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Students get renowned NYU professor fired for giving low grades
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/03/us/nyu-organic-chemistry-petition.html
A quarter of students signed a petition that an organic chemistry class was too hard, and the professor teaching it was fired. The professor, Maitland Jones, had taught organic chemistry for decades, at NYU and Princeton before it. He had also written a widely used textbook on it. Causes cited include MJ being an asshole; COVID educational policies; and a general downward trend in student quality preceding COVID. One thing that isn't mentioned is that NYU adopted an SAT-optional test policy for the class entering in 2020.
This is why educational policies matter at every level. As a cohort degrades in quality, downstream institutions face pressure to adapt curricula and policies to satisfy those students. The next downstream organization then faces the same pressure. If the student was good enough to graduate high school, shouldn't they be good enough to go to college? If a student got into a university, shouldn't they be good enough to pass all their classes? If a student graduated from undergrad, shouldn't they have a shot at doctoral and professional degrees? If they got into med school, shouldn't they be able to graduate? If they got an MD, shouldn't they able to be a practicing surgeon?
What makes you so confident that this is a particularly shitty cohort?
“X only happened because today’s youth are stupid/immoral/lazy/...” is a perennial favorite. I’m not sure that the SAT change is obviously responsible for this outcry.
In my undergrad, there were a few classes with this sort of reputation. They were junior or senior level courses core to the degree—not electives—like Electromagnetic Fields. The good students complained that it was brutal. The bad students just failed. And there was a constant undercurrent of how it was the professor’s fault, how he was too inexperienced, or had been doing it too long, or had ridiculous expectations, pro was just an asshole. These complaints originated from across the class.
Now, not much ever came of them. Fields was expected to be hard, we were learning something, there was trauma-bonding, the curve meant GPAs were reasonable. A dozen tiny factors leading to the conclusion that it was alright, we supposed, and no further action would be taken. I’m sure a few people would have signed on to a complaint. The advanced circuits professor always started out his class by reading enraged reviews, which had the added effect of enhancing the reputation!
Organic chemistry is, as far as I know, firmly in this category of challenging junior classes. I’ve seen it considered anywhere from a “weed-out” class to unfair. I would expect to see lots of complaints, lots of failures, a big curve for the survivors, and a professor encouraged to play the hardass.
So it’s not hard for me to imagine those factors crystallizing a bit differently. A sufficiently sympathetic student rallying enough of the underperformers to sign a petition. I’ve had bad professors, some of whom had extensive experience, and wished for more competent ones. That’s despite our SAT-qualified student body. Complaining enough that the professor gets pushed out is entitlement, but it isn’t necessarily a sign of a worse cohort.
It was a freshman class at my school, I thought it was like this everywhere. At the very least, I think it's a lower division class, unlike E&M.
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Should statements that were first uttered recently be considered more to likely to be true than ones repeated throughout history, all else being equal?
Nothing in the article indicates he cranked up the difficulty, so complaints over a course that was taught for several decades, indicate that something has else changed. I do not see why decrease in student quality should be an explanation of exclusion for decrease in student results, only seen as valid when all others have been disproven. Seems external-locus-of-controlly, tbh.
It is at least a sign of a morally worse cohort, students having power over their professor seems exactly the inverse of justice.
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The easy exercise is to try and solve exam questions from n years ago. Most of the time, in most subjects, people just walk away shocked how much harder they were.
I've TAed for the same CS courses at a major US university for many years in a row, and could watch the standards being lowered in real time. Yet, in one of my last (COVID) years, we still had a group of students with highly polished progressive vocabulary start a petition about how the difficulty level of our exams is exacerbating a stressful situation and causing particular harm to underprivileged students and we therefore must discontinue our use of plagiarism detection software. (The harvest the software had produced up to that point was bountiful.) Several others messaged us to express their support, but only anonymously and in private. In the end, we survived the semester only by throwing them many bones and basically not giving any grades below an A-.
I don't know about your course in particular, but the "look how badly current students fail old exams" technique is deeply flawed. When a course is changed it almost always adds some parts while removing others.
If the previous version covered points ABCD but the new course is now ADEF then it's only natural that today's students would be confused by points B and C. It's not a fair comparison unless you also consider how well the original group would have done on E and F.
Right, that's fair, but it has been long enough since I took those courses for me that I can also look at present ones (including ones that I didn't teach or practice in the meantime) and convince myself that I find them easier than the ones I took 10-15 years ago.
There might be some sources of error in that comparison. Hopefully 10-15 years of practical experience makes many of the types of questions you'd see simpler to solve. It's like trying to remember the mental/emotional state of not understanding the solution to a puzzle that seems obvious/straightforward in hindsight. I'd still agree things are probably simpler. In my own academic career I had the misfortune to having to take two versions of a foundational course; the first time as a non-program student taking it as a prereq to continue taking interesting higher level courses as electives, the second time several years later as a program student to meet degree requirements. The first was a notorious weed-out course, while the second one was significantly less difficult although more practically applicable for modern software.
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It was common practise in most courses to provide the last few years exams with the correct answers to students as practise material back when I was studying in university in Finland around the turn of the millennium. Is this not the case in US?
IIRC it varies from school to school, but at least for final exams and PhD quals it's common for there to be an official file of old exams with professors' answers that students can get copies of, and at places where that isn't the case, I think it's quite common for there to be an unofficial file of graded+returned exams maintained by clubs or Greek societies.
But the natural way to study those old files is to start at n=1 and work backward, and by the time you're confident in your ability to answer the last 5 years worth of questions you're probably confident enough to stop there. The "try to solve exam questions from n years ago" advice is more about n=20 or n=50 than n=2 or n=5. In that case there might be much more of a cumulative change, and in cases where that's so, the only good counterargument I know of is the one @Kevin_P points out above.
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The good thing there ageism is likely not going to be the thing in the industry for very long, even if it still exists (got mixed data on that). I mean, with the declining quality of the new cadre, people still would need somebody who is actually able to make the code work. So if someone wants to be employed in their advanced age, and still remembers how to do that, there will always be some demand.
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And then, these people have over-inflated estimates of their own competence, and off they go out into the real world to make basic mistakes and cause problems...
If such people are lucky enough to pass an interview, they'll often become aware of their limitations on the job and shift to contributing in other, less technical ways. For example, coordinating diversity initiatives, contributing to codes of conduct, or scrubbing codebases of "biased" language. That last one is fantastic, because if your employer is dumb enough to measure lines of code, it looks like you're actually contributing code.
I used to be an interview-giver (~50 per year) at a major tech company. One of the reasons I stopped giving interviews was the experience I had around a particular candidate in 2019.
Background context: the company I'm referencing here has a general candidate intake; relatively few people are recruited to work on a particular team. The candidate, after an initial screen, goes through five typical whiteboarding coding interviews (now four; one has been replaced by a Goodliness and Leadership "G&L" interview to provide a more, err, holistic perspective). Each interviewer scores the candidate on several attributes, briefly comments on them, and provides a rating from Strong No Hire to Strong Hire. If the initial scores are promising, everyone writes up a full review and justification that takes 1-2 hours of time. A hiring committee composed of technical leadership then reviews the packet and gives the thumbs up or down.
My go-to questions were framed around an array that starts with increasing integers and then switches, once, to decreasing integers. E.g. you might have [1, 3, 5, 4, 2] or [11, 12, 15, 9]. I start with a very simple question that tests that the candidate understands the property, followed by a warm-up, and then three more sophisticated questions that I actually try to get a hiring signal from. Around 50% of candidates make it substantially past the warm-up, and even those who don't usually still feel good about the interview and hopefully learned something because they made genuine progress.
So, the candidate comes in, and he had graduated cum laude with a CS degree from a HBCU before going to work at a government contractor. So after some chit-chat to get him into a productive headspace, I pose the simple question: how might you find the minimum value for an array with this property? Most candidates can immediately answer (sometimes with some clarifications on the spec) so I rarely ask them to code it out, but he just didn't get it. So we code, and he struggles everywhere, from not knowing how to get the length of the array to not understanding how something could be increasing and then decreasing. We spent 45 minutes with me hand-holding him to a pseudocode solution on the initial sanity check and don't even get to the warm-up.
Naturally, I give Strong No Hire. Surprisingly, I am told by the recruiter I need to do the full write up, which I dutifully and meticulously do. The recruiter comes back and tells me that she thinks I unfairly rated him (how would she know???) on two of the attributes and needed to either further justify them or change them. I justify further. Finally, he goes to hiring committee, he's (thankfully) turned down, and the scores everyone gave him are released to us. Literally everyone had given him the lowest possible rating on every attribute and said Strong No Hire. Despite that, all of us had to spend hours writing up the interviews and resisting calls from the recruiter to revise our scores, which was highly exceptional and not something we used to be asked. The second that happened, I removed myself permanently from the interviewer pool: clearly my time wasn't something they respected or valued.
I checked up on the candidate on LinkedIn a couple months ago, and he's still at his government contractor, writing the code that runs the US military. Glad that critical ad impression code was protected from him.
min(array[first_index],array[last_index])?Either something is seriously wrong with the HBCU's or that student goofed real hard due to anxiety or whatever, it's hard to imagine someone failing upwards that spectacularly.
There's something seriously wrong at the HBCUs. This is pretty well known at "major tech company", which has actually attempted to do something about that. Not successfully.
(and finding the max is trivial in O(N) time, a bit harder in O(log N) time)
But is that something wrong with HBCUs?
As a non American outsider, my impression is that they are regular colleges other than the history and the current student demographics.
Something being "wrong" with the proportion of black people in tech is independent of something being wrong with HBCUs.
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What I find interesting is how much easier your actual (ie. not the warmup one) problem is, relative to the problems I was given when I interviewed at the exact same company a decade ago. Then, when I worked there, the problems I was giving people during interviews were easier than the ones I was given, but harder than the one you are giving.
I think that this was ultimately unavoidable, given the number of people the company wanted and did hire over this time period. It did result in the transformation of the image of the company within the industry though, from the coolest place that everyone wanted to work at, through a place that everyone wanted to have on their resume, to another Microsoft: a steady job paying well, but not particularly exciting or hard to come by.
I’m confused. Where does he actually state the non warm up problem? Was it edited?
With experience, you can easily guess what the real problem will be, based on input and the warm up part, but in any case, he does say what the problem is in another comment.
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Yeah, they're not particularly hard and not intended to be; the goal is to just see if someone is a competent coder, not a genius. I still only ended up giving a LH or higher recommendation to ~20% of people.
In some ways going for the best and brightest would be disadvantageous; they'd get bored wiring protos and updating config files all day. The main things selected for are competence, willingness to do some bare minimum of work, and compliance/desire not to rock the boat too much. Which probably makes sense.
It is true that for an established company, not destroying it is the first order of business. That said, even if you ignore how lousy Google is on product side (recent story of Stadia being probably the best example of the fundamental problem it has), if you assume that it could come up with a great and compelling product, the ability to effectively execute on this is simply not there. Chrome was originally built by a team of 10 people or so. A team I was on for a whole, which is responsible for the project that is absolutely fundamental to GCP’s existence, was 15 people when the software was 95% feature complete (and the remaining features, including the ones I worked on, are mostly useless crap), is apparently above 60 people today, I have no idea what they all even do. This means that even if the promo driven culture was not a thing, projects like Stadia couldn’t survive anyway, because Google is not efficient enough to run projects that don’t have insanely good margins and quick growth. Their current cash cow of AdWords is going to slowly but steadily lose value, as general search slowly loses relevance on modern web.
I’m just rambling here, but I find it sad to compare how cool Google was in mid-to-late 2000s, vs the sad thing it is now. And that is even before you consider loss of open company culture, DEI etc.
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Are the people applying and getting hired at major tech companies really that bad at basic algorithmic thinking? Conceptually, that stuff was at the level of a quiz in AP CS in junior year in high school.
Maybe I should crank out an online course or something...
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It's probably too late now, but I'm pretty sure once upon a time I was on hiring committees at the same company, and you should have told that recruiter's manager (the recruiters are almost always TVCs, who only care about hitting their hiring targets) about that. They shouldn't waste yours and others' time, and they shouldn't be getting incompetent people hired.
I too have set my interviews / week to zero.
*edit: should -> shouldn't
Once upon a time, people working there cared about the company culture. Now, most of my friends who still work there are extremely detached, and only do it for a paycheck. In fact, given the current climate, going against the recruiter and the candidate in this particular case is a move with rather low upside to you (due to the tragedy of commons) and very high downside. You’d have to be pretty autistic to try, like, for example, James Damore.
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Is itcomparing the first and last values , or is there a catch I’m missing?
Your choice to remove from the interview gives me mixed feelings. On one hand, it seems like jury selection: if everyone competent finds a way out, who is left? On the other, screw that, and screw them for wasting your time. The best signal is refusing to be complicit.
This has been on my mind because the number one complaint about my defense-contractor employer is related. Last time we had a merger we picked up a bunch of policies which are, apparently, universally reviled in our branch. I’m under the impression it’s not just unfamiliarity, but actual lost productivity. So if there’s a better way to mitigate this, I and the rest of the company would love to know...
Yep, exactly that. No catch.
It then is supposed to segue neatly into the actual warm-up (to find the maximum). Depending on the performance there, I have different follow-up questions: write a function to verify that an array satisfies this constraint; "invert" an array that initially satisfies this constraint such that it decreases and then increases; or sort an array that initially satisfies this constraint. (Though it's been leaked and has since been retired.)
Out of curiosity, did you expect the warmup to be addressed with something like:
Compare two middlemost entries; the max lies in the half of the array containing the greater of the two. Return this half of the array. Repeat until the remaining array has length 1 (with the max entry guaranteed).
Or is there a better way? Conversely, suppose the interviewee does the obvious thing and compares consecutive pairs until a decreasing pair is found. Would they have any chance of getting hired?
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I was an interviewer at another big tech company that imported much of its interviewing processes from your big tech company.
I never encountered a situation as egregious as yours, but I could perceive that the URM candidates were more frequently completely lost than other candidates. We had lowered the bar for getting to on-site interviews for those candidates, so that's a natural consequence. Thankfully we had not lowered the bar for actually passing the interviews, and I was never pressured to change a hire/no-hire rating.
We didn't say it super loudly that the bar was lowered for these candidates. I have to wonder if some interviewers weren't aware of this and ended up with the impression that generally worse interview performance for URM candidates had something to do with the sexes or races involved instead of being an artifact of a biased screening process.
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Yeah, until everyone else is out and Tacoma needs a new bridge across the Narrows.
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Archive here to get past the paywall, but :
It's possible Jones is covering his ass, and either was not able to adapt to COVID-era environments, or even his skills to teach or evaluate tests had plummeted off a cliff, but this seems like reasonable things to take from the paper.
So according to him, the problem predates COVID and the SAT removal both.
I guess increases my willingness to believe the cohort is unusually lazy/entitled/unprepared, but not that it was either of those causes.
I've heard this all my life from teachers and professors. I went to university many years before covid and profs were always ranting about how unprepared our cohort was and how it was so different back in the day, and high school standards are falling off a cliff and they must offer all sorts of prep courses about stuff that used to be core high school material. And a few years before that, my high school teachers were ranting about how primary schools don't prepare students for high school any more and they must repeat primary school material during the first year. And this is in Hungary where there is no "customer mentality" in education like in the US.
The reality is, the fraction of capable people per cohort is fixed (or grows very slowly) over time, but more and more people are going to higher and higher educational levels. At that point it's basically inevitable that every new cohort looks less and less prepared and cannot learn the same material as the cohorts a decade prior.
Thank you. I now understand why I'm so painfully frustrated every time I try to play D&D with the current crop of players.
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Hmm, interesting point.
I had the opposite experience exactly once. We had a freshly minted professor get assigned to Circuits I as his first class. Probably 100 students. He’s a huge hardass and assigns a ton of homework, plus difficult exams. Unusually high fail rate even for that class.
The next semester’s Circuits II professor told us, after the first exam: “For the last 5 years, I’ve always had the same score distribution on this test, to within a few percentage points. You guys are weirdly well prepared.” We knew why.
That was the one and only time that it didn’t match your experience.
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I kind of thought that the top 5000 high school graduates today have to be better prepared than the top 5000 from 30 years ago. Those are the ones who have been raised to do this since pre-K. Honors and AP classes all the way.
So either the "top" 5000 high school students now are those who resume-padded the most, and/or they have a learned behavior to just manipulate the system instead of doing actual work.
I agree. Things are much more competitive now compared to 30 years ago in terms of math competitions, high-stakes testing, and also selecting from a much larger pool of students. Today's top students are probably much more talented than the top students of 50+ years ago. But maybe the median student is less prepared.
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Resume padding doesn't exist in Europe, you get admitted based on cold hard criteria like tests and grades, not cozy fluffy stuff like extracurriculars, quality of personality and "well-roundedness". Still it seems that standards have to be lowered steadily. This is understandable for universities that are growing in student count. For already very selective schools like NYU, it's probably due to a change in selection criteria.
Old-man-yelling-at-clouds time: It's maybe too easy to say that today's generation is coddled and soft. But there does seem to be a difference. Youths always used to be entitled/lazy/whatever, but that was in defiance of the messaging towards them. Now a generation has grown up who were told all along that they are a special little unique snowflake whose greatest value lies in "being who they are". (It's tempting but probably futile to summarize entire generations like this but whatever.) At the same time though, it seems that zoomers are more neurotic, anxious, self-conscious etc., drink less alcohol, have less sex, drive slower, generally are more aware of their constant public image (online, and also in person due to the constant presence of Internet-connected cameras in people's pockets). The stakes are high all the time, and reality smacks people in the face compared to what they were told.
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