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I went to a different school, but I've also experienced similar "teachers" only in chemistry, and even specifically OChem. Difficult/opaque lecture style, very

I went to a different school, but I've also experienced similar "teachers" only in chemistry, and even specifically OChem. Difficult/opaque lecture style, very high difficulty tests, openly mocking students in a 500+ person lecture if he deemed a question not intelligent enough, and on top of all of it, forced to buy a textbook he co-authored (homework questions taken from the required book, refreshed every year). For some reason this story seems to happen more often in chemistry than other disciplines. In my experience as a Biomedical Engineering major, my chemistry classes were by far the most difficult, almost like it was the point - just difficulty for difficulty's sake. And I had plenty of other hard classes, including AI/ML, Diff EQ, and a course on the physics of blood, but each of those professors, while rigorous, were also fair and kind, willing to help students understand the material, and definitely never refusing to answer what they believed to be a "stupid question." I even remember conversations with friends about how the chemistry department seemed to have a very high number of massively egotistical professors who mistreated their students. My chem major friends confirmed it was like this all the time. All of this is anecdotal, but soft-confirmed by multiple friends and friends of friends at the time. When this story broke I was honestly not at all surprised.

melony 4y ago
Chem majors are not their target, the majority of orgo Chem victims are potential medical students. They take the class because they don't have a choice and it keeps the department relevant. Been that way for decades now. Imagine gatekeeping software engineering to people who can memorize and regurgitate the Intel CPU menus and implement the X86 standard from memory. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/it-s-time-to-retire-premed/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/it-s-time-to...
- maldev 4y ago
  Is that not what your computer arch class was? In mine we had to write every mips instruction and what it did, from memory, on pencil and paper. And that was the "Final" along with some demorgans.
  - melony 4y ago
    And exactly how many software engineer roles test for that during interviews? We test algorithm and data structures for a reason, and we don't interview for computer arch outside of certain systems engineering roles. Tech is much more empirical than many of the more traditional fields. The companies that test framework knowledge/implementation details first are generally all mediocre/traditional enterprise companies where the software engineering department is secondary to sales when it comes to value generation. None of the top tier companies care about specific framework and architectural details outside of domain specific knowledge if your day to day doesn't heavily depend on it. > Is that not what your computer arch class was? In mine we had to write every mips instruction and what it did, from memory, on pencil and paper. A few deterministic RISC op codes that nearly mirrors a Turing machine can hardly compare to the rigor of organic/biochemistry. You don't see exams asking students to build a branch predictor from the transistor level. Take a look at what organic chemistry really entails https://www.masterorganicchemistry.com/reaction-guide/ https://www.masterorganicchemistry.com/reaction-guide/ All the reactions above can be combined in arbitrary ways and a potential student is expected to recall and apply the concepts in an instant on-demand.
timr 4y ago
My theory is that chemistry (i.e. organic and biochemistry) are common weed-out courses for pre-med students. The grade-grubbing is intense, and those courses often end up as gauntlets as a result. It's a vicious cycle -- students grub for advantage; professors make the course "harder" to compensate. Also, few professors want to teach huge lecture halls of kids who are only there for the grade, and view the whole exercise as a waste of their time. (Having taught a few sections of this kind of thing myself, I'm not entirely unsympathetic. It's a long, painful day when you're waiting at hour 5+ of a lab session, watching someone fumble around hopelessly with gel rig or something, knowing that they're never going to make it and that this result is going to make or break their grade for the quarter...) I had an O-Chem professor who explicitly set a curve and gave incredibly difficult exams, such that only a few people in the 100+ person class could get an A. It was almost like he was transparently trying to reduce the student population.
- humanistbot 4y ago
  What is grade-grubbing?
  - PuppyTailWags 4y ago
    This describes a pattern of behaviors in which a student's goal is to raise their grade. It can involve approaching after class to discuss an exam, asking for extra credit, asking for a regrading or retaking exams, asking for a small letter grade bump final scoring (B+ vs A-), etc. Students are especially motivated to do this because most future opportunities are locked behind specific grade point average cutoffs.
  - Jensson 4y ago
    Some students go and complain when they don't get top grades. I can see it being very tedious when lots of students come and complain, so nice professors quickly go to other courses while only those who shrugs off complaints stay.
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  Isn't an early weed-out a service to the students? The school could pass through 100% of their premed students, taking their money for all four years of their undergrad only for most of their premeds to get weeded when they apply to medical schools. If instead they get weeded a few years earlier, they still have time to change their major and go for an undergrad degree that will suit them better. Some may choose to drop out completely when they get weeded out of premed, and the school will lose tuition money from those. But what cynical advantage does the school gain from weeding out premeds? Besides tough love for the students who won't cut the mustard, what is their motivation for weeding out premeds?
apohn 4y ago
Yep, similar experience, and I was an undergrad 20+ years ago. In the undergraduate institution I attended grading on a curve was not common outside of Chemistry classes. I specifically remember taking a chem class where the majority of the class failed on a percentage basis, but most people passed after the curve. What was the goal of that class exactly? To learn something? To ensure people passed and repeated the same experience in the next class which was also graded on a curve? What did it mean exactly to have passed Chem 1/2 and Organic chem? It was taught poorly and you were tested on concepts that were not taught properly and not understood. I know people who opted to take the same Chemistry sequence at a local community college and they learned way more than we did, simply because the teacher wasn't trying to haze them.
- busterarm 4y ago
  Same and also in Math and Physics classes. SUNY system schools. Also 20 years ago. The vast majority of my classes were 300+ people. If it wasn't the self-authored textbooks refreshed every year, chances were that the adjunct teaching barely spoke English. It took me extra long to get through school just because of all of the math classes I had to drop and take the next semester just because on the first day I showed up to class, the prof was mumbling or non-verbal, would face the board and write illegibly all lecture and not explain a damn thing.
ushtaritk421 4y ago
OChem is a weeder course for med students. Med schools are controlled by the AMA, which intentionally keeps the number of doctors low for normal cartel reasons. It's not about teaching Organic Chemistry, it's about reducing the number of students who can apply for an artificially limited number of med school slots.
- nradov 4y ago
  That is misinformation. The number of doctors is kept low by limits on the number of residency program slots in teaching hospitals. Residency programs are almost entirely funded by the federal government through Medicare. The AMA has publicly lobbied to increase the number of doctors, and even put their own funding in. https://www.ama-assn.org/education/gme-funding/save-graduate-medical-education https://www.ama-assn.org/education/gme-funding/save-graduate...
insane_dreamer 4y ago
To me the biggest problem is when the prof includes test questions that weren't covered in either the lectures or the study material (or maybe it's mentioned once on some random page of the 500 pages of study material that one was expected to read). That is simply setting up the students for failure.
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> Difficult/opaque lecture style, very high difficulty tests, openly mocking students in a 500+ person lecture if he deemed a question not intelligent enough I don’t want to condone or encourage this behavior. However, I often think back to a similar professor I had in college who I loathed at the time. I gritted through the course and complained the whole way. Then I graduated into the working world and encountered a similarly difficult person in my management chain. Weirdly, I felt prepared to handle the situation and kept relatively calm while navigating the not-nice boss. I didn’t stay for long, but I was able to thrive and get some early career wins even under a not-nice boss. So I don’t think mean teachers or bosses are a good thing, but at the same time I feel like I grew more during those periods than I did at other times in my education/career. I still don’t know exactly what to think about all of this.
falsenapkin 4y ago
My highschool chem teacher was a pyromaniac, we did things on the regular during class downtime that should have been expelling offenses. My college chem professor was a first year out of industry, incapable of basic socialization, we all knew why he became a professor. The head of the department had his own text/work books, we had to spend like $400 on ~5 books for one class. This new guy had to teach off of this and had strict guidelines around testing etc. The brightest and most studious students got like B+ end of semester. The majority F-C, and we needed a B to continue the class schedule. 80 students had their grades bumped by the dean by like 20 points so an entire engineering year wasn't flunked. It was a tight schedule and if the majority failed chem it would look bad on the school and gum up the scheduling for that class and the following class. My friends in other majors weren't having a much better time.
powersnail 4y ago
My chem professor in college was like that, to an extreme degree. He openly declared that he was going to put trick question and gotchas in quizzes and pop quizzes—all of which counted towards the final grade, mocked students who got tricked, insisted to talk in an opaque manner, and dismissed any objection to his teaching style. It was the only way to learn, he claimed. But at midterms and finals, his class scored consistently worse than the same course taught by a different professor, even though he was the one writing the exams. And he got angry every time this happened.
whafro 4y ago
My partner took Orgo from the professor in question ~20 years ago, and described it as one of the transformational classes of her undergraduate years, though she also thought it was the lowest grade she'd ever received. Things may have changed during those decades (as things do), but she said there were options at her school to take "Maitland Jones Orgo" or "Easy Orgo", and approximately everyone knew that they would be challenged in the former, but provided the opportunity to grow more than the latter. I'm sure there are many things involved, but perhaps he didn't fully grasp that when he moved institutions, he was also shifting his audience, and perhaps his new audience wasn't quite as interested in the challenge.
nradov 4y ago
My biology 101 professor assigned his own textbook for the course. However he refunded his royalty to any student who purchased a new copy in order to eliminate the conflict of interest. This ought to be the standard policy at every college.
- mcguire 4y ago
  I remember being at a conference once and wandering through the new books display with my advisor. We saw a new edition of one of Avi Silberschatz's texts and my advisor said, "Oh, yeah, Avi has another kid about to go to college." ;-)

melony 4y ago

Chem majors are not their target, the majority of orgo Chem victims are potential medical students. They take the class because they don't have a choice and it keeps the department relevant. Been that way for decades now. Imagine gatekeeping software engineering to people who can memorize and regurgitate the Intel CPU menus and implement the X86 standard from memory. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/it-s-time-to-retire-premed/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/it-s-time-to...

maldev 4y ago
Is that not what your computer arch class was? In mine we had to write every mips instruction and what it did, from memory, on pencil and paper. And that was the "Final" along with some demorgans.
- melony 4y ago
  And exactly how many software engineer roles test for that during interviews? We test algorithm and data structures for a reason, and we don't interview for computer arch outside of certain systems engineering roles. Tech is much more empirical than many of the more traditional fields. The companies that test framework knowledge/implementation details first are generally all mediocre/traditional enterprise companies where the software engineering department is secondary to sales when it comes to value generation. None of the top tier companies care about specific framework and architectural details outside of domain specific knowledge if your day to day doesn't heavily depend on it. > Is that not what your computer arch class was? In mine we had to write every mips instruction and what it did, from memory, on pencil and paper. A few deterministic RISC op codes that nearly mirrors a Turing machine can hardly compare to the rigor of organic/biochemistry. You don't see exams asking students to build a branch predictor from the transistor level. Take a look at what organic chemistry really entails https://www.masterorganicchemistry.com/reaction-guide/ https://www.masterorganicchemistry.com/reaction-guide/ All the reactions above can be combined in arbitrary ways and a potential student is expected to recall and apply the concepts in an instant on-demand.

timr 4y ago

My theory is that chemistry (i.e. organic and biochemistry) are common weed-out courses for pre-med students. The grade-grubbing is intense, and those courses often end up as gauntlets as a result. It's a vicious cycle -- students grub for advantage; professors make the course "harder" to compensate. Also, few professors want to teach huge lecture halls of kids who are only there for the grade, and view the whole exercise as a waste of their time. (Having taught a few sections of this kind of thing myself, I'm not entirely unsympathetic. It's a long, painful day when you're waiting at hour 5+ of a lab session, watching someone fumble around hopelessly with gel rig or something, knowing that they're never going to make it and that this result is going to make or break their grade for the quarter...) I had an O-Chem professor who explicitly set a curve and gave incredibly difficult exams, such that only a few people in the 100+ person class could get an A. It was almost like he was transparently trying to reduce the student population.

humanistbot 4y ago
What is grade-grubbing?
- PuppyTailWags 4y ago
  This describes a pattern of behaviors in which a student's goal is to raise their grade. It can involve approaching after class to discuss an exam, asking for extra credit, asking for a regrading or retaking exams, asking for a small letter grade bump final scoring (B+ vs A-), etc. Students are especially motivated to do this because most future opportunities are locked behind specific grade point average cutoffs.
- Jensson 4y ago
  Some students go and complain when they don't get top grades. I can see it being very tedious when lots of students come and complain, so nice professors quickly go to other courses while only those who shrugs off complaints stay.
MichaelCollins 4y ago
Isn't an early weed-out a service to the students? The school could pass through 100% of their premed students, taking their money for all four years of their undergrad only for most of their premeds to get weeded when they apply to medical schools. If instead they get weeded a few years earlier, they still have time to change their major and go for an undergrad degree that will suit them better. Some may choose to drop out completely when they get weeded out of premed, and the school will lose tuition money from those. But what cynical advantage does the school gain from weeding out premeds? Besides tough love for the students who won't cut the mustard, what is their motivation for weeding out premeds?

apohn 4y ago

Yep, similar experience, and I was an undergrad 20+ years ago. In the undergraduate institution I attended grading on a curve was not common outside of Chemistry classes. I specifically remember taking a chem class where the majority of the class failed on a percentage basis, but most people passed after the curve. What was the goal of that class exactly? To learn something? To ensure people passed and repeated the same experience in the next class which was also graded on a curve? What did it mean exactly to have passed Chem 1/2 and Organic chem? It was taught poorly and you were tested on concepts that were not taught properly and not understood. I know people who opted to take the same Chemistry sequence at a local community college and they learned way more than we did, simply because the teacher wasn't trying to haze them.

busterarm 4y ago
Same and also in Math and Physics classes. SUNY system schools. Also 20 years ago. The vast majority of my classes were 300+ people. If it wasn't the self-authored textbooks refreshed every year, chances were that the adjunct teaching barely spoke English. It took me extra long to get through school just because of all of the math classes I had to drop and take the next semester just because on the first day I showed up to class, the prof was mumbling or non-verbal, would face the board and write illegibly all lecture and not explain a damn thing.

ushtaritk421 4y ago

OChem is a weeder course for med students. Med schools are controlled by the AMA, which intentionally keeps the number of doctors low for normal cartel reasons. It's not about teaching Organic Chemistry, it's about reducing the number of students who can apply for an artificially limited number of med school slots.

nradov 4y ago
That is misinformation. The number of doctors is kept low by limits on the number of residency program slots in teaching hospitals. Residency programs are almost entirely funded by the federal government through Medicare. The AMA has publicly lobbied to increase the number of doctors, and even put their own funding in. https://www.ama-assn.org/education/gme-funding/save-graduate-medical-education https://www.ama-assn.org/education/gme-funding/save-graduate...

insane_dreamer 4y ago

To me the biggest problem is when the prof includes test questions that weren't covered in either the lectures or the study material (or maybe it's mentioned once on some random page of the 500 pages of study material that one was expected to read). That is simply setting up the students for failure.

PragmaticPulp 4y ago

> Difficult/opaque lecture style, very high difficulty tests, openly mocking students in a 500+ person lecture if he deemed a question not intelligent enough I don’t want to condone or encourage this behavior. However, I often think back to a similar professor I had in college who I loathed at the time. I gritted through the course and complained the whole way. Then I graduated into the working world and encountered a similarly difficult person in my management chain. Weirdly, I felt prepared to handle the situation and kept relatively calm while navigating the not-nice boss. I didn’t stay for long, but I was able to thrive and get some early career wins even under a not-nice boss. So I don’t think mean teachers or bosses are a good thing, but at the same time I feel like I grew more during those periods than I did at other times in my education/career. I still don’t know exactly what to think about all of this.

falsenapkin 4y ago

My highschool chem teacher was a pyromaniac, we did things on the regular during class downtime that should have been expelling offenses. My college chem professor was a first year out of industry, incapable of basic socialization, we all knew why he became a professor. The head of the department had his own text/work books, we had to spend like $400 on ~5 books for one class. This new guy had to teach off of this and had strict guidelines around testing etc. The brightest and most studious students got like B+ end of semester. The majority F-C, and we needed a B to continue the class schedule. 80 students had their grades bumped by the dean by like 20 points so an entire engineering year wasn't flunked. It was a tight schedule and if the majority failed chem it would look bad on the school and gum up the scheduling for that class and the following class. My friends in other majors weren't having a much better time.

powersnail 4y ago

My chem professor in college was like that, to an extreme degree. He openly declared that he was going to put trick question and gotchas in quizzes and pop quizzes—all of which counted towards the final grade, mocked students who got tricked, insisted to talk in an opaque manner, and dismissed any objection to his teaching style. It was the only way to learn, he claimed. But at midterms and finals, his class scored consistently worse than the same course taught by a different professor, even though he was the one writing the exams. And he got angry every time this happened.

whafro 4y ago

My partner took Orgo from the professor in question ~20 years ago, and described it as one of the transformational classes of her undergraduate years, though she also thought it was the lowest grade she'd ever received. Things may have changed during those decades (as things do), but she said there were options at her school to take "Maitland Jones Orgo" or "Easy Orgo", and approximately everyone knew that they would be challenged in the former, but provided the opportunity to grow more than the latter. I'm sure there are many things involved, but perhaps he didn't fully grasp that when he moved institutions, he was also shifting his audience, and perhaps his new audience wasn't quite as interested in the challenge.

nradov 4y ago

My biology 101 professor assigned his own textbook for the course. However he refunded his royalty to any student who purchased a new copy in order to eliminate the conflict of interest. This ought to be the standard policy at every college.

mcguire 4y ago
I remember being at a conference once and wandering through the new books display with my advisor. We saw a new edition of one of Avi Silberschatz's texts and my advisor said, "Oh, yeah, Avi has another kid about to go to college." ;-)