NYU organic chemistry professor terminated for tough grading

As a recent grad, this doesn't at all seem surprising

I had a class where literally half of the people in it cheated on the autograded assignments and got caught. Then after getting caught a bunch of them cheated again by just refactoring what they already wrote

There were two to three other classes where a group of 10-20 people banded together and started insisting out of nowhere that the class was "too difficult". We had one lecture where the professor was reviewing the exam material and this group literally wasted the entire lecture bitching about the class and yelling at the professor over zoom

I've found that you only hear about it being a "hard" class if a bunch of people get together and start insisting that it's hard. Which then puts pressure on the professor and uni to water down the class, which then makes it worse off for everyone else and dilutes the program

Sorry for the rant but this stuff still pisses me off to this day

edit: I feel like video lectures (and class group chats without uni oversight) enable this behavior. This and the sheer complacency on the part of universities for prioritizing "student well being" over actually teaching something

Tough question, but it boils down to the type of subject matter that's been taught.

I'll use myself as a illustration: I've done a wide range of subjects in my time and I'll use two instances. One was philosophy which included political philosophy the other electronics (which was separate from science, physics, chemistry, etc.).

Philosophy covers a vast field: analytic Phil./logic requires mathematical precision whereas political Phil. requires a different type of thinking altogether much of which is subjective in nature. If I were to be employed in this field an employer would be mainly looking for my ability to assess and judge situations, etc. but that would have had precious little to do with any course materials. Here, an employer is looking at the worldly skills Phil. has taught me which is very different to my electronics courses.

An employer who was employing me for my electronic skills would expect me to have perhaps basic but very specific skills as taught in the course. If given a spectrum analyzer or oscilloscope, my employer would expect me to know what they were and how to use them. If I'd not used those models previously, any reasonable employer would give me operations manuals and a little familiarization time then set me to work on some electronics project. Essentially, in electronics there are certain specific skills that one must be taught and be familiar with or one cannot do the work.

In essence, in some professions there's a very tight coupling between one's education and one's work, especially so in engineering, chemistry, etc. and less so in others.

The "how good is university" is based on some arbitrary metric, which does not tell anything to the student, but works on foreign students see PolyMatter The Chinese Student Crisis - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQWlnTyOSig

It has even lower value for Europeans, because even if some university in Paris would be THE BEST in the world, it still will have only a national character. For example some guy from Poland is not going to study there, simply because when you are 20 years old, then you can barely speak English on A2, but at that case, to actually understand and learn, you would need to speak French on B2 (of course, we can find rare exceptions).

So in the end you are choosing your school from less than dozen national universities (could be less or more, depends on size of your country) and then you will decide by their program - Do you want to study agriculture university with a program on genetical engineering of plants? Do you want to study technical university with a program of computer science? etc.

All those universities are national (public), there are also some private universities, but you will go in those if you are mandated to have diploma (i.e. some governmental positions). The problem with private universities is that non-governmental employers are not taking them seriously and they will look at you as on somebody who accidentally bought his diploma with his newspapers.

Organic chem 1 and 2 are prerequisites for medical schools. A lot of colleges actually make the courses as hard as possible to make sure that the med school acceptance rate for their graduates is very high.