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Part of it is to ensure that your medical students are not terrified by "chemicals". Plus, doing organic chemistry instills into you the idea that reactions may

Part of it is to ensure that your medical students are not terrified by "chemicals". Plus, doing organic chemistry instills into you the idea that reactions may not be pure, and that enantiomers are both real and potentially problematic (see thalidomide). It is at minimum a way to get you to be able to ask critical questions when needed, even if there is already an infrastructure to answer those questions for you. It is sort of like learning C but programming solely in Python: you can get your job done, but when one of your abstractions breaks it is worthwhile to be able to at least identify the root cause and talk to the right people.

voisin 4y ago
All of this can be true or achieved without making a class so difficult as to fail 1/3 of the students.
- tsbischof 4y ago
  Maybe? Weeder courses in CS based on SICP have similar dropout rates, and the push towards making the curriculum easier causes endless hand-wringing. We could argue that organic chemistry is less central to medicine than recursion and functional programming are to software development, but there is a similar "click" that is a reasonable signal of whether you are likely to parse more complicated concepts.
- PubliusMI 4y ago
  Humans are not all equally capable.
- giardini 4y ago
  I don't believe organic chemistry is intentionally used to cull out medical students. Instead it is simply the difficulty of the course, which by-the-way matches the learning situation in medical school: My organic chemistry course was excellent until the half-semester, whereupon the professor's well-organized and insightful presentation ceased. Instead we were confronted with a plethora of memorization with little organization. The change in teaching method and learning was obvious to everyone in the room. We questioned it and the professor said apologetically "That's the way it is! It's hard! I'm sorry!" Within a week a large part of the class dropped and many of the remainder became more reclusive and protective about their study. So much must be memorized in medical school that the process alters the way students think. I watched an excellent scientist fall away from science (but become an excellent memorizer) in medical school. Once a brilliant researcher, now a doddering encyclopedia of (sometimes incorrect) facts. Sad.

voisin 4y ago

All of this can be true or achieved without making a class so difficult as to fail 1/3 of the students.

tsbischof 4y ago
Maybe? Weeder courses in CS based on SICP have similar dropout rates, and the push towards making the curriculum easier causes endless hand-wringing. We could argue that organic chemistry is less central to medicine than recursion and functional programming are to software development, but there is a similar "click" that is a reasonable signal of whether you are likely to parse more complicated concepts.
PubliusMI 4y ago
Humans are not all equally capable.
giardini 4y ago
I don't believe organic chemistry is intentionally used to cull out medical students. Instead it is simply the difficulty of the course, which by-the-way matches the learning situation in medical school: My organic chemistry course was excellent until the half-semester, whereupon the professor's well-organized and insightful presentation ceased. Instead we were confronted with a plethora of memorization with little organization. The change in teaching method and learning was obvious to everyone in the room. We questioned it and the professor said apologetically "That's the way it is! It's hard! I'm sorry!" Within a week a large part of the class dropped and many of the remainder became more reclusive and protective about their study. So much must be memorized in medical school that the process alters the way students think. I watched an excellent scientist fall away from science (but become an excellent memorizer) in medical school. Once a brilliant researcher, now a doddering encyclopedia of (sometimes incorrect) facts. Sad.