed? If not, what is special about the current crop of students as opposed to the ones in the past?
This is a very dangerous precedent. If you don't have a fundamental and strong grasp of organic chemistry, you have no business being a physician, no exceptions. As an analogy, imagine a civil engineering program that bowed down to student complaints about the intro statics or materials science courses being too difficult. Would you want to drive across a bridge designed by one of their graduates?
Yes, and yes.
"WSN also accessed student evaluation records for courses taught by Jones, which showed that his scores had been consistently low for years — long before the spring 2022 student petition. In the past five years, Jones’ co-professors teaching the same course typically had scores around or above 4.0 on a 5.0 scale, while Jones averaged around 3.3. In his final semester, his evaluation score dropped to 2.4.
"They were part of an experimental semester, one that was forced to combine the in-person with the online, and Jones was not considerate of the need for change. ... Students said they spent 11 to 19 hours per week on the course — a course that traditionally takes up 10 to 15 hours per week." (https://nyunews.com/opinion/2022/10/05/maitland-jones-nytime...)
In reality O-chem should not be a pre-med class nor should it be required by medical schools. Other countries admit straight to med school without a BS requirement.
It's really more about, how much do you really want this and less about the coursework.
However, O-chem probably wouldn't have any students if it wasn't a premed course either.
Also, O-chem would be a lot more fun if it were actually a small lecture course. Pre-med ruins it by turning it into "memorize this book of obscure recipes". You might as well point them to the Joy of Cooking and have them memorize that, instead. Same purpose, but at least the outcome would be delicious.
If you don't believe me then download their financial reports and look where their money is going.
Isn't that how an 'A' grade is supposed to work? I'm not suggesting you curve it to deliberately fail people, but an 'A', 'B' and 'C' should have some meaning. If 90% of a class get's an A, the grading is meaningless and might as well just be pass/fail.
Unsure if 100+ is a decently sized sample to say that a grade curve based on current class performance has any meaning beyond that class.
https://www.ama-assn.org/education/gme-funding/save-graduate...
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/it-s-time-to...
> Is that not what your computer arch class was? In mine we had to write every mips instruction and what it did, from memory, on pencil and paper.
A few deterministic RISC op codes that nearly mirrors a Turing machine can hardly compare to the rigor of organic/biochemistry. You don't see exams asking students to build a branch predictor from the transistor level.
Take a look at what organic chemistry really entails
https://www.masterorganicchemistry.com/reaction-guide/
All the reactions above can be combined in arbitrary ways and a potential student is expected to recall and apply the concepts in an instant on-demand.
In the undergraduate institution I attended grading on a curve was not common outside of Chemistry classes. I specifically remember taking a chem class where the majority of the class failed on a percentage basis, but most people passed after the curve.
What was the goal of that class exactly? To learn something? To ensure people passed and repeated the same experience in the next class which was also graded on a curve? What did it mean exactly to have passed Chem 1/2 and Organic chem? It was taught poorly and you were tested on concepts that were not taught properly and not understood.
I know people who opted to take the same Chemistry sequence at a local community college and they learned way more than we did, simply because the teacher wasn't trying to haze them.
If it wasn't the self-authored textbooks refreshed every year, chances were that the adjunct teaching barely spoke English.
It took me extra long to get through school just because of all of the math classes I had to drop and take the next semester just because on the first day I showed up to class, the prof was mumbling or non-verbal, would face the board and write illegibly all lecture and not explain a damn thing.
But at midterms and finals, his class scored consistently worse than the same course taught by a different professor, even though he was the one writing the exams. And he got angry every time this happened.
My college chem professor was a first year out of industry, incapable of basic socialization, we all knew why he became a professor. The head of the department had his own text/work books, we had to spend like $400 on ~5 books for one class. This new guy had to teach off of this and had strict guidelines around testing etc. The brightest and most studious students got like B+ end of semester. The majority F-C, and we needed a B to continue the class schedule. 80 students had their grades bumped by the dean by like 20 points so an entire engineering year wasn't flunked. It was a tight schedule and if the majority failed chem it would look bad on the school and gum up the scheduling for that class and the following class.
My friends in other majors weren't having a much better time.
I don’t want to condone or encourage this behavior. However, I often think back to a similar professor I had in college who I loathed at the time. I gritted through the course and complained the whole way.
Then I graduated into the working world and encountered a similarly difficult person in my management chain. Weirdly, I felt prepared to handle the situation and kept relatively calm while navigating the not-nice boss. I didn’t stay for long, but I was able to thrive and get some early career wins even under a not-nice boss.
So I don’t think mean teachers or bosses are a good thing, but at the same time I feel like I grew more during those periods than I did at other times in my education/career. I still don’t know exactly what to think about all of this.
Things may have changed during those decades (as things do), but she said there were options at her school to take "Maitland Jones Orgo" or "Easy Orgo", and approximately everyone knew that they would be challenged in the former, but provided the opportunity to grow more than the latter.
I'm sure there are many things involved, but perhaps he didn't fully grasp that when he moved institutions, he was also shifting his audience, and perhaps his new audience wasn't quite as interested in the challenge.
To give an example, I had an engineering class on electrical machinery. On one test, not a single person made an A. In fact, the highest grade was a "C" obtained by the class genius. I studied hard for the exam, attended all lectures, did all homework assignments, and got a ~45 on the exam out of 100 points. At that point, you have nothing like a bell curve. The teacher has failed to either teach or formulate a test that meets reasonable expectations. Something is broken. I don't think everyone should've gotten an "A", but failing an entire class of students that are not even remotely lazy (nearly all over achievers) is stupid.
1. The instructor has difficulty calibrating the difficulty of the assignments because it's all so easy to them now.
2. The instructor is interested in having a high ceiling so the truly gifted can distinguish themselves, usually using a generous curve to not screw over the competent but average students.
3. The class is beyond the current capability of the students.
You're just in the last 2-3 years landing upon all of the kids who were entirely educated via Common Core.
My niece just finished her degree and got private math tutoring from her parents to supplement what was done in school (which was woefully inadequate). All of her friends are pretty atrocious at basic math. That damage was done long before COVID.
Before Common Core, there were 0 national standards for math (and language skills, but this is about math). The US "standards" were created accidentally, like how Texas sets the standard for many states due to being the largest customer of textbooks and printers not wanting to make separate versions for smaller states.
Common Core simply set the minimum knowledge and skills by grade level, basically saying "students should be able to do fractions by the end of 5th grade."
The major criticisms of Common Core are that it was too expensive to implement for states that were already so far behind in funding their educational systems, and that it's too test-driven, for example tying teacher evaluations to test scores.
In any case, over the last 12 years since it started in 2010, many states have quit trying to implement it and gone in other directions. Most experts agree the overall impact of Common Core is nothing to slightly negative due to the implementation problems.
This says more about our abject failure to properly fund and organize our educational systems nationally, by the way, since the people in charge of implementing the standards in various states and cities did things like LA spending 9 figures on iPads to deliver Pearson tests that only were licensed for 3 years. AKA typical American turn-government-initiative-into-private-industry-giveaway stuff.
And anyway, the oldest child that would have been "entirely educated via Common Core" would be 17 (5 y.o. kindergartener in 2010)
I'm speaking from the perspective of New York State. NYS completely overhauled its curriculum based on the Common Core Standard. NYS has and had already had one of the best funded primary education programs in the nation.
2018 was the first year that exiting high school students had to take the Common Core version of the algebra exam. Failure rates increased dramatically and that was the first year that the graduation rate (passed the Regents exam) dropped in 17 years.
In fact we had already seen this coming because failure rates at lower grade levels on standardized tests started spiking dramatically in 2014-2015.
Just last year we replaced the curriculum and common core standards entirely.
However, he made up for the brutal exams with ample extra credit opportunities. As a result, while very few people got As and Bs in his exams, a normal-ish percentage of people passed, but were forced to work harder than expected to pass. This was Calculus I and II, so it was tricky but an interesting teaching style. At least those who passed knew the material. Plenty still failed - but this is why everyone I knew called him a difficult, but not unfair, instructor.
It was American History (college) and I've never liked history. When people found out I was taking his class, they tell me they were sorry for me.
To this day, that man was the best orator I have ever seen in my life (and I'm over 40). He would get up, start talking, and I would be enthralled. It quickly became my favorite class.
But he was ironclad in his expectations. He had no attendance requirements, but every class he gave a 3 question quiz over the lecture the day before. These quizzes added up to be worth more than the tests in terms of final grade, and he would only allow you to make up 3 of those quizzes (for missing). And he was absolutely, 100%, willing to fail you if you didn't have the points for it.
What I learned from that class is that students didn't like him because he wasn't lenient. You got the grade you deserved and there was never any leeway. He made this quite clear.
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Contrast this with the semester I ended up having to drop Diff Eq. The professor had a policy of 3 missed days is an automatic failure. My alarm clock stopped working and I went over that limit (kept trying to get people to wake me up, but none did). I had to drop a class I had an A in.
> The teacher has failed to either teach or formulate a test that meets reasonable expectations.
I think there are potentially other explanations.
I once had a math professor explain he stopped grading on a curve because he once had a class where the highest grade was a low C and he didn't feel that deserved an A.
And I agree with him.
You're there to learn, the grade isn't supposed to be a reflection of your effort.
I once had a class where the professor would put things on the test that weren't in the lecture. Caught me off guard the first time, didn't catch me off guard the rest of the semester. The gap between my grade and everyone else in the class was huge (I think I'm the only one that passed in that class).
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At the end of the day, if a student cannot show some sort of mastery of the subject, they should be failed.
Where I grew up, and A was a 93. Where my partner grew up an A was a 90. We already have this problem. For better or worse your GPA + your universities prestige/perception/etc are a factor in hiring/grad school anyway.
Is a 4.0 from University of Phoenix (Online School) the same as a 4.0 from an Ivy?
How do you compare two "A"s, one from a mediocre place and one from a well established institution? By knowing the difference, of course.
If the outcome was the teacher talked about that lesson, then said "we'll adjust the grade so you don't all have negative consequences b/c you did nothing wrong: this is a school, after all!" yeah I'd agree with you...
In fact, that is the difference between a good educator and a bad one: a bad one will just say, "it is what it is", and describe their failure to teach as laziness or stupidity on the part of the student.
If the knowledge is necessary, it sounds like there should be an additional class before said class to give knowledge that can be built on in the more difficult advanced class.
This "organic chemistry is hard" idea gets trotted out pretty frequently. The paradox is that premeds also need to take classes in physiology, which in involves a lot of... you guessed it - memorization. Maybe more memorization.
That said, there are as many ways to teach this course as there are teachers. I suspect some emphasize memorization because that's the easiest kind of knowledge to test for. But when approached conceptually, organic chemistry requires little more memorization than any serious scientific topic.
How did you learn to program? You probably had someone show you the syntax, you wrote a few basic programs, learned OOP, and then you took an algorithms class. Did you need to take an algorithms class to become a productive programmer? Probably not but it certainly helped you, and maybe you "memorized" a few techniques along the way (time complexity analysis, BFS, DFS, heaps, data structures, etc...). These techniques, as varied and general as we believe they are, are merely human inventions. We, the computer science community, discovered these in the 20th century and have been using them for less than a century. There is no way to accidentally kill someone while programming, modulo military and health care.
Chemistry is not like that. Chemistry kills people as much as it saves people. Mediocre chemists are at risk of accidentally killing themselves and others. Mediocre chemists "forget" the order you're supposed to mix an acid and water in (do you kill someone if you do obj == null instead of null == obj?). Mediocre chemists "forget" to work in a fume hood with volatile species. Mediocre chemists "forget" what type of container a substance needs to be stored in. Mediocre chemists "forget" what catalyst is needed for a reaction.
The cost of forgetting something in chemistry is at best a failed experiment, at worst death. Organic chemistry is the first class where you start dealing with potentially deadly substances, so ya it's hard not to die or injure/kill your lab mates and if you don't like it then you should switch to an easier major.
Source: I entered college as a materials science major, took up to organic chemistry, said fuck this and switch to CS.
Rumor has it, this is precisely why Organic Chemistry has the reputation for being brutally difficult throughout the university system, as it is meant to filter out students early on in their studies.
How are you going to keep up with a chemistry course if you have to consult documentation every time you encounter Pb to remember that means lead? Organic chemistry entails a lot more memorization than that, but memorizing the periodic table at least is simply table stakes for entry level highschool chemistry. Memorizing the periodic table is month one of 10th grade chemistry 1. What the periodic table means is also taught at the same time, and is trickier than the basic memorization. Most students can get the basic memorization of the periodic table figured out in a week or two with a stack of flash cards. If you can't manage that much, what's the point in going further?
The memorization bits come with remembering nomenclature and equilibriums, which you just kinda have to memorize or you're not really learning any chemistry at all. They're the building blocks of all higher level chemistry that come after, organic or inorganic.
General chemistry is hard because people have difficulty with the math that they told themselves they would never need to use in the future. Algebra, logarithms, etc.
If you never learn to balance an equation, however, you will never succeed. Similarly, you will get low grades if you cannot solve an equilibrium problem, which requires algebra, logarithms, and a calculator. If you can't do equilibria, you can't do acid-base problems. If you are expected to know a few reactions for the exam, not memorizing them will probably leave you in a bad place. This is the same as for other subjects, as said above with physiology. Is it fair? I don't know, school is like that. I would say, though, that a lot of General Chemistry represents things that people do every day in Chemistry, and also represents the historical understanding of chemistry until about 1850. There's also some stuff in there about analyzing chemicals to determine what is there.
Organic chemistry is a little different. Organic compounds are quite varied and do many interesting things. They are soluble in many different substances, many of which are organic chemicals themselves. They react in often surprising ways with each other and with inorganic compounds. They may react to heat and light, or even just agitating or dropping them. There's a lot to say in the subject. So the education is focused on covering a wide array of substances and reaction types, and trying to show where general properties apply and the limits of generalization. In addition, there is a large analytic component because, as you might expect, a lot of compounds do not exist in isolation and need to be identified and quantified. As a (veterinary) physician, I don't think you can really do medicine properly without grokking OChem. You don't need to do reactions yourself, but if it looks like an alien language, then a lot of the information we have about drugs and physiology won't make sense to you.
People find OChem hard because it's a lot to learn in a small amount of time, and they don't put in the work. I think that the majority of students at my undergrad school could have succeeded if they put in 20 hours a week and did all the problems in the back of the book, which is what I did. The test is really checking to see if you have seen the thing before, and the only way to do that is to expose yourself to it.
Maybe OChem is the Leetcode of the med school admissions process. The MCAT certainly has some OChem, as well as Physics, Biology and Biochemistry. And, I'll be honest, if studying hard enough to get an A in four courses while spending 20 hours a week on 1 of them is difficult, med school is probably not the right choice. I went through undergrad twice and the first time through I would not have pulled that off.
"They were part of an experimental semester, one that was forced to combine the in-person with the online, and Jones was not considerate of the need for change. The document explains that more work is not equivalent to more learning, and provides an estimate of how much time an average student spends on the class per week. Students said they spent 11 to 19 hours per week on the course — a course that traditionally takes up 10 to 15 hours per week."
https://nyunews.com/opinion/2022/10/05/maitland-jones-nytime...
Also Maitland Jones has a very good reputation as a teacher.
Combine that with a class that is the first real hard step in a chemistry education, and thus will by necessity be tough, and you're in for a bunch of pissed of pre-med students.
The semester in which my buddies and I took the class was particularly bad. The class average was in the 50s or 60s, the highest score was in the high 70s, and half of the class or more failed the midterm.
There was an uproar, so the prof held a town hall of sorts with the students in the class. In that town hall he didn't back down on the curve, it wasn't going to be curved. It also came out that the prof hadn't actually written the test, nor had he taken the test himself. It was written and graded all by TAs. The students were able to convince him to actually take the test amd report back.
He took the test and reported back. He scored a 68 (or so, it's been a while). a bit above the average in the class but still not good. My buddy scored a 78, he did way better than the prof on his own test. In the end the prof agreed to set his own score as 100% and then basically bumped everyone score by 100%-his score. The folks that did better than his score just got 100%.
It was considered one of thr weed out classes for all engineering disciplines at Mines.
A teacher like this is failing his customers, the students. A educators job is to educate, not to sort or judge.
Edited - typo.
His mind for organic chemistry might still be sharp as a tack. But at 84 years old, if he was the students' teacher during the initial part of the pandemic there's probably a chance he struggled with the digital adjustments to doing so many things online and delivered a subpar overall experience. If nothing else, perhaps eyesight and hearing fades a bit with age and makes trying to do stuff through Zoom and other online tools something very difficult for them making office hours and other things a challenge everybody resisted. This means that these students were far behind other years students.
By the time they all resumed in-person activities, the teacher might have thought that his students were at the normal level he was used to through decades of experience, but he misread how far behind they were.
> "NYU had in Professor Maitland Jones a faculty member with a one-year appointment specifically to teach organic chemistry," wrote John Beckman, a spokesperson for NYU, in a statement to Reason. "In one of his organic chemistry classes in the spring 2022 there were, among other troubling indicators, a very high rate of student withdrawals, a student petition signed by 82 students, course evaluations scores that were by far the worst not only among members of the Chemistry Department but among all the University's undergraduate science courses, and multiple student complaints about his dismissiveness, unresponsiveness, condescension, and opacity about grading."
> Beckman continued: So, what exactly would be the argument for renewal of this appointment? NYU has lots of hard courses and lots of tough graders among the faculty - they don't end up with outcomes like this. Surely, among the many things a university should stand up for - including academic freedom, academic rigor, and a robust research enterprise - one of them should be good teaching. Good teaching shouldn't be pitted against rigor as an excuse for poor teaching; good teaching and rigor are perfectly compatible, and the latter is not a threat to the former at NYU.
"NYU had in Professor Maitland
Jones a faculty member with a
one-year appointment
specifically to teach organic
chemistry," wrote John Beckman
This "service courses" effect is, in my experience, by far the most strong for premed students as well.
False, this is your opinion, they were careful not to state what is, but what might be the case.
PS: As an aside, to be very pedantic, the word ageist is a subjective term, not objective. You can say that 2+2=4 is literally true, but can you fairly say that anything is literally ageist when that's subjective? Just something to noodle over about what that word even means.
Your respectfulness or lack thereof is almost totally irrelevant to if your post is ageist. I don’t see “ageism” as a very useful word anyways since my attempt to narrow the definition makes it painfully subjective.
It seems like most people would agree with your examples.
Do you view this sort of ageism filter as a useful tool for understanding the world? Does the word ageism automatically imply a negative connotation then?
Would you turn down getting lectures from Donald Knuth even if he's older than dirt?
Using age as one tool to understand a complicated world with incomplete information seems fair, but I think you have to judge the individual on their own merits and abilities or you can miss out.
There's a difference between giving lunchtime lectures and teaching an entire course while assigning grades that affect the careers of young people.
You managed to contradict yourself within the same sentence.
- Basic chemistry (chemistry 101): Concepts like bond formation, electronegativity, acid-base reactions, etc
- Memorization: Functional groups, reaction types, etc are fundamental building blocks (much like writing and speaking requires a knowledge of words).
- Deductive reasoning: Getting from molecule A to molecule B requires long chains of intermediate steps that logically follow from previous steps
- Visuo-spatial: This is probably the one faculty that comes naturally to some and absolutely does not click for others.. Understanding organic chemistry fundamentally requires an appreciation of how molecules and groups interact in 3-D space. Understanding spatial patterns and interactions also helps with memorization (e.g. it is easier to remember why certain functional groups behave the way they do)
- Linguistic: This may seem trivial but many struggle with the grammar of naming molecules (IUPAC nomenclature)
It is true that organic chemistry is a weeder course for pre-meds. However, I do think it is a relatively good filter to select people who excel across multiple cognitive dimensions, which is required for success in medical school. Now whether or not this is required to produce good doctors can be debated, but I suspect that in certain corners of medicine, particularly the more cerebral specialties like nephrology or academic medicine in general, rigorous undergraduate courses such as organic chemistry are absolutely pre-requisite.
I ended up leaving medicine and am now a founder of a biotech startup, so take my opinions with a huge grain of salt :)
How to help make sure the teachers don't burn out is a different issue. I imagine it's hard to be the teacher of these kinds of classes year after year.
If anything has suffered a reputation hit from this story it’s organic chemistry professors in general who are broadly being portrayed in threads like these as sadists who care more about failing out future doctors than teaching them practical know-how who slid into standard medical education through an accident of history despite ochem perhaps being more appropriate as an elective topic.
I have no patience for professors on an ego trip. If a majority of students consistently fail your class, then you are failing as an educator. Besides teaching, it also includes designing an appropriate lesson plan for the level of their students.
There are very few fields where we place the responsibility on customers to suck it up if they regularly receive a bad product or service.
I would argue that attempts to obfuscate that are in fact attempts to maintain the university’s power over their students
the student is a raw input the output is semi useable consumer/producer
that’s it.
In every EE course afterwards, we would in the first week or two solve problems using calc/diffeq, then get told "of course that's not how we want to really do it, so here's how you do it using algebra and complex numbers". It was pretty clear that Differential Equations, maybe even parts of Calculus, were not necessary to learn the engineering, they were a way of having another department (Math) do the filtering. In ten years of work in the semiconductor industry, I never once needed to use calculus or differential equations.
I think there are a lot of fields that have "weed-out" courses, and the author of this article is right to point out that the more fundamental issue is whether or not this is the right way to do the (probably necessary) filtering.
I’m a trained EE. Calculus and even differential equations concepts were used all the time before I became a manager. It depends on the type of EE work you do, but I would strongly disagree with anyone who suggests these math topics aren’t relevant to EE work.
Calculus is the "algebra" of higher level math. That is to say, it forms the base. Diff Eq teaches you the ability to create classes of equations (meta-math, if you will). My degree wasn't in EE, but I can't imagine neither of those are useful for an Electrical Engineer.
My degree was EE, and I can say they're definitely useful for a lot of EE concepts.
It's similar to computer science: It's possible to jump into the industry and write CRUD apps and connect APIs together without ever studying algorithms or how CPUs work. However, if you go deeper or have to do the more complex work, you really need to understand the underlying concepts.
I suspect this is because the test format at Princeton is rarely multiple choice, and mostly essay or problem solving based. Maitland Jones' class fits the bill in that the problems are mostly about synthesis of organic compounds.
It is hard because it requires you to memorize dozens of reactions and their respective limitations, however there is not always "one right answer" as long as you can accomplish the synthesis of the molecule in a reasonable fashion.
The class taught me to think in 3D about chiralty, and also how to problem solve through multi-step synthesis from simple products.
I'm now a physician and I credit all of my understanding of organic chemistry to Dr. Jones and Gingrich who worked with him on laboratory portion. It was a perfectly fine class, hard but totally doable with a lot of effort.
There's a kind of professor I like to refer to as the "wheel of misfortune" professor. I think we've all known them - they're one of a group of professors who teach a standard part of a curriculum but teach a vastly different version of the class, with outlier levels of time commitment and grading standards. This professor can end up severely disadvantaging certain cohorts simply because the students had the misfortune to end up in the unfortunate class based on a spin of the wheel, because of what year they entered a program or what time slot of day happened to be open in their course schedule. Well connected students who ask around are often aware of who you need to dodge.
I've known a few of these professors, and I'm not exaggerating when I say that a student who happens to have the misfortune of this particular professor for organic chemistry or intro to data structures and algorithms is measurably less likely to continue in the major or professional path than a student who happens to enroll in the same credit class with someone else. I remember a nature show about newly born fawns and grizzly bears. A fawn's survival to adulthood is largely a matter of chance, depending on which side of the river the hungry grizzly bear happens to be wandering down that day. These professors are the grizzly bears of the academic world, and they leave a real trail of destruction in their wake.
To be clear - I don't know that this particular professor qualifies as a grizzly bear. A few red flags - such as cheating and not attending class - suggest to me that the scenario I described above might not quite apply. But I do know that these professors often invoke rigor and standards as a justification for the harm they do - as if the other professors, who assign higher grades and higher completion rates don't teach a rigorous class.
When this happens, I generally see no need to "fire" someone - I'd just limit the professor's teaching load to advanced, intensely difficult electives at the upper division or grad level.
The spring 2022 class was "experimental" (presumably due to the end of COVID restrictions) as well.
I believe this to be it: https://nyunews.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Organic-Chemi...
Linked from https://nyunews.com/opinion/2022/10/05/maitland-jones-nytime... which seems to be the only coverage not from Jones' point of view.
If this is true, this isn't being reported widely enough.
> The petition did not call for Jones' firing.
Also notable, the petition isn’t publicly available either. Why? Because the students were actually being quite reasonable- they weren’t trying to get him fired.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33100836 (18 hours ago)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33093467 (1 day ago)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33083095 (1 day ago)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33070843 (2 days ago)
A main issue here is that any real (and interesting) understanding of organic chemistry requires a fairly solid understanding of quantum mechanics and things like electronic structure calculations. This is also true of spectroscopy, which is probably the main analytical and experimental tool used in the field.
However, that would likely require QM as a prerequisite for organic chemistry, which is a course program that makes little sense for pre-med students. Hence, crude approximations, hand-waving arguments, and rote memorization are often used instead of trying to actually explain things based on more fundamental concepts like electron density. (This approach is sometimes called physical organic chemistry).
Additionally, chemistry is one of the most patent-centric areas in the corporate university, and teaching tends to be a second-hand concern. The researchers with large grants aren't required to teach courses, so they farm the job out to temporary hires, grad students and this 84-year old who probably should have retired years ago.
At my school, there was a different organic chem class for physics/chem students that was based on physical understanding + QM.
Right, so the ratio of [professors]:[students] is already too low, so fire the professor. Brilliant
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The universities that pay their salaries and the students that pay the universities should demand more from their professors. If students get poor grades for not understanding the assignment then it is only fair that bad professors get a poor review for not understanding the assignment.
That prof being one that curved everyone up to make their life easier by keeping everyone happy. Rather, we needed to learn the material and figure it out asap.
I learned from that class, I didn't know how to learn - and was totally confused, as I was a great student with great grades, etc. But that talk hit me hard, I realized that he was correct - and I needed to change.
That wake up call, nearly three decades ago, has since allowed me to learn novel tools, technologies, etc - where others struggle. I have benefited personally incredibly from knowing how to learn - many won't understand what I'm saying nor will they realize why it is important. Too often, my peers - other prof's will make an easy class/test/etc to make everyone happy and pass that buck forward (after all, admin is happiest when the customers are happiest). Are we really helping these students though?
I've been lucky to work with teams from Brazil, India, China, etc - these folks have been pushed in ways that would seem inhumane by the standards I'm reading in the comments. These folks are the ones that industry (and the individual for that matter) wants and will want, as they know what they are doing and are able to learn novel technologies as they emerge.
I tell my students the importance of learning how to learn, that their competition isn't in the room with them - it's thousands of miles away...They just want an 'A' for that six figure job that they have been promised. Indeed, whenever I hear that "six figure paycheck" my heart aches and I'm saddened that someone in advising/online/etc keeps pumping this idea out. In my opinion, a bit of discomfort in a synthetic environment like academia - for the possibility of a lifetime of ease now being taboo is beyond saddening.
No they didn't: https://poetsandquants.com/2020/09/26/usc-marshall-finds-stu...
Also USC is not an Ivy League university, but that's another matter.
Sure, a student can be lazy. But in most cases like these, it's that you inadvertently hit a weeder course. It's effectively a landmine.
And schools benefit from these too. It lowers GPA's, threatens loans and grants, forces you on a different path, and they still get paid for not doing their end of the implied bargain. And naturally, these "teachers" are nearly immune from criticism, which is why this story is being blasted everywhere.
I ended up switching to CS, finished all of the required courses in 4 semesters instead of the usual 6+, and graduated only 1 year late, 5 years instead of 4. I even ended up doing an independent study and NIH funded summer research as an undergraduate in CS. I got to work in a grad lab on campus, one of the few non-phd candidates.
Organic chemistry is interesting because the cognition required for it is pretty similar to the cognition required for software development. The underlying technique is about knowing fundamental puzzle pieces and putting them together in new ways to solve problems/equations. This is a generalization and the techniques are obviously distinct at higher levels. But there are strong parallels between the problem solving method and techniques in organic chemistry and software engineering.
I should have really loved organic chemistry but I didn't. I still hate it to this day, not because of the material, but because of the negative emotions associated with the class.
It's really frustrating that CS education has a strong culture, in the US, of having to teach yourself to be successful. This is true regardless of how great of a university you end up at. It's equally true at MIT and Stanford as it is at any state University. I understand the motivation to foster an environment of students passionate to learn on their own, but forcing them doesn't accomplish that, it just pushes the issue to the next year. I understand the need to make students learn that at a certain point in their academic journey, they need to be comfortable teaching themselves because no one else will really have an answer for them. This gets warped into this fear based teaching method of encouraging the idea that anything less than a B means failure but at the same time getting an A is impossible unless you're a prodigy. It's very damaging to the mental health of the students. Professors dismissing this fact shouldn't teach because they clearly can't foster a healthy environment for students.
I don't know if that's true for every university, but it was true for mine, a respected R1, top 20 math, top 30 CS, physics, top 50 Bio, Chem program in the country. It was true for the 300+ level classes in biology and chemistry as well as math and CS.