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This sounds to me like kids who've been incessantly praised and coddled all their lives and are destined to be jolted by the working world.
Wrong. They are destined to be coddled in the working world, too. That is, if the employer wants a good ESG score to show their stockholders and any government officials who demand to see them.
Rather, this ex-professor is getting a taste of the Real New World.
Organic Chemistry is the weed out class for pre-med. It's always been impossible to pass - even back in the 1980's. Many students failed the course on a regular basis. It made sure only the best students went on to finish pre-med.
There are so many disturbing aspects to this, but it caught my attention that the students objected to the professor seeming condescending and demanding. This sounds to me like kids who've been incessantly praised and coddled all their lives and are destined to be jolted by the working world.
At N.Y.U., Students Were Failing Organic Chemistry. Who Was to Blame?
Maitland Jones Jr., a respected professor, defended his standards. But students started a petition, and the university dismissed him.
“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.
And, they said, he had a “condescending and demanding” tone. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/03/u...-petition.html
I read the story and normally I would side with the professor, even though it was Chem 208 that blew me out of pre-med. However, if the failure or low-grade rate was overwhelming questions need to be asked on all sides.
I knew someone who was determined to get into the medical field. He flunked out the first time he took Organic Chem. He kept re-taking it, in different medical schools. He switched to a naturopathic specialty school, and flunked out again. Later, he switched to Osteopathy in yet another school, and that time, he passed it, and got his degree. That was back in the 80's/90's. He's had a successful practice ever since.
I don't know the details, as to whether he just kept banging his head on the same wall, and it eventually gave in, or if the 3rd time around he got an instructor who approached it differently (like the prof. in the OP). That's quite a show of determination. He knew what field he wanted to be in, and he wouldn't let the weed-out class best him.
There are so many disturbing aspects to this, but it caught my attention that the students objected to the professor seeming condescending and demanding. This sounds to me like kids who've been incessantly praised and coddled all their lives and are destined to be jolted by the working world.
NYU has an undergrad enrollment of 30K students (or close to it.) Presumably, this professor isn't the only instructor teaching organic chemistry. Presumably, the department and administration have reference points for comparison. Even in a tough weed-out class like organic chemistry, four instructors teach 50 kids each, and one of them has a 10% pass rate and the rest have a 50% pass rate, that's a sign.
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