Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

NYU organic chemistry professor terminated for tough grading

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 110 posts

Re: NYU organic chemistry professor terminated for tough grading

#21

Post by hilbert42 »

"And how hard should organic chemistry be anyway?"

Heaven forbid, it should be as hard as is necessary to achieve the stated outcome. If someone does a course in organic synthesis and graduates from that course then a company hiring the person expects him or her to be able to synthesize chemicals to the extent or level that the course coverd.

Graduates need to know what they're taught and companies expect their prospective employees to understand the work that they need to do.

When I was a student I used to sometimes whinge about the 'tough grading' in certain courses and think I was hard done by when I either failed an exam or didn't do well in it.

The fact was that the education system made it hard for me because I either wasn't good enough and or I had not done sufficient study to pass the course.

Students shouldn't be allowed to reset the standard because they think it's set too high or that they consider the work too tough.

Re: NYU organic chemistry professor terminated for tough grading

#22

Post by yucky »

faeriechangling wrote: post #14

They make him sound like a mediocre professor, but it sounds like grading a class of students objectively which were setup to fail by a pandemic is what ultimately did him in. It’s clear to me what the implications are. A generation of students won’t understand what they’re doing and they will be shoved through the system anyways because of some high minded sentiments about failing students not being the best way to…

Yup, and then some of them will end up killing patients due to these lowered "feel-good" standards. Thanks NYU.

Re: NYU organic chemistry professor terminated for tough grading

#23

Post by yucky »

faeriechangling wrote: post #15
dexwiz wrote: post #2

OChem tends to be the weed-out class for several majors, primarily Chemistry. You often take it as a college sophomore, and represents a fundamental shift in topics. Most high school and introductory chemistry is acid/base aqueous chemistry, which is relatively straightforward HAcid + BaseOH H20 + Salt. You may do an organic reaction here or there, but only the the most basic like esterification. Making the fake bana…

Calling them whiners is too harsh even if it’s technically correct. This was a class setup to fail by COVID. If they took no action, they were going to be crushed when in normal circumstances they would have succeeded.

No post body was provided.

Re: NYU organic chemistry professor terminated for tough grading

#24

Post by detaro »

anonAndOn wrote: post #20
detaro wrote: post #17

> The officials also had tried to placate the students by offering to review their grades and allowing them to withdraw from the class retroactively. The chemistry department’s chairman, Mark E. Tuckerman, said the unusual offer to withdraw was a “one-time exception granted to students by the dean of the college.” I find that one interesting. You'd normally not be allowed to retry a class you scored badly in? Or what…

> what's the purpose of retroactively withdrawing? GPA inflation. Failed O-chem and ruined your chances of a top med school? Not to worry, how about a do-over!

So it's a special exception to let a student repeat a class they failed first try?

Re: NYU organic chemistry professor terminated for tough grading

#25

Post by forgetbook »

hilbert42 wrote: post #21

"And how hard should organic chemistry be anyway?" Heaven forbid, it should be as hard as is necessary to achieve the stated outcome. If someone does a course in organic synthesis and graduates from that course then a company hiring the person expects him or her to be able to synthesize chemicals to the extent or level that the course coverd. Graduates need to know what they're taught and companies expect their prosp…

What connection do you see between the company hiring and the course content? I don't think there is a closed-loop there.

Re: NYU organic chemistry professor terminated for tough grading

#26

Post by engineer_22 »

hilbert42 wrote: post #21

"And how hard should organic chemistry be anyway?" Heaven forbid, it should be as hard as is necessary to achieve the stated outcome. If someone does a course in organic synthesis and graduates from that course then a company hiring the person expects him or her to be able to synthesize chemicals to the extent or level that the course coverd. Graduates need to know what they're taught and companies expect their prosp…

It seems to be a pervasive attitude.

Today a group of my colleagues received their grades on a linear algebra test. The class average was below the failing mark. One of my acquaintances remarked: "The professor is going to have to do something about these grades, they can't fail the whole class!"

Maybe it's the class that should do something about the grades...

Re: NYU organic chemistry professor terminated for tough grading

#27

Post by forgetbook »

engineer_22 wrote: post #26
hilbert42 wrote: post #21

"And how hard should organic chemistry be anyway?" Heaven forbid, it should be as hard as is necessary to achieve the stated outcome. If someone does a course in organic synthesis and graduates from that course then a company hiring the person expects him or her to be able to synthesize chemicals to the extent or level that the course coverd. Graduates need to know what they're taught and companies expect their prosp…

It seems to be a pervasive attitude. Today a group of my colleagues received their grades on a linear algebra test. The class average was below the failing mark. One of my acquaintances remarked: "The professor is going to have to do something about these grades, they can't fail the whole class!" Maybe it's the class that should do something about the grades...

It is trivially simple for an educator(edit: typo) to write a test that every student fails, curve the grades into a normal distribution, and place blame on students while showing a normal distribution of outcomes to administration.

Do you think that practice produces better learning?

Re: NYU organic chemistry professor terminated for tough grading

#28

Post by danso »

Forcing out a long-time (non-tenured) professor seems a bit extreme, but there are a lot of extreme circumstances:

- Professor Jones is 84 years old (according to his Wikipedia [0])

- Students are recovering from an unprecedented break/rift in their studies b/c of the pandemic

- faculty and administration are still struggling to adapt to the new technology and methods hastily adapted for pandemic education.

My reflexive assumption is that after 2 years of diminished educational experience, students are just unprepared to handle o-chem's traditional rigors. But maybe Professor Jones's instruction ability has also fallen in that time, especially if he's had to do ad hoc adoption of new educational software and processes. And I'm sure the administration is even more out of whack.

It truly sucks that, at least from what the story tells us, we don't have a good idea of where the deficiencies and room for improvement are, and educators are stuck trying to figure it out mid-flight while the academic machine continues to stumble forward.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maitland_Jones_Jr.

Re: NYU organic chemistry professor terminated for tough grading

#29

Post by nh23423fefe »

incogitomode wrote: post #4

A point made in the article's comments — an experienced doctor working in prenatal diagnosis says he struggled with organic chemistry, has not found it relevant to his career, and found biochemistry in med school more approachable. He concludes with: > It makes no sense that a course so peripheral to successful, high quality medical careers is a gatekeeper > to medical school applications at undergraduate programs th…

Cool nobody needs to learn algebra because no one uses it. Learning itself has no value, sends no signal. Gates are bad let everyone in. Struggling is bad and an indication that something in the world should change.

Re: NYU organic chemistry professor terminated for tough grading

#30

Post by fiat_fandango »

TheLoafOfBread wrote: post #12
fiat_fandango wrote: post #9

This is how the united states fails - our education institutions fail to hold the bar and let the pillars of real education turn to sand. Admittedly, initially in college I was a horrible student. But I got better, admittedly after re-taking a few classes. It cost me, but I learned from it. Not just maths but the lesson of having to grind and struggle to get better at something when it felt like I sucked and had zero…

Exactly. I see a lot of people on HN are often bashing European public universities, but advantage of those universities is that you are essentially judged by a third party which does not have any monetary reason to let you pass. You either know, or you are kicked from exams.

I think the bashing comes in when the topic of rigor / how good the university is comes up. For instance, how do you equitably discriminate to only allow smarter people into universities with an intentionally elevated amount of rigor?

This is inherently discriminatory since ironically enough the root of all inequality is endowed intelligence. The value of giving away free resources of high value is going to get messy, it's why the competition for scholarships to top universities is incredibly fraught with fraud.

Post reply on HN