Althouse: "Students... performed abysmally on exams that would have seemed too easy only a few years ago...."

October 22, 2022

"Students... performed abysmally on exams that would have seemed too easy only a few years ago...."

"Exams that should have yielded a B average dropped to C- or worse. Single digit scores became common and we even had zeros on exams, something that had never happened before. Despite those declining scores, about 60 percent of my students still got As and Bs this past semester. At the same time the bottom was dropping out under the poorly performing members of the class; the top students, while still deserving their excellent grades, were no longer being stretched. Previously, they would be getting 90s, now they were routinely getting 100. Their A grades would not change of course, but they were not being challenged and thus not learning as much as they should."

From "I was fired from NYU after students complained that the class was too hard. Who’s next?/In these times when critical thinking skills are desperately needed, it is more important than ever to dedicate ourselves to the high standards of education" by Maitland Jones Jr.

47 comments:

Dave Begley said...: High standards?

Forgetaboutit.; 10/22/22, 6:46 AM
wendybar said...: It's only going to get worse with Progressives running the institution. Homeschool to save your kids.; 10/22/22, 6:58 AM
Wilbur said...: Clearly the answer is to increase the budget of the Department of Education.; 10/22/22, 7:05 AM
R C Belaire said...: As part of the interview process for new graduates (usually with advanced degrees) applying for their 1st job out of college, we would generally have them make a presentation on a subject in their area of expertise to be followed by a Q & A period. Very effective in judging competence.; 10/22/22, 7:25 AM
Temujin said...: Standards? We don't need no stinkin' standards.

At least our kids can graduate with multiple pronouns and a larger than life view of themselves as the Center of All Things. They know they world as we know it will cease to exist in about 10-12 years due to something called 'climate'. They know gender is fluid and you can be whatever you want on any given day. They know that single white men are the disease of the earth and masculinity is toxic. They know America is evil and Capitalism is the religion of this evil, that Socialism will make everything better again. They know that all the smartest kids get their news from TikTok and that reading is something only old people do. And they know that voting for Democrats will keep things going as is, protect the Teachers Unions, and remove any heterodox thinkers from their safe spaces.

What could possibly go wrong?; 10/22/22, 7:25 AM
Jeff Vader said...: Silly old man with outdated ideas, participation trophy generation has won out; 10/22/22, 7:25 AM
Gusty Winds said...: Wait. Colleges pad grades to cover up their declining interest in actually educating young people? A’s and B’s are handed out like participation trophies? It’s a grift? I’m shocked.

You can just go $100,000 in debt and buy the trophy these days. Cool. Then everyone can pretend college is worth something while administrators collect wasted salaries, and PhDs can slap each other on their arrogant liberal asses, and say the declining output is all the fault of the paying students. It’s like a Jedi mind trick.

Paint your hair green, get a nose ring, absorb the group think, kiss a bit of liberal ass and fawn over your brilliant professors...and the empty credential is all yours. You can carry the diploma and the $100k debt with you the rest of your life. Such a deal!!!

And on Saturday afternoons everyone can get together and Jump Around. Well worth the money.; 10/22/22, 7:28 AM
Mike Sylwester said...: More and more university students are admitted because of their "diversity" -- not because of their intellectual ability.; 10/22/22, 7:31 AM
Mike Sylwester said...: Organic chemistry for pre-med students is largely a weed-out course.

Practicing doctors rarely need to know organic chemistry to do their jobs.; 10/22/22, 7:34 AM
Left Bank of the Charles said...: New York Post: ‘A spokesperson for the university said his course evaluation was “by far the worst, not only among members of the chemistry department but among all the university’s undergraduate science courses.”’

Sounds like he got a failing grade. According to his Wikipedia bio, the professor retired from Princeton at age 70, is now age 84, and had been teaching at NYU on an annual contract basis. Sometimes it is time to retire. The NYU chemistry department head reportedly wanted to move him from teaching premeds to teaching chem majors, but that doesn’t seem fair to the chem majors.; 10/22/22, 7:36 AM
JPS said...: Left Bank of the Charles,

"The NYU chemistry department head reportedly wanted to move him from teaching premeds to teaching chem majors, but that doesn’t seem fair to the chem majors."

Maybe. But I've seen teachers who excel at teaching chem majors and pretty well suck at teaching mandatory courses to students who are only there because they have to be. And I've seen it the other way: Teachers who can engage the students who are most scared of chemistry and guide them through the basics, but whose approach would strike the ablest students as babying.

I never met Maitland Jones. I know people who studied under him, and they are impressive scientists. I could believe it was time for him to retire, but I find it easier to believe he's a crusty old bastard refusing to go easy on his weaker students, and that's why he had to go.

A very dedicated educator once asked our department whether we wanted our lower-level courses to be a pump or a filter. I think a lot of departments still haven't made up their minds on that.; 10/22/22, 8:14 AM
mikee said...: Mike Sylvester, may I introduce you to the Krebs Cycle? Diabetes is all organic chemistry. So are almost all prescription drugs. You may not need to know how to synthesize aspirin as a doctor, but if you don't know the difference between aspirin, acetominophen and ibuprofen your patients are gonna suffer.; 10/22/22, 8:47 AM
ElPresidenteCastro said...: "Practicing doctors rarely need to know organic chemistry to do their jobs."

Holy Krebs cycle Batman, this is the dumbest comment in the history of dumb comments. Org is a hard course and is a weed out course but it is also fundamental to everything a doctor does all day. Want to know how a muscle works...organic chemistry; carbohydrate metabolism...organic chemistry and on and on. It is absolutely essential to the education of a physician.; 10/22/22, 8:48 AM
Tina848 said...: I am a chemist, I took organic, it was HARD. Exams were 3 hours, open book, not that it helped.There were 10 questions, you picked 6. You had to create the reaction and explain why it was happening. It was an essay test. Averages were around 50, then curved.

This was one of my easier classes. Differential Equations and PChem were the hard ones.

If you can't do the work, change majors.; 10/22/22, 8:50 AM
ElPresidenteCastro said...: A very smart fellow commented on Insta:

Perhaps the teacher is actually bad.

I used to credit professors with competence until my son went off to a fairly prestigious California university. He spent four years in the Marine Corps before attending so he is no snow flake. The stories he tells, from professors reading power point slides, to professors with poor English skills more concerned with completing the book rather than actual teaching the material. Complaints to the Dean are ignored and the poor teaching continues unabated.

His take is that the experienced professors have give up and the younger teachers couldn't get a job in industry. He is a STEM major so only a love of teaching or the inability to hold a job would bring someone to a University. Universities have become havens for the otherwise unemployable.; 10/22/22, 8:51 AM
Mark said...: It sounds like this professor thinks that exams teach critical thinking skills.

I am guessing our blog host did most of that education in the classroom, only using exams to see what was absorbed from the lesson.

Tired talking points from a has been professor off their game, but as it aligns with the world view of boomers clearly he has an audience to perform for; 10/22/22, 8:52 AM
Left Bank of the Charles said...: The experience of having a bad teacher can be invaluable.

My ninth grade Algebra teacher was a bit hard of hearing. If he asked a question like, “What is the square root of 25?” and you answered “4,” he might reply, “that’s correct, 5.” My tenth grade biology teacher announced on the first day of class that he believed the earth was created by God in six days but he was going to have to teach us evolution because it was required by the State of Iowa. It was hard to stay motivated in that class. He and another teacher also taught the state-required health class. They didn’t bother to update their tests when they changed textbooks. My youngest brother took the same course, noticed that the tests were asking question not covered in the book or lectures, found my class notes from seven years before in the closet, and did quite well.

In college, I had an econometrics professor who knew his stuff but would make mistakes when working math problems on the blackboard. He’d get down to step 9 or 10, realize his answer wasn’t coming out right, and quickly fix all the steps above. That drove many in the large class nuts and you would see them furiously fixing their notes before he erased the board for the next problem. Some of us would notice when he made his first mistake, nudge each other, write the correct math into our notes, and wait to see how long before he discovered it. He always did.; 10/22/22, 8:55 AM
Scott Patton said...: At one time, students who would likely get less than 50% on tests would not be taking the same class as students regularly getting 90% or more.
What once were institutions, are now rackets.
"60 percent of my students still got As and Bs this past semester." That means the other 40% shouldn't be there and the tests should be about 50% more difficult.; 10/22/22, 9:01 AM
I Have Misplaced My Pants said...: My bright and extremely hardworking chemistry major kid (she struggled more than usual but ultimately earned a low A in ochem, and is now pushing grimly through physical chemistry) says that her peers are dumber than they used to be, that there is a genuine problem here. She says hard to say if it's the vaccines, if it's so-called long covid, if it's two years of Zoom U, if it's an accelerated pace of attention span decline but she says there is definitely something going on here. Family members who are on university staffs (one who is a history department chair, one who is a dean of the college of psychology) say the same thing. Not to say that whining and throwing a tantrum is an appropriate response but the kids are not all right.; 10/22/22, 9:10 AM
ElPresidenteCastro said...: Tina848 said "Differential Equations and PChem were the hard ones."

Dear lord Tina, you have to warn us before smacking us with something like that. I am having PChem flashbacks. When chemistry teams up with differential equations the result is undergraduate pain; 10/22/22, 9:15 AM
Sydney said...: Actually, you don’t use organic chemistry much in the day to day practice of medicine. Yeah, I learned the Krebs cycle, but outside of a test situation, I haven’t had to think about it or recall it since medical school. At my college the premed Organic chemistry was straight memorization of different compounds and reactions. My classmates hated it. I took the organic chemistry course in the chemical engineering curriculum because it was taught by a good teacher who taught so you understood the principles. I loved it, and few people complained about the course. I do consider those principles once in a while in my practice of medicine.
I suppose if you are a student expecting to focus on memorizing equations and compounds you might be highly opposed to a more fundamental approach. Especially if your strength is memorization.; 10/22/22, 9:38 AM
Big O's Meanings Dictionary said...: professorial competence - anecdote

To elaborate on what ElPresidenteCastro said.

When getting that bio degree, I took physics. The instructor I got was the only one available in the evening.

He was an Indian immigrant.

The instructor may or may have not known his subject, but his accent was so heavy that literally 100% of the class wrote the Dean to request that he write his statements on the board as well.

He did. With his right hand. In his left was an erasor that he trailed behind his right hand by perhaps eight inches in a clear "Fuck you." to the students.

He was never replaced.; 10/22/22, 9:48 AM
Gahrie said...: How about this? I'm a high school teacher in Southern California. This year I have:

Student A in nominally a Junior, but has only earned 15 units (should have 120 by now) and has skipped my class 33 times. (Yesterday was day 54. Student has A lunch and my class is during B lunch) Hasn't turned in a single assignment or taken a single test all year. Literally has a zero percentage. (my district mandates a policy of giving a student fifty percent just for turning and assignment or test in.)

Student B has over thirty excused absences, (from her mother) has not turned in a single assignment in any class all year. Last week they tried to call her mother to tell her she could drop her daughter from the school if they brought in her books and laptop. They couldn't reach the mom, so they called her Dad, who doesn't live with her, who was furious to find out she hasn't been going to school.

Student C almost never comes to class, is late when she does do so. When she does come to class, invariably she'll ask to leave the room to go to the bathroom, get water, go to the nurse, go to the office etc. She happens to be Black, and regular gets invited by Admin to participate in Black leadership field trips, including one for admission to HSBCs, even though she has no chance of graduating high school.

I have two other students with zero percentages.

One fourth to one third of my students in every class are failing my class and at least three other classes at this point.

Three parents, upon getting the first quarter progress reports, have begun the process to get a 504 Plan, which extends special ed privileges and protections to kids who aren't special ed. They almost always get them, because admin never tells parents no.

The kids get upset if I yell at them about their tardies. Dress code is not enforced. Suspensions and detentions have been replaced with "restorative justice". The principal we had the last three years told us not to fight the kids over cell phone usage, so most of the kids have their earbuds in constantly. (Our new admin wants to change this but doesn't know how without sparking a revolt) Kids actually come up and ask me if they can take a phone call in the hallway during class.

Two years ago I was teaching government, and one kid came up to me on the teacher work day, after the last day of school and graduation, with literally a semester's worth of work that he actually expected me to grade, put in the gradebook and change his grade to a passing grade.; 10/22/22, 10:09 AM
Joe Smith said...: I think we peaked as a nation about 50 years ago when we could still put men on the moon.

The collective national IQ has dropped considerably since then...; 10/22/22, 10:12 AM
Joe Smith said...: 'Holy Krebs cycle Batman, this is the dumbest comment in the history of dumb comments. Org is a hard course and is a weed out course but it is also fundamental to everything a doctor does all day.'

My doctor friend tells me he never uses it, but he's a surgeon so...; 10/22/22, 10:13 AM
Jupiter said...: Most doctors in America work for corporations that dictate standards of "treatment" from which they have little ability to deviate. Modern medicine is increasingly a matter of pushing pills and injections for the Pharmocracy. But it is still important to be able to remember lots of funny-sounding names. Doctors will always need the ability to babble convincingly. Maybe they should be taking Theater instead of Organic.; 10/22/22, 10:17 AM
Michael said...: My view is begin every semester by awarding As to everyone and declaring attendance at lectures as optional. Assignments optional. Because I wouldn’t give a shit if they learned anything or not.; 10/22/22, 10:21 AM
Narr said...: Even at my mediocre state u, the mediocre history department's mediocre graduate program evolved, by the late 70s at the latest, a de facto two-tier system. To get A's took real work and commitment, B's not so much, but C's could be got very easily--a symbiotic relationship between mediocre public school teachers in need of more credits and the department's and university's need to fill seats.

All the faculty, and the more intelligent students, understood the scheme and worked with it.

My own adjuncting with undergrads there was spread over about a decade, and I definitely noticed a decline over time in basic knowledge and literacy, as I did in my day job in the library from the 80s to 2015.; 10/22/22, 10:24 AM
Left Bank of the Charles said...: Organic chemistry was my mother’s favorite course in college. She became a pharmacist.; 10/22/22, 10:26 AM
Dear corrupt left, go F yourselves said...: The corrupt left want crime and stupidity - it helps line their pockets.; 10/22/22, 10:28 AM
Jamie said...: Practicing doctors rarely need to know organic chemistry to do their jobs.

Kind of good to know your doctor was able to do this work, though, isn't it? Might point to some other skills and traits s/he possesses, including dogged determination in the face of great and unjust travail, mightn't it?

Everyone who goes to college ought to have a terrible prof at least once; if you persist in spite of him or her, it helps you learn how to teach yourself, which will stand you in good stead throughout your life. Maybe this prof is bad and maybe he's not, but can anyone reasonably argue that he's wrong about grade inflation and standards deflation?; 10/22/22, 10:44 AM
rrsafety said...: The name Maitland Jones still strikes fear in the hearts of us Organic Chem students from mid80s Princeton. I thought my time hearing that name had past but the PTSD is real. BTW, he was a good teacher.; 10/22/22, 10:45 AM
Maynard said...: Most doctors in America work for corporations that dictate standards of "treatment" from which they have little ability to deviate. Modern medicine is increasingly a matter of pushing pills and injections for the Pharmocracy.

That is absolutely true.

We have the Obama administration to thank for our corporate medical system. The "rules" were primarily written by the insurance industry that even dictates the pay of practitioners.; 10/22/22, 11:20 AM
hombre said...: Too late! We have generations of ignoramuses to overcome.

Have you talked to a Democrat or a young person about the state of the nation (or anything else) lately? Wow!; 10/22/22, 11:28 AM
Michael K said...: Blogger Joe Smith said...

'Holy Krebs cycle Batman, this is the dumbest comment in the history of dumb comments. Org is a hard course and is a weed out course but it is also fundamental to everything a doctor does all day.'

My doctor friend tells me he never uses it, but he's a surgeon so...

There are surgeons and surgeons. I spent 50 years as a surgeon and I needed to understand some science behind what I was doing. When I retired from surgery, I began teaching medical students in clinical subjects. After a short time I realized I needed to study some basic science that had changed so much from my student days. I started to read a Genetics textbook, "Genes VII" by Lewin. Very quickly, I realized I needed to study molecular biology first. So, I read "The Cell" by Alberts. It is 1500 pages and it took me a year to read it. Then I went back to genetics. The current textbook was "Gene XI"! It had gone through 4 editions in a year. Genetics and Molecular Biology are Organic Chemistry applied.

Your surgeon friend is probably one of those "mechanics" who I remember quite well.; 10/22/22, 11:41 AM
NorthOfTheOneOhOne said...: I Have Misplaced My Pants said...

My bright and extremely hardworking chemistry major kid (she struggled more than usual but ultimately earned a low A in ochem, and is now pushing grimly through physical chemistry) says that her peers are dumber than they used to be, that there is a genuine problem here.

Pants is correct. There is a genuine problem. I see it with a lot of my younger co-workers; the have no idea how to solve problems or any inkling that they should do anything other than sit and wait for instructions if they encounter a roadblock.; 10/22/22, 11:51 AM
Lars Porsena said...: Anybody want to venture a guess on the demographics of the 82 that forwarded the petition?; 10/22/22, 12:17 PM
David-2 said...: I was going to comment more but Tina848 got there first.

If you think Organic is hard, try PChem. (Much harder than diffyq, IMO, but then I was a math major.)

(At HMC in the 70s the PChem final was 1 question: compute the rate of reaction of a given formula. The formula was followed by about 25 pages of tables and charts. 3hrs. The problem was: there was only one path through (some of) the tables and charts that would let you get to an answer. All the rest of the data were red herrings there to trick you to taking some other path leading to a dead end, 2hrs into the test, when you realized you'd been had.)

BTW, back to the main topic: The world is doomed. Clear thought - which must be taught! - has been completely erased in "schools" to be replaced by validating feelings. And we're seeing the results already. Just one way: The takeover, with the polity's approval, of our governments by (powerful people claiming to believe in the) "green" movement. All of Europe and most of the US NE is going to be in for a miserable, possibly deadly, cold winter.; 10/22/22, 1:14 PM
Yancey Ward said...: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion require the lowering of standards. This is the dirty truth. Sure, you might burn your face off in the lab by dumping the water into the conc. HCl, but you get a chemistry degree anyway as compensation.; 10/22/22, 1:55 PM
effinayright said...: Michael said...
My view is begin every semester by awarding As to everyone and declaring attendance at lectures as optional. Assignments optional. Because I wouldn’t give a shit if they learned anything or not.
*****************

Do you also go by the name Randi Weingarten????

You've got that "Teacher's Union Contempt" thing down pat.; 10/22/22, 5:17 PM
Original Mike said...: Poor students give their professors poor evaluations. What did his evaluations from the good students look like?

My favorite eval from my years of teaching was a student who commented: "I would have done better in his course if he had made me do the homework."

You can lead a horse to water, …; 10/22/22, 5:48 PM
effinayright said...: Mark said...
It sounds like this professor thinks that exams teach critical thinking skills.
**********

Perhaps you need a remedial reading course.

THE POINT IS: what's needed for success in Ochem and most other science courses is:

listening attentively to class lectures; reading the text; understanding the principles behind chemical reactions and syntheses; performing lab experiments demonstrating those principles in action---IOW understanding how organic chemistry "works"---and THEN demonstrating what you've learned by by applying facts and reasoning to the questions posed on the exam.

That's not too much to ask for would-be scientists and doctors.

But apparently it is too much for today's brainless snowflakes.

Yeah, an MD doesn't "use" organic chemistry in daily practice----but he/she sure as shit better understand the hows and whys certain pharmaceuticals operate inside a human body, and when and when not to use them on patients. Those chemical diagrams appearing on the inserts included in the med boxes are there for a reason.

As an aside: some Nobel were awarded just the other day for a new reaction method called "Click Chemistry".

Go to Youtube to see it explained.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0Hh48wyuW0

It's not something most laymen know anything about.

But working chemists and biochemists do, and they consider it a key development in the field, greatly speeding up the search for useful pharmaceuticals.

And, of course, they didn't whinge about the subject being "hard".; 10/22/22, 6:06 PM
wildswan said...: JPS said...
"whether we wanted our lower-level courses to be a pump or a filter."

Great question.

Also, the question that goes through my mind is whether these phenomena are part of a two-tier system in which those who want to learn, work hard on studying and get graded and get jobs in engineering and medicine while those who don't want to learn, don't work and do get a passing grade and then get a job in DIE.
And whether DIE administration has ruined both teaching and learning everywhere? Or is life going on - under, in, around the fuckwits as in an occupied country? The teaching of English literature in the universities has definitely been ruined but is that balanced by learning online by adults? Podcasts on literature, not for credit listened to by thousands and sometimes hundreds of thousands (Angl0-Saxon I'm looking at you.) What are those people learning? English was banned in England among the cultured for two hundred years and yet it emerged stronger than ever in Chaucer's day and still is here today. But perhaps it is really being banned again and is sinking down again to survive in the vital life of the common folk while the timeservers speak their meaningless thoughts in their bastard language (pronouns: they, they; men can be pregnant; DIE).; 10/22/22, 7:22 PM
Mike said...: STEM courses need to have a "filter" ethic. I have a friend, now in his 80's, who said he was surprised when NASA hired in as a new engineering graduate. He said he was surprised because he had "graduated in the middle of his class".

Well as Paul Harvey said, "Now--for the rest of the story". My friend had entered California Poly San Luis Obispo as one of three hundred freshman engineering students. The Engineering Dean had told the class that he would wash out half of them at the end of their freshman year--and another half at the end of the sophomore year. He said he had neither the classrooms nor the faculty to teach upper division engineering courses to so many students.

The Dean was true to his word. My friend was indeed in the middle of his graduating class--he was #3 in a graduating class of 6.

My friend explained that the failure rate was so high because the engineering classes built cumulatively. You had to master each course in turn, because if you didn't you could never keep up with the subsequent courses--and you then changed to another major.

Of course this was in the early 60s so those failed engineering students became business majors. These days, they'd fall into some "gender studies" curriculum.; 10/23/22, 11:28 AM
Fred Drinkwater said...: The "why learn it when you won't need it at work" argument re: o-chem is just as bogus as the argument against teaching diffeq to engineering students. These are necessary tools for understanding, never mind mastering, the advanced subjects. And you damn well better master them before you go off to a work environment where so much is done by rote, or automated. You earn your salt by being able to see when normal processes go wrong, or by inventing new processes. That's how lives, and/or companies, get saved.; 10/23/22, 7:28 PM
Narayanan said...: is there such a thing as /uncritical thinking/

or is that just unthinkingly etc.; 10/24/22, 4:53 AM
Narayanan said...: Mike Sylwester said...
Organic chemistry for pre-med students is largely a weed-out course.

Practicing doctors rarely need to know organic chemistry to do their jobs.
==========
I have noticed prescription inserts show the molecular structure of the drug compounds
===> is that for the pharmacists and patients and other per curiosos?; 10/24/22, 4:59 AM