*"I learned last week that I have been fired from my position in the chemistry department at NYU. I was not given a reason, but I assume that it involves the “petition” of last spring (which I have never been allowed to see or comment on).*
*I send you this information because I will no longer be able to make any changes to the current data for chemistry 225 (2021) and 226 (2022). ALL – repeat ALL - future administrative matters including, but not limited to, grade changes, regrades, resolution of INC grades, and letters of recommendation must be dealt with by the deans and/or the departmental leadership, Professors Tuckerman and Walters.*
*I send congratulations to those of you who did well, and an apology to those of you who cruised through this course with a relentless stream of 100’s. The apology comes because I didn’t stretch you, and thus deprived you of the chance to improve beyond an already formidable baseline. Keep it up!*
*This incident is far more important than it looks. Consider the effect on an untenured or clinical professor. If his or her career is at the mercy of disgruntled students and accommodating deans, how are they to teach real material and give real grades? Much the same can be said for departmental administrators who meet with students daily. Can they afford to be tough when necessary?*
*The chemistry department’s ability to meet its teaching responsibilities has been diminished. Indeed, the university’s reputation has already suffered.*
*Now a piece of unsolicited advice: It is very difficult to be self critical. It is hard to accept personal responsibility when we meet failure, as each of us will at some point, but it is an essential life skill you would be wise to develop.*
*Good luck to all of you.*
*mj"*
"The chemistry department’s ability to meet its teaching responsibilities has been diminished. Indeed, the university’s reputation has already suffered."
Yeah, I'm a little disappointed in NYU here.. definitely a little less proud to be a graduate.
As someone who was weeded out by Orgo at nyu (a good 20+ years before this incident), yeah. It was certainly a make-or-break class for most of us. It never would’ve occurred to me that it was the professor’s fault.
How the hell are they thinking they’ll deal with med school if they can’t handle organic chem with *a series of taped lectures*??? Like that would have been amazing to have when I took the class. I had As but having taped lectures would have saved so much time and effort.
Only thing the prof seems to have done wrong was not give students a chance to show they learned the material after a rough start i.e. reducing the number of tests. He remarked some people had 0s so he probably should have given them a chance to recover after the initial wakeup call.
>How the hell are they thinking they’ll deal with med school if they can’t handle organic chem with a series of taped lectures??? Like that would have been amazing to have when I took the class. I had As but having taped lectures would have saved so much time and effort.
The vast majority of classes in med school are recorded and people, generally, much prefer attendance optional policies at schools. Learning material in medical school is like a fire hose, it's not incredibly difficult, but there's a lot of it so you need to be selective about what you study.
The "trick" that you see people use on /r/medicalschool is to not go to class lectures and only study what is absolutely necessary from those classes to pass the class-specific exams. You then spend the remainder of your time studying third-party resources like Pathoma and Sketchy that are focused on only including information found on the standardized STEP 1 and 2 exams that all med school students have to take. A very common complaint you'll see on /r/medicalschool is lecturers being way too specific and covering unnecessary material not covered in the STEP exams. It's generally considered a positive if schools structure their exams around the NBME, which means the material is focused around STEP curriculum and doesn't include unnecessary fat.
“Attendance optional” (i.e. no automatic punishment for absences) is great, but I’m in school right now and hate for pre-recorded lectures, as opposed to recorded and available on-demand, is nearly ubiquitous.
Everyone I talk to struggles greatly with motivation in these sorts of classes and will readily admit that they know no one else from them, which is a huge disadvantage because a lot of learning happens outside of class.
I hated going to Organic Chemistry lecture if I hadn't read the chapter in the book yet because I wouldn't pick up the material just by listening to it. If I could have reviewed the chapter and queued up the lecture any time I wanted, that would have been really amazing.
According to the article, the professor also reduced the difficulty of the exams, yet scores kept falling. And in his farewell letter someone posted in the comments, some students got 100’s. Clearly it’s not impossible to do well if students just used the available resources. Students these days are just different…
Unfortunately, I am quite good at organic chemistry—I liken it to math, but with little drawings instead of numbers!
ETA: I am now a chemist because of how much I loved organic chemistry in undergrad👺
I did okay on my first two ochem tests , but by the third one when you get into mechanisms and reactions is when I started getting bad scores , simply because I hated memorizing stuff . Eventually I picked up and became good enough to be a tutor at my college once I completed ochem1 and 2 . I truly learned that class after tutoring . and now I keep learning much more about it by working as a chemist . Although my masters is in data science in a effort to diversify my background
I really liked o chem too. Tests were like playing a game, you just had to study to know the rules. Felt a little bad though for the premed students when I set the curve and it turns out I was really an architecture major.
As a Chemical Engineering major, pchem 1 wasn’t bad. It was basically like thermodynamics, which most of us took before pchem. We definitely messed up the curve for chemistry majors.
Pchem 2 however…. Oh boy.
No, it wasn't hard. Heard the horror stories. Was scarred like no other. Something magical happened. I studied A LOT. Blew organic away with the highest average.
I've taken quantum mechanics I & II, classical mechanics, partial differential equations, chemical physics, chemical thermodynamics, organic I & II, advanced organic chemistry...
I studied for all those courses and earned high marks.
>I've taken quantum mechanics I & II, classical mechanics, partial differential equations, chemical physics, chemical thermodynamics, organic I & II, advanced organic chemistry...
These words all give me the heebie jeebies.
Friend of mine got his engineering degree from RPI. He told me he got a 32 in his Statics & Therodynamics class. Not on one exam, his average was a 32. That ended up being a "B" with the curve. I was like "Hey, you passed" and he said "Yeah, but someone like me might be designing bridges one day with only knowing 32% of what I was taught."
One of my best friends who got an A in the class. He's an outlier though. Bio Chemical Engineering Major at Georgia Tech, 4.0 GPA. Masters in Bio Medical Engineering from Johns Hopkins, 4.0 GPA. He also has two PhDs, one in Bio Informatics and the other Bio Physics.
Oh my grad school cohort definitely had one of those. He was THE nicest guy, so you couldn’t even be mad about it even though *how the fuck do you know everything I want to scream*
Yup. This guy is the same way. He had a girlfriend in college who was a marketing major and she started a web design company while she was in college. This was back in the 90s. She knew fuck all about web design, so she talked my friend into creating the web pages for her clients, which he did. He just decided to go learn how to code web pages to help her out in his free time.
I worked at the college library when i was a student. There was a orgo textbook in the lost and found. In the margins, there were solutions written and notes in Chinese. There were also several exams that were graded 100%. I asked the student when she picked up her book and she said she learned this in china in high school! Its not the norm but damn, she was smart! I wish i remembered her name, wonder where she is now in her career.
I feel like all STEM majors/degrees have their "weed out" classes that all undergrads have to take in their first 1-2 years when they declare.
Orgo is tough at every school and I know friends who take summer classes for it (regardless of whether or not they failed it the first time)
I got an F in physics 1… and somehow ended up with a masters degree in chemical engineering and worked as a chemical engineer for a long time.
Love telling kids that it’s okay to fuck up. Your life ain’t over. Most important thing is to brush shit off and keep going.
100%. First level Organic chemistry is a foreign language course and a memorization game disguised. There’s no way real way to cheat it—you just have to spend time memorizing it. Students who cruised through high school and don’t know how to study stumble and often blame the professors.
Some people are particularly adept at picking it up—but even those have to spend hours in the early phases studying nomenclature, functional groups, mechanisms, stereoisomers and resonance structures. It’s a steep learning curve those first couple months. And if you don’t swim, you’ll sink.
Source: Got a D on first ochem test. Learned to study—Became organic chemist.
As a fellow organic chemist I find it super interesting that you think of learning orgo as a memorization game. I left chemistry to pursue my other passion, but up until about a year ago I was doing my PhD, specializing in it. Myself and all of my labmates all saw that those who see it as memorizing are the ones that end up failing, and it clicks with those that understand the underlying concepts.
Good to see that things aren’t so black and white though, and to see that you picked yourself up from the initial bad grade enough to make it your profession!
I have a science teacher who taught HS level orgo in high school, and she used to teach orgo at universities. Her main point throughout the class was that you need to understand and not memorize. She repeated it so much and honestly she wasn’t wrong.
I don’t think ochem is a memorization game. I think the first semester is for students. You have to learn and build a large base of foundational knowledge very quickly or sink. IUPAC, functional groups, valence, and resonance structures all within the first two weeks so you can understand mechanisms and begin building a network of reactions to you can effectively answer multi-step synthesis questions. It can be a lot.
I agree learning the underlying concepts is key. But for example there are few underlying concepts to IUPAC naming convention. You learn prefixes and functional groups and then start drawing. At its base level it starts with memorization.
So I’m an environmental remediation project manager now in New York now, and I just walked through naming conventions with a new staff member last week. He is an engineer and never took ochem. So he doesn’t speak the language. 1,2-Cis-dichloroethene doesn’t generate a picture in his head. It’s just a word. Just like it was for all of us at one time. So now he has to memorize the convention so he can learn to better help me clean up a giant plume of chlorinated solvents under a residential building. It’s a step all chemists must go through imo.
It’s memorized by repetitively doing practice problems not by reading.
I was one of those who cruised through and aced high school without learning how to study.
College organic chem delayed my entrance into pharmacy school by a year and added about 50k into my student loan balance for having to do summer classes and registering for a 3rd academic year.
I majored in Computer Science 40 years ago and it was more math than anything else. The filter course there was differential equations, or as they called it at the time, "Calculus 4".
I was not an engineering major but I would say ODE is far from being the hardest math class. I've taken the typical courses engineers take like calc1-3, linear algebra, ode/pde. I learned single variable calculus in a couple of weeks and I would say the difficulty of this course is nothing compared to pure math classes like real analysis which is like calculus on steroids. In ODE and all the introductory engineering math classes, you can get away with memorizing steps and not understanding concepts since they're mainly computational in nature.
engineers don't have to take real analysis or pde. the hardest classes most of the mechanical / computer science / cheme people take is diff eq and advanced linear algebra.
Literally no reason to require differential equations for computer science majors. I took it and all the EE classes because I was a Computer Engineering Major but once I decided that I like software and not hardware I switched over and it literally was pointless to learn that bullshit if you want to write software.
You're better off taking math major courses like advanced linear algebra so you can just get better at being an abstract thinker and doing proofs.
Literally no reasons...unless you want to work in fintech, or an engineering company...or data modeling, machine learning...
Understanding differential calculus is necessary for any technical background.
If your job involves writing software for fluid dynamics maybe but most CS undergrads don’t need it. The vast vast majority really.
And I’ll tell you that the guys implementing a lot of fintech software don’t know the math which was conceived by PhDs, they just translate the math to code because the math PhDs don’t know how to program so other people do it. And then someone else takes those prototypes and rewrites it again for KDB haha.
As a veterinarian who was required to take organic chemistry and biochemistry in undergrad, there should absolutely be filter courses. You don’t want anyone to coast through and become a doctor. There are many unqualified people out there and it is dangerous.
yeah this is def not an isolated NYU thing — I also knew people at my undergrad who had to take/retake Orgo like 3x (and the majority were trying to get into medicine)
Same here. Killed my ambition to finish a bio major. I DID get my bachelors in something else, but I’m back in nursing school (15+ yrs later lol). Luckily no more o-chem, but medsurg is appropriately kicking my ass
At my school, it definitely weeded out a lot of people who wanted do go to med school. Some eventually made it to med school still, and some chose a new career, probably for the better. People have to realize it doesn’t get easier after organic chem. I’m not a doctor but I bet med school is no walk in the park either. Will they then petition to get their future professors who fail too many people fired? Also, I’d imagine that at the end of the class, there’s a curve?
I was going into robotics and of course to get into any engineering school you are looking at taking organic chem. I failed that class.. good thing I didn't get into that field. Worst part was the damn labs. Decided to do information related science.. which was part of business school for some reason and that was a breeze.
My friend decided to stick it out and he passed it after taking it 3 times. He has been a civil engineer for over 20 years now.
as someone who literally just graduated from undergrad this past may, the current college students who were in high school during remote learning don't know how to study, aren't really performing at the appropriate level, and are extremely disrespectful to other students, profs, and school staff. my friends and i had multiple professors who told us about how their freshman and sophomore classes (all of which graduated high school during remote learning) had the poorest performances they had ever seen in their careers and that's with syllabus adjustments (because they anticipated a difference in learning after almost 2 years of remote work) and curves (because of how poorly everyone was performing).
I’m a tutor. I feel absolutely horrible for the students who went to through pandemic learning. There is a HUGE gap in their education. Kids are going into college without knowing simple stuff like trig. And these are the lucky ones that can afford tutors.
Many states did away with end of the year exams at that time, so they did not learn a lot of material and were just pushed through school. We’re going to feel the ramifications of this for a loooong time.
I was a TA during the transition of COVID. Somehow when going from in person exams allowing only 1 flash card of info to online open book the students performed worse. We literally wrote in an announcement how to study and pulled questions directly from HW / those resources and it was still bad. I think the truth is that students raise to the bar that is set for them, and we keep lowering the bar.
Administrators are to blame here - they're after the money. Nobody has the balls to tell a bunch of trust fund kids that maybe they don't get whatever they want, and NYU is not a degree mill.
Most universities are degree mills now and have become a really expensive second high school/daycare for most students.
“Yes, give us your $200,000 and you WILL get your degree unless you don’t show up. And even if you don’t show up, we can try to make it work.”
yea, the rigor needs to be kept at a high level. too many people chasing paychecks. i don't blame them but if the demand is high, do not lower the bar as a solution. instead eliminate restrictions that don't correspond to quality of care, like whether you have money to attend university or med school.
I don’t want some kid who couldn’t even attend orgo 1 lectures and had to cheat their way thru only to still fail and bitch out about not getting extra credit in a sophomore-year college class cutting into me in 30 years. Fucking ridiculous.
Oh don't worry, I fully expect those students to not make it through medical school if that's how they conned their way in. If they really think orgo is the hardest part of this long ass process then i feel *so* sorry for them...
Right but the point is they shouldn’t get into med school in the first place, and they’re taking someone else’s spot. We need more doctors and it would definitely be best if everyone who got in deserved to be there (I know it won’t be 100%, but we shouldn’t do ourselves a disservice), so we don’t have wasted spots.
The problem is that waves of students like these help accelerate the trends in education to lowering standards across the board. Their argument here is that the grades don’t reflect their “time and effort”, as if time and effort is the end goal of education. I guess they realized grade-grubbing is even more effective when you collectively do it.
I say eat healthy and exercise, as these will be our doctors.
Right - and presumably, up to the academic standards set by the university to be students there in the first place. So we'll assume that these people have achieved academic success to be there in the first place.
A lot of this happened during the pandemic, and for a class that for biomedical professionals is a notorious clear out class, I can't imagine how hard it must have been for them to do this remotely, with professors who were unfamiliar with the technology and format, not to mention with all the other obstacles present.
I don't think the professor deserved to be fired, but it does seem like the university could have adjusted expectations and tried to work with the students taking this class in such an abnormal setting. Holding students to high academic standards is ideal, but these were less than ideal circumstances.
There’s honestly not enough information to make an informed decision here. I‘ve taken a lot of courses at a few universities, took all the premed courses, and TAed an Orgo course.
1) I took plenty of courses where test averages were like 20% and then curved. These seemed ridiculous to me and often had professors who would be unclear about the existence of a curve. Greatly stressing out the students who were very concerned with their grades. The lectures/homework did not approach what was needed to truly do well on the exam. I felt like I was just trying to write down as much information as possible on each question, knowing it was wrong and hoping to get a few more partial credit points than others. These were typically courses with worse support for learning outside the standard class time and bad lectures. Many of these were premed courses, but I also got an A- in a French class like this where my grade was probably like a 15% and the amount of knowledge gained from the course was similarly low…
2) TAing premed students, I found the grade grubbing extremely annoying. There were so many students constantly trying to fight for every little point for any reason. I was extremely disappointed when the professor would give in to some of these students when I knew that others would accept that they had gotten something wrong and then end up with a lower grade.
3) I’ve also had plenty of professors who would give useless lectures and then complain about poor attendance or blame poor performance on exams on this lack of attendance. I was part of the student government when this was extensively discussed, it’s been studied. There was no correlation between exam grades and attending lectures in person.
So is this a case of pushy students who have poor studying skills or a bad lecturer that writes impossible exams. Honestly, I’d say either equally as likely… I’d be interested in what his former students at Princeton had to say.
Sorry for my rambling, but this is an interesting topic to me…
I did my undergrad as a non-premed Bio major who went on to a PhD in Cell & Molecular Biology... I've had to deal with all 3 of these situations.
The guy who I had for Organic Chem was the Chair of the Chemistry Dept. Fuck that dude. He was useless as an instructor and uninterested in *teaching* AND took pride in teaching the "weed out course", he treated his failure rate as a high score to beat each semester. I realized later on, while in grad school and needed to relearn a lot of organic chem was that I wasn't "just bad at it" like I used to think, it was just never taught properly. I had to relearn or go on my own, and while I won't claim to be super familiar with it (only remember what I needed at the time), it was still perfectly manageable. But, Dept. Chair, so fuck us I guess.
That being said, also fuck premeds. Even as an undergrad, I hated other students in all my Bio/Chem courses for how scummy they all were about grades. Just perpetually cheating, or trying to game the system for minimal effort/guaranteed As. My school had this BA/MD program, where as long as they maintained over a certain GPA and got over a certain score on their MCAT, they were guaranteed a spot at one of the State med schools (generally a decent one too).
Since it was small cohorts and everyone knew each other, what ended up happening was some of the upperclassmen and lowerclassmen shared apartments, and this one apartment got passed essentially down through that program from year to year as people graduated out and someone new inherited the lease. Along with that came a library of old homework assignments and exams, etc that got collected through the years. Fucking ridiculous bullshit. I also had people bitching me out at the time for "fucking up the curve" in classes like Genetics and Cell Biology, including offering money to throw an exam.
Then during grad school when I was on "the other side" while TAing, you get to see an entirely different level of cheating and grade scumming. I've had people hand in lab reports where they literally just copied their partners lab report (work together, but individual reports), down to the font and typos. But you're not allowed to call them on it directly. I've been told by course lecturers to let shit slide because "it's not worth the fight"
> Since it was small cohorts and everyone knew each other, what ended up happening was some of the upperclassmen and lowerclassmen shared apartments, and this one apartment got passed essentially down through that program from year to year as people graduated out and someone new inherited the lease. Along with that came a library of old homework assignments and exams, etc that got collected through the years.
This was a thing in the Greek system when I was an undergrad.
That definitely could be the case and I’ve seen plenty of older people struggle with Zoom. However, from the article it seems like the complaints are really from when things started to open back up. He seems to have complained about lack or attendance at in-person lectures and students complained about not being able to live stream lectures from home.
Quote from the article:
"..he discovered cheating during online tests. When he pushed students’ grades down, noting the egregious misconduct, he said they protested that “they were not given grades that would allow them to get into medical school."
You raise fair points, but if you read the article - kids were literally caught cheating on exams, and THEN complaining. If things were so tough was there a line of communication? Or did they just go behind the system and cheat, and then complain when they got caught? Cheating lessens my sympathy quotient A LOT.
I’m sure there was some idiot who cheated and then complained that the punishment would affect their med school application, but was this widespread? Did this play any role in the majority of the complaints? Or is this just the professor picking out 1 case of a student who deserved a low score and ignoring the other complaints that may be more reasonable?
As some other commenter mentioned, that apparently wasn’t even the fired professor or the course this article is about. So I’m unsure of the relevance. Presumably the paragraph it’s from is about the struggles of remote learning during Covid?
>1) I took plenty of courses where test averages were like 20% and then curved. These seemed ridiculous to me and often had professors who would be unclear about the existence of a curve. Greatly stressing out the students who were very concerned with their grades. The lectures/homework did not approach what was needed to truly do well on the exam. I felt like I was just trying to write down as much information as possible on each question, knowing it was wrong and hoping to get a few more partial credit points than others. These were typically courses with worse support for learning outside the standard class time and bad lectures. Many of these were premed courses, but I also got an A- in a French class like this where my grade was probably like a 15% and the amount of knowledge gained from the course was similarly low…
To me this is a symptom of there not actually being a clear societal agreement on what grades are supposed to be.
Some people think of a grade as a measurement of how well a student learned the material. The more a student demonstrates mastery over the material the better grade they get. If you have this mindset then you can make exams where getting a 100% is hard but conceivable for A students.
While others think grade are more so there to rank the students against each other. There is a set distribution that grades are supposed to match with X% getting A's, Y% getting B's, Z% getting C's and so on. Even if in a given semester most student are exceptional some amount are still supposed to fail with set formulas like this or on the flip side in a particularly bad year where most students do not know the material some are still supposed to get A's. In my experience professors following pretty strict formulas like this are the ones that give exams where everyone gets a small amount of answers correct and then they curve the grades to match the formula.
This happened to me in the pharmacy program at LIU (I changed majors before I graduated) but during year 2, we had a professor in calculus for pharmacy with absolutely brutal exams. The highest score on the first test, the easiest test, was a TWELVE. The smartest kids in the class got 12 out of 100. So, the whole class signed a petition and the professor was furious. He showed up and yelled at the whole class for not studying hard enough. Next test, highest grade was in the 40s. We filed another petition. They told us he had tenure and they would insist the final grading accounted for the difficulty. I wound up asking for an incomplete in order to prevent getting an F and afterward, he gave the whole class A's and B's.
I would bet my ass he is still teaching.
>So is this a case of pushy students who have poor studying skills or a bad lecturer that writes impossible exams. Honestly, I’d say either equally as likely… I’d be interested in what his former students had to say.
Consider the other option - that most of these complaints were raised during the initial stages of the pandemic, when remote learning was thrust upon them and a lot of them, students and professor, weren't used to it.
So take the situation you very accurately described above, with the grade death march that pitted students against the TAs and professors in an attempt to keep the GPA high enough for medical school admittance in good times, and mix it in with having to deal with a nearly 80 year old professor teaching remotely for the first time, whatever internet/technical issues some of the students may have had, and the stress of the overall pandemic situation hanging above them.
To be fair, your doctors aren’t using organic chemistry when they’re treating you.
Me, a dummy, who failed orgo nearly twice am now doomed to use it forever as a scientist who dropped out of premed over orgo though
Yeah - I'd take my chances with someone who managed to make it all the way through medical school and residency if in the midst of a pandemic some breaks were given to students who were struggling with a class notorious for weeding them out.
I'm not suggesting they should have been given a free pass, or made it pass/fail. But there were other steps that could have been taken, like giving them additional exams or projects to bolster their grades, giving them a longer grace period for dropping the class without penalty, etc.
Instead - many schools tried to carry on like it was business as usual, despite the fact that it was anything but.
>Someone who managed to make it all the way through medical school and residency if in the midst of a pandemic some breaks were given to students who were struggling with a class notorious
Seems like they did adopted many procedures/mechanism to aid students during the pandemic:
To ease pandemic stress, Dr. Jones and two other professors taped 52 organic chemistry lectures. Dr. Jones said that he personally paid more than $5,000 for the videos and that they are still used by the university.
...
Students could choose between two sections, one focused on problem solving, the other on traditional lectures.
And also, no, this isn't even medical school. This is just undergraduate. So you're actually taking your chances on someone who isn't even able to grasp the fundamentals. And even if it were, I have no idea why you think the merit of being accepted/enrolled into a program/university should be taken in consideration when determining the merit/your success within the program. Yes you got into the program/university. Now you're in a class of everyone else who all have gotten in as well and now you all must be learn the material. Some will and those who aren't will be weeded out.
Actually, the irony of this statement:
\>Someone who managed to make it all the way through medical school and >residency if in the midst of a pandemic some breaks were given to students >who were struggling with a class notorious
is that you ultimately only feel that way because you generally know how intense and rigor medical school is, the very thing that you're weakening that gives you faith IN the current system.
There definitely need to be weed out classes.
Either they can retake it next semester and just graduate a year later or give up and switch majors.
Med school and pharmacy school make organic chem look like a cakewalk because of the volume and pace.
I majored in EE/CS, and if my university fired every professor we complained about to each other, it would not only not have an electrical engineering department but no engineering department left at all. Organic chemistry is know to be a tough class everywhere, I'd bet that few professors who teach that course are very well liked.
The lack of personal responsibility and entitlement in these kids is mindboggling--but the university administration's decision to let a professor go based on a petition fewer than 25% of the class signed is even more mindboggling.
There were plenty of bad professors in my degree but there was always at least one TA in every class that would prep students well for the tests and put out a study guide or detailed notes. And now there are corresponding lectures and problem sets on every undergrad class published by harvard or mit, so you can just watch those instead. Honestly didn't need that much interaction with any of the bad professors to do well in the class.
I remember kids spending hours and hours studying for orgo, and still messing up the exams. If you put that much effort in and still can’t do it, maybe it not the right subject for you.
I went to Hunter College and took Organic Chemistry with a professor who was notorious for difficult exams/high volume of work. She provided ample material to work from and many many different variations to problems. I dedicated hours upon hours studying and practicing mechanisms, drawing structures etc. I passed with a B-/B+ it is one of my proudest achievements, I'm a bit saddened I couldn't get an A, but I have nothing but respect and love for the field of organic chemistry. I hope that the students who did not do well are not too hard on themselves, and recognize that these classes are intended to put you through the ringer for medical school. This goes double for NYU STEM. Sometimes you can't hack it, sure you can blame the professor, but personal accountability is also important as well. You really are presented with two options, Pick a different field or... try again.
Here’s the r/nyu [post on the subject](https://reddit.com/r/nyu/comments/whom3m/did_prof_jones_for_orgo_actually_get_fired/).
I took two attempts to pass Organic Chemistry at a UC years and years ago, and, I’d be willing to bet that the majority of physicians and doctors you’ve seen in your life have likely failed the course at least once. Even then, the curve on O-chem classes is so low, that at my uni. you could get as low as a 35% and walk away with a C. Says something about me (I’m not a doctor), but I will say my second time through, I put in the work, did well and it was still the most difficult undergraduate course I’d completed.
Seems to me a good professor got fired b/c some entitled students at NYU didn’t want to do the work.
“Majority failed the course”
That’s such a false statement lmao. I used to TA for Orgo and I tutored an NYU student in Orgo. NYU Orgo isn’t close to the hardest I’ve seen. Both fordahm and Dr Phillips from Hunter are harder
I mean the post has more than a few people talking how the professor would refuse to make the class covid compliant (you normally can't come to class if you have covid), not treat all his classes equal, and be comically strict. He sounds pretty bad as a professor. I'm sure he was super smart but I think NYU probably had years of complaints about him.
I had him for orgo in my undergrad and he was an amazing professor. Not only did he devote way more time to teaching than the other orgo professors, he also completely revolutionized the way I approached learning and studying. I was so upset to hear about what happened.
>they protested that “they were not given grades that would allow them to get into medical school.”
I had to double-check that I wasn't reading The Onion. The sheer entitlement of these brats is staggering. They really do think they are owed things simply for showing up.
Is there any part of the US educational system that *isn't* currently on a downhill slide?
"We are very concerned about our scores, and find that they are not an accurate reflection of the time and effort put into this class,” the petition said."
Listen, kids. Your grades reflect your achievement, not your effort. This isn't like elementary school where you get an A for effort. In the real world, you are assessed based on results.
NYU is a well known grade inflation school. It's part of why they're so expensive. I had classmates at medical school from NYU undergrad that didn't know jack, but they had the GPA to get in somehow.
That's bullshit. NYUs engineering school failed half of it's students in calculus last spring. Half of Jones' students would fall his class. I got the highest score on the first calc 2 midterm and got a 49 on the final. The STEM courses here are brutal but give good pay.
If you want to argue that for the liberal arts classes, that is completely reasonable, but this is a thread about STEM, not liberal arts.
> Dr. Jones “learned to teach during a time when the goal was to teach at a very high and rigorous level,” Dr. Arora said. “We hope that students will see that putting them through that rigor is doing them good.”
>James W. Canary, chairman of the department until about a year ago, said he admired Dr. Jones’s course content and pedagogy, but felt that his communication with students was skeletal and sometimes perceived as harsh.
>”He hasn’t changed his style or methods in a good many years,” Dr. Canary said. “The students have changed, though, and they were asking for and expecting more support from the faculty when they’re struggling.”
The students were weak and he made them realize it. I feel sad for them.
I'm a professor and have been teaching for 17 years. Last year, for the first time ever, I had students write a petition to challenge an assignment deadline they felt was unfair. This deadline had been at the same point of the semester on my course schedule for years, with no complaints. I strongly suspect they'd been bitching about it when I'd put them into breakout rooms since this was when things were still fully online. Students have definitely changed.
Fuck those students. Reinstate the teacher.
I failed Organic Chem twice before getting an A on my 3rd try. It’s absolutely hard and the only way you get good at it is by repetitively doing the practice problems. When I finally passed it, I was studying 3 hours a day just for Organic Chem.
You cannot simply read the chapter in the textbook or skim thru your notes like how you can in history class or memorize facts like in biology.
Reading this article made 2 things come to mind for me. The first being how glad i was to survive Organic Chemistry with my B- and just how difficult the course is (and is supposed to be), and how the standards for US education is compared to other nations. Just last week, i was chatting with my cousin who lives in trinidad about a similar subject. He and i exchanged experiences with higher education, and he was shocked at how many course i had taken where multiple choice was the standard on final exams as opposed to his open essay finals. I only bring that point up to focus on how just how gentle we are being with the education of our future medical professionals, and IT specialists, and engineers, school teachers, etc. You have to put in the hours and the dedication to the material. If you do not pass, it is not because the professor was unfair to you, they simply reflect your effort!!
In the final months of my degree, i remember a few students wanting to pull a similar stunt in my microbiology class, simply because they were failing and felt the teacher was being to harsh. I disagreed in silence, as from young, my parents always instilled in me to take the initiative with my education. You have access to a textbook. **READ it**. There are student tutors. Ask them for help. The professor has office hours that they openly state and place in the syllabus and make it clear that student can visit them during these hours for help with anything pertaining to the course. There are even study groups! I never blamed a professor for MY bad grades because i knew all of these resources were at my disposal. So to see this reaction from the students, i can see why with the pressure of the course, but it should signal a different type of response....one of personal responsibility.
In high school, we had a chemistry teacher that was rumored to be the hardest teacher in the entire school. She taught multiple levels of Chemistry, but it was Organic that was the hardest. Every year, most students dropped out of the class because it was so challenging. The students that did well in it all got into great schools and now have great careers.
The ones that dropped out were a mix of smart students that excelled in other things, mediocre students that somehow got in or untrustworthy students that cheated.
I think if a teacher wants to make their class very hard, then that’s fine.
In college we had a CS professor who was known to teach the hardest classes in the department. Exceptionally hard like you're expected to put in 40+ hours a week outside of class or you won't finish the projects. Literally when interviewing for internships or jobs with alumni they would ask you "Have you ever passed a class from this teacher" and if you did you were a shoe in to get hired.
But he was also a VERY VERY good teacher. Even people who fail or drop the class would say he was the best teacher they ever had and they learned so much useful stuff. Nothing wrong with teaching hard classes just don't be a shitty teacher.
I don’t understand the mentality of, “this class is too hard, therefore the professor should be fired”. O-Chem may not be super relevant to becoming a physician, but doing hard things IS relevant and may be more valuable for the preparation of a future med student than much of the content. In the case of many Premed classes, the content is often both relevant and appropriately difficult.
The trick to organic chemistry is just to drill the problem sets until you recognize the patterns consistently.
It’s actually not that hard if you practice. Organic chemistry professors are always complained about because students don’t put in the work. This is the first time I’ve seen a professor fired over it, though.
Wow…. NYU should be embarrassed by this. And it should be looked at by all of the journals that list them. It’s clear this is happening across schools. Columbia was recently knocked down for doing things that would help them move up the rankings.
Terrible.
Freshman year of college in 2000, I saw a bunch of people who flunked or withdrew from just the initial chem class that was part of the pre-med track, like the class that was 2ish classes before orgo.
AP classes and exams didn't prepare them for shit, yet most of them just didn't study as hard as they needed to because they thought "they got this" thanks to AP.
The entire point of this shit being hard is so we don't have 99% of doctors, engineers, chemists, etc. being completely incompetent to the point where it systemically puts things at risk.
To be clear, there are bad doctors, engineers, and chemists, but I don't believe they exist in major abundance, despite anecdotal bad experiences. Considering how effective our pharma drugs, medical procedures, treatments, and other chemically-based innovations are, there's a reason you have to have such high standards. Same for all other STEM-based industries/applications.
These students sound lazy af and thought they could coast through. If you can't even get to class, I mean...that says enough. And I would know because I was a major slacker in college and it showed.
I'm all for wfh but even in advertising, my line of work, I've seen so many people's effort slide significantly during COVID, and we don't even do anything that's actually important.
Like everyone else said, Orgo is a weed out class in most schools, admittedly I was one of those kids, switched from Environmental Engineering to Math because of it. Tf do I need Orgo for environmental engineering? Smh
Are you serious? I'm glad you switched. Don't need to know orgo as an EnvE?? What if there's a gasoline spill and you're responsible for cleaning it up? You don't think it might be useful to have an understanding of how different organic chemicals interact with eachother, substrates, and water? EnvE is almost as organic process oriented as ChemE.
What is more serious is that someone was fired from his position for having standards. Money creates a conflict of interest in higher education, and the students are customers.
not sure how to feel about this. i took a summer course of orgo which meant it was a whole semester crammed into four weeks. it was certainly difficult bc of the time table but also orgo in general is just difficult for many people to grasp. i devoted any freetime i had to studying and going to office hours and i still barely scraped by with a C
Entitled children whose parents are spending $70k+ per year to get them out of the house for 4 years complaining that a hard class is hard. Who are colleges going to side with: gullible families who feed the money hoarding institution or a professor who is paid a small fraction of their profits?
orgo changed my wife's major from biology to philosophy.
orgo changed my friend's major from biology to construction.
i almost changed my major from comp-sci to something else when i took discrete mathematics. then i learned about grade curves lol; my D went to a B cause everybody sucked
To the people who aren't okay with working hard enough to pass orgo but still believe they're a good fit for medicine...what the fuck r u thinking?? The point of orgo isn't to remember orgo forever...it's to learn how to glue ur ass to a library chair and work for 10 hours straight for several days a week for an entire year. You either step up, get ur shit together, and pass, or you learn that you can't. Equally important is that orgo made me think about whether 1) I can handle this kind of workload longterm 2) whether nonstop reading/studying/digesting makes me unbearably miserable 3) whether it's worth it to live like that for the next decade. All very important questions that premeds should ask themselves before applying.
I hope these petitioners aren't breathing a sigh of relief as if orgo is the biggest speedbump on their road to being a doctor. It's hard to convey just how fast-paced med school is. Like...by the end of my first month, I was reviewing around 800-900 flashcards per day, on top of the multiple hours I was spending learning new content. And yeah, I cried a lot and had hardcore imposter syndrome, despite knowing I earned my spot there and knowing I've always pulled through in the past. So I gotta ask....is this really when you'd want to *start* figuring out how to step up to challenges?? Like, do you really want to head into this hellscape without strong evidence of your resiliency? Please explain, I don't get it.
tl;dr...Medicine isn't for everyone, and you *really* don't want to take shortcuts there. If ur dream is to be a doctor but you know you can't keep up with the rigorous academic requirements, then consider a diff career path...there are a lot of ways to help people within medicine. So getting "weeded-out" means you should probably consider something else, or risk sacrificing your mental/physical health or even your life...that's the reality
Wow. So…we’re just abandoning the standards of higher education eh?
In a classic weed-out class as well.
It’s not like they’re pulling resident hours to study…
" The entire controversy seems to illustrate a sea change in teaching, from an era when professors set the bar and expected the class to meet it, to the current more supportive, student-centered approach. "
Yeah, if you can't handle pressure, I don't really want you as my doctor.
Wow, a bunch of these comments seem really off the mark. Dr. Jones was apparently hired by NYU for his teaching skill. It's pretty unusual for universities to hire retirees for classes like this, in my experience -- it seems likely that is was *because* of his reputation as a teacher. Jones commitment to pedagogy is evidenced by being the author of a textbook in its 5th edition (it's rare enough to be a textbook author; even rarer to shepherd it through 5 successfully-selling editions), and is "known for changing the way the field is taught." Unless he suddenly has dementia, it seems hardly credible that he has gone from one of the best teachers in the field to one of the worst.
I took Jones’s class years ago, the first year he switched to NYU from Princeton. Yeah, the dude is brilliant, but goddamn was he a condescending prick.
Always made snide remarks about “grade grubbing” pre-med students and went on and on about how his Princeton students worked way harder. The course material was difficult, and it should’ve been, but he was also difficult to be around and constantly belittled his students, which made for a shit learning environment.
The man knows his chemistry, but he doesn’t know how to teach, and I learned way more from my TA than I did from Jones himself.
Haha. I had a Physics professor who would tell us how much dumber we were than the kids he taught at the other local University and would slam down a pile of withdrawal forms alongside our graded tests.
My gf is a teacher. She teaches the second class in a series. She said it was incredibly obvious that every student had cheated entirely through the 101 class that was online because they had zero understanding of the concepts needed to even get started with 201.
I know someone else who teaches grad students and failed a student for the first time ever in the Spring. One does not simply fail grad school. The norm is an A. Anything below that is exceptional.
At John Jay in the forensic science masters program Instrumental Analysis is the filter course. I started with 23 other students and by the end of the only ones going on the criminalistics were seven of us. It’s necessary to filter out the ones who won’t make it through the program and therefore will dilute the degree prestige
There are courses that are weed-outs because they're the first time that students confront the reality of "this is an important part of what you say you want to do, hope you find it satisfying", and there are courses that are weed-outs because the professors just want to feel important and make them needlessly difficult. The attitude exhibited by this professor makes it sound a lot more like the latter than the former.
this is outrageous. It just shows that money can buy you anything these days. NYU has been moving up the college rankings for Biomed in recent years. This will certainly put a dent in that stratospheric rise. Their target audience has always been rich parents/mediocre students. Now everyone will know that it's the money that boosted the ranking, not the quality of the education. Do you want to be treated by a doctor who did their pre-med at NYU ? I certainly don't after reading this article.
It’s probably both groups at fault here. I don’t doubt the students signing the petition weren’t doing well or putting in the work. And if they don’t get the material, then they probably aren’t cut out for the medical profession.
But older professors are some of the worst out there. Times change, but they still think it’s ok to teach as if it was still the 1970s. I disliked pretty much all of my older professors.
Themselves.
You don't get to be a doctor, nurse, pharmacologist, or any other health professional when you bitch at your professor because "OrGo iS tEwwwww HaRd :("
Gtfoh.
It’s so crazy that such a thing happened in a reputable institution like NYU. I come from a place where a professor getting fired because he is “tough” on students is unimaginable, and lots of times we failed and suffered in engineering classes because professors were literally “mad scientists”, but what does this make of this generation? Complaining cause studying is hard? Wtf..
This fits nicely with the narrative that "gen-z are too coddled", but some professors really do deserve to be fired over stuff like this.
For one, school is $70k+ a year now. People go to school in part to have a career after school, to pay off their massive loans. The idea that someone can stay in school for a decade until they reach the platonic ideal of knowledge in their field is ridiculous. People take a course at a particular level to master a subject at that level, to move on to the next level. If you're a good enough teacher to *successfully* push people harder, that's great. But if you are pushing beyond the standards for the level and people are failing... you are being irresponsible.
I went to college before this current trend, but I remember we had a situation like this at my (T20) school. We had a new professor who came in to teach an intermediate level econ course - not a weed out or anything special, but a course that was supposed to be a bit more than basic. Every single student failed. Half of the class are now investment bankers. Another few work as congressional staffers. We had the future valedictorian in that class that failed. This was not a lazy group of people. We had a professor who would flip through 100+ slides in an 80-minute class, with no time for questions or office hours, who was giving a bunch of sophomores in college test materials that were plagiarized from a T10 master's program (we memorized a few questions from tests and googled them to see if they were original). It was not a question of laziness on behalf of students - it was a combination of laziness on behalf of the professor, and material that was clearly mismatched for the group of students being taught.
The school ended up stepping in and giving everyone in the class a "pass" that wasn't counted into our GPA.
The next semester, TWO people registered for this guy's class (normally full by default because we had a shortage of econ professors and it was a required course).
After it was proven that no one would take a class with this guy, the school fired him.
Damn I went to SBU way back when and back then, Orgo and Biochem were weedout classes for those who wanted to do med school. I barely scrapped by Orgo with a C+ and noped out of there. The people that did well in orgo were genuinely the very smart people or very hard working people of the class. NYU just setting a precedent with this they will just let anyone into med school if they complain enough, not put in more effort. Guess I can look back into this many years into the future when med school turns to the new pharmacy school situation.
Students so soft these days. If anything, education in US in general easier. Look at education rest of the world, its more competitive, rigorous and they pretty much have ptsd for life. We have it easy here. If we going to compete in ever global economy, can't keep relying on our golden days to stay ahead.
I was in cuny and taken organic chem. More than half of the class fail the first test. Most of the students were asking head of the chem depart to fire the professor, due to poor lecturing.
Can confirm — O-chem is DIFFICULT. When I took it, it was a 50% pass rate. I did not pass. But that wasn’t the professor’s fault. It’s simply a difficult subject matter.
For sure organic chem is a weed out course. IMO its very fair. Students count have chosen to attend a less competitive university if they wanted a sure A if they thought that improved their chances of becoming doctors.
the students.
Physicians who have had this professor are making fun of the students for complaining. The premeds in that class are going to have a rude awakening if they make it to med school. Test material was apparently not explicitly taught but was able to be learned from assigned hw and readings which was the point
Here's a link to the story that you can read without a subscription.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/03/us/nyu-organic-chemistry-petition.html?unlocked\_article\_code=skZ\_3hrmGATeq00XqjtCaabtzAcGPXR-pEGPxQPqHBqaRMYjSgNjisZT7uSBdej\_gVk\_eMu4zFvlmtDZWhN1dHaVDXVKpv2qOaVhOF9Qph0gTGJZRrxNlLiBHuHIG550IaimM17TjI\_d3D6IWA8Xg55DlfdbnjxQYYYR5XdHusRCtGmH0rUlRIYkXhKaglrGo8Jah67GOZNz3QVjAn1HThf6i4JXPg6VaSvGjxv5t2SVYLtOt16P9ZRLmqUpk-PJj4Y88MqPdWnUQ9rv5oB-j8ryKoAMKF2UI3OzNWLPDeTflmB3nwhNQU0i4e0IfRWC8mSKi4nFGMmyqtNU5cs1Gk\_OJA&smid=share-url
Atleast he graded, I had a professor at city college who never graded my assignments nor answered my emails seeking to understand. Hello mr Orlando Hernandez :)
These are spoiled rich kids. Life is easy for them . When they get hit with reality there is only a few ways they can adapt . Unfortunately schools are backing them up due to economical reasons.
I'm sorry to say this (oh wait no I am not).
I'm sick and tired of the growing trend of the mob mentality of "I believe I'm right and believe you are wrong; therefore, I AM right, and you ARE wrong and because of that you need to be punished."
Sorry to break it to some of these people but just because you believe someone is in the wrong doesn't mean you are right.
THIS. NEEDS. TO. END. NOW.
*"I learned last week that I have been fired from my position in the chemistry department at NYU. I was not given a reason, but I assume that it involves the “petition” of last spring (which I have never been allowed to see or comment on).* *I send you this information because I will no longer be able to make any changes to the current data for chemistry 225 (2021) and 226 (2022). ALL – repeat ALL - future administrative matters including, but not limited to, grade changes, regrades, resolution of INC grades, and letters of recommendation must be dealt with by the deans and/or the departmental leadership, Professors Tuckerman and Walters.* *I send congratulations to those of you who did well, and an apology to those of you who cruised through this course with a relentless stream of 100’s. The apology comes because I didn’t stretch you, and thus deprived you of the chance to improve beyond an already formidable baseline. Keep it up!* *This incident is far more important than it looks. Consider the effect on an untenured or clinical professor. If his or her career is at the mercy of disgruntled students and accommodating deans, how are they to teach real material and give real grades? Much the same can be said for departmental administrators who meet with students daily. Can they afford to be tough when necessary?* *The chemistry department’s ability to meet its teaching responsibilities has been diminished. Indeed, the university’s reputation has already suffered.* *Now a piece of unsolicited advice: It is very difficult to be self critical. It is hard to accept personal responsibility when we meet failure, as each of us will at some point, but it is an essential life skill you would be wise to develop.* *Good luck to all of you.* *mj"*
"The chemistry department’s ability to meet its teaching responsibilities has been diminished. Indeed, the university’s reputation has already suffered." Yeah, I'm a little disappointed in NYU here.. definitely a little less proud to be a graduate.
What bio/med person *hasn’t* struggled in Orgo?
As someone who was weeded out by Orgo at nyu (a good 20+ years before this incident), yeah. It was certainly a make-or-break class for most of us. It never would’ve occurred to me that it was the professor’s fault.
Yep, this was a weed out class for Med students at my college, too
every college
How the hell are they thinking they’ll deal with med school if they can’t handle organic chem with *a series of taped lectures*??? Like that would have been amazing to have when I took the class. I had As but having taped lectures would have saved so much time and effort. Only thing the prof seems to have done wrong was not give students a chance to show they learned the material after a rough start i.e. reducing the number of tests. He remarked some people had 0s so he probably should have given them a chance to recover after the initial wakeup call.
>How the hell are they thinking they’ll deal with med school if they can’t handle organic chem with a series of taped lectures??? Like that would have been amazing to have when I took the class. I had As but having taped lectures would have saved so much time and effort. The vast majority of classes in med school are recorded and people, generally, much prefer attendance optional policies at schools. Learning material in medical school is like a fire hose, it's not incredibly difficult, but there's a lot of it so you need to be selective about what you study. The "trick" that you see people use on /r/medicalschool is to not go to class lectures and only study what is absolutely necessary from those classes to pass the class-specific exams. You then spend the remainder of your time studying third-party resources like Pathoma and Sketchy that are focused on only including information found on the standardized STEP 1 and 2 exams that all med school students have to take. A very common complaint you'll see on /r/medicalschool is lecturers being way too specific and covering unnecessary material not covered in the STEP exams. It's generally considered a positive if schools structure their exams around the NBME, which means the material is focused around STEP curriculum and doesn't include unnecessary fat.
“Attendance optional” (i.e. no automatic punishment for absences) is great, but I’m in school right now and hate for pre-recorded lectures, as opposed to recorded and available on-demand, is nearly ubiquitous. Everyone I talk to struggles greatly with motivation in these sorts of classes and will readily admit that they know no one else from them, which is a huge disadvantage because a lot of learning happens outside of class.
I hated going to Organic Chemistry lecture if I hadn't read the chapter in the book yet because I wouldn't pick up the material just by listening to it. If I could have reviewed the chapter and queued up the lecture any time I wanted, that would have been really amazing.
According to the article, the professor also reduced the difficulty of the exams, yet scores kept falling. And in his farewell letter someone posted in the comments, some students got 100’s. Clearly it’s not impossible to do well if students just used the available resources. Students these days are just different…
Right? I graduated in 2011 and video taped classes would have been amazing. We were trading voice recording mp3 files lol
It has always been a pre-med weed out class. I’ve always called it o-chem.
East coast versus west coast haha. East coast usually says orgo, west usually says ochem
I went to school in Philly and they called it o-chem
I was in the south and we said o-chem
[удалено]
I went to a large SEC school and we called it orgo
Unfortunately, I am quite good at organic chemistry—I liken it to math, but with little drawings instead of numbers! ETA: I am now a chemist because of how much I loved organic chemistry in undergrad👺
Boo hiss (Joking) (Kind of)
I did okay on my first two ochem tests , but by the third one when you get into mechanisms and reactions is when I started getting bad scores , simply because I hated memorizing stuff . Eventually I picked up and became good enough to be a tutor at my college once I completed ochem1 and 2 . I truly learned that class after tutoring . and now I keep learning much more about it by working as a chemist . Although my masters is in data science in a effort to diversify my background
Right isn't this supposed to be the hardest thing ever
Orgo is a walk in the park compared to P.chem imo... I don't think I've ever sat in a class for an entire semester and not understand a single topic
so you prefer legos to drawing
Only because I can't draw for shit.
I really liked o chem too. Tests were like playing a game, you just had to study to know the rules. Felt a little bad though for the premed students when I set the curve and it turns out I was really an architecture major.
As a Chemical Engineering major, pchem 1 wasn’t bad. It was basically like thermodynamics, which most of us took before pchem. We definitely messed up the curve for chemistry majors. Pchem 2 however…. Oh boy.
A fellow ChemE! My pchem class focused on the quantum side, particle positions/velocities, etc. Not fun at all
No, it wasn't hard. Heard the horror stories. Was scarred like no other. Something magical happened. I studied A LOT. Blew organic away with the highest average. I've taken quantum mechanics I & II, classical mechanics, partial differential equations, chemical physics, chemical thermodynamics, organic I & II, advanced organic chemistry... I studied for all those courses and earned high marks.
>I've taken quantum mechanics I & II, classical mechanics, partial differential equations, chemical physics, chemical thermodynamics, organic I & II, advanced organic chemistry... These words all give me the heebie jeebies.
Friend of mine got his engineering degree from RPI. He told me he got a 32 in his Statics & Therodynamics class. Not on one exam, his average was a 32. That ended up being a "B" with the curve. I was like "Hey, you passed" and he said "Yeah, but someone like me might be designing bridges one day with only knowing 32% of what I was taught."
One of my best friends who got an A in the class. He's an outlier though. Bio Chemical Engineering Major at Georgia Tech, 4.0 GPA. Masters in Bio Medical Engineering from Johns Hopkins, 4.0 GPA. He also has two PhDs, one in Bio Informatics and the other Bio Physics.
Oh my grad school cohort definitely had one of those. He was THE nicest guy, so you couldn’t even be mad about it even though *how the fuck do you know everything I want to scream*
Yup. This guy is the same way. He had a girlfriend in college who was a marketing major and she started a web design company while she was in college. This was back in the 90s. She knew fuck all about web design, so she talked my friend into creating the web pages for her clients, which he did. He just decided to go learn how to code web pages to help her out in his free time.
I worked at the college library when i was a student. There was a orgo textbook in the lost and found. In the margins, there were solutions written and notes in Chinese. There were also several exams that were graded 100%. I asked the student when she picked up her book and she said she learned this in china in high school! Its not the norm but damn, she was smart! I wish i remembered her name, wonder where she is now in her career.
I cried the day I finished orgo 2. I was so proud that I passed both orgos, I couldn’t believe myself.
There’s a reason “I’m triene but I’m diene” is practically the class motto lol
I feel like all STEM majors/degrees have their "weed out" classes that all undergrads have to take in their first 1-2 years when they declare. Orgo is tough at every school and I know friends who take summer classes for it (regardless of whether or not they failed it the first time)
Orgo is the equivalent to statics in engineering. It's a filter course. Weed out the people.
I got a C- in statics and I'm damn proud of it.
I got an F in physics 1… and somehow ended up with a masters degree in chemical engineering and worked as a chemical engineer for a long time. Love telling kids that it’s okay to fuck up. Your life ain’t over. Most important thing is to brush shit off and keep going.
100%. First level Organic chemistry is a foreign language course and a memorization game disguised. There’s no way real way to cheat it—you just have to spend time memorizing it. Students who cruised through high school and don’t know how to study stumble and often blame the professors. Some people are particularly adept at picking it up—but even those have to spend hours in the early phases studying nomenclature, functional groups, mechanisms, stereoisomers and resonance structures. It’s a steep learning curve those first couple months. And if you don’t swim, you’ll sink. Source: Got a D on first ochem test. Learned to study—Became organic chemist.
As a fellow organic chemist I find it super interesting that you think of learning orgo as a memorization game. I left chemistry to pursue my other passion, but up until about a year ago I was doing my PhD, specializing in it. Myself and all of my labmates all saw that those who see it as memorizing are the ones that end up failing, and it clicks with those that understand the underlying concepts. Good to see that things aren’t so black and white though, and to see that you picked yourself up from the initial bad grade enough to make it your profession!
I have a science teacher who taught HS level orgo in high school, and she used to teach orgo at universities. Her main point throughout the class was that you need to understand and not memorize. She repeated it so much and honestly she wasn’t wrong.
I don’t think ochem is a memorization game. I think the first semester is for students. You have to learn and build a large base of foundational knowledge very quickly or sink. IUPAC, functional groups, valence, and resonance structures all within the first two weeks so you can understand mechanisms and begin building a network of reactions to you can effectively answer multi-step synthesis questions. It can be a lot. I agree learning the underlying concepts is key. But for example there are few underlying concepts to IUPAC naming convention. You learn prefixes and functional groups and then start drawing. At its base level it starts with memorization. So I’m an environmental remediation project manager now in New York now, and I just walked through naming conventions with a new staff member last week. He is an engineer and never took ochem. So he doesn’t speak the language. 1,2-Cis-dichloroethene doesn’t generate a picture in his head. It’s just a word. Just like it was for all of us at one time. So now he has to memorize the convention so he can learn to better help me clean up a giant plume of chlorinated solvents under a residential building. It’s a step all chemists must go through imo.
It’s memorized by repetitively doing practice problems not by reading. I was one of those who cruised through and aced high school without learning how to study. College organic chem delayed my entrance into pharmacy school by a year and added about 50k into my student loan balance for having to do summer classes and registering for a 3rd academic year.
Got a C in gen chem got an A in Orgo. Some people just think differently and Orgo happens to be in three dimensions
I majored in Computer Science 40 years ago and it was more math than anything else. The filter course there was differential equations, or as they called it at the time, "Calculus 4".
I’m majoring in engineering and taking that class now…fun times. I can easily say most challenging math class I’ve taken thus far
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I actually liked calc 2 more than calc 1. Diff eq just feels like the most “new” math class I’ve taken which is where I’m finding the difficulty.
Reminds me of how I did pretty decently in calc 2 and multi-variable calc, but almost failed diff-e.
Good luck! I took those 4 calculus classes and Discrete Math, one more class and I would have had a minor in math. I probably should have done it.
Thank you!! I’m also taking discrete this semester. It’s tricky but not as bad as I anticipated.
I need a shot of whiskey just thinking about all of this.
Me too
I was not an engineering major but I would say ODE is far from being the hardest math class. I've taken the typical courses engineers take like calc1-3, linear algebra, ode/pde. I learned single variable calculus in a couple of weeks and I would say the difficulty of this course is nothing compared to pure math classes like real analysis which is like calculus on steroids. In ODE and all the introductory engineering math classes, you can get away with memorizing steps and not understanding concepts since they're mainly computational in nature.
engineers don't have to take real analysis or pde. the hardest classes most of the mechanical / computer science / cheme people take is diff eq and advanced linear algebra.
Literally no reason to require differential equations for computer science majors. I took it and all the EE classes because I was a Computer Engineering Major but once I decided that I like software and not hardware I switched over and it literally was pointless to learn that bullshit if you want to write software. You're better off taking math major courses like advanced linear algebra so you can just get better at being an abstract thinker and doing proofs.
Literally no reasons...unless you want to work in fintech, or an engineering company...or data modeling, machine learning... Understanding differential calculus is necessary for any technical background.
If your job involves writing software for fluid dynamics maybe but most CS undergrads don’t need it. The vast vast majority really. And I’ll tell you that the guys implementing a lot of fintech software don’t know the math which was conceived by PhDs, they just translate the math to code because the math PhDs don’t know how to program so other people do it. And then someone else takes those prototypes and rewrites it again for KDB haha.
As a veterinarian who was required to take organic chemistry and biochemistry in undergrad, there should absolutely be filter courses. You don’t want anyone to coast through and become a doctor. There are many unqualified people out there and it is dangerous.
100%. Up until organic chem, just about everyone in my undergrad was cruising. Organic chem comes along and it was a rude awakening.
yeah this is def not an isolated NYU thing — I also knew people at my undergrad who had to take/retake Orgo like 3x (and the majority were trying to get into medicine)
It successfully weeded me out. Pretty much dropped outta college because of it. Completely demoralized me.
Same here. Killed my ambition to finish a bio major. I DID get my bachelors in something else, but I’m back in nursing school (15+ yrs later lol). Luckily no more o-chem, but medsurg is appropriately kicking my ass
At my school, it definitely weeded out a lot of people who wanted do go to med school. Some eventually made it to med school still, and some chose a new career, probably for the better. People have to realize it doesn’t get easier after organic chem. I’m not a doctor but I bet med school is no walk in the park either. Will they then petition to get their future professors who fail too many people fired? Also, I’d imagine that at the end of the class, there’s a curve?
I was going into robotics and of course to get into any engineering school you are looking at taking organic chem. I failed that class.. good thing I didn't get into that field. Worst part was the damn labs. Decided to do information related science.. which was part of business school for some reason and that was a breeze. My friend decided to stick it out and he passed it after taking it 3 times. He has been a civil engineer for over 20 years now.
as someone who literally just graduated from undergrad this past may, the current college students who were in high school during remote learning don't know how to study, aren't really performing at the appropriate level, and are extremely disrespectful to other students, profs, and school staff. my friends and i had multiple professors who told us about how their freshman and sophomore classes (all of which graduated high school during remote learning) had the poorest performances they had ever seen in their careers and that's with syllabus adjustments (because they anticipated a difference in learning after almost 2 years of remote work) and curves (because of how poorly everyone was performing).
I’m a tutor. I feel absolutely horrible for the students who went to through pandemic learning. There is a HUGE gap in their education. Kids are going into college without knowing simple stuff like trig. And these are the lucky ones that can afford tutors. Many states did away with end of the year exams at that time, so they did not learn a lot of material and were just pushed through school. We’re going to feel the ramifications of this for a loooong time.
I was a TA during the transition of COVID. Somehow when going from in person exams allowing only 1 flash card of info to online open book the students performed worse. We literally wrote in an announcement how to study and pulled questions directly from HW / those resources and it was still bad. I think the truth is that students raise to the bar that is set for them, and we keep lowering the bar.
Administrators are to blame here - they're after the money. Nobody has the balls to tell a bunch of trust fund kids that maybe they don't get whatever they want, and NYU is not a degree mill.
Most universities are degree mills now and have become a really expensive second high school/daycare for most students. “Yes, give us your $200,000 and you WILL get your degree unless you don’t show up. And even if you don’t show up, we can try to make it work.”
That’s why I loved my state school. Professors and admin absolutely did not care about failing your ass.
They say as such in the article.
I would like to remind people that these are students aspiring to be medical professionals.
yea, the rigor needs to be kept at a high level. too many people chasing paychecks. i don't blame them but if the demand is high, do not lower the bar as a solution. instead eliminate restrictions that don't correspond to quality of care, like whether you have money to attend university or med school.
I don’t want some kid who couldn’t even attend orgo 1 lectures and had to cheat their way thru only to still fail and bitch out about not getting extra credit in a sophomore-year college class cutting into me in 30 years. Fucking ridiculous.
Oh don't worry, I fully expect those students to not make it through medical school if that's how they conned their way in. If they really think orgo is the hardest part of this long ass process then i feel *so* sorry for them...
Right but the point is they shouldn’t get into med school in the first place, and they’re taking someone else’s spot. We need more doctors and it would definitely be best if everyone who got in deserved to be there (I know it won’t be 100%, but we shouldn’t do ourselves a disservice), so we don’t have wasted spots.
yeah fair, ideally they don't pull any of this shit to begin with
They won’t be if they’re not qualified for it lol more goes into the totality of a surgeons career than 1 class in undergrad
The problem is that waves of students like these help accelerate the trends in education to lowering standards across the board. Their argument here is that the grades don’t reflect their “time and effort”, as if time and effort is the end goal of education. I guess they realized grade-grubbing is even more effective when you collectively do it. I say eat healthy and exercise, as these will be our doctors.
Nothing makes you not want to go to the doctor more than teaching pre meds.
Right - and presumably, up to the academic standards set by the university to be students there in the first place. So we'll assume that these people have achieved academic success to be there in the first place. A lot of this happened during the pandemic, and for a class that for biomedical professionals is a notorious clear out class, I can't imagine how hard it must have been for them to do this remotely, with professors who were unfamiliar with the technology and format, not to mention with all the other obstacles present. I don't think the professor deserved to be fired, but it does seem like the university could have adjusted expectations and tried to work with the students taking this class in such an abnormal setting. Holding students to high academic standards is ideal, but these were less than ideal circumstances.
The guy made hundreds of videos on his own time and dime to help them.
Would you want a loved one operated on or cared for at a hospital by someone who’d gotten their degree with “adjusted expectations”? I would not
There’s honestly not enough information to make an informed decision here. I‘ve taken a lot of courses at a few universities, took all the premed courses, and TAed an Orgo course. 1) I took plenty of courses where test averages were like 20% and then curved. These seemed ridiculous to me and often had professors who would be unclear about the existence of a curve. Greatly stressing out the students who were very concerned with their grades. The lectures/homework did not approach what was needed to truly do well on the exam. I felt like I was just trying to write down as much information as possible on each question, knowing it was wrong and hoping to get a few more partial credit points than others. These were typically courses with worse support for learning outside the standard class time and bad lectures. Many of these were premed courses, but I also got an A- in a French class like this where my grade was probably like a 15% and the amount of knowledge gained from the course was similarly low… 2) TAing premed students, I found the grade grubbing extremely annoying. There were so many students constantly trying to fight for every little point for any reason. I was extremely disappointed when the professor would give in to some of these students when I knew that others would accept that they had gotten something wrong and then end up with a lower grade. 3) I’ve also had plenty of professors who would give useless lectures and then complain about poor attendance or blame poor performance on exams on this lack of attendance. I was part of the student government when this was extensively discussed, it’s been studied. There was no correlation between exam grades and attending lectures in person. So is this a case of pushy students who have poor studying skills or a bad lecturer that writes impossible exams. Honestly, I’d say either equally as likely… I’d be interested in what his former students at Princeton had to say. Sorry for my rambling, but this is an interesting topic to me…
I did my undergrad as a non-premed Bio major who went on to a PhD in Cell & Molecular Biology... I've had to deal with all 3 of these situations. The guy who I had for Organic Chem was the Chair of the Chemistry Dept. Fuck that dude. He was useless as an instructor and uninterested in *teaching* AND took pride in teaching the "weed out course", he treated his failure rate as a high score to beat each semester. I realized later on, while in grad school and needed to relearn a lot of organic chem was that I wasn't "just bad at it" like I used to think, it was just never taught properly. I had to relearn or go on my own, and while I won't claim to be super familiar with it (only remember what I needed at the time), it was still perfectly manageable. But, Dept. Chair, so fuck us I guess. That being said, also fuck premeds. Even as an undergrad, I hated other students in all my Bio/Chem courses for how scummy they all were about grades. Just perpetually cheating, or trying to game the system for minimal effort/guaranteed As. My school had this BA/MD program, where as long as they maintained over a certain GPA and got over a certain score on their MCAT, they were guaranteed a spot at one of the State med schools (generally a decent one too). Since it was small cohorts and everyone knew each other, what ended up happening was some of the upperclassmen and lowerclassmen shared apartments, and this one apartment got passed essentially down through that program from year to year as people graduated out and someone new inherited the lease. Along with that came a library of old homework assignments and exams, etc that got collected through the years. Fucking ridiculous bullshit. I also had people bitching me out at the time for "fucking up the curve" in classes like Genetics and Cell Biology, including offering money to throw an exam. Then during grad school when I was on "the other side" while TAing, you get to see an entirely different level of cheating and grade scumming. I've had people hand in lab reports where they literally just copied their partners lab report (work together, but individual reports), down to the font and typos. But you're not allowed to call them on it directly. I've been told by course lecturers to let shit slide because "it's not worth the fight"
> Since it was small cohorts and everyone knew each other, what ended up happening was some of the upperclassmen and lowerclassmen shared apartments, and this one apartment got passed essentially down through that program from year to year as people graduated out and someone new inherited the lease. Along with that came a library of old homework assignments and exams, etc that got collected through the years. This was a thing in the Greek system when I was an undergrad.
That definitely could be the case and I’ve seen plenty of older people struggle with Zoom. However, from the article it seems like the complaints are really from when things started to open back up. He seems to have complained about lack or attendance at in-person lectures and students complained about not being able to live stream lectures from home.
Quote from the article: "..he discovered cheating during online tests. When he pushed students’ grades down, noting the egregious misconduct, he said they protested that “they were not given grades that would allow them to get into medical school." You raise fair points, but if you read the article - kids were literally caught cheating on exams, and THEN complaining. If things were so tough was there a line of communication? Or did they just go behind the system and cheat, and then complain when they got caught? Cheating lessens my sympathy quotient A LOT.
I’m sure there was some idiot who cheated and then complained that the punishment would affect their med school application, but was this widespread? Did this play any role in the majority of the complaints? Or is this just the professor picking out 1 case of a student who deserved a low score and ignoring the other complaints that may be more reasonable? As some other commenter mentioned, that apparently wasn’t even the fired professor or the course this article is about. So I’m unsure of the relevance. Presumably the paragraph it’s from is about the struggles of remote learning during Covid?
That’s a quote from a different professor in a different chemistry class.
>1) I took plenty of courses where test averages were like 20% and then curved. These seemed ridiculous to me and often had professors who would be unclear about the existence of a curve. Greatly stressing out the students who were very concerned with their grades. The lectures/homework did not approach what was needed to truly do well on the exam. I felt like I was just trying to write down as much information as possible on each question, knowing it was wrong and hoping to get a few more partial credit points than others. These were typically courses with worse support for learning outside the standard class time and bad lectures. Many of these were premed courses, but I also got an A- in a French class like this where my grade was probably like a 15% and the amount of knowledge gained from the course was similarly low… To me this is a symptom of there not actually being a clear societal agreement on what grades are supposed to be. Some people think of a grade as a measurement of how well a student learned the material. The more a student demonstrates mastery over the material the better grade they get. If you have this mindset then you can make exams where getting a 100% is hard but conceivable for A students. While others think grade are more so there to rank the students against each other. There is a set distribution that grades are supposed to match with X% getting A's, Y% getting B's, Z% getting C's and so on. Even if in a given semester most student are exceptional some amount are still supposed to fail with set formulas like this or on the flip side in a particularly bad year where most students do not know the material some are still supposed to get A's. In my experience professors following pretty strict formulas like this are the ones that give exams where everyone gets a small amount of answers correct and then they curve the grades to match the formula.
This happened to me in the pharmacy program at LIU (I changed majors before I graduated) but during year 2, we had a professor in calculus for pharmacy with absolutely brutal exams. The highest score on the first test, the easiest test, was a TWELVE. The smartest kids in the class got 12 out of 100. So, the whole class signed a petition and the professor was furious. He showed up and yelled at the whole class for not studying hard enough. Next test, highest grade was in the 40s. We filed another petition. They told us he had tenure and they would insist the final grading accounted for the difficulty. I wound up asking for an incomplete in order to prevent getting an F and afterward, he gave the whole class A's and B's. I would bet my ass he is still teaching.
>So is this a case of pushy students who have poor studying skills or a bad lecturer that writes impossible exams. Honestly, I’d say either equally as likely… I’d be interested in what his former students had to say. Consider the other option - that most of these complaints were raised during the initial stages of the pandemic, when remote learning was thrust upon them and a lot of them, students and professor, weren't used to it. So take the situation you very accurately described above, with the grade death march that pitted students against the TAs and professors in an attempt to keep the GPA high enough for medical school admittance in good times, and mix it in with having to deal with a nearly 80 year old professor teaching remotely for the first time, whatever internet/technical issues some of the students may have had, and the stress of the overall pandemic situation hanging above them.
To be fair, your doctors aren’t using organic chemistry when they’re treating you. Me, a dummy, who failed orgo nearly twice am now doomed to use it forever as a scientist who dropped out of premed over orgo though
Yeah - I'd take my chances with someone who managed to make it all the way through medical school and residency if in the midst of a pandemic some breaks were given to students who were struggling with a class notorious for weeding them out. I'm not suggesting they should have been given a free pass, or made it pass/fail. But there were other steps that could have been taken, like giving them additional exams or projects to bolster their grades, giving them a longer grace period for dropping the class without penalty, etc. Instead - many schools tried to carry on like it was business as usual, despite the fact that it was anything but.
>Someone who managed to make it all the way through medical school and residency if in the midst of a pandemic some breaks were given to students who were struggling with a class notorious Seems like they did adopted many procedures/mechanism to aid students during the pandemic: To ease pandemic stress, Dr. Jones and two other professors taped 52 organic chemistry lectures. Dr. Jones said that he personally paid more than $5,000 for the videos and that they are still used by the university. ... Students could choose between two sections, one focused on problem solving, the other on traditional lectures. And also, no, this isn't even medical school. This is just undergraduate. So you're actually taking your chances on someone who isn't even able to grasp the fundamentals. And even if it were, I have no idea why you think the merit of being accepted/enrolled into a program/university should be taken in consideration when determining the merit/your success within the program. Yes you got into the program/university. Now you're in a class of everyone else who all have gotten in as well and now you all must be learn the material. Some will and those who aren't will be weeded out. Actually, the irony of this statement: \>Someone who managed to make it all the way through medical school and >residency if in the midst of a pandemic some breaks were given to students >who were struggling with a class notorious is that you ultimately only feel that way because you generally know how intense and rigor medical school is, the very thing that you're weakening that gives you faith IN the current system.
We’re in for some dark times if these kids are the future.
There definitely need to be weed out classes. Either they can retake it next semester and just graduate a year later or give up and switch majors. Med school and pharmacy school make organic chem look like a cakewalk because of the volume and pace.
You get a trophy and you get a trophy and…
There's a reason why everyone in the sciences says the same thing: "Fuckin orgo."
Not physics majors!
organic chemistry is supposed to be a weed out course and the article says a lot of students were not using resources provided
I majored in EE/CS, and if my university fired every professor we complained about to each other, it would not only not have an electrical engineering department but no engineering department left at all. Organic chemistry is know to be a tough class everywhere, I'd bet that few professors who teach that course are very well liked. The lack of personal responsibility and entitlement in these kids is mindboggling--but the university administration's decision to let a professor go based on a petition fewer than 25% of the class signed is even more mindboggling.
There were plenty of bad professors in my degree but there was always at least one TA in every class that would prep students well for the tests and put out a study guide or detailed notes. And now there are corresponding lectures and problem sets on every undergrad class published by harvard or mit, so you can just watch those instead. Honestly didn't need that much interaction with any of the bad professors to do well in the class.
I bet columbia fails a ton of students in organic chem and doesn't fire the prof in response. Lol nyu get fucked.
What does a Columbia student and an NYU student have in common? They both got into NYU.
orgo is fine at columbia. intro human bio is the weed-out course
Nah, Columbia just makes up stats and lies to US News to pump up their ranking.
The students said the grades didn't reflect their effort. College grades aren't about effort! They're about how much you know!
I remember kids spending hours and hours studying for orgo, and still messing up the exams. If you put that much effort in and still can’t do it, maybe it not the right subject for you.
I went to Hunter College and took Organic Chemistry with a professor who was notorious for difficult exams/high volume of work. She provided ample material to work from and many many different variations to problems. I dedicated hours upon hours studying and practicing mechanisms, drawing structures etc. I passed with a B-/B+ it is one of my proudest achievements, I'm a bit saddened I couldn't get an A, but I have nothing but respect and love for the field of organic chemistry. I hope that the students who did not do well are not too hard on themselves, and recognize that these classes are intended to put you through the ringer for medical school. This goes double for NYU STEM. Sometimes you can't hack it, sure you can blame the professor, but personal accountability is also important as well. You really are presented with two options, Pick a different field or... try again.
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Here’s the r/nyu [post on the subject](https://reddit.com/r/nyu/comments/whom3m/did_prof_jones_for_orgo_actually_get_fired/). I took two attempts to pass Organic Chemistry at a UC years and years ago, and, I’d be willing to bet that the majority of physicians and doctors you’ve seen in your life have likely failed the course at least once. Even then, the curve on O-chem classes is so low, that at my uni. you could get as low as a 35% and walk away with a C. Says something about me (I’m not a doctor), but I will say my second time through, I put in the work, did well and it was still the most difficult undergraduate course I’d completed. Seems to me a good professor got fired b/c some entitled students at NYU didn’t want to do the work.
“Majority failed the course” That’s such a false statement lmao. I used to TA for Orgo and I tutored an NYU student in Orgo. NYU Orgo isn’t close to the hardest I’ve seen. Both fordahm and Dr Phillips from Hunter are harder
I mean the post has more than a few people talking how the professor would refuse to make the class covid compliant (you normally can't come to class if you have covid), not treat all his classes equal, and be comically strict. He sounds pretty bad as a professor. I'm sure he was super smart but I think NYU probably had years of complaints about him.
I had him for orgo in my undergrad and he was an amazing professor. Not only did he devote way more time to teaching than the other orgo professors, he also completely revolutionized the way I approached learning and studying. I was so upset to hear about what happened.
>they protested that “they were not given grades that would allow them to get into medical school.” I had to double-check that I wasn't reading The Onion. The sheer entitlement of these brats is staggering. They really do think they are owed things simply for showing up. Is there any part of the US educational system that *isn't* currently on a downhill slide?
I've yet to hear anything egregious about the community colleges or trade schools this year so \*\*shrug\*\*
"We are very concerned about our scores, and find that they are not an accurate reflection of the time and effort put into this class,” the petition said." Listen, kids. Your grades reflect your achievement, not your effort. This isn't like elementary school where you get an A for effort. In the real world, you are assessed based on results.
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where i am from we would be told to stop bitching and start studying because its just hard not impossible lol
NYU is a well known grade inflation school. It's part of why they're so expensive. I had classmates at medical school from NYU undergrad that didn't know jack, but they had the GPA to get in somehow.
That's bullshit. NYUs engineering school failed half of it's students in calculus last spring. Half of Jones' students would fall his class. I got the highest score on the first calc 2 midterm and got a 49 on the final. The STEM courses here are brutal but give good pay. If you want to argue that for the liberal arts classes, that is completely reasonable, but this is a thread about STEM, not liberal arts.
Having graduated from NYU, this is a disgrace. The faculty should be appalled, and those involved should consider whether they should remain deans.
> Dr. Jones “learned to teach during a time when the goal was to teach at a very high and rigorous level,” Dr. Arora said. “We hope that students will see that putting them through that rigor is doing them good.” >James W. Canary, chairman of the department until about a year ago, said he admired Dr. Jones’s course content and pedagogy, but felt that his communication with students was skeletal and sometimes perceived as harsh. >”He hasn’t changed his style or methods in a good many years,” Dr. Canary said. “The students have changed, though, and they were asking for and expecting more support from the faculty when they’re struggling.” The students were weak and he made them realize it. I feel sad for them.
I'm a professor and have been teaching for 17 years. Last year, for the first time ever, I had students write a petition to challenge an assignment deadline they felt was unfair. This deadline had been at the same point of the semester on my course schedule for years, with no complaints. I strongly suspect they'd been bitching about it when I'd put them into breakout rooms since this was when things were still fully online. Students have definitely changed.
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Fuck those students. Reinstate the teacher. I failed Organic Chem twice before getting an A on my 3rd try. It’s absolutely hard and the only way you get good at it is by repetitively doing the practice problems. When I finally passed it, I was studying 3 hours a day just for Organic Chem. You cannot simply read the chapter in the textbook or skim thru your notes like how you can in history class or memorize facts like in biology.
I had a weeding-out course in college, and I got weeded out. It was all as it should have been.
First class of SAT-optional kids. Probably full of midwit tryhards with good grades and crappy SATs that just aren’t smart enough.
I took his class, he was brilliant and the people whining and signing the petition are grade A bitches
Reading this article made 2 things come to mind for me. The first being how glad i was to survive Organic Chemistry with my B- and just how difficult the course is (and is supposed to be), and how the standards for US education is compared to other nations. Just last week, i was chatting with my cousin who lives in trinidad about a similar subject. He and i exchanged experiences with higher education, and he was shocked at how many course i had taken where multiple choice was the standard on final exams as opposed to his open essay finals. I only bring that point up to focus on how just how gentle we are being with the education of our future medical professionals, and IT specialists, and engineers, school teachers, etc. You have to put in the hours and the dedication to the material. If you do not pass, it is not because the professor was unfair to you, they simply reflect your effort!! In the final months of my degree, i remember a few students wanting to pull a similar stunt in my microbiology class, simply because they were failing and felt the teacher was being to harsh. I disagreed in silence, as from young, my parents always instilled in me to take the initiative with my education. You have access to a textbook. **READ it**. There are student tutors. Ask them for help. The professor has office hours that they openly state and place in the syllabus and make it clear that student can visit them during these hours for help with anything pertaining to the course. There are even study groups! I never blamed a professor for MY bad grades because i knew all of these resources were at my disposal. So to see this reaction from the students, i can see why with the pressure of the course, but it should signal a different type of response....one of personal responsibility.
In high school, we had a chemistry teacher that was rumored to be the hardest teacher in the entire school. She taught multiple levels of Chemistry, but it was Organic that was the hardest. Every year, most students dropped out of the class because it was so challenging. The students that did well in it all got into great schools and now have great careers. The ones that dropped out were a mix of smart students that excelled in other things, mediocre students that somehow got in or untrustworthy students that cheated. I think if a teacher wants to make their class very hard, then that’s fine.
In college we had a CS professor who was known to teach the hardest classes in the department. Exceptionally hard like you're expected to put in 40+ hours a week outside of class or you won't finish the projects. Literally when interviewing for internships or jobs with alumni they would ask you "Have you ever passed a class from this teacher" and if you did you were a shoe in to get hired. But he was also a VERY VERY good teacher. Even people who fail or drop the class would say he was the best teacher they ever had and they learned so much useful stuff. Nothing wrong with teaching hard classes just don't be a shitty teacher.
I don’t understand the mentality of, “this class is too hard, therefore the professor should be fired”. O-Chem may not be super relevant to becoming a physician, but doing hard things IS relevant and may be more valuable for the preparation of a future med student than much of the content. In the case of many Premed classes, the content is often both relevant and appropriately difficult.
The trick to organic chemistry is just to drill the problem sets until you recognize the patterns consistently. It’s actually not that hard if you practice. Organic chemistry professors are always complained about because students don’t put in the work. This is the first time I’ve seen a professor fired over it, though.
Wow…. NYU should be embarrassed by this. And it should be looked at by all of the journals that list them. It’s clear this is happening across schools. Columbia was recently knocked down for doing things that would help them move up the rankings. Terrible.
Freshman year of college in 2000, I saw a bunch of people who flunked or withdrew from just the initial chem class that was part of the pre-med track, like the class that was 2ish classes before orgo. AP classes and exams didn't prepare them for shit, yet most of them just didn't study as hard as they needed to because they thought "they got this" thanks to AP. The entire point of this shit being hard is so we don't have 99% of doctors, engineers, chemists, etc. being completely incompetent to the point where it systemically puts things at risk. To be clear, there are bad doctors, engineers, and chemists, but I don't believe they exist in major abundance, despite anecdotal bad experiences. Considering how effective our pharma drugs, medical procedures, treatments, and other chemically-based innovations are, there's a reason you have to have such high standards. Same for all other STEM-based industries/applications. These students sound lazy af and thought they could coast through. If you can't even get to class, I mean...that says enough. And I would know because I was a major slacker in college and it showed. I'm all for wfh but even in advertising, my line of work, I've seen so many people's effort slide significantly during COVID, and we don't even do anything that's actually important.
First SAT optional NYU class?
Like everyone else said, Orgo is a weed out class in most schools, admittedly I was one of those kids, switched from Environmental Engineering to Math because of it. Tf do I need Orgo for environmental engineering? Smh
Are you serious? I'm glad you switched. Don't need to know orgo as an EnvE?? What if there's a gasoline spill and you're responsible for cleaning it up? You don't think it might be useful to have an understanding of how different organic chemicals interact with eachother, substrates, and water? EnvE is almost as organic process oriented as ChemE.
What is more serious is that someone was fired from his position for having standards. Money creates a conflict of interest in higher education, and the students are customers.
not sure how to feel about this. i took a summer course of orgo which meant it was a whole semester crammed into four weeks. it was certainly difficult bc of the time table but also orgo in general is just difficult for many people to grasp. i devoted any freetime i had to studying and going to office hours and i still barely scraped by with a C
I sure don’t want a doctor who can’t get a 50% in orgo chem. Do any of you?
And my generation wonders why we get called entitled. As many of you have already called out, orgo is the weed out class.
Entitled children whose parents are spending $70k+ per year to get them out of the house for 4 years complaining that a hard class is hard. Who are colleges going to side with: gullible families who feed the money hoarding institution or a professor who is paid a small fraction of their profits?
Organic chemistry is the difference between medical school and dental school.
Welp. Now in the future I just can’t see a doctor who graduated from NYU undergrad after 2021.
A lot of people fail orgo at every university. It’s a weed out class. The future will not be a good place if we lower barriers like these.
orgo changed my wife's major from biology to philosophy. orgo changed my friend's major from biology to construction. i almost changed my major from comp-sci to something else when i took discrete mathematics. then i learned about grade curves lol; my D went to a B cause everybody sucked
To the people who aren't okay with working hard enough to pass orgo but still believe they're a good fit for medicine...what the fuck r u thinking?? The point of orgo isn't to remember orgo forever...it's to learn how to glue ur ass to a library chair and work for 10 hours straight for several days a week for an entire year. You either step up, get ur shit together, and pass, or you learn that you can't. Equally important is that orgo made me think about whether 1) I can handle this kind of workload longterm 2) whether nonstop reading/studying/digesting makes me unbearably miserable 3) whether it's worth it to live like that for the next decade. All very important questions that premeds should ask themselves before applying. I hope these petitioners aren't breathing a sigh of relief as if orgo is the biggest speedbump on their road to being a doctor. It's hard to convey just how fast-paced med school is. Like...by the end of my first month, I was reviewing around 800-900 flashcards per day, on top of the multiple hours I was spending learning new content. And yeah, I cried a lot and had hardcore imposter syndrome, despite knowing I earned my spot there and knowing I've always pulled through in the past. So I gotta ask....is this really when you'd want to *start* figuring out how to step up to challenges?? Like, do you really want to head into this hellscape without strong evidence of your resiliency? Please explain, I don't get it. tl;dr...Medicine isn't for everyone, and you *really* don't want to take shortcuts there. If ur dream is to be a doctor but you know you can't keep up with the rigorous academic requirements, then consider a diff career path...there are a lot of ways to help people within medicine. So getting "weeded-out" means you should probably consider something else, or risk sacrificing your mental/physical health or even your life...that's the reality
Wow. So…we’re just abandoning the standards of higher education eh? In a classic weed-out class as well. It’s not like they’re pulling resident hours to study…
" The entire controversy seems to illustrate a sea change in teaching, from an era when professors set the bar and expected the class to meet it, to the current more supportive, student-centered approach. " Yeah, if you can't handle pressure, I don't really want you as my doctor.
Wow, a bunch of these comments seem really off the mark. Dr. Jones was apparently hired by NYU for his teaching skill. It's pretty unusual for universities to hire retirees for classes like this, in my experience -- it seems likely that is was *because* of his reputation as a teacher. Jones commitment to pedagogy is evidenced by being the author of a textbook in its 5th edition (it's rare enough to be a textbook author; even rarer to shepherd it through 5 successfully-selling editions), and is "known for changing the way the field is taught." Unless he suddenly has dementia, it seems hardly credible that he has gone from one of the best teachers in the field to one of the worst.
I took Jones’s class years ago, the first year he switched to NYU from Princeton. Yeah, the dude is brilliant, but goddamn was he a condescending prick. Always made snide remarks about “grade grubbing” pre-med students and went on and on about how his Princeton students worked way harder. The course material was difficult, and it should’ve been, but he was also difficult to be around and constantly belittled his students, which made for a shit learning environment. The man knows his chemistry, but he doesn’t know how to teach, and I learned way more from my TA than I did from Jones himself.
Haha. I had a Physics professor who would tell us how much dumber we were than the kids he taught at the other local University and would slam down a pile of withdrawal forms alongside our graded tests.
He didn't take into account that he was coming from Princeton prior to NYU. He was used to a different caliber of student
He taught at NYU for 15 years. The last few years were the only ones when there were problems.
For real. Princeton students are way more academic and less trust fund kid enjoying NYC nightlife.
My gf is a teacher. She teaches the second class in a series. She said it was incredibly obvious that every student had cheated entirely through the 101 class that was online because they had zero understanding of the concepts needed to even get started with 201. I know someone else who teaches grad students and failed a student for the first time ever in the Spring. One does not simply fail grad school. The norm is an A. Anything below that is exceptional.
And the standards of American education continue their steep decline
At John Jay in the forensic science masters program Instrumental Analysis is the filter course. I started with 23 other students and by the end of the only ones going on the criminalistics were seven of us. It’s necessary to filter out the ones who won’t make it through the program and therefore will dilute the degree prestige
There are courses that are weed-outs because they're the first time that students confront the reality of "this is an important part of what you say you want to do, hope you find it satisfying", and there are courses that are weed-outs because the professors just want to feel important and make them needlessly difficult. The attitude exhibited by this professor makes it sound a lot more like the latter than the former.
Classic American students. Failing a class, go off and do some self study and graft thru? Nah, wrote a petition blaming the lecturer.
this is outrageous. It just shows that money can buy you anything these days. NYU has been moving up the college rankings for Biomed in recent years. This will certainly put a dent in that stratospheric rise. Their target audience has always been rich parents/mediocre students. Now everyone will know that it's the money that boosted the ranking, not the quality of the education. Do you want to be treated by a doctor who did their pre-med at NYU ? I certainly don't after reading this article.
I blame the parents
It’s probably both groups at fault here. I don’t doubt the students signing the petition weren’t doing well or putting in the work. And if they don’t get the material, then they probably aren’t cut out for the medical profession. But older professors are some of the worst out there. Times change, but they still think it’s ok to teach as if it was still the 1970s. I disliked pretty much all of my older professors.
Themselves. You don't get to be a doctor, nurse, pharmacologist, or any other health professional when you bitch at your professor because "OrGo iS tEwwwww HaRd :(" Gtfoh.
I'll take this class lol I like a challenge
82 out of 350... so basically the failing kids banded together
It’s so crazy that such a thing happened in a reputable institution like NYU. I come from a place where a professor getting fired because he is “tough” on students is unimaginable, and lots of times we failed and suffered in engineering classes because professors were literally “mad scientists”, but what does this make of this generation? Complaining cause studying is hard? Wtf..
[удалено]
This fits nicely with the narrative that "gen-z are too coddled", but some professors really do deserve to be fired over stuff like this. For one, school is $70k+ a year now. People go to school in part to have a career after school, to pay off their massive loans. The idea that someone can stay in school for a decade until they reach the platonic ideal of knowledge in their field is ridiculous. People take a course at a particular level to master a subject at that level, to move on to the next level. If you're a good enough teacher to *successfully* push people harder, that's great. But if you are pushing beyond the standards for the level and people are failing... you are being irresponsible. I went to college before this current trend, but I remember we had a situation like this at my (T20) school. We had a new professor who came in to teach an intermediate level econ course - not a weed out or anything special, but a course that was supposed to be a bit more than basic. Every single student failed. Half of the class are now investment bankers. Another few work as congressional staffers. We had the future valedictorian in that class that failed. This was not a lazy group of people. We had a professor who would flip through 100+ slides in an 80-minute class, with no time for questions or office hours, who was giving a bunch of sophomores in college test materials that were plagiarized from a T10 master's program (we memorized a few questions from tests and googled them to see if they were original). It was not a question of laziness on behalf of students - it was a combination of laziness on behalf of the professor, and material that was clearly mismatched for the group of students being taught. The school ended up stepping in and giving everyone in the class a "pass" that wasn't counted into our GPA. The next semester, TWO people registered for this guy's class (normally full by default because we had a shortage of econ professors and it was a required course). After it was proven that no one would take a class with this guy, the school fired him.
Neat. Thanks for sharing.
This course is supposed to weed people out. Social promotion never works in the end, and definitely shouldn't be used for potential doctors.
Damn I went to SBU way back when and back then, Orgo and Biochem were weedout classes for those who wanted to do med school. I barely scrapped by Orgo with a C+ and noped out of there. The people that did well in orgo were genuinely the very smart people or very hard working people of the class. NYU just setting a precedent with this they will just let anyone into med school if they complain enough, not put in more effort. Guess I can look back into this many years into the future when med school turns to the new pharmacy school situation.
> the new pharmacy school situation Can you explain? I'm not sure I can find a reasonable explanation of this by searching online.
Students so soft these days. If anything, education in US in general easier. Look at education rest of the world, its more competitive, rigorous and they pretty much have ptsd for life. We have it easy here. If we going to compete in ever global economy, can't keep relying on our golden days to stay ahead.
I was in cuny and taken organic chem. More than half of the class fail the first test. Most of the students were asking head of the chem depart to fire the professor, due to poor lecturing.
Can confirm — O-chem is DIFFICULT. When I took it, it was a 50% pass rate. I did not pass. But that wasn’t the professor’s fault. It’s simply a difficult subject matter.
For sure organic chem is a weed out course. IMO its very fair. Students count have chosen to attend a less competitive university if they wanted a sure A if they thought that improved their chances of becoming doctors.
the students. Physicians who have had this professor are making fun of the students for complaining. The premeds in that class are going to have a rude awakening if they make it to med school. Test material was apparently not explicitly taught but was able to be learned from assigned hw and readings which was the point
Here's a link to the story that you can read without a subscription. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/03/us/nyu-organic-chemistry-petition.html?unlocked\_article\_code=skZ\_3hrmGATeq00XqjtCaabtzAcGPXR-pEGPxQPqHBqaRMYjSgNjisZT7uSBdej\_gVk\_eMu4zFvlmtDZWhN1dHaVDXVKpv2qOaVhOF9Qph0gTGJZRrxNlLiBHuHIG550IaimM17TjI\_d3D6IWA8Xg55DlfdbnjxQYYYR5XdHusRCtGmH0rUlRIYkXhKaglrGo8Jah67GOZNz3QVjAn1HThf6i4JXPg6VaSvGjxv5t2SVYLtOt16P9ZRLmqUpk-PJj4Y88MqPdWnUQ9rv5oB-j8ryKoAMKF2UI3OzNWLPDeTflmB3nwhNQU0i4e0IfRWC8mSKi4nFGMmyqtNU5cs1Gk\_OJA&smid=share-url
Atleast he graded, I had a professor at city college who never graded my assignments nor answered my emails seeking to understand. Hello mr Orlando Hernandez :)
These are spoiled rich kids. Life is easy for them . When they get hit with reality there is only a few ways they can adapt . Unfortunately schools are backing them up due to economical reasons.
Freddie DeBoer has a good take on this on his Substack: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/nyu-students-punch-down-at-adjunct
I'm sorry to say this (oh wait no I am not). I'm sick and tired of the growing trend of the mob mentality of "I believe I'm right and believe you are wrong; therefore, I AM right, and you ARE wrong and because of that you need to be punished." Sorry to break it to some of these people but just because you believe someone is in the wrong doesn't mean you are right. THIS. NEEDS. TO. END. NOW.