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.

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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.

Yup. My dad's take when I complained about a teacher was, "try to learn as much as you can from them. it doesn't matter if you don't like him or he doesn't like you - deal with it. you're going to have to deal with annoying coworkers and bosses you're whole life so you mean as well start learning that now." He was a WW2 baby. I think many other subsequent generations did not teach their kids this attitude.

I would be embarrassed to sign that petition as a student.

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.

Anonymous wrote:Organic chemistry is hard? Who knew?

This was especially interesting in light of discussions over Covid learning loss:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/03/us/nyu-organic-chemistry-petition.html

“Students were misreading exam questions at an astonishing rate,” he wrote in a grievance to the university, protesting his termination. Grades fell even as he reduced the difficulty of his exams.

The problem was exacerbated by the pandemic, he said. “In the last two years, they fell off a cliff,” he wrote. “We now see single digit scores and even zeros.”

After several years of Covid learning loss, the students not only didn’t study, they didn’t seem to know how to study, Dr. Jones said.

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Anonymous wrote:Some of it may be aging. Some of it maybe students not working hard enough. None of us has inside knowledge on why the administration ultimately made this decision, so we are largely projecting our own stuff onto it.

Recognizing all of that, I will put out there that I think some educators are too quick to wash their hands of learning loss. If part of what’s going on is that students did not fully learn the foundational material they needed for orgo before taking the class because of pandemic-related learning gaps, where should that be made up? The students are in the worst position of anyone to recognize the gaps and address them in advance because they don’t have the foundation to recognize what they are missing. If substantial portions of the class are coming in with those foundational gaps, is the right answer to just keep doing what you’ve always done and let them fail? Sure, if all you care about it having your class be a weed out event for prospective med school students. But if you care about students actually learning orgo, you have to meet them where they are and take responsibility for filling in gaps when you discover them so your students have an opportunity to succeed. My sense reading the article is that this professor may have been more the former than the latter.

If he had dumbed it down they would have been griping because they didn’t do well on the mcat. (Which, by the way, most of the petitioners won’t anyway.)

Anonymous wrote:Some of it may be aging. Some of it maybe students not working hard enough. None of us has inside knowledge on why the administration ultimately made this decision, so we are largely projecting our own stuff onto it.

Recognizing all of that, I will put out there that I think some educators are too quick to wash their hands of learning loss. If part of what’s going on is that students did not fully learn the foundational material they needed for orgo before taking the class because of pandemic-related learning gaps, where should that be made up? The students are in the worst position of anyone to recognize the gaps and address them in advance because they don’t have the foundation to recognize what they are missing. If substantial portions of the class are coming in with those foundational gaps, is the right answer to just keep doing what you’ve always done and let them fail? Sure, if all you care about it having your class be a weed out event for prospective med school students. But if you care about students actually learning orgo, you have to meet them where they are and take responsibility for filling in gaps when you discover them so your students have an opportunity to succeed. My sense reading the article is that this professor may have been more the former than the latter.

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Anonymous wrote:Ugh. My worse college grade was in organic chemistry.
But I side with the prof.

Me too and my dad was an organic chemist and couldn’t understand why . Analytical chem and O Chem were the Bain of my existence as a Bio major.

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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.