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The layoffs must have pissed some people off.
Laid off by ZS, today
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The layoffs must have pissed some people off.
Laid off by ZS, today
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PWC is exactly right. Organic Chemistry is a filtering class to get rid of those that can’t hack it in medical school.
If you can’t pass this class then you probably should not be a doctor.
It boils down to a bunch of entitled students paying $80k a year being mad that they are essentially being told to switch their major.
This also isn’t some no-name professor. He was formerly tenured but retired and teaching as an adjunct to stay engaged. He knows what he is doing
Rising Star
When the focus is only on numbers and not on standards universities make stupid decisions like these. Colleges and universities are stepping stones for the world, if you can’t handle failure and rejection in a safe setting, how are you going to handle it in the real world?
Rising Star
Stem major here, I agree with the professor’s methods. I have no business being a doctor if I can’t ace organic chemistry.
Chief
I’ll preface this with saying I haven’t read the NYT article because of the paywall, and while I read the NYP article, that publication is essentially a tabloid that doesn’t even pretend to write balanced articles, so I take their second hand reporting with a grain of salt.
I can see both sides of this. Filtering classes like Organic Chem are a real thing and provide a dose of reality. No argument there. But I also can easily see a world in which an 84 year old retired professor would not be able to adequately rise to the occasion of teaching in today’s post-Covid world.
I think back on some of the dinosaurs of professors that I had in UG who simply weren’t effective teachers. Yea, I buckled down and did what it took to perform in their class, but I’m not going to pretend that the university wouldn’t have been better served by putting them out to pasture. More importantly, I would have undoubtedly learned more from more effective educators, and as a consumer, that is important. Especially if I’m paying a fortune for a private education.
And firing a professor, even one that isn’t tenured, isn’t something that just happens lightly. I’m sure the University applied some element of rigor in coming to their decision. It is clearly cited that his scores were the lowest in the department. Imagine having someone at our firms score at the absolute bottom of their cohort, both objectively and subjectively, and then complain about how firing them sets a “dangerous precedent”.
This whole thing just feels like this week’s manufactured clickbait drama for the “kids these days” crowd.
Rising Star
The NYT article doesn’t present the student’s case. Everyone knows o-chem is a filter but that’s not the problem - the problem was his teaching method.
He was constantly cited as a poor communicator and he used his own textbook so there was no backup for other methods.
Everyone will soon be TikTok stars and influencers. Doctor? Nah that’s making dancing TikTok’s about your symptoms and pointing to the medicine you need.
Chief
Making Tik Toks that blame all your flaws on ADHD is indeed much more profitable.
At a minimum, we need to know the names of these students as when (if) they become doctors, we can actively “cancel” them from our medical providers choices
Rising Star
I have. But ochem is already known as a filter. The students contention was that he in particular made the class inordinately difficult. By all accounts his tests weren’t even hard, students were just ill prepared due to him.
Guys, while I agree that someone shouldn’t be fired if the class is difficult and lately I ve seen too many complaints against professors for random stuff, there are two sides of the story.
From the article « An NYU spokesperson said multiple students had complained about Jones’ “dismissiveness, unresponsiveness, condescension and opacity about grading.” »
May be true, may be not. But that ‘s one professor’s words against a whole university which I like to think has made its own investigation.
Students nowadays are coddled - a lot of universities have turned from institutions of higher education to primarily businesses serving customers.
And in these cases, these students are the customers. If you as NYU strictly see yourself as a business, it makes “sense” to bend over backwards and listen to Gen Z’s demands of you.
Would you say the students had a "chemical" reaction or "physical" reaction?
Ah, that was going to keep me up tonight...thanks for the clarification!
I had terrible engineering professors and TA’s, especially those that struggled to communicate especially when their English was limited.
It was my problem to learn the material so that often meant self teaching via books/web. If this professor has a history where his students did fine and these students aren’t, the problem is with them.
Completely agree, and having engineering and mathematics professors who didn’t speak English was obviously challenging.
I still had to do well in thermodynamics despite this to not get weeded out though.
Chief
He made the mistake of not reaching his classes in tik tock for the zoomers
Chief
This shows why weekly small group tutorials supporting the lectures to work through and really test students is a much better educational method.
My husband was a professor for a year and he quit for this precise reason. Students are incredibly entitled and coddled and in his words “if he set the bar any lower, he’d have to start digging”.