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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35413 thread views

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.

What makes you so confident that this is a particularly shitty cohort?

Archive here to get past the paywall, but :

“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.

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.

About a decade ago, he said in an interview, he noticed a loss of focus among the students, even as more of them enrolled in his class, hoping to pursue medical careers.

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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