NYU Professor fired for making a class "too hard".

There is a difference in having high standards and being bad at teaching or testing on things you didn’t teach. Sounds like he sucked.

Having said that… my oldest is 3rd year med school. He had like one or two B+’s rest were A’s at UF. I know Org chemistry for sure was a B+. He thinks they should fire all the Org Chem teachers. Lol.

10 of the Hardest Classes at University of Florida - OneClass Blog

 

Ha, I got the same from my boy. There's a whole forum dedicated to why you shouldn't take physics 2 at UF.

 

But it is the job of the tenured professor to publish.

 

One of my most vivid memories from undergrad (where I was in the B-school) was watching all the pre-meds/dents in my fraternity abjectly panic the night before an organic exam. It was not uncommon for someone to make a 50 on an exam that was curved up to a B grade.

Weed out classes are supposed to be hard, and I know covid made it harder.

What struck me about the article was his assistant saying that the complaining students didn't avail themselves of the resources available to them. Not saying the prof was perfect, but I doubt his entire exam/teaching/grading methods have changed that much over time.

 

He had some of the worst student evaluations of any professor at the university. I highly doubt he received a disproportionate number of students who simply didn't avail themselves of the resources. The guy did a crummy job.

 

No Statics and Dynamics?

Fake news!!!!

 

FIN 3403 rings a bell. My oldest took it as his sole class last spring to graduate UF. And the prof promptly retired from what I hear.

 

It is one of the jobs.

If they are teaching classes... it is their job to teach too.

 

Nor has organic chemistry.

 

How do you know he did a "crummy job" based on reading one article? I've taught undergraduate and graduate level classes in masters programs and I can tell you with virtual certainty the students who rated me the least positive were the ones who did the worst in the class.

I suspect he had bad evaluations in part (if not in large part) b/c the subject matter is among the most difficult in undergraduate life on any campus and the grades he issued were likely among the lowest on campus. Covid probably made it worse-as referenced in the article where its reported his whiteboard notes could not be saved online b/c the technology the school provides doesn't allow it. But that doesn't mean he was a bad professor per se-he just had a bunch of kids not happy with their grades.

Re: the bolded part, I was repeating what his TA said in the article, and they are a better source than your opinion.

 

Yes, but times change. It happens to all of us. It may be that the students changed. It is likely that at least in part.

But that is the story of human history. Things change, there are innocent victims, people get old. I don't like it. But it doesn't mean it doesn't happen. And of course there are exceptions, but we can presume that an 84-year-old doesn't perform as effectively as he did 20 years ago and certainly doesn't relate to students as well.

Again, I'm not judging change as universally morally positive. I am saying it is universally inevitable, and few of us have unique claims to victimhood, especially as a product of malign human agency

 

A person I knew had orientation at dental school at UF and they told them if they had some reason like a learning disability they could have extra time on exams. What a ridiculous concept. It’s not often I have emergencies but when I do I don’t get extra time to sort it out. Those students just don’t belong.

 

According to some student forums, another issue is that the professor has been reusing the same exams for years, and recently found out that students had access to his old exams. So he changed up the exams and everyone who was cheating failed.

 

I'm a big fan of students getting accommodations in K-12. Everyone deserves to get that basic education. I'm kind of ambivalent about accommodations in undergraduate education. For the most part, no one is going to get a job with an undergraduate degree that has high stakes attached to it, but also, this is a higher level of education and students should be expected to perform at a higher level.

I am very much opposed to accommodations for graduate students. If you want to achieve at the highest levels, you need to be able to do the work it takes to achieve at the highest levels.

 

Was able to (fortunately) avoid Orgo. Hardest classes I took were what I think you refer to as Physics II (in my day, they called it "Dynamics"; Phy I was "Statics") and my Microprocessor class (avg grade in that one was ~45).

There's a major league "quit" problem with today's generation. Kids don't want a challenge anymore, they want it "easy." When they don't get easy, they complain/protest or outright quit themselves with the rationale of "I didn't want it anyway". It doesn't speak very well for the future.

 

It's called a 504. And it's the "in thing" with high schoolers these days too. It also takes a LOT to get one. Need to prove a medical diagnosis (like ADHD) and have exhausted several options before schools will even consider it.

 

My dad was a pediatrician before he retired. He used to tell me horror stories about the difficulty of organic chemistry.

 

my daughter aced both org 1 and 2 at UF and loved it. for some reason, her brain eats that stuff up to the point she was teaching others. she has now went on the PT school but her ability to process those classes at UF makes me think she missed her calling by turning to physical therapy

with respect to the OP, perhaps there are communication challenges that both parties needed to work on and covid only made it worse. doing anything that requires a great deal of mental acuity at 80+ is challenging, cannot imagine trying to convey the details of org chem at that age

 

I took four of the classes on that list, and yeah, they were all over the top. Still think Organic Chem was the hardest. I thought Calc II (which didn't make the list) was way harder than Calc I, but sometimes it's the teacher that makes the difference.

 

Sometimes it is that they put Calc I in the auditorium at Norman with 80 more students than there are seats, and it takes two weeks for enough people to drop that everyone can get in the door.