I went to a different school, but I've also experienced similar "teachers" only in chemistry, and even specifically OChem.
Difficult/opaque lecture style, very high difficulty tests, openly mocking students in a 500+ person lecture if he deemed a question not intelligent enough, and on top of all of it, forced to buy a textbook he co-authored (homework questions taken from the required book, refreshed every year).
For some reason this story seems to happen more often in chemistry than other disciplines. In my experience as a Biomedical Engineering major, my chemistry classes were by far the most difficult, almost like it was the point - just difficulty for difficulty's sake. And I had plenty of other hard classes, including AI/ML, Diff EQ, and a course on the physics of blood, but each of those professors, while rigorous, were also fair and kind, willing to help students understand the material, and definitely never refusing to answer what they believed to be a "stupid question."
I even remember conversations with friends about how the chemistry department seemed to have a very high number of massively egotistical professors who mistreated their students. My chem major friends confirmed it was like this all the time.
All of this is anecdotal, but soft-confirmed by multiple friends and friends of friends at the time. When this story broke I was honestly not at all surprised.
My theory is that chemistry (i.e. organic and biochemistry) are common weed-out courses for pre-med students. The grade-grubbing is intense, and those courses often end up as gauntlets as a result. It's a vicious cycle -- students grub for advantage; professors make the course "harder" to compensate. Also, few professors want to teach huge lecture halls of kids who are only there for the grade, and view the whole exercise as a waste of their time.
(Having taught a few sections of this kind of thing myself, I'm not entirely unsympathetic. It's a long, painful day when you're waiting at hour 5+ of a lab session, watching someone fumble around hopelessly with gel rig or something, knowing that they're never going to make it and that this result is going to make or break their grade for the quarter...)
I had an O-Chem professor who explicitly set a curve and gave incredibly difficult exams, such that only a few people in the 100+ person class could get an A. It was almost like he was transparently trying to reduce the student population.
Isn't an early weed-out a service to the students? The school could pass through 100% of their premed students, taking their money for all four years of their undergrad only for most of their premeds to get weeded when they apply to medical schools. If instead they get weeded a few years earlier, they still have time to change their major and go for an undergrad degree that will suit them better. Some may choose to drop out completely when they get weeded out of premed, and the school will lose tuition money from those.
But what cynical advantage does the school gain from weeding out premeds? Besides tough love for the students who won't cut the mustard, what is their motivation for weeding out premeds?
Yeah, I've seen those curves. I had a chemistry professor announce "I like to construct my exams such that the best student can complete seventy-five percent of the material in the time allotted." Complete, not get right. Too bad for him he got slapped with the gauntlet he threw down.
The US med/school complex is regulated by the AMA based on the number of residency slots. The schools get high tuitions and the restricted supply means we get less but higher paid doctors.
The US doesn't have enough doctors and accordingly there is a large amount of medicine that we don't need doctors for such that PAs and NPs are taking over.
In reality O-chem should not be a pre-med class nor should it be required by medical schools. Other countries admit straight to med school without a BS requirement.
It's really more about, how much do you really want this and less about the coursework.
However, O-chem probably wouldn't have any students if it wasn't a premed course either.
> I had an O-Chem professor who explicitly set a curve and
> gave incredibly difficult exams, such that only a few people
> in the 100+ person class could get an A.
Isn't that how an 'A' grade is supposed to work? I'm not suggesting you curve it to deliberately fail people, but an 'A', 'B' and 'C' should have some meaning. If 90% of a class get's an A, the grading is meaningless and might as well just be pass/fail.
OChem is a weeder course for med students. Med schools are controlled by the AMA, which intentionally keeps the number of doctors low for normal cartel reasons. It's not about teaching Organic Chemistry, it's about reducing the number of students who can apply for an artificially limited number of med school slots.
That is misinformation. The number of doctors is kept low by limits on the number of residency program slots in teaching hospitals. Residency programs are almost entirely funded by the federal government through Medicare. The AMA has publicly lobbied to increase the number of doctors, and even put their own funding in.
Chem majors are not their target, the majority of orgo Chem victims are potential medical students. They take the class because they don't have a choice and it keeps the department relevant. Been that way for decades now. Imagine gatekeeping software engineering to people who can memorize and regurgitate the Intel CPU menus and implement the X86 standard from memory.
Is that not what your computer arch class was? In mine we had to write every mips instruction and what it did, from memory, on pencil and paper. And that was the "Final" along with some demorgans.
Yep, similar experience, and I was an undergrad 20+ years ago.
In the undergraduate institution I attended grading on a curve was not common outside of Chemistry classes. I specifically remember taking a chem class where the majority of the class failed on a percentage basis, but most people passed after the curve.
What was the goal of that class exactly? To learn something? To ensure people passed and repeated the same experience in the next class which was also graded on a curve? What did it mean exactly to have passed Chem 1/2 and Organic chem? It was taught poorly and you were tested on concepts that were not taught properly and not understood.
I know people who opted to take the same Chemistry sequence at a local community college and they learned way more than we did, simply because the teacher wasn't trying to haze them.
Same and also in Math and Physics classes. SUNY system schools. Also 20 years ago. The vast majority of my classes were 300+ people.
If it wasn't the self-authored textbooks refreshed every year, chances were that the adjunct teaching barely spoke English.
It took me extra long to get through school just because of all of the math classes I had to drop and take the next semester just because on the first day I showed up to class, the prof was mumbling or non-verbal, would face the board and write illegibly all lecture and not explain a damn thing.
My chem professor in college was like that, to an extreme degree. He openly declared that he was going to put trick question and gotchas in quizzes and pop quizzes—all of which counted towards the final grade, mocked students who got tricked, insisted to talk in an opaque manner, and dismissed any objection to his teaching style. It was the only way to learn, he claimed.
But at midterms and finals, his class scored consistently worse than the same course taught by a different professor, even though he was the one writing the exams. And he got angry every time this happened.
My highschool chem teacher was a pyromaniac, we did things on the regular during class downtime that should have been expelling offenses.
My college chem professor was a first year out of industry, incapable of basic socialization, we all knew why he became a professor. The head of the department had his own text/work books, we had to spend like $400 on ~5 books for one class. This new guy had to teach off of this and had strict guidelines around testing etc. The brightest and most studious students got like B+ end of semester. The majority F-C, and we needed a B to continue the class schedule. 80 students had their grades bumped by the dean by like 20 points so an entire engineering year wasn't flunked. It was a tight schedule and if the majority failed chem it would look bad on the school and gum up the scheduling for that class and the following class.
My friends in other majors weren't having a much better time.
> Difficult/opaque lecture style, very high difficulty tests, openly mocking students in a 500+ person lecture if he deemed a question not intelligent enough
I don’t want to condone or encourage this behavior. However, I often think back to a similar professor I had in college who I loathed at the time. I gritted through the course and complained the whole way.
Then I graduated into the working world and encountered a similarly difficult person in my management chain. Weirdly, I felt prepared to handle the situation and kept relatively calm while navigating the not-nice boss. I didn’t stay for long, but I was able to thrive and get some early career wins even under a not-nice boss.
So I don’t think mean teachers or bosses are a good thing, but at the same time I feel like I grew more during those periods than I did at other times in my education/career. I still don’t know exactly what to think about all of this.
To me the biggest problem is when the prof includes test questions that weren't covered in either the lectures or the study material (or maybe it's mentioned once on some random page of the 500 pages of study material that one was expected to read). That is simply setting up the students for failure.
My partner took Orgo from the professor in question ~20 years ago, and described it as one of the transformational classes of her undergraduate years, though she also thought it was the lowest grade she'd ever received.
Things may have changed during those decades (as things do), but she said there were options at her school to take "Maitland Jones Orgo" or "Easy Orgo", and approximately everyone knew that they would be challenged in the former, but provided the opportunity to grow more than the latter.
I'm sure there are many things involved, but perhaps he didn't fully grasp that when he moved institutions, he was also shifting his audience, and perhaps his new audience wasn't quite as interested in the challenge.
My biology 101 professor assigned his own textbook for the course. However he refunded his royalty to any student who purchased a new copy in order to eliminate the conflict of interest. This ought to be the standard policy at every college.
I remember being at a conference once and wandering through the new books display with my advisor. We saw a new edition of one of Avi Silberschatz's texts and my advisor said, "Oh, yeah, Avi has another kid about to go to college." ;-)
Not sure about this case in particular, but I have a firm belief that a class should be in a certain aspect fair. Although that is subjective, I mean the class shouldn't be unreasonable.
To give an example, I had an engineering class on electrical machinery. On one test, not a single person made an A. In fact, the highest grade was a "C" obtained by the class genius. I studied hard for the exam, attended all lectures, did all homework assignments, and got a ~45 on the exam out of 100 points. At that point, you have nothing like a bell curve. The teacher has failed to either teach or formulate a test that meets reasonable expectations. Something is broken. I don't think everyone should've gotten an "A", but failing an entire class of students that are not even remotely lazy (nearly all over achievers) is stupid.
I've seen three scenarios where most of a class has low numerical scores
1. The instructor has difficulty calibrating the difficulty of the assignments because it's all so easy to them now.
2. The instructor is interested in having a high ceiling so the truly gifted can distinguish themselves, usually using a generous curve to not screw over the competent but average students.
3. The class is beyond the current capability of the students.
Coming out of the pandemic, in math we're seeing a lot of #3. It's rather hard to blame the instructors when we have college calculus students who struggle to work with basic fractions.
I’d say 50% of my electrical engineering courses were this way in a bad semester and it was often emotionally debilitating and resulted in lots of test anxiety fueled fever dreams. And this is after the first years were weeded out and lots of hard working and bright students remained. I think it’s absolutely pointless to do this and is a cop out for those that can’t teach.
Exactly. This was my junior year where we were all battle-hardened vets that had survived two full years of weed-out classes. At some point it's bad teaching. I still have test related nightmares in my 30s.
I had an instructor that was quite unforgiving on his tests - he was well known for the difficulty of his exams.
However, he made up for the brutal exams with ample extra credit opportunities. As a result, while very few people got As and Bs in his exams, a normal-ish percentage of people passed, but were forced to work harder than expected to pass. This was Calculus I and II, so it was tricky but an interesting teaching style. At least those who passed knew the material. Plenty still failed - but this is why everyone I knew called him a difficult, but not unfair, instructor.
The best teacher I ever had was known for being difficult.
It was American History (college) and I've never liked history. When people found out I was taking his class, they tell me they were sorry for me.
To this day, that man was the best orator I have ever seen in my life (and I'm over 40). He would get up, start talking, and I would be enthralled. It quickly became my favorite class.
But he was ironclad in his expectations. He had no attendance requirements, but every class he gave a 3 question quiz over the lecture the day before. These quizzes added up to be worth more than the tests in terms of final grade, and he would only allow you to make up 3 of those quizzes (for missing). And he was absolutely, 100%, willing to fail you if you didn't have the points for it.
What I learned from that class is that students didn't like him because he wasn't lenient. You got the grade you deserved and there was never any leeway. He made this quite clear.
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Contrast this with the semester I ended up having to drop Diff Eq. The professor had a policy of 3 missed days is an automatic failure. My alarm clock stopped working and I went over that limit (kept trying to get people to wake me up, but none did). I had to drop a class I had an A in.
What are teachers reasons to not giving out extra credit? From the outside looking in, it seems like being against extra credit ensures students will learn less and pass less.
I once had a math professor explain he stopped grading on a curve because he once had a class where the highest grade was a low C and he didn't feel that deserved an A.
And I agree with him.
You're there to learn, the grade isn't supposed to be a reflection of your effort.
I once had a class where the professor would put things on the test that weren't in the lecture. Caught me off guard the first time, didn't catch me off guard the rest of the semester. The gap between my grade and everyone else in the class was huge (I think I'm the only one that passed in that class).
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At the end of the day, if a student cannot show some sort of mastery of the subject, they should be failed.
What if the lesson was "sometimes things in life are really hard, and no matter how much you prepare, things may still challenge you beyond your current capability?"
How does one get an A on that test, since grades are important as people move to jobs and graduate degrees? How can I compare an A from the University of Everything is Reasonable versus one that includes the grade every student gets on the Kobayashi Maru?
In an academic context, where the institution is supposedly setting admission requirements, prerequisites for courses, etc. - and final grades are effectively published, as the institution's professional opinion on the student's qualifications - no, sorry. There are plenty of better ways to teach that lesson, which do not screw up the public grading metrics.
That's fine, but that lesson shouldn't also impact your finances (having to maybe retake the class), your future career, and your life in general... that's pretty extreme. And yeah, depending on the class, failing one test can really have consequences like that. I had a few classes where I only had 2 tests and 2 finals. The tests were like 40% of your grade. And it didn't seem like it was an isolated incident, from the tone of the post.
If the outcome was the teacher talked about that lesson, then said "we'll adjust the grade so you don't all have negative consequences b/c you did nothing wrong: this is a school, after all!" yeah I'd agree with you...
Well, you see, that's kinda the thing about "education". Every step should be beyond your current capability, but not so far beyond it that you cannot expand your capability to take the step. With the assistance of an educator and the assorted educational materials, of course.
In fact, that is the difference between a good educator and a bad one: a bad one will just say, "it is what it is", and describe their failure to teach as laziness or stupidity on the part of the student.
If that is a part of the syllabus than okay. But if that isn't clearly stated as a goal of the class at any point than it doesn't make sense.
If the knowledge is necessary, it sounds like there should be an additional class before said class to give knowledge that can be built on in the more difficult advanced class.
Sometimes things are just hard and it should be expected that nobody masters it in any arbitrary period (e.g., the course of a two week period covering a topic, or even over a semester).
If you can’t cover the courses materials in a semester then split the course into multiple different classes. Most collages have 2 or more Calculus courses, but you can also pull various aspects of multiple classes into a single introductory one.
> As for the inevitability, organic chemistry, at least as it's currently taught, is hard, involving a mix of memorization and problem solving (see today's Nobel Prize coverage if you want a greater sense of why). The memorization can be compared to committing dozens of flow charts to your brain, as each type of reaction will need different conditions and catalysts depending on the precise nature of the starting materials. Armed with that memorization, people are then ready for problem-solving: figuring out which combinations of reactions will build simple raw materials into a complex chemical like an antibiotic or polymer.
This "organic chemistry is hard" idea gets trotted out pretty frequently. The paradox is that premeds also need to take classes in physiology, which in involves a lot of... you guessed it - memorization. Maybe more memorization.
That said, there are as many ways to teach this course as there are teachers. I suspect some emphasize memorization because that's the easiest kind of knowledge to test for. But when approached conceptually, organic chemistry requires little more memorization than any serious scientific topic.
I've never taken any chemistry, but everyone seems to have horror stories. It seems like chemistry is uniquely obsessed with memorization. I can't fathom the purpose of memorizing the periodic table - who cares? Why not focus on what the periodic table actually means?
How did you learn to program? You probably had someone show you the syntax, you wrote a few basic programs, learned OOP, and then you took an algorithms class. Did you need to take an algorithms class to become a productive programmer? Probably not but it certainly helped you, and maybe you "memorized" a few techniques along the way (time complexity analysis, BFS, DFS, heaps, data structures, etc...). These techniques, as varied and general as we believe they are, are merely human inventions. We, the computer science community, discovered these in the 20th century and have been using them for less than a century. There is no way to accidentally kill someone while programming, modulo military and health care.
Chemistry is not like that. Chemistry kills people as much as it saves people. Mediocre chemists are at risk of accidentally killing themselves and others. Mediocre chemists "forget" the order you're supposed to mix an acid and water in (do you kill someone if you do obj == null instead of null == obj?). Mediocre chemists "forget" to work in a fume hood with volatile species. Mediocre chemists "forget" what type of container a substance needs to be stored in. Mediocre chemists "forget" what catalyst is needed for a reaction.
The cost of forgetting something in chemistry is at best a failed experiment, at worst death. Organic chemistry is the first class where you start dealing with potentially deadly substances, so ya it's hard not to die or injure/kill your lab mates and if you don't like it then you should switch to an easier major.
Source: I entered college as a materials science major, took up to organic chemistry, said fuck this and switch to CS.
It's not about memorizing the periodic table, it is memorizing the mapping from names to structures. So, for example, the name of a compound might be 2,3-Diphenylbenzoyl 2,4,6-trimethylbenzoate. Here is what the compound's structure looks like: https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/2_3-Diphenylbenzoy... That information is encoded in the name, but you have to memorize all the rules for the encoding to be able to translate it.
Why do language courses ask students to memorize the meaning of the letters of the alphabet?
How are you going to keep up with a chemistry course if you have to consult documentation every time you encounter Pb to remember that means lead? Organic chemistry entails a lot more memorization than that, but memorizing the periodic table at least is simply table stakes for entry level highschool chemistry. Memorizing the periodic table is month one of 10th grade chemistry 1. What the periodic table means is also taught at the same time, and is trickier than the basic memorization. Most students can get the basic memorization of the periodic table figured out in a week or two with a stack of flash cards. If you can't manage that much, what's the point in going further?
My education only went as far as AP Chemistry in high school but we did no such memorization of periodic table. The table is organized in a way that's extremely informative with regards to ionic charge and element classification. It pretty much is exactly what you say re: learning what the periodic table means. Any high level chemistry class that's focused on such trivial memorization is doing a huge disservice to its students.
The memorization bits come with remembering nomenclature and equilibriums, which you just kinda have to memorize or you're not really learning any chemistry at all. They're the building blocks of all higher level chemistry that come after, organic or inorganic.
If you memorize all sorts of things, people treat you like they do people with good memories in other subjects, as a resource to help them recall what they need. If you need books and tables and cheat sheets, that's also fine. I have a mediocre memory for details and I did fine with chemistry. If I had a genuine memory problem, but could succeed with notes, I don't doubt that I could have gotten a special dispensation from the school. I suspect that's not the case with a lot of students who complain.
General chemistry is hard because people have difficulty with the math that they told themselves they would never need to use in the future. Algebra, logarithms, etc.
If you never learn to balance an equation, however, you will never succeed. Similarly, you will get low grades if you cannot solve an equilibrium problem, which requires algebra, logarithms, and a calculator. If you can't do equilibria, you can't do acid-base problems. If you are expected to know a few reactions for the exam, not memorizing them will probably leave you in a bad place. This is the same as for other subjects, as said above with physiology. Is it fair? I don't know, school is like that. I would say, though, that a lot of General Chemistry represents things that people do every day in Chemistry, and also represents the historical understanding of chemistry until about 1850. There's also some stuff in there about analyzing chemicals to determine what is there.
Organic chemistry is a little different. Organic compounds are quite varied and do many interesting things. They are soluble in many different substances, many of which are organic chemicals themselves. They react in often surprising ways with each other and with inorganic compounds. They may react to heat and light, or even just agitating or dropping them. There's a lot to say in the subject. So the education is focused on covering a wide array of substances and reaction types, and trying to show where general properties apply and the limits of generalization. In addition, there is a large analytic component because, as you might expect, a lot of compounds do not exist in isolation and need to be identified and quantified. As a (veterinary) physician, I don't think you can really do medicine properly without grokking OChem. You don't need to do reactions yourself, but if it looks like an alien language, then a lot of the information we have about drugs and physiology won't make sense to you.
People find OChem hard because it's a lot to learn in a small amount of time, and they don't put in the work. I think that the majority of students at my undergrad school could have succeeded if they put in 20 hours a week and did all the problems in the back of the book, which is what I did. The test is really checking to see if you have seen the thing before, and the only way to do that is to expose yourself to it.
Maybe OChem is the Leetcode of the med school admissions process. The MCAT certainly has some OChem, as well as Physics, Biology and Biochemistry. And, I'll be honest, if studying hard enough to get an A in four courses while spending 20 hours a week on 1 of them is difficult, med school is probably not the right choice. I went through undergrad twice and the first time through I would not have pulled that off.
My wife took his organic chemistry course at Princeton 20 years ago, and says he was an excellent teacher. Obviously many things can change in two decades, so take from that what you will.
I wouldn't be surprised if his teaching style changed in his late 70s early 80s; people can naturally tend to become much more inflexible at that age. He might still be a genius in his area of expertise but no longer a good teacher.
Well the article doesn't give any evidence that that's the case. In fact it mentions that Jones' style is one that focuses less on drudgery and more on the interesting aspects of ochem.
Note that the NYTimes article specifically mentioned it was largely premeds who complained. From my experience teaching o-chem, the premeds were always the pushiest. Probably because they need the A for medical school.
Also Maitland Jones has a very good reputation as a teacher.
My wife got a B in his course (because of a mixup about lab attendance, which was not an issue with the professor), and attended (at the time) the most competitive medical school in the US. No one "needs" an A.
A similar thing happened at the college I went to, the Colorado school of Mines. We had a physics prof, I think it was physics 2 that was the real tough one. It was known for being very hard, most folks didn't get good grades despite trying very hard in the class, and they famously never curved it, at all.
The semester in which my buddies and I took the class was particularly bad. The class average was in the 50s or 60s, the highest score was in the high 70s, and half of the class or more failed the midterm.
There was an uproar, so the prof held a town hall of sorts with the students in the class. In that town hall he didn't back down on the curve, it wasn't going to be curved. It also came out that the prof hadn't actually written the test, nor had he taken the test himself. It was written and graded all by TAs. The students were able to convince him to actually take the test amd report back.
He took the test and reported back. He scored a 68 (or so, it's been a while). a bit above the average in the class but still not good. My buddy scored a 78, he did way better than the prof on his own test. In the end the prof agreed to set his own score as 100% and then basically bumped everyone score by 100%-his score. The folks that did better than his score just got 100%.
It was considered one of thr weed out classes for all engineering disciplines at Mines.
A teacher like this is failing his customers, the students. A educators job is to educate, not to sort or judge.
I'm not sure I fully understand the exact timeline from the article, but is it possible that age indirectly played a factor in the students' unhappiness?
His mind for organic chemistry might still be sharp as a tack. But at 84 years old, if he was the students' teacher during the initial part of the pandemic there's probably a chance he struggled with the digital adjustments to doing so many things online and delivered a subpar overall experience. If nothing else, perhaps eyesight and hearing fades a bit with age and makes trying to do stuff through Zoom and other online tools something very difficult for them making office hours and other things a challenge everybody resisted. This means that these students were far behind other years students.
By the time they all resumed in-person activities, the teacher might have thought that his students were at the normal level he was used to through decades of experience, but he misread how far behind they were.
> "NYU had in Professor Maitland Jones a faculty member with a one-year appointment specifically to teach organic chemistry," wrote John Beckman, a spokesperson for NYU, in a statement to Reason. "In one of his organic chemistry classes in the spring 2022 there were, among other troubling indicators, a very high rate of student withdrawals, a student petition signed by 82 students, course evaluations scores that were by far the worst not only among members of the Chemistry Department but among all the University's undergraduate science courses, and multiple student complaints about his dismissiveness, unresponsiveness, condescension, and opacity about grading."
> Beckman continued: So, what exactly would be the argument for renewal of this appointment? NYU has lots of hard courses and lots of tough graders among the faculty - they don't end up with outcomes like this. Surely, among the many things a university should stand up for - including academic freedom, academic rigor, and a robust research enterprise - one of them should be good teaching. Good teaching shouldn't be pitted against rigor as an excuse for poor teaching; good teaching and rigor are perfectly compatible, and the latter is not a threat to the former at NYU.
"NYU had in Professor Maitland
Jones a faculty member with a
one-year appointment
specifically to teach organic
chemistry," wrote John Beckman
The statement is factually correct but misleading. He's been at NYU since 2007. Given he's on a one year appointment, I guess he's been re-hired 14 times.
When a professor gets the worst course evaluation scores among all courses at a university - just about always it means that there is a problem with the lecturer.
It's fine to be ageist against someone who is 84 years old. There are severe cognitive declines that almost no one avoids at that age. It is irresponsible to hire an 84 year old for any important job.
I attended medical school and excelled in my organic chemistry courses as an undergraduate. In my view, organic chemistry is a difficult course for many because it is quite multidiscplinary and requires multiple modes of thinking/reasoning.
- Basic chemistry (chemistry 101): Concepts like bond formation, electronegativity, acid-base reactions, etc
- Memorization: Functional groups, reaction types, etc are fundamental building blocks (much like writing and speaking requires a knowledge of words).
- Deductive reasoning: Getting from molecule A to molecule B requires long chains of intermediate steps that logically follow from previous steps
- Visuo-spatial: This is probably the one faculty that comes naturally to some and absolutely does not click for others.. Understanding organic chemistry fundamentally requires an appreciation of how molecules and groups interact in 3-D space. Understanding spatial patterns and interactions also helps with memorization (e.g. it is easier to remember why certain functional groups behave the way they do)
- Linguistic: This may seem trivial but many struggle with the grammar of naming molecules (IUPAC nomenclature)
It is true that organic chemistry is a weeder course for pre-meds. However, I do think it is a relatively good filter to select people who excel across multiple cognitive dimensions, which is required for success in medical school. Now whether or not this is required to produce good doctors can be debated, but I suspect that in certain corners of medicine, particularly the more cerebral specialties like nephrology or academic medicine in general, rigorous undergraduate courses such as organic chemistry are absolutely pre-requisite.
I ended up leaving medicine and am now a founder of a biotech startup, so take my opinions with a huge grain of salt :)
I think organic chemistry is hard enough as a subject to where students shouldn't have to face the additional difficulty of having adversarial teachers. A weeder course shouldn't be the same class students are expected to learn how to teach themselves material. If anything, a weeder course should have the best teachers in the department.
How to help make sure the teachers don't burn out is a different issue. I imagine it's hard to be the teacher of these kinds of classes year after year.
Readit News
Difficult/opaque lecture style, very high difficulty tests, openly mocking students in a 500+ person lecture if he deemed a question not intelligent enough, and on top of all of it, forced to buy a textbook he co-authored (homework questions taken from the required book, refreshed every year).
For some reason this story seems to happen more often in chemistry than other disciplines. In my experience as a Biomedical Engineering major, my chemistry classes were by far the most difficult, almost like it was the point - just difficulty for difficulty's sake. And I had plenty of other hard classes, including AI/ML, Diff EQ, and a course on the physics of blood, but each of those professors, while rigorous, were also fair and kind, willing to help students understand the material, and definitely never refusing to answer what they believed to be a "stupid question."
I even remember conversations with friends about how the chemistry department seemed to have a very high number of massively egotistical professors who mistreated their students. My chem major friends confirmed it was like this all the time.
All of this is anecdotal, but soft-confirmed by multiple friends and friends of friends at the time. When this story broke I was honestly not at all surprised.
(Having taught a few sections of this kind of thing myself, I'm not entirely unsympathetic. It's a long, painful day when you're waiting at hour 5+ of a lab session, watching someone fumble around hopelessly with gel rig or something, knowing that they're never going to make it and that this result is going to make or break their grade for the quarter...)
I had an O-Chem professor who explicitly set a curve and gave incredibly difficult exams, such that only a few people in the 100+ person class could get an A. It was almost like he was transparently trying to reduce the student population.
But what cynical advantage does the school gain from weeding out premeds? Besides tough love for the students who won't cut the mustard, what is their motivation for weeding out premeds?
In reality O-chem should not be a pre-med class nor should it be required by medical schools. Other countries admit straight to med school without a BS requirement.
It's really more about, how much do you really want this and less about the coursework.
However, O-chem probably wouldn't have any students if it wasn't a premed course either.
Isn't that how an 'A' grade is supposed to work? I'm not suggesting you curve it to deliberately fail people, but an 'A', 'B' and 'C' should have some meaning. If 90% of a class get's an A, the grading is meaningless and might as well just be pass/fail.
https://www.ama-assn.org/education/gme-funding/save-graduate...
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/it-s-time-to...
In the undergraduate institution I attended grading on a curve was not common outside of Chemistry classes. I specifically remember taking a chem class where the majority of the class failed on a percentage basis, but most people passed after the curve.
What was the goal of that class exactly? To learn something? To ensure people passed and repeated the same experience in the next class which was also graded on a curve? What did it mean exactly to have passed Chem 1/2 and Organic chem? It was taught poorly and you were tested on concepts that were not taught properly and not understood.
I know people who opted to take the same Chemistry sequence at a local community college and they learned way more than we did, simply because the teacher wasn't trying to haze them.
If it wasn't the self-authored textbooks refreshed every year, chances were that the adjunct teaching barely spoke English.
It took me extra long to get through school just because of all of the math classes I had to drop and take the next semester just because on the first day I showed up to class, the prof was mumbling or non-verbal, would face the board and write illegibly all lecture and not explain a damn thing.
But at midterms and finals, his class scored consistently worse than the same course taught by a different professor, even though he was the one writing the exams. And he got angry every time this happened.
My college chem professor was a first year out of industry, incapable of basic socialization, we all knew why he became a professor. The head of the department had his own text/work books, we had to spend like $400 on ~5 books for one class. This new guy had to teach off of this and had strict guidelines around testing etc. The brightest and most studious students got like B+ end of semester. The majority F-C, and we needed a B to continue the class schedule. 80 students had their grades bumped by the dean by like 20 points so an entire engineering year wasn't flunked. It was a tight schedule and if the majority failed chem it would look bad on the school and gum up the scheduling for that class and the following class.
My friends in other majors weren't having a much better time.
I don’t want to condone or encourage this behavior. However, I often think back to a similar professor I had in college who I loathed at the time. I gritted through the course and complained the whole way.
Then I graduated into the working world and encountered a similarly difficult person in my management chain. Weirdly, I felt prepared to handle the situation and kept relatively calm while navigating the not-nice boss. I didn’t stay for long, but I was able to thrive and get some early career wins even under a not-nice boss.
So I don’t think mean teachers or bosses are a good thing, but at the same time I feel like I grew more during those periods than I did at other times in my education/career. I still don’t know exactly what to think about all of this.
Things may have changed during those decades (as things do), but she said there were options at her school to take "Maitland Jones Orgo" or "Easy Orgo", and approximately everyone knew that they would be challenged in the former, but provided the opportunity to grow more than the latter.
I'm sure there are many things involved, but perhaps he didn't fully grasp that when he moved institutions, he was also shifting his audience, and perhaps his new audience wasn't quite as interested in the challenge.
To give an example, I had an engineering class on electrical machinery. On one test, not a single person made an A. In fact, the highest grade was a "C" obtained by the class genius. I studied hard for the exam, attended all lectures, did all homework assignments, and got a ~45 on the exam out of 100 points. At that point, you have nothing like a bell curve. The teacher has failed to either teach or formulate a test that meets reasonable expectations. Something is broken. I don't think everyone should've gotten an "A", but failing an entire class of students that are not even remotely lazy (nearly all over achievers) is stupid.
1. The instructor has difficulty calibrating the difficulty of the assignments because it's all so easy to them now.
2. The instructor is interested in having a high ceiling so the truly gifted can distinguish themselves, usually using a generous curve to not screw over the competent but average students.
3. The class is beyond the current capability of the students.
However, he made up for the brutal exams with ample extra credit opportunities. As a result, while very few people got As and Bs in his exams, a normal-ish percentage of people passed, but were forced to work harder than expected to pass. This was Calculus I and II, so it was tricky but an interesting teaching style. At least those who passed knew the material. Plenty still failed - but this is why everyone I knew called him a difficult, but not unfair, instructor.
It was American History (college) and I've never liked history. When people found out I was taking his class, they tell me they were sorry for me.
To this day, that man was the best orator I have ever seen in my life (and I'm over 40). He would get up, start talking, and I would be enthralled. It quickly became my favorite class.
But he was ironclad in his expectations. He had no attendance requirements, but every class he gave a 3 question quiz over the lecture the day before. These quizzes added up to be worth more than the tests in terms of final grade, and he would only allow you to make up 3 of those quizzes (for missing). And he was absolutely, 100%, willing to fail you if you didn't have the points for it.
What I learned from that class is that students didn't like him because he wasn't lenient. You got the grade you deserved and there was never any leeway. He made this quite clear.
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Contrast this with the semester I ended up having to drop Diff Eq. The professor had a policy of 3 missed days is an automatic failure. My alarm clock stopped working and I went over that limit (kept trying to get people to wake me up, but none did). I had to drop a class I had an A in.
> The teacher has failed to either teach or formulate a test that meets reasonable expectations.
I think there are potentially other explanations.
I once had a math professor explain he stopped grading on a curve because he once had a class where the highest grade was a low C and he didn't feel that deserved an A.
And I agree with him.
You're there to learn, the grade isn't supposed to be a reflection of your effort.
I once had a class where the professor would put things on the test that weren't in the lecture. Caught me off guard the first time, didn't catch me off guard the rest of the semester. The gap between my grade and everyone else in the class was huge (I think I'm the only one that passed in that class).
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At the end of the day, if a student cannot show some sort of mastery of the subject, they should be failed.
If the outcome was the teacher talked about that lesson, then said "we'll adjust the grade so you don't all have negative consequences b/c you did nothing wrong: this is a school, after all!" yeah I'd agree with you...
In fact, that is the difference between a good educator and a bad one: a bad one will just say, "it is what it is", and describe their failure to teach as laziness or stupidity on the part of the student.
If the knowledge is necessary, it sounds like there should be an additional class before said class to give knowledge that can be built on in the more difficult advanced class.
This "organic chemistry is hard" idea gets trotted out pretty frequently. The paradox is that premeds also need to take classes in physiology, which in involves a lot of... you guessed it - memorization. Maybe more memorization.
That said, there are as many ways to teach this course as there are teachers. I suspect some emphasize memorization because that's the easiest kind of knowledge to test for. But when approached conceptually, organic chemistry requires little more memorization than any serious scientific topic.
How did you learn to program? You probably had someone show you the syntax, you wrote a few basic programs, learned OOP, and then you took an algorithms class. Did you need to take an algorithms class to become a productive programmer? Probably not but it certainly helped you, and maybe you "memorized" a few techniques along the way (time complexity analysis, BFS, DFS, heaps, data structures, etc...). These techniques, as varied and general as we believe they are, are merely human inventions. We, the computer science community, discovered these in the 20th century and have been using them for less than a century. There is no way to accidentally kill someone while programming, modulo military and health care.
Chemistry is not like that. Chemistry kills people as much as it saves people. Mediocre chemists are at risk of accidentally killing themselves and others. Mediocre chemists "forget" the order you're supposed to mix an acid and water in (do you kill someone if you do obj == null instead of null == obj?). Mediocre chemists "forget" to work in a fume hood with volatile species. Mediocre chemists "forget" what type of container a substance needs to be stored in. Mediocre chemists "forget" what catalyst is needed for a reaction.
The cost of forgetting something in chemistry is at best a failed experiment, at worst death. Organic chemistry is the first class where you start dealing with potentially deadly substances, so ya it's hard not to die or injure/kill your lab mates and if you don't like it then you should switch to an easier major.
Source: I entered college as a materials science major, took up to organic chemistry, said fuck this and switch to CS.
How are you going to keep up with a chemistry course if you have to consult documentation every time you encounter Pb to remember that means lead? Organic chemistry entails a lot more memorization than that, but memorizing the periodic table at least is simply table stakes for entry level highschool chemistry. Memorizing the periodic table is month one of 10th grade chemistry 1. What the periodic table means is also taught at the same time, and is trickier than the basic memorization. Most students can get the basic memorization of the periodic table figured out in a week or two with a stack of flash cards. If you can't manage that much, what's the point in going further?
The memorization bits come with remembering nomenclature and equilibriums, which you just kinda have to memorize or you're not really learning any chemistry at all. They're the building blocks of all higher level chemistry that come after, organic or inorganic.
General chemistry is hard because people have difficulty with the math that they told themselves they would never need to use in the future. Algebra, logarithms, etc.
If you never learn to balance an equation, however, you will never succeed. Similarly, you will get low grades if you cannot solve an equilibrium problem, which requires algebra, logarithms, and a calculator. If you can't do equilibria, you can't do acid-base problems. If you are expected to know a few reactions for the exam, not memorizing them will probably leave you in a bad place. This is the same as for other subjects, as said above with physiology. Is it fair? I don't know, school is like that. I would say, though, that a lot of General Chemistry represents things that people do every day in Chemistry, and also represents the historical understanding of chemistry until about 1850. There's also some stuff in there about analyzing chemicals to determine what is there.
Organic chemistry is a little different. Organic compounds are quite varied and do many interesting things. They are soluble in many different substances, many of which are organic chemicals themselves. They react in often surprising ways with each other and with inorganic compounds. They may react to heat and light, or even just agitating or dropping them. There's a lot to say in the subject. So the education is focused on covering a wide array of substances and reaction types, and trying to show where general properties apply and the limits of generalization. In addition, there is a large analytic component because, as you might expect, a lot of compounds do not exist in isolation and need to be identified and quantified. As a (veterinary) physician, I don't think you can really do medicine properly without grokking OChem. You don't need to do reactions yourself, but if it looks like an alien language, then a lot of the information we have about drugs and physiology won't make sense to you.
People find OChem hard because it's a lot to learn in a small amount of time, and they don't put in the work. I think that the majority of students at my undergrad school could have succeeded if they put in 20 hours a week and did all the problems in the back of the book, which is what I did. The test is really checking to see if you have seen the thing before, and the only way to do that is to expose yourself to it.
Maybe OChem is the Leetcode of the med school admissions process. The MCAT certainly has some OChem, as well as Physics, Biology and Biochemistry. And, I'll be honest, if studying hard enough to get an A in four courses while spending 20 hours a week on 1 of them is difficult, med school is probably not the right choice. I went through undergrad twice and the first time through I would not have pulled that off.
Also Maitland Jones has a very good reputation as a teacher.
The semester in which my buddies and I took the class was particularly bad. The class average was in the 50s or 60s, the highest score was in the high 70s, and half of the class or more failed the midterm.
There was an uproar, so the prof held a town hall of sorts with the students in the class. In that town hall he didn't back down on the curve, it wasn't going to be curved. It also came out that the prof hadn't actually written the test, nor had he taken the test himself. It was written and graded all by TAs. The students were able to convince him to actually take the test amd report back.
He took the test and reported back. He scored a 68 (or so, it's been a while). a bit above the average in the class but still not good. My buddy scored a 78, he did way better than the prof on his own test. In the end the prof agreed to set his own score as 100% and then basically bumped everyone score by 100%-his score. The folks that did better than his score just got 100%.
It was considered one of thr weed out classes for all engineering disciplines at Mines.
A teacher like this is failing his customers, the students. A educators job is to educate, not to sort or judge.
Edited - typo.
His mind for organic chemistry might still be sharp as a tack. But at 84 years old, if he was the students' teacher during the initial part of the pandemic there's probably a chance he struggled with the digital adjustments to doing so many things online and delivered a subpar overall experience. If nothing else, perhaps eyesight and hearing fades a bit with age and makes trying to do stuff through Zoom and other online tools something very difficult for them making office hours and other things a challenge everybody resisted. This means that these students were far behind other years students.
By the time they all resumed in-person activities, the teacher might have thought that his students were at the normal level he was used to through decades of experience, but he misread how far behind they were.
> "NYU had in Professor Maitland Jones a faculty member with a one-year appointment specifically to teach organic chemistry," wrote John Beckman, a spokesperson for NYU, in a statement to Reason. "In one of his organic chemistry classes in the spring 2022 there were, among other troubling indicators, a very high rate of student withdrawals, a student petition signed by 82 students, course evaluations scores that were by far the worst not only among members of the Chemistry Department but among all the University's undergraduate science courses, and multiple student complaints about his dismissiveness, unresponsiveness, condescension, and opacity about grading."
> Beckman continued: So, what exactly would be the argument for renewal of this appointment? NYU has lots of hard courses and lots of tough graders among the faculty - they don't end up with outcomes like this. Surely, among the many things a university should stand up for - including academic freedom, academic rigor, and a robust research enterprise - one of them should be good teaching. Good teaching shouldn't be pitted against rigor as an excuse for poor teaching; good teaching and rigor are perfectly compatible, and the latter is not a threat to the former at NYU.
False, this is your opinion, they were careful not to state what is, but what might be the case.
- Basic chemistry (chemistry 101): Concepts like bond formation, electronegativity, acid-base reactions, etc
- Memorization: Functional groups, reaction types, etc are fundamental building blocks (much like writing and speaking requires a knowledge of words).
- Deductive reasoning: Getting from molecule A to molecule B requires long chains of intermediate steps that logically follow from previous steps
- Visuo-spatial: This is probably the one faculty that comes naturally to some and absolutely does not click for others.. Understanding organic chemistry fundamentally requires an appreciation of how molecules and groups interact in 3-D space. Understanding spatial patterns and interactions also helps with memorization (e.g. it is easier to remember why certain functional groups behave the way they do)
- Linguistic: This may seem trivial but many struggle with the grammar of naming molecules (IUPAC nomenclature)
It is true that organic chemistry is a weeder course for pre-meds. However, I do think it is a relatively good filter to select people who excel across multiple cognitive dimensions, which is required for success in medical school. Now whether or not this is required to produce good doctors can be debated, but I suspect that in certain corners of medicine, particularly the more cerebral specialties like nephrology or academic medicine in general, rigorous undergraduate courses such as organic chemistry are absolutely pre-requisite.
I ended up leaving medicine and am now a founder of a biotech startup, so take my opinions with a huge grain of salt :)
How to help make sure the teachers don't burn out is a different issue. I imagine it's hard to be the teacher of these kinds of classes year after year.