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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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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.

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-.

In the end, we survived the semester only by throwing them many bones and basically not giving any grades below an A-.

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.

Is it comparing 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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