NYU Prof fired because his class was too hard

[Anonymous]

Everyone needs to inflate grades to give our kids the best chance to achieve the dreams we have for them, right?
B-? No. C+? Are you kidding me, teacher/prof?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Everyone needs to inflate grades to give our kids the best chance to achieve the dreams we have for them, right?
B-? No. C+? Are you kidding me, teacher/prof?

Class rank? No way!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:One of the lines in the petition was that grades didn’t reflect effort and time put in. Welcome to the rest of your life, dummies!

Seriously. I could have studied nonstop for weeks and probably still would’ve gotten at best a C on an organic chemistry exam. It’s just not my strong suit. Grades aren’t about effort; they’re about how well you know the material.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:His rate my professor is pretty bad dating back to 2017. Even his high ratings say the TAs teach all the information or you have to teach yourself from the book,

His average is actually pretty middle of the road, but it’s interesting that the scores tend to be either 5 or 1. It looks like the bright students really enjoy his class and the ones who struggled really struggled. The kids who rated him 5 all said reading the textbook was key. The reviews actually back his argument that these kids don’t know how to study. They expect to be spoon fed.

Pre 2020

Professor Jones is very intelligent and definitely knows his materials. However, he's horrible at presenting the materials

Rated 4, you are forced to learn independently.

Super disorganized and poor at explaining concepts. Definitely would not recommend

Rated 5: he's not easy at all and can be a very obnoxious figure

average on every exam was a 55% and a 38% on the final.

Most of the learning takes place during the group problems with the TAs. The lectures are pretty tough to understand

Avoid. Half the class received C. Great lectures but tests are v. difficult; it's impossible to do all 10,000 provided practice q's that can pop up on them. Class test av. was 50. I had an A- with Mahal (she's great), did 2x the work for Jones and still did much worse. It's very hard to gauge if you understand material from the way he tests you.

Rated 3: Lectures aren't clear and tests are designed for you to do bad.

He is one of the rudest people I have ever met

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If smart kids are failing at a high rate you are not doing your job as a professor.

Sorry the free ride for average white makes is over. Welcome to the world the rest of us have to live in. Either do your job or get fired.

Why doesn’t this apply to the students? Their job is to study. It’s not the job of a college professor to pass students who won’t (or can’t) learn the material. “Meeting your students where they are” ends in high school. If you can’t do university level work, you shouldn’t be in a university. Unfortunately it seems “meeting the students where they are” in HS means we have an increasing number of kids who can’t do the work. The answer is not to dumb down the university. Maybe community college can fill the gap, but there are plenty of professions who need workers that don’t have college degrees.

Because if you have a problem with many you are the problem.

It’s organic chem not creative writing. Either your tests make sense or not. His test didn’t make sense and questions were written badly.

There are certain classes like calculus, chem, physics, … you either teach it or you don’t, tests are not subjective. It’s pedestrian to claim these classes are different at different institutions.

He wrote badly worded tests to prove he was hard sand he got caught not going his job, bye Felicia.

We’re you in his class? How do you know this? It was a minority of students who complained, and other students weighed in to defend him. As pp said, the professor taught at Princeton for decades and was “revered.” He literally wrote the textbook and created the modern method of teaching organic chemistry. Do you have evidence that he purposely made his tests confusing after years of teaching at NYU?

DP. He retired from a tenured position at Princeton about 10 years ago and then went to NYU on a year-to-year contract to teach a reduced schedule. And then right around the same time he felt students suddenly changed and just weren’t as bright and weren’t as willing to work hard. It is entirely possible that, in reality, he was slowing down cognitively as he got older, he wasn’t as sharp, and his teaching and test writing weren’t what they used to be. It makes sense since he perceived a shift in students right around the time he seemingly decided he couldn’t carry the load of a tenured professor anymore. I suspect it did not come out of the blue that his contract was non-renewed, and that NYU had been trying to counsel him through it for years because his name still carried prestige.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Reminds me of one of my classes. None of the questions in the tests matched what was covered in the lectures or textbook. It was the most interesting class but grade wise it was the worst. To this day I remember her lectures, she was brilliant. And a terrible test writer.

It's definitely possible that this is what's happening, just like it's possible that the kids are complaining about tests that are appropriately difficult. It's really hard to say without having taken the class and taken the exams, so it becomes this Rorschach test that reveals whatever you already think about what's happening in colleges, but nothing else.

I’ve had experience with new teachers who haven’t yet calibrated their tests and give tests that almost no one can pass. In this case, it’s a professor who is giving the same tests he has given for decades (and allegedly tried to make them easier). Nothing has changed but the students.

It's possible, but we had an experienced professor when I was in school who taught and then had every single student fail the standardized university exam (it was a language class). The same students passed the exam after another course with a different teacher (and being exposed to the material twice, obviously), sometimes these things happen.

You mean, after they took the course twice, they passed? Not a very useful example.

The article says many students wrote letters defending the professor. The complaints seem to be from those who are mad that he didn’t make them feel better about failing.

Zacharia Benslimane, a teaching assistant in the problem-solving section of the course, defended Dr. Jones in an email to university officials.

“I think this petition was written more out of unhappiness with exam scores than an actual feeling of being treated unfairly,” wrote Mr. Benslimane, now a Ph.D. student at Harvard. “I have noticed that many of the students who consistently complained about the class did not use the resources we afforded to them.”

Ryan Xue, who took the course, said he found Dr. Jones both likable and inspiring.

“This is a big lecture course, and it also has the reputation of being a weed-out class,” said Mr. Xue, who has transferred and is now a junior at Brown. “So there are people who will not get the best grades. Some of the comments might have been very heavily influenced by what grade students have gotten.”

Other students, though, seemed shellshocked from the experience. In interviews, several of them said that Dr. Jones was keen to help students who asked questions, but that he could also be sarcastic and downbeat about the class’s poor performance.

My 9th grader has a sarcastic teacher who bemoans the performance of the class. Yes, she sucks, but the fact is (and what my 14 year is learning) that some people suck and the thing to do is figure out how to do your best despite it.

Right?!? It will help your kid learn they can't quit when the people they are working with suck (if that's the case---I tend to think the prof is good and the issue is the students). Can't quit your job just because your boss sucks, or at least not until you have another job in place

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Reminds me of one of my classes. None of the questions in the tests matched what was covered in the lectures or textbook. It was the most interesting class but grade wise it was the worst. To this day I remember her lectures, she was brilliant. And a terrible test writer.

It's definitely possible that this is what's happening, just like it's possible that the kids are complaining about tests that are appropriately difficult. It's really hard to say without having taken the class and taken the exams, so it becomes this Rorschach test that reveals whatever you already think about what's happening in colleges, but nothing else.

I’ve had experience with new teachers who haven’t yet calibrated their tests and give tests that almost no one can pass. In this case, it’s a professor who is giving the same tests he has given for decades (and allegedly tried to make them easier). Nothing has changed but the students.

It's possible, but we had an experienced professor when I was in school who taught and then had every single student fail the standardized university exam (it was a language class). The same students passed the exam after another course with a different teacher (and being exposed to the material twice, obviously), sometimes these things happen.

You can fire your employees when they are not doing their job.

Do you want students to learn if somebody is smart but can’t do their job, you give them a break and don’t fire them?

You mean, after they took the course twice, they passed? Not a very useful example.

The article says many students wrote letters defending the professor. The complaints seem to be from those who are mad that he didn’t make them feel better about failing.

Zacharia Benslimane, a teaching assistant in the problem-solving section of the course, defended Dr. Jones in an email to university officials.

“I think this petition was written more out of unhappiness with exam scores than an actual feeling of being treated unfairly,” wrote Mr. Benslimane, now a Ph.D. student at Harvard. “I have noticed that many of the students who consistently complained about the class did not use the resources we afforded to them.”

Ryan Xue, who took the course, said he found Dr. Jones both likable and inspiring.

“This is a big lecture course, and it also has the reputation of being a weed-out class,” said Mr. Xue, who has transferred and is now a junior at Brown. “So there are people who will not get the best grades. Some of the comments might have been very heavily influenced by what grade students have gotten.”

Other students, though, seemed shellshocked from the experience. In interviews, several of them said that Dr. Jones was keen to help students who asked questions, but that he could also be sarcastic and downbeat about the class’s poor performance.

My 9th grader has a sarcastic teacher who bemoans the performance of the class. Yes, she sucks, but the fact is (and what my 14 year is learning) that some people suck and the thing to do is figure out how to do your best despite it.

Right?!? It will help your kid learn they can't quit when the people they are working with suck (if that's the case---I tend to think the prof is good and the issue is the students). Can't quit your job just because your boss sucks, or at least not until you have another job in place

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Reminds me of one of my classes. None of the questions in the tests matched what was covered in the lectures or textbook. It was the most interesting class but grade wise it was the worst. To this day I remember her lectures, she was brilliant. And a terrible test writer.

It's definitely possible that this is what's happening, just like it's possible that the kids are complaining about tests that are appropriately difficult. It's really hard to say without having taken the class and taken the exams, so it becomes this Rorschach test that reveals whatever you already think about what's happening in colleges, but nothing else.

I’ve had experience with new teachers who haven’t yet calibrated their tests and give tests that almost no one can pass. In this case, it’s a professor who is giving the same tests he has given for decades (and allegedly tried to make them easier). Nothing has changed but the students.

It's possible, but we had an experienced professor when I was in school who taught and then had every single student fail the standardized university exam (it was a language class). The same students passed the exam after another course with a different teacher (and being exposed to the material twice, obviously), sometimes these things happen.

You mean, after they took the course twice, they passed? Not a very useful example.

The article says many students wrote letters defending the professor. The complaints seem to be from those who are mad that he didn’t make them feel better about failing.

Zacharia Benslimane, a teaching assistant in the problem-solving section of the course, defended Dr. Jones in an email to university officials.

“I think this petition was written more out of unhappiness with exam scores than an actual feeling of being treated unfairly,” wrote Mr. Benslimane, now a Ph.D. student at Harvard. “I have noticed that many of the students who consistently complained about the class did not use the resources we afforded to them.”

Ryan Xue, who took the course, said he found Dr. Jones both likable and inspiring.

“This is a big lecture course, and it also has the reputation of being a weed-out class,” said Mr. Xue, who has transferred and is now a junior at Brown. “So there are people who will not get the best grades. Some of the comments might have been very heavily influenced by what grade students have gotten.”

Other students, though, seemed shellshocked from the experience. In interviews, several of them said that Dr. Jones was keen to help students who asked questions, but that he could also be sarcastic and downbeat about the class’s poor performance.

My 9th grader has a sarcastic teacher who bemoans the performance of the class. Yes, she sucks, but the fact is (and what my 14 year is learning) that some people suck and the thing to do is figure out how to do your best despite it.

Right?!? It will help your kid learn they can't quit when the people they are working with suck (if that's the case---I tend to think the prof is good and the issue is the students). Can't quit your job just because your boss sucks, or at least not until you have another job in place

You can fire your employees when they are not doing their job.

Do you want students to learn if somebody is smart but can’t do their job, you give them a break and don’t fire them?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If smart kids are failing at a high rate you are not doing your job as a professor.

Sorry the free ride for average white makes is over. Welcome to the world the rest of us have to live in. Either do your job or get fired.

Why doesn’t this apply to the students? Their job is to study. It’s not the job of a college professor to pass students who won’t (or can’t) learn the material. “Meeting your students where they are” ends in high school. If you can’t do university level work, you shouldn’t be in a university. Unfortunately it seems “meeting the students where they are” in HS means we have an increasing number of kids who can’t do the work. The answer is not to dumb down the university. Maybe community college can fill the gap, but there are plenty of professions who need workers that don’t have college degrees.

Because if you have a problem with many you are the problem.

It’s organic chem not creative writing. Either your tests make sense or not. His test didn’t make sense and questions were written badly.

There are certain classes like calculus, chem, physics, … you either teach it or you don’t, tests are not subjective. It’s pedestrian to claim these classes are different at different institutions.

He wrote badly worded tests to prove he was hard sand he got caught not going his job, bye Felicia.

We’re you in his class? How do you know this? It was a minority of students who complained, and other students weighed in to defend him. As pp said, the professor taught at Princeton for decades and was “revered.” He literally wrote the textbook and created the modern method of teaching organic chemistry. Do you have evidence that he purposely made his tests confusing after years of teaching at NYU?

DP. He retired from a tenured position at Princeton about 10 years ago and then went to NYU on a year-to-year contract to teach a reduced schedule. And then right around the same time he felt students suddenly changed and just weren’t as bright and weren’t as willing to work hard. It is entirely possible that, in reality, he was slowing down cognitively as he got older, he wasn’t as sharp, and his teaching and test writing weren’t what they used to be. It makes sense since he perceived a shift in students right around the time he seemingly decided he couldn’t carry the load of a tenured professor anymore. I suspect it did not come out of the blue that his contract was non-renewed, and that NYU had been trying to counsel him through it for years because his name still carried prestige.

Simple, life past him by.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There's a reason for "weed-out" classes in college for premeds. If these students cannot handle the rigor and stress of a difficult class, how will they handle medical school? Frankly, I wouldn't want them in the position of making life and death decisions.

Yes, there’s a reason for weed out classes but it’s not the one you think it is. They have to weed people out of certain majors because they don’t have enough professors in the upper classes and there’s a bunch of other majors that nobody wants to do that they need to push kids to. It has nothing to do with the kids ability. It’s a game.

What a load of BS!

Medical school is hard. Hence, undergrad premed courses will be weed out classes. Better to find out you can't handle it while there's still time to change your major. If you can't figure out how to pass Orgo, then I certainly don't think you will get into Med school or if you manage to do that, you likely will struggle.

the world does not need more Biology majors on the premed track who cannot score well on MCATS and get into med school. There is already enough of them.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There's a reason for "weed-out" classes in college for premeds. If these students cannot handle the rigor and stress of a difficult class, how will they handle medical school? Frankly, I wouldn't want them in the position of making life and death decisions.

Is there any actual proof of this regarding this specific class? Or is it just "it's always been done this way thinking"?

It's something that is impossible to prove. Whether its orgo, or some other class, there have always been classes where a premed student just doesn't do well on. One may argue that orgo is not directly useful in medical school, but the fact remains that many medical school classes are difficult and these premed classes show which students know how to learn a difficult topic and which don't.

Yet you can take org Chem at a community college and transfer the credit.

No, most medical programs require the core classes be taken at 4 year univerisites (I know that's the case with most DPT programs as well)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There's a reason for "weed-out" classes in college for premeds. If these students cannot handle the rigor and stress of a difficult class, how will they handle medical school? Frankly, I wouldn't want them in the position of making life and death decisions.

Yes, there’s a reason for weed out classes but it’s not the one you think it is. They have to weed people out of certain majors because they don’t have enough professors in the upper classes and there’s a bunch of other majors that nobody wants to do that they need to push kids to. It has nothing to do with the kids ability. It’s a game.

What a load of BS!

Medical school is hard. Hence, undergrad premed courses will be weed out classes. Better to find out you can't handle it while there's still time to change your major. If you can't figure out how to pass Orgo, then I certainly don't think you will get into Med school or if you manage to do that, you likely will struggle.

the world does not need more Biology majors on the premed track who cannot score well on MCATS and get into med school. There is already enough of them.

But alas if you got the other teacher you are now magically “premed track”.

How did you become such a sheep?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There's a reason for "weed-out" classes in college for premeds. If these students cannot handle the rigor and stress of a difficult class, how will they handle medical school? Frankly, I wouldn't want them in the position of making life and death decisions.

Is there any actual proof of this regarding this specific class? Or is it just "it's always been done this way thinking"?

It's something that is impossible to prove. Whether its orgo, or some other class, there have always been classes where a premed student just doesn't do well on. One may argue that orgo is not directly useful in medical school, but the fact remains that many medical school classes are difficult and these premed classes show which students know how to learn a difficult topic and which don't.

Yet you can take org Chem at a community college and transfer the credit.

Right but med schools notice that! These kids want credit on their med school applications for an nyu orgo class (which certainly gives them a boost over an applicant with a cc orgo class) but they don’t want it to be too hard.

That is 100% untrue.

You think med school admissions committees can’t differentiate who took their pre-reqs at Penn or Northwestern and who took them at community college? I am a huge fan of community colleges and I’m not saying it makes sense for schools to ding applicants but they absolutely do.

They don’t care. Just like they don’t care your calculus class was a lame HS class and a 4 on your AP exam.

Actually, most med schools/dentist/DPT program actually do care. You cannot use AP/IB credit for required classes. Or if you do, it means you have to take higher level college courses to meet the requirement. (ie. sure you can use AP biology for BIO 101 and 102 credit, but you still need 2 units of Biology, so now you must take 2 higher level biology courses---great if you are a bio major, not so great if you are a Psychology major)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There's a reason for "weed-out" classes in college for premeds. If these students cannot handle the rigor and stress of a difficult class, how will they handle medical school? Frankly, I wouldn't want them in the position of making life and death decisions.

Is there any actual proof of this regarding this specific class? Or is it just "it's always been done this way thinking"?

It's something that is impossible to prove. Whether its orgo, or some other class, there have always been classes where a premed student just doesn't do well on. One may argue that orgo is not directly useful in medical school, but the fact remains that many medical school classes are difficult and these premed classes show which students know how to learn a difficult topic and which don't.

Yet you can take org Chem at a community college and transfer the credit.

Right but med schools notice that! These kids want credit on their med school applications for an nyu orgo class (which certainly gives them a boost over an applicant with a cc orgo class) but they don’t want it to be too hard.

That is 100% untrue.

You think med school admissions committees can’t differentiate who took their pre-reqs at Penn or Northwestern and who took them at community college? I am a huge fan of community colleges and I’m not saying it makes sense for schools to ding applicants but they absolutely do.

They don’t care. Just like they don’t care your calculus class was a lame HS class and a 4 on your AP exam.

Actually, most med schools/dentist/DPT program actually do care. You cannot use AP/IB credit for required classes. Or if you do, it means you have to take higher level college courses to meet the requirement. (ie. sure you can use AP biology for BIO 101 and 102 credit, but you still need 2 units of Biology, so now you must take 2 higher level biology courses---great if you are a bio major, not so great if you are a Psychology major)

They actually like to see a diversity of interest. The cookie cutter med students are no longer attractive to admissions.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The sad thing about this to me, is that it seems like a covid learning loss story more than anything. These students are not dumber. The test optional stuff means that potentially fewer rich kids are in the classroom, since we know that standardized test score are a better measure of parental income than of aptitude. Why not figure out what gaps existed and focus the semester on remediation? A pandemic happened, lets figure out how to get all the info crammed Into student heads and move on.

There are lots of inequities that come out in standardized tests but the fact remains, they are fairly good at predicting college performance, especially when combined with grades. Of course test optional makes a differences in performance!

Actually GPA is a better predictor of College success than SAT/ACT scores.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/nickmorrison/2020/01/29/its-gpas-not-standardized-tests-that-predict-college-success/?sh=ffd83a032bd1

NOPE. MIT research says otherwise.
https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/we-are-reinstating-our-sat-act-requirement-for-future-admissions-cycles/

Numerous researches shows tests are better indicators.
Your kid must be test optional.

Did you even read that?

Yes.

"Our research shows standardized tests help us better assess the academic preparedness of all applicants"