I failed Organic chemistry first time and then got an A- in the summer semester. We never even thought about about asking the school to fire the professor.
I'm a college professor and just had a conversation this week with a colleague on this very topic. That is, the risk we take when failing students because they aren't doing the work needed to pass the class. When we eliminate those that aren't demonstrating or performing to the standard, our retention rate falls. If retention rates decrease we risk our professional record, and job security. It's definitely a stressful tightrope we walk. It's not just parents causing this, greedy leadership is at fault as well.
Congratulations for your contribution for brainwashing the last generation of students. As a young GenX male, I find it disturbing what has happens on college campuses since I left in 2001.
I recall during my undergraduate years we had a class where the professor buckled under to some students who "earned" a C grade on the mid-term exam. He gave another examination based on the curve, as they requested, rather than the standard. We few who had no issue with the previous examination met outside the auditorium classroom and vowed to concentrate on the next test as all the other mid-terms had already come to pass. 5 of us aced the new exam, others pushed the curve up as well and the complainers either failed the test or "earned" D grades. The professor said no do overs, they had their examination results.👨🎓
i would like to remind the people who complain about the participation trophy generation: it wasn't the kids who wanted those trophies. it was their parents, who didn't want to feel the heartbreak of seeing their child learn what loss was; parents who didn't want to feel like they raised failures. parents who are chris christie's age now.
Yeah, that's my generation and I wish I could say it wasn't us but it most certainly was. I never had kids, however, I watched nearly all of my friends who had kids actively engage in this nonsense. On behalf of Generation X, I formally acknowledge our needy stupidity.
I think it is a mistake to say it was a "generation" that promoted "trophies". It was a culture that developed over the last couple decades within a certain segment of society that many people and parents opposed.
Yeah honestly I hated my parents for being really tough on me when I was young but now I realise that it was actually extremely beneficial, I look at other people in my generation and I'm just like "what in the fuck". Maybe it's because my parents were a lot older than normal, so they actually remembered what it was like to be a PARENT, not a friend to your children.
I'm glad someone is finally saying it. Those parents suck...I was seeing it happen with the kids a few years younger than me...And now look. America is as soft as buttercream..Congrats guys...🙄
@@Djamonja yeah, my dad got flack for giving stat awards to kids on the team for iron on patches for our sleeves. We only lost 1 game in season and whipped them in the playoffs. Many games were scoreboard shut-offs.
I was reading a study that said the biggest thing we failed to teach Gen Z was how to fail. We have a whole generation that thinks if they fail, they are done and they can't answer the question of, "you failed, now what are you going to do?" They were never taught how to pick themselves up and to move on. Parents thought they were giving their kids advantages, instead, they crippled them. Like it or not, everyone fails at something at some point. If you don't know how to recover from that, what happens next?
In order to “learn to fail” the cost of failure can’t be paramount, there has to be less pressure. You don’t learn ti ride a bike while being chased by wolves, you learn on empty streets where falling won’t be so bad. Having to take a class over should be an inconvenience, but the stakes are a lot higher than that
As a hiring manager I can attest to the fact that some of these kids coming out of college have never been told NO! They've had everything handed to them and they are not prepared for the real world where everyone doesn't overlook your shortcomings and says you're doing a great job constantly, regardless of your lackadaisical attitude or much less job performance or pronouns.
true.. new generations look like spoiled brats...its not just fault of parents and society but also technology.. we call new generations "Google kids".. if they dont learn or get something ASAP they lose interest and motivation and their focus go on something else...all that is good base to get bunch of kids, that if they learn something at the end, that would be just some facts without ability to process those information and be a "thinker" in situations when something goes wrong :)
My architecture school required us to take 3 calculus classes. I failed each one the first time round. Did all the homework, sometimes 3x over every night, and I’d still fail the exams. It almost stopped my university career, but somehow I squeaked by passing each one, collecting C and D grades. But I discovered a lot about myself and am a veteran architect today. Bones only grow under stress, and dealing w failure is crucial in life.
I hated calculus, and might well have changed my major if my scholarship hadn't required that I do math. So I'm curious -- how much have you actually used calculus in your career as an architect?
@@carolthedabbler2105 while I actually learned how to calculate rotational surface area (the pinnacle of my calculus career), in my entire architecture career (30 years and counting), I have NEVER used calculus. Ironically, after passing my last calc. class (2nd try again), the university dropped the calculus requirement entirely! I was a bit miffed, but I remain proud of myself for getting past something my brain architecture was clearly not cut out for…..
@@jokermtb I'm not surprised you never used it. I was a math teacher and a software engineer and never used it either. My husband just retired from doing electronic circuit design, and says he actually did use calculus -- once. I assume it's mostly needed by structural engineers.
@@carolthedabbler2105 Same, I can't remember the last time I had to do any math as a software engineer. Logical thinking is important, but honestly that can be taught with anything really.
My first year of law school over 1/3 of the students failed out or left. The following year we got an email asking how the school could change to retain more people. Every class grade was based almost 100% on the final exam, so I responded "students could be told upfront, learn the material or quit before finals". I had to get special permission from the dean of the school to go full time while working full time because I needed to support my wife and child. They made it very clear that if i didnt meet the standards to pass i would be kicked out, no exceptions. So for years my day started at 6am and ended at 2am if i was lucky, but I did what I had to do to learn while I earn. I graduated on schedule with my class May of 2020 just after Covid hit, but I still managed to keep the same job through school, get my law degree, and get licensed. I'm not special in that respect, but there is nothing worse than hearing the person in class with no job, school paid for, and/or all the free time in the world talk about how school is unfair because it requires too much from you... then quit. The school doesn't need you, the classmates putting in the time don't want you, and society doesn't need people entering life changing careers who arent willing to sacrifice their free time to learn the material in order to be qualified for the job. Careers in the medical field, legal field, and other fields where you get 1 shot to do it right the first time is not designed for people who are unwilling to do what it takes.
You worked incredibly hard to get the career you dreamed of. I’m willing to admit that I haven’t had a work ethic like yours, but unlike a lot of people in that boat, I’ve accepted that the effort I put out is what I received in return. It’s not like I’m lazy or anything. I did receive a bachelor’s degree in journalism and currently work as a reporter. However, if I could go back and do it all over again, I would have chosen a better social circle (which I had ample opportunities to do in the good schools I went to, but foolishly didn’t do), had a tireless academic (and athletic, considering I loved sports as a kid but wasn’t blessed with much natural ability) work ethic, and pursued my first childhood dream of becoming a doctor. I salute you for putting in all that time and effort to get your law degree, and you hit the nail right on the head when talking about other students who had better circumstances than you and still complained about how hard things were and how they wanted almost everything just handed to them.
I retired not long ago after teaching dentistry for over a third of my career. Just in the last 3 years or so my friends/ colleagues and I have seen a shift in authority from the faculty to the students. Two things declined; the skills and knowledge of the graduates and the morale of the teaching faculty. There were students that regularly skipped both preclinical labs (where clinical skills are taught before they enter the clinic) and actual clinic sessions where they'd gain clinical experience on their way to becoming a dentist. As the video and comments point out the fault for this declining work/ training ethic started with the parents, but is shared by the students who have an utterly unprofessional attitude towards their education, and the administration that allows this increasingly dysfunctional culture to continue. Assuming that we can extrapolate my experience into the rest of American society my wife and I have decided that unless we have no choice we will avoid all kinds of professionals, especially health professionals that are under 40 years old. Other countries, such as China which was mentioned are not burdened by this crazy notion of mandatory equal outcomes and No Child Left Behind. On an individual level these recent graduates are not equipped to deal with the real world, but also America will find itself increasingly unable to compete with a real world in which competition with other countries is a very real thing. Very sad.
That is so shocking! The participation trophy and pat yourself on the back generation has gotten so out of hand (and it shouldn’t have been started in the first place) that now it’s entering dental schools! You can bet, the participation trophy and self esteem movement era has also entered medical schools as well even. There’s going to be a lot of dead patients and malpractice suits.
Organic Chemistry as a make or break course for entry to medical school is a North American phenomenon. Nowhere else in the world does this apply. Medical School entry in most of the rest of the world is directly from High School!!
When you turn education into a ‘product’ and submit it to the according business model, this is what you get. Education is NOT a product. As a retired 30 year veteran of public education, this problem, the ‘for profit business product model’ is IMO a deeper and more perfidious cause of these issues. We are also now plagued with a schizophrenic understanding of the purpose of education in our country, ranging from religious indoctrination wanted by the Christian Right to the ‘practical’ train me to make money wanted by the middle class , to the feel good self realization wanted by the liberal left.
In my country When education was not seen as a product, the consequences were disastrous. The low salaries the government could afford to pay attracted the worst set of people into the teaching profession. Recently the governor of a state fired 20,000 teachers who couldn't pass an assessment test for 8 year olds.
@@stinger4712 In my country, higher education is for free, you just have to pass the entry exams. It's unimaginable that a mob of students would ask the university to fire a professor and the university would do it. We can wish for more dialogue with the student, the professors shouldn't treat the kids unfairly, the exam requirements should be transparent etc., but the universities stand behind their staff because they don't have to follow the market rules ("if the students complain, we lose money").
Exactly, thank you! According to the guests, it's the parents' fault, or the trophy generation fault, but neither of them addresses the fact that the US higher education system is a corporate system where money matters first and the students are treated as "clients" who have all the rights whereas the staff is mere "necessary evil" that must be somehow paid (because you can't cash in money from the students if you don't teach them) but they have no rights. We can all get angry at spoiled students but it's ultimately the university who fires a docent because the kids complained.
Education has to be a product to get the best professors/teachers but, 60k vs 20k. This is no longer capitalism. This is piracy aka privatization. Schools here get so many tax breaks that they should not get, charging this kind of money. If a professor wants to be wealthy, maybe they should have been a lawyer or a doctor. 60k vs 20k is absurd.
Certain things should not be on the 'for profit' model. Competition is good, and I get that. Try and make schools (hospitals, prisons) improve their outcomes, but the same bad practices that lead to VW emissions scandal or the Wells Fargo fraudulent accounts scandal can be practiced by teachers, doctors, and wardens when the product is an actual human life - even yours. Do schools need to run efficiently? Absolutely. Are teachers underpaid? Certainly any good ones are. Is it wrong to want the school to practice what they preach about using a little petroleum as possible and recycling what they can, only with tax dollars? I don't think so. When a university costs $70,000 a year, where does the money go? If your classroom has 20 students, that is $1.4 million for M-W-F, 9-11. That same professor teaches say one other class that day and 2 more on Tue-Thur. That is $5.6 million. Okay, you need an actual classroom big enough to hold 20 people, and to pay the professor. Where does that translate into that kind of money? Where is it even close? And that doesn't even touch on classes with 300 students in them.
As someone in academia, I’ve seen the the difference from COVID in college entry classes. When I took anatomy at community college, we knew the instructor was hard but fair. Only five students passed out of 30/35 and it wasn’t an issue in 2010. This mentally is also being seen in K-12. We are lowering teaching requirement standards due to shortages instead of supporting them while also allowing parents to bully and have their way.
When I was at Penn State, freshmen engineering majors were informally know as pre-business, because a large portion didn't make it through those first year engineering classes.
There's something I think these kids haven't learned that the parents need to explain too. Failure is not absolute failure. If you applied yourself and still failed, that's an opportunity for maturity. Some parents are so laser focused on their kids passing that they make failure seem like an irreversible stain on their records. So instead of using failure as an opportunity to learn, they're told that if they fail, it's because everyone else is wrong and they are right.
Wasn't it Churchill that said “Success is not final; failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” apparently Americans lack courage?
well.. my late high school professor once said: there are only two kinds of people in this world: "those who find excuses and those who search for solutions" ... i guess those parents are first kind of people and they learn their kids to behave same way.. :) btw. one other teacher said something similar: "the biggest book on the world is not Bible or some Encyclopedia but Book of excuses" :) that can be applied on both parents and kids these days, especially during pandemic when schools were closed - no one has forbidden to kids to open books and learn on their own, they didn't need to wait for teachers or online classes to start - lots of people used this relatively mild situation just as excuse for their laziness
I don't like how the immediate assumption is that the professor was right when he said the students forgot how to study, discounting entirely the possibility that the students and the university were right when they all said that the professor forgot how to teach.
He's a funny guy. During an interview on Letterman years ago, he pulled a donut out of his vest pocket and started eating it. Brought the house down...
I took Computational Aerodynamics course in my bachelor's. It was the toughest course my entire batch had ever elected. More than half ran out during the switching period, rest of us bled through the course and the course was never made easier regardless of our endless imploring to our very talented professor. Honestly, I am better for it. I look back at the time when I successfully passed this course with an A and any challenge seems small in comparison.
I work as a desk clerk at a hotel in Miami Beach. I think all kids should work front desk one season. Afterwards they would be able to face ANYTHING service related, public related. It is like soldiers. They are not ready until they "see the elephant". And then they ARE soldiers. Hardening is hard, but we either sweat in training or bleed on the field. Because we will all go to the field eventually, including the kids that live in their parents' basements until they are 40. They WILL go and bleed like stuck pigs. And if you had failed CA you would have realized it was not for you and moved on while you still had time.
As someone who was premed in college and took and passed organic chem I and II, I have to say that the subject is ridiculously difficult. I loved nonorganic chem. I’m a good student, I studied all the time, A’s in almost every class, yet those were the two classes that really tripped me up. It’s not the professors’ fault. The students need to sink or swim, and perhaps modify their study habits.
Thanks. I wondered how hard the class was. Science classes never seemed to me as hard as literature classes because the answer to the former’s test question was in the book or teacher’s lecture. After trying to read my literature teachers’ minds for 4 years, I took a computer class and thought I’d entered a new world.
I might also add smaller classes, tutoring, extending the class to two semesters and adding 1/2 practical application etc. I have to wonder if the school tried to solve the problem or just remove the problem. Sounds like the latter. In the letter the students never asked for the teacher to be removed.
I remember hearing about how difficult organic Chem was, and a decent number of students would drop the class. I guess with the obscene prices of tuition dropping a class isn’t much of an option anymore.
I went through organic chemistry and all of the upper level sciences and went on to a doctorate. I can tell you from experience taking hundreds of final exams over 8 years of school that it is completely possible for a professor to become extremely out of touch and to write exams that are nearly impossible to study for. An organic chem book can be 400-500 pages. Imagine a professor taking a tiny part of one little paragraph from that book and asking it on an exam. There’s simply not enough time in the world to efficiently prepare for an exam when someone does this. I’ve experienced classes where you essentially had to memorize a textbook word for word to pass because every picture, of word, every diagram was fair game. It teaches absolutely nothing. Other times you take ungodly amounts of hours memorizing hundreds of pages of text and they don’t even put a single question from it on the exam. It’s maddening. And keep in mind that all of this info is absolutely worthless later in life when you become a doctor.
Im a chemical engineer and loved organic chemistry. I will note the the premeds in the class we're more likely to cheat on homework assignments and find old exams rather than actually learning the material. It kinda scares me that these hyper competitive neurotic types will one day be people I take medical advice from...
When I was in grad school I had a roommate who was a Biochemistry grad student. He was the teaching assistant for the organic chemistry class taught to pre-med students. He didn't have much nice to say about their skills or study habits.
Let me tell you Bill, as a Millenial (age 29) I cannot stress how little importance a gold star sticker I got for participation twenty years ago has on my life. It had no impact on my worldview. It's completely irrelevant to me, you're not making a mind blowing revelation by telling a grown man that his participation trophies didn't matter, we already don't care about them.
@@Antonio-yg7io It really shouldn't be. At least Christie appears sane (here) and is somewhat self-deprecating. These are the kinds of conversations people that have any critical thoughts in their head should be having with each other exactly BECAUSE it's uncomfortable because it forces you to press back against your inherent biases when someone is directly in front of you.
In our province we had a very good education system. Then in the late 80's early 90's it changed drastically. Kids with behavioural issues we no longer in a separate class. It would be cruel to separate them for the other students and friends, even though it completely disrupted the class. Then it was kids could not fail no matter what (didn't matter about attendance or grades), because it would not be good for their social development. I dealt with kids who went through the educational system and "graduated" but could not read or write at all. These kids tried to go to university and failed miserably (our university has over 50 percent drop out rate). Professors would come from other provinces or countries to teach and were so frustrated on how much they had "dumb" down the curriculum. Students who were studying to be teachers wrote the most atrocious papers and the T.A. could not penalise for grammar or spelling. If the T.A. could not understand what the paper was trying to say they had to talk to the student for them to clarify and then mark the paper on the clarification.
The most insane thing to me is when people like Bill and Melinda Gates give donations towards things like equitable math. I can understand some blue haired humanities professor trying to argue that 2+2=5 because she's never had to do anything important in her life, but you'd think the a founding member and long-time CEO of the world's biggest software company would understand that no, not all answers are in some way correct. There are ancient gods that are more forgiving than source code.
Having taught for a number of years at Hunter College of the City University of New York, I can tell you that this issue is typical of Pre-Med students. I was continuously and relentlessly bombarded by the pleadings of pre-Med students for higher grades and opportunities for extra credit. The rate of such appeals by pre-med students was always far, far greater than that of other majors. In fact, it almost never happened with other majors. And if I did ever agree to accept an extra credit assignment, invariably the quality of the work was only mediocre. But that never stopped the pre-med student from begging for an A in spite of the fact that the extra work didn't justify a higher grade. More mediocre work still averaged to a mediocre grade.
They would not be able to handle my O. Chm and Biochemistry professors. Average grade was around 60. The classes were difficult and after I took the MCAT I no longer hated my O. CHM professor.
@@ianfisch7289 You'd be amazed how many times you review blood work, test results or therapeutic treatments and apply all your science classes. As an RN I used Algebra, chemistry, A&P and microbiology every single day. What i remember most from my Organic Chem class was it was the first semester the professor was teaching after spending 15 years in the lab studying the effects of marijuana. 😁 I remember him wearing lavender overalls with dark purple flowers on the back pockets. It's been a while so....
I'm a part time manager in a large food pantry that also serves our local poor in other ways. Many of our volunteers are HS kids. Technically they are forced to volunteer in order to graduate. Anyway, the inability for many of them to do the most simple things like fill out a form w/o mommy or daddy doing it for them is astounding. I often get a parent start to talk for the child and I don't answer, I look at the kid and answer. If I then ask a question of the kid, the latter often looks to the parent or the parent answers! Not long ago a girl asked if she had been there an hour. There a conventional clock on the wall. I asked what time she got there, she told me. She could not tell, 75 minutes later, if she had been there an hour. I know old people have always griped about the younger generation. There are lots of kid volunteers that work hard, are smart, and I hope will be the leaders of the next generation. But damn, I'm sure kids are a lot dumber, generally speaking, that when I was in HS.
Every generation is sure of that. Every generation is sure that they were better, smarter, stronger, more resilient than the generation that replaces them. It’s nothing new and it’s no more relevant or accurate than it’s ever been.
Parents should realize that there is good from both sides. I would strongly encourage children and boost there spirits when they are down. But also only give them accolades when they earned them. My parents were very cold and discouraging towards me and even when I achieved something it wasn’t a big deal. I wish they took the time to build my confidence as a child, it’s a lot harder to build it as an adult. Sometimes a kid needs the encouragement even if it’s a participation trophy. That being said I never received a participation trophy in my life.
Why do they create a problem where one doesn`t exists? I got two little league trophies in 1962. One for making the all star team and the other was for playing on the Dodgers, ie. my participation trophy. They both sat on my shelve for years and had equal value.
The US is not a participation trophy society. Not at all. The competition to get into top universities is tougher than every then students have to pay staggering fees so that their professors (me) can only teach two courses per semester. I teach at a university ranked about #100 and my students are fine except for not talking to each other. They could be executives or scientists. They write well, their Math is good, they are polite. Many start companies. The big problem I see is that they have no social interaction at all. I have to assign them to be friends to each other.
Organic Chemistry is a filtering course for med school applications. Every doctor I know doesn't remember anything from organic chemistry. It is very possible that the teacher literally was making the class too hard. In the school I went to in 2003, one of the organic chemistry teachers lost his tenure because the entire class failed the exam. That course specifically can be made to be "too hard" on purpose without actually teaching the material properly.
I would be interested in how many students, in terms of percentage, failed the course. If we are looking at a 65 -70% fail rate, it could really be too hard. Who knows what the professor was told for the course, but organic chemistry is supposed to be a really difficult class to weed out poor performers before the more complex medical and science courses. That said, it should be possible to pass the course without being an expert in the field. If nearly everyone in a course fails the class, is the realistic assumption to assume all the kids in the class are idiots or is it that the course and professor failed to prepare the students to pass the class (test outside the required lecture and course material or far outside the normal requirements). Factoring in the costs of college, making an impossible course that forces students to spend a longer time in college isn't a negligible event, it has major repercussions in the overall costs of college and severe impacts to students with scholarships trying to get through college.This is our problem, a news story designed to invoke particular emotions without providing all the information to allow for an informed decision. It could be what they are trying to portray, a bunch of petulant kids and parents complaining about failing and the wrongful termination of a professor or it could be a class that barely anyone passed and the students letting the administration know. To be fair, I couldn't find the initial story and they could have included this information, but this segment did not.
Seeing how gen z turned out... I'm working hard to raise my son to not be that way. He's only 3 and he's autistic but I already have discipline, guidelines, rules, boundaries etc.
I agree with some of the comments that question the instructors ability to teach, and do think there should be a standard for the ability to teach. I took a year of organic chemistry and biochemistry as a part of my major. Organic chemistry 1 was so confusing, I had no homework assignments-only tests, and the professor kept saying "don't worry, there will be a curve" all semester long as none of us understood. I used my one-time emergency drop to drop the class literally the day before the final- because my grade was somewhere around a 38%. I thought there was no way I would pass even with a curve. Well, while the class was taking the final, the professor sent out the curve of everyone's grade no including the final. He obviously didn't receive the memo that I dropped because I got a grade: B-. My 38% was brought up to a B-. I was livid. Not because I had dropped, but because it meant that the class didn't understand. And while only a few of us had to actually know the material for the next level up (or 2 levels in my case), there was no way in hell I would be able to pass level 2 or 3 knowing 38% of level 1....to turn a 38% into a B-?!?! No. This professor failed. He failed all of us. I took the course again in the summer, with a professor from the local state school allowed to teach at the big-time school, and got a genuine B+ curved up to an A- after the final. The state school professor could teach organic chemistry 1. The big-time professor could not. For those who don't know what "the curve" is, it's a way of taking raw performance data and applying the "Bell curve" to it. So students are measured compared to each other, rather than static standard. A static standard like > 90% = A, > 80% = B, > 70 = C, and so on. With a curve applied, the top 3% of students with the highest score becomes the 97th percentile, even if the "highest score" is 85%. The following ~17% become A to B+ percentile, then the next ~32% become B to C+ percentile, then the next ~17% become C to D+ percentile, etc so you end up with this "Bell curve" of ranking student performance. It's used to act as a buffer between bad teaching and bad exam questions. If a topic is discussed that only zero to a couple people understand, then it's not the students fault for not understanding, and the Bell curve would reflect that. It becomes the teacher's fault for not know how to teach effectively and not the student's fault or hitting all their GPA's negatively. It is used in colleges everywhere as a way of not-punishing the students for trying new teaching methods, or for not punishing students for material poorly covered that ended up heavily impacting an exam. In practice, a Bell curve usually only raises grades by half a letter (a B becomes a B+, or a B+ becomes an A-). Raising a whole letter would be - in my day - considered an extreme but could happen. For example, the semester when 9/11 happened, college kids everywhere would've happened cause a whole class who normally would have earned a B average suddenly is getting a C average in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. So for my 38% ending up in the top 20% of the class, that meant 80% were actually scoring as-bad or worse than I did. In other words, no one was learning or passing the material, but our grades were "altered" to look like we were....and there were +150 students in my class.
Wow! Unheard of. I started pre-med at my university in 1998. I graduated third in high school with strait As in my class. Unfortunately my parents sent me to Christian school for 11 years, and despite my good grades, they didn’t teach science well. In chem 101, there were 300 kids in my class at the university. The professor power pointed the whole class at a rapid speed. I hired a foreign grad student to tutor me for the final and barely got the first B of my life. For the next semester I signed up for the professor who wrote the book. It was a hard fight to pass the class. There were whole sections of my biology class that my high school never taught, Neanderthals and evolution. I was told to filter biology through the Bible in high school. The dean called me in and asked if I had what it took to be a doctor. I went back to my dorm and searched the book of majors for a new career and became a successful wildlife biologist. Could I have been a doctor if I went to public high school? Maybe. Or maybe I just couldn’t grasp chemistry at a high enough level to do the job.
Give me a break, how old are you? NO Christian schools teach HS science like this. Christian schools have higher standards than public school. And homeschoolers blow them all away on testing and college admissions.
Giving participation trophies to 6-7 year old kids is a good thing. It's a problem only when it continues as they grow up. The competition should intensify.
Helicopter parents aside, something that really lacks at the university level is people with the actual ability to teach. For some reason we say that while people are extremely gifted in their own disciplines, that automatically makes them qualified to teach it. The further couldn't be from the truth. I struggled through my computer science degree enough back in the day trying to learn it from computer nerds with no ability to convey material.
From what I understand its a similar issue with this professor. The professor taught at NYU for 10 years and said he saw a decline in student performance with a drop off during the pandemic. The main complaints from students were that he was dismissive of their concerns, unclear grading, and did not seem to even try to help them. Hell they didn't want him fired and were surprised the university did so. Seem the guy was riding on his laurels.
I am a professor and I agree with you. My Ph.D. was four years of learning to produce publishable research. I then spent 80% of my time teaching with no training at all. Any elementary school teacher has better preparation for lesson planning.
I think the average college student, at least in the STEM fields, spends just as much time if not more studying than our parents’ generation. And because of the internet, the expectations for content covered and the scope of the projects has only gotten larger. Having hard courses is fine, but professors that assume students should spend 25 hours a week only on their course, and then still give out C’s to most of the class, should really re-consider if that’s necessary and constructive.
Getting degrees is easier than it used to be precisely because of the internet. I went to college for the first time and completed a four-year course after years of working in a menial job and after getting my honours degree, i feel like if i can do it anyone can, and i didnt work that hard for it either. The one thing i did notice is that lecturers are incredibly lenient and todays young men and women are lazy and have very little going for them in terms of common sense and critical thinking.
Well, that lies the other problem, grade inflation. For most of academic history, Cs were seen as the "passing" grade and was the expected average that many (if not most) students were going to get. That is why you see so many stories of past famous people "x or y had bad grades when they were in school", because that was what they gave out then. "As" were rarely given and only to truly exceptional folks. However, of course everything has change. A = average and everything else is failure. The average GPAs for colleges has surged. That philosophy has basically overtaken everything from Uber Ratings (5 or bust) to Amazon reviews.
Participation Trophy discussion aside, from a market perspective you are receiving increasingly less for increasingly more. Sooner or later it has to go bust
That reason for firing seems simplistic and dumb. It is possible there was another reason they are hiding because its embarrassing. I must admit Christ’s joke about turning his kids into New York Mets fan so they know pain and disappointment from the beginning was funny as hell😂😂
Agree but we also have No Child Keft Behind to thank. We are seeing the results of an entire generation of students being taught that lassoing a standardized test is the goal, There is no standardized test worthy of being the ultimate measure of a child’s success.
I was born mid 70's and we had participation trophies so please stop acting like we are holier than thou. If anything I feel like alot of this is the break up or nuclear families and adults wanting to compensate their kids for their own failures. They are still compensating. I've made the participation trophy argument myself but I've learned it's really bigger than that.
Organic Chemistry was one of the hardest sets of courses at my university. It weeds out the pre-meds who can’t cut it. This is supposed to be a hard course. I had a very mean professor in one of my o-chem classes & he definitely wouldn’t be allowed to behave the way he did back then but the class should still be very hard.
To be clear, the petition did not ask for the professor to be fired. NYU did that on their own. I think the students wanted a second chance with more assistance available for study and mental health in order to pass a class with far less impervious passing standards. And as for the professor noting students now having an inability to read exam questions, that should be a major alarm, because reading comprehension is a basic requirement for any college. Either the material is too incomprehensible or more students than ever need remedial English, or perhaps both.
I am so sick of being labeled the participation trophy generation. We didn’t ask for participation trophies, they were given to us whether we wanted them or not. Blame the generation that gave them to us.
I took stats at least 4 times in college. It was my poor study habits that made it hard. I finally barely passed. Took it again in grad school when I was more mature. Passed with flying colors. Work harder!
This guy thinks that the 70k fees children are changed at their Universitues are too much. I wonder how much he is charging for his Services. Doesnt he find that he us also charging too much?
To be fair, from what I read, the kids didn't ask for the professor to be fired. NYU did that on their own. When I was in school, there was a professor who was constantly on sabbatical working on a Shakespeare cross-reference database and he was an internationally known Shakespeare expert. His classes were known for being really hard. When he finally came back from one of his many sabbaticals, I signed up for his course immediately and I'm glad of it. His reputation was deserved and I'm a better person for it.
@@The_Real_Grand_Nagus actually we do know. The entire story has been made public. And the notion that it might be because the whole class is failing is ridiculous because as we know, his classes were obviously very successful prior to Covid or else this would have happened sooner. Facts are facts.
As a recent college grad with some knowledge of orgo chem, that is an extremely complicated course. I wouldn't't necessarily agree that college students are complaining about how hard things are but some people don't realize that not all teachers and professors teach the same and I think that may be one reason but then again this is up to both student and teacher. I also agree that college students really do not know how to study. In a number of my classes, my professors pointed out to the class that we had no idea how to study and all students agreed.
I am parent of kids who got bunch of participation trophies and I can tell you that neither parents nor kids ask for trophies or take them seriously. Trophies are piece of plastic given by an organization as a "thank you parents for paying us." Kids today are the same as kids have always been. In many ways they have it tougher. What changed is that universities have became for-profit organizations, so they overact in fear of losing costumer.
Well when the Majority of the class not doing well, it is the professor, you can't have the entire class failing or not interested in the class. I have two kids just graduated from U of M, there are some Great professors and some are some are lazy and not interested in teaching. (Teaching is a Talent,not knowing the material only)
And this is how America finds out that kids that have money to pay for school and kids smart enough to go through that school are not the same group. The more expensive a school becomes the less you get people that are part of one group and not the other.
Bill doesn't quite have this right. Word is, the students didn't ask that he be fired. No idea if his course was appropriately difficult or not. If it was, this is silly. If it was a professor teaching an intro class like it was a second year med school class, that's something else.
To be clear, the school is not renewing his contract. But by any other name it's still a firing. For the worst of reasons: NYU doesn't want to piss of parents and legacy donors. Gotta keep the gravy train rollin'.
He was let go against the chemistry department’s recommendation. The students, the majority of which are pre-med, had a petition running to get rid of him. The director of undergraduate studies in that department, emailed the professor saying there was a plan to let students have their grades reviewed or the possibility to withdraw retroactively from his class. This is an insult to any teacher...
@@purplehaze8557 Again, the reporting has all been that the petition didn't call for his termination. That appears to be an assumption some people have made.
4:16 This is no joke the answer. People like me were not blessed with dopamine and without adderall you can only be so competent if you have a poverty of natural dopamine.
@@bl4ckst0ne The university declined to renew his contract but the students didn't specifically petition to make that happen. He was also 84 so I'm not surprised the university decided to go with someone a little less geriatric and set in their ways
@@Hassingerjeff Uh oh. I hope Maher doesn't see you calling someone geriatric. He might ban you from his page. For someone who loves the truth he hates when people call old people old.
Wouldn't be the first time for Bill to ignore basic fact so he can slam something. I look up the story to fact check myself and found the students were basically "Hey prof I'm having trouble understanding the course" and he blew them off. You think at some point he would have thought: "Hmm, yeah O Chem is hard but if a fourth of my students are not getting it I wonder why?"
@@nickbarcheck1019 Well, it's one thing to state the obvious (older people are old!), and another one completely to use this fact as a pejorative. And ageism is a very real problem in our society. Calling someone geriatric isn't acknowledging that that person is an older citizen, with all that entails - including the wealth in experience and knowledge. It's just dismissive and offensive, and frankly quite myopic too.
This could very much depend on the context. Was the exam unreasonably hard? There actually are professors living in their ivory tower thinking their subject is the most important one asking students to learn some obscure information. Organic chemistry is actually not that important for Medicine students.
The best thing that a parent can do is to try and instill moral values & a proper work ethic in their kid(s) from as young of an age as possible. The rest should take care of itself.
@@vitd5283 It seems to me the republicans say one thing and do the opposite. For them school is not about education, but a way to sort out those who have rich parents from those who haven't, so that those on top in society can position their kids in the top of the society again, just like the school system in UK does and has done for generations.
When I went back to university in 2008, I was completely unprepared for the seismic shift that had occurred since 2001 when I finished my education degree. My fellow 1st year graphic design students, ranging in age from 17-28 with a single outlier, me, a 53-year-old woman. At first, I thought this was a joke or some sort of performance put on by the faculty. There was a row of "older people" standing at the back of the classroom studio on the first day. Typically, this is the day that profs hand out the course outline including assignment and exams schedule … you know, the RIOT ACT. It didn't happen that way. After the course outline sheets were distributed, the older people at the back of the room began throwing questions at the prof. Questions about supplies. Workload. Concerns about safety … These were PARENTS!! Okay, let's say it is caused by parents, a Katty quite accurately guessed. The students could have said something, either then or in our first class. They didn't. What's even worse is that our course kept getting watered down because students would complain about how hard it was. So the profs would cut assignments from the "riot act" outline. We should have covered so much more than what was even in the original outline - things like contract law, ethics in advertising, etc. Instead, by the time I graduated with a BA in graphic design (honours :/ ), my degree was barely an overview of all the seminars and online courses I'd have to take since then. I graduated with a $20,000 student loan debt along with the now 21-32-year-olds that said, in 2008, "why should we vote. We have everything we want," when I talked about protest & voting, being a child of the 60s-70s. I warned that any gains could be lost … and I lost their interest. As I listen to Bill Maher talk about the younger people, my head explodes. I could even say LITERALLY EXPLODES because that same age group as my fellow students - the ones I taught grade 10 math when I was a teacher, the ones that argued "when will we ever need math " - they whined that they were being ridiculed for using the word "literally" wrong, so WEBSTER CHANGED A DEFINITION TO APPEASE MILLENNIALS. I am literally ready to blow my brains out. Now you don't know if you should call crisis support or hand me a joint. We literally have no way to say if we are speaking literally or metaphorically.
To be fair Webster changes definitions based on published material. They didn’t do it to “appease millennials”. They have plenty of words in there that were completely made up by authors. Quidditch for example. Some of us millennials realize how stupid the others are. But the older generations don’t get to claim they did better. Every major cataclysm we face today was brought about by selfish, present focused, decisions… we didn’t make.
I agree with Mike -- dictionaries merely report how the language is currently being used, and they've been doing that ever since there have been dictionaries -- because language keeps changing, which is why we're not communicating in Anglo-Saxon.
@@mikeximenez5285 "Published material?" what published material changed the vernacular according to Webster and only Webster? If I say something & then qualify it by telling you that I'm speaking metaphorically, what is/are the other options?
I have to say, as much as I may not care for Chris Christie, he has a good point, as do those who place responsibility for the PTC on the parents to the point where their kids expect something just for showing up. That being said, I would have liked to hear how he teaches. I took organic chemistry as a CUNY student, and I struggled. I'll admit, as much as I love math and science, this was particularly challenging. However, my professor welcomed any opportunity to sit and discuss where I needed to improve. At semester's end, I think I got a C+. I wasn't enthusiastic about that, but I was just glad I didn't fail. If this professor is condescending or behaving in a way that's unprofessional, the students may have a case. In the same breath, the way tuition has skyrocketed, it's almost like a diploma is a product, rather than a reward. It sounds like our education system could use an overhaul. I'm not necessarily unopposed for everyone getting a prize in a competition; I just don't think they should be equal prizes. There's a tremendous difference between the student who just takes up space and scrapes by with a "D" than the valedictorian.
One thing she forgets is that British universities cost less because the government subsidies them. Foreign students don't get that help and their tuition will cost much more. Universities cost a fortune everywhere.
Dude if these med students think organic chemistry is hard, they want to try Physical Chemistry.... loads of people I went to Uni with got A grades in Organic Chemistry, but almost everyone on the course struggled a fair bit with Physical Chemistry. Physical Chemistry is like chemistry, maths and physics all in the same place....
For 50k-70k a year I would expect competent TEACHERS not lecturers to impart classes.. people that actually care that students learn. If 50% of your class fails probably the problem is you
In colleges and universities, you are supposed to learn the curriculum by yourself. They may make a shitty exam sometimes, but in most cases, it is your own fault if you fail.
Participation trophy society nailed it. I stopped signing up for my bowling league when they started participation trophies, luckily I was old enough not to be impressed by a trophy I didn’t earn and I thought it was embarrassing. Bowling was always fun and I only ever went to the banquets because a pack of wild dogs couldn’t keep my grandma from getting dressed up for a dinner celebrating the kids. Was never disappointed about not getting a trophy, we knew what teams were in the top 3 and who’s averages were the highest in the final weeks of the season. I don’t just blame the parents, they got it from the media and representatives that pushed that crap. It’s still happening btw, a girl in medical school last year never went to class and her mom demanded she should still get to take finals, she did then she made a scene at graduation when she didn’t think enough people clapped for her. Sensitivity will be our downfall.
Can’t believe no one followed up on why Christie’s kids don’t attend less obscenely expensive universities, since that comment was what prompted his anecdote.
There has to be a balance though. Some courses are hard but they’re made extra hard by the professors if they have tenure and can establish their own rules for the course. We had professors who taught you that 1+1=2 but on the test wanted you to calculate the mass of the Sun if airplanes are purples. There’s also the question of how engaging they are. In math, I took two courses with the toughest professors of the department. I scraped by with a C in both courses but man they were great and engaging. And I had other professors who had no reason to teach because they just read a powerpoint slide. All about a balance BUT I agree that this latest generation is becoming very soft and expects everything handed to them. Even with Millennials it was almost a thing.
It is better to have your first disappointement as a toddler than as a college student. As any beautiful skill, coping with disappointement is something you have to practise.
I used to teach at a large university and about half the students failed Calculus. We were told we had to address this somehow. It seemed Pre-Calculus was too hard too. A new fundamental class, which was really elementary and high school math, was introduced to prepare students for Pre-Calculus. I taught that class one semester, and had a girl come in to see me during office hours, students rarely came in during our mandatory office hours, crying that she did well in honors math classes in high school and couldn't understand how she was failing. One semester, I took over a "Math for Elementary School Teachers" class in the College of Education and I think I found the problem. I was teaching about fractions and a student stood up and screamed that they couldn't understand at all! I later taught HS level courses and found that most primary and secondary level teachers were just clueless.
I find calculus to be very binary in understanding, you either completely get it or you don't. I took calculus at the university level without having taken it at the highschool level first (big mistake). I've never had a decent professor actually tell me what it ACTUALLY means when 2x is the derivative of X^2... People who took it at the highschool level go into university with a very basic understanding of what it means. A good highschool calculus teacher is worth their weight in gold.
Oxford and Cambridge used to be free for ages. Of course, only the extremely clever and/or extremely privilaged could ever test in, so upper class highschools cost more than US private universities...
Yeah, unlike America other countries don't have their athletes subsided by the rest of the uni. I.E. It doesn't spend 3 mil a year on a football coach.
I had a physical chemistry teacher who gave everyone an F but two who got C and B because he was “disappointed” He got fired but I knew some of those students who got Fs that were remarkably intelligent. Their GPAs got ruined because the grades at state universities in my state stayed no matter what. Getting an A in Physical Chemistry is truly an honor but having that honor stolen is almost like getting intellectually graped
Yea, these types of professors do exist, and this is why complaints about a class being too 'hard' should not be dismissed so easily like Bill does here. If a professor is feeling spiteful, they can dock points for anything. I've had a math professor that docked points for showing all of the steps in my correct answers, when we were specifically told to show our work. Most don't do dumb crap like this, but some do.
I acknowledge organic C is painfully hard and usually half the students fail. It is a weed out class. I acknowledge that pre covid this teacher had accolades. However, we must all adapt and evolve. By that I do not mean dumb down the class or lower the bar. What has gotten swept under the rug is that this teacher could have done some things to aid his students but would not do so and that seemed to be a big part of the student petition and a big reason he got fired. You always want to be there for your students when you can. The biggest thing we college instructors can do to aid our students is have lectures online especially the ones we had to videotape during covid. I include them for my in person classes so if the students find they did not understand something they can go to those lectures and watch and rewatch them until they understand. By the way this is not giving the students a chance to be lazy but giving them another avenue to put in some work and the best students absolutely will do it and love that those online lectures are there even if they find they don't need to use them. Plus for those of us who put in the work during covid, we have that already for them and are doing our students a disservice if you do not let them use it. We are in an online age and we have to adapt to that. If you cannot you will at some point find yourself on the outside. Now did the university overreact? It is hard to tell but I can see the universities side in this. To show my bias in this I teach Astronomy at a university.
I totally agree with you, but you better get the VPs of Finance and IT on your side - All that storage isn't free. I will say there was one time in my college years on the 80's that I had to go to the library to find and old text book because the teacher and the book were not getting the point across to me and several of my fellow students. Sometimes a different POV helps.
I failed Organic chemistry first time and then got an A- in the summer semester. We never even thought about about asking the school to fire the professor.
I'm a college professor and just had a conversation this week with a colleague on this very topic. That is, the risk we take when failing students because they aren't doing the work needed to pass the class. When we eliminate those that aren't demonstrating or performing to the standard, our retention rate falls. If retention rates decrease we risk our professional record, and job security. It's definitely a stressful tightrope we walk. It's not just parents causing this, greedy leadership is at fault as well.
Congratulations for your contribution for brainwashing the last generation of students. As a young GenX male, I find it disturbing what has happens on college campuses since I left in 2001.
Thanks for sharing this.
You let everyone go to college. This was a mistake.
Great point
I recall during my undergraduate years we had a class where the professor buckled under to some students who "earned" a C grade on the mid-term exam. He gave another examination based on the curve, as they requested, rather than the standard.
We few who had no issue with the previous examination met outside the auditorium classroom and vowed to concentrate on the next test as all the other mid-terms had already come to pass.
5 of us aced the new exam, others pushed the curve up as well and the complainers either failed the test or "earned" D grades. The professor said no do overs, they had their examination results.👨🎓
i would like to remind the people who complain about the participation trophy generation: it wasn't the kids who wanted those trophies. it was their parents, who didn't want to feel the heartbreak of seeing their child learn what loss was; parents who didn't want to feel like they raised failures. parents who are chris christie's age now.
Yeah, that's my generation and I wish I could say it wasn't us but it most certainly was. I never had kids, however, I watched nearly all of my friends who had kids actively engage in this nonsense. On behalf of Generation X, I formally acknowledge our needy stupidity.
I think it is a mistake to say it was a "generation" that promoted "trophies". It was a culture that developed over the last couple decades within a certain segment of society that many people and parents opposed.
Yeah honestly I hated my parents for being really tough on me when I was young but now I realise that it was actually extremely beneficial, I look at other people in my generation and I'm just like "what in the fuck". Maybe it's because my parents were a lot older than normal, so they actually remembered what it was like to be a PARENT, not a friend to your children.
I'm glad someone is finally saying it. Those parents suck...I was seeing it happen with the kids a few years younger than me...And now look. America is as soft as buttercream..Congrats guys...🙄
@@Djamonja yeah, my dad got flack for giving stat awards to kids on the team for iron on patches for our sleeves. We only lost 1 game in season and whipped them in the playoffs. Many games were scoreboard shut-offs.
The irony is ...
The failure isn't being removed from your kids life. It's just being moved into a huge surprise box outside school.
And in to my doctor's office, apparently.
Yep, school yard politics don't apply...
@@Saudade54 tougher than it's ever been? Lol quite the opposite. Other generations didn't have smartphones.
Reality always catches up with you.
Part of that surprise box is the dating arena... How is a boy or young man going to take it when his crush rejects him?
I was reading a study that said the biggest thing we failed to teach Gen Z was how to fail. We have a whole generation that thinks if they fail, they are done and they can't answer the question of, "you failed, now what are you going to do?" They were never taught how to pick themselves up and to move on. Parents thought they were giving their kids advantages, instead, they crippled them. Like it or not, everyone fails at something at some point. If you don't know how to recover from that, what happens next?
I think you hit the nail on the head. Learning to lose is a great character-builder, and gives you motivation to do better or try something different.
In order to “learn to fail” the cost of failure can’t be paramount, there has to be less pressure. You don’t learn ti ride a bike while being chased by wolves, you learn on empty streets where falling won’t be so bad. Having to take a class over should be an inconvenience, but the stakes are a lot higher than that
As a hiring manager I can attest to the fact that some of these kids coming out of college have never been told NO! They've had everything handed to them and they are not prepared for the real world where everyone doesn't overlook your shortcomings and says you're doing a great job constantly, regardless of your lackadaisical attitude or much less job performance or pronouns.
I’m 70 and the most valuable life lessons I learned from falling on my arse.
true.. new generations look like spoiled brats...its not just fault of parents and society but also technology.. we call new generations "Google kids".. if they dont learn or get something ASAP they lose interest and motivation and their focus go on something else...all that is good base to get bunch of kids, that if they learn something at the end, that would be just some facts without ability to process those information and be a "thinker" in situations when something goes wrong :)
As a professor working for a US university, I see the truth to this in my day to day
My architecture school required us to take 3 calculus classes. I failed each one the first time round. Did all the homework, sometimes 3x over every night, and I’d still fail the exams. It almost stopped my university career, but somehow I squeaked by passing each one, collecting C and D grades. But I discovered a lot about myself and am a veteran architect today. Bones only grow under stress, and dealing w failure is crucial in life.
I hated calculus, and might well have changed my major if my scholarship hadn't required that I do math. So I'm curious -- how much have you actually used calculus in your career as an architect?
@@carolthedabbler2105 while I actually learned how to calculate rotational surface area (the pinnacle of my calculus career), in my entire architecture career (30 years and counting), I have NEVER used calculus. Ironically, after passing my last calc. class (2nd try again), the university dropped the calculus requirement entirely! I was a bit miffed, but I remain proud of myself for getting past something my brain architecture was clearly not cut out for…..
@@jokermtb I'm not surprised you never used it. I was a math teacher and a software engineer and never used it either. My husband just retired from doing electronic circuit design, and says he actually did use calculus -- once. I assume it's mostly needed by structural engineers.
We’ll done. All that is correct. And none of it has anything at all to do with trophies
@@carolthedabbler2105 Same, I can't remember the last time I had to do any math as a software engineer. Logical thinking is important, but honestly that can be taught with anything really.
My first year of law school over 1/3 of the students failed out or left. The following year we got an email asking how the school could change to retain more people. Every class grade was based almost 100% on the final exam, so I responded "students could be told upfront, learn the material or quit before finals". I had to get special permission from the dean of the school to go full time while working full time because I needed to support my wife and child. They made it very clear that if i didnt meet the standards to pass i would be kicked out, no exceptions. So for years my day started at 6am and ended at 2am if i was lucky, but I did what I had to do to learn while I earn. I graduated on schedule with my class May of 2020 just after Covid hit, but I still managed to keep the same job through school, get my law degree, and get licensed. I'm not special in that respect, but there is nothing worse than hearing the person in class with no job, school paid for, and/or all the free time in the world talk about how school is unfair because it requires too much from you... then quit. The school doesn't need you, the classmates putting in the time don't want you, and society doesn't need people entering life changing careers who arent willing to sacrifice their free time to learn the material in order to be qualified for the job. Careers in the medical field, legal field, and other fields where you get 1 shot to do it right the first time is not designed for people who are unwilling to do what it takes.
As a college professor, I salute your hard work!
You worked incredibly hard to get the career you dreamed of. I’m willing to admit that I haven’t had a work ethic like yours, but unlike a lot of people in that boat, I’ve accepted that the effort I put out is what I received in return. It’s not like I’m lazy or anything. I did receive a bachelor’s degree in journalism and currently work as a reporter. However, if I could go back and do it all over again, I would have chosen a better social circle (which I had ample opportunities to do in the good schools I went to, but foolishly didn’t do), had a tireless academic (and athletic, considering I loved sports as a kid but wasn’t blessed with much natural ability) work ethic, and pursued my first childhood dream of becoming a doctor. I salute you for putting in all that time and effort to get your law degree, and you hit the nail right on the head when talking about other students who had better circumstances than you and still complained about how hard things were and how they wanted almost everything just handed to them.
I retired not long ago after teaching dentistry for over a third of my career. Just in the last 3 years or so my friends/ colleagues and I have seen a shift in authority from the faculty to the students. Two things declined; the skills and knowledge of the graduates and the morale of the teaching faculty. There were students that regularly skipped both preclinical labs (where clinical skills are taught before they enter the clinic) and actual clinic sessions where they'd gain clinical experience on their way to becoming a dentist. As the video and comments point out the fault for this declining work/ training ethic started with the parents, but is shared by the students who have an utterly unprofessional attitude towards their education, and the administration that allows this increasingly dysfunctional culture to continue. Assuming that we can extrapolate my experience into the rest of American society my wife and I have decided that unless we have no choice we will avoid all kinds of professionals, especially health professionals that are under 40 years old. Other countries, such as China which was mentioned are not burdened by this crazy notion of mandatory equal outcomes and No Child Left Behind. On an individual level these recent graduates are not equipped to deal with the real world, but also America will find itself increasingly unable to compete with a real world in which competition with other countries is a very real thing. Very sad.
Yes. Our country is hyper focused on the wrong things.
Our future is doomed.
That is so shocking! The participation trophy and pat yourself on the back generation has gotten so out of hand (and it shouldn’t have been started in the first place) that now it’s entering dental schools!
You can bet, the participation trophy and self esteem movement era has also entered medical schools as well even. There’s going to be a lot of dead patients and malpractice suits.
Organic Chemistry as a make or break course for entry to medical school is a North American phenomenon. Nowhere else in the world does this apply. Medical School entry in most of the rest of the world is directly from High School!!
When you turn education into a ‘product’ and submit it to the according business model, this is what you get. Education is NOT a product. As a retired 30 year veteran of public education, this problem, the ‘for profit business product model’ is IMO a deeper and more perfidious cause of these issues. We are also now plagued with a schizophrenic understanding of the purpose of education in our country, ranging from religious indoctrination wanted by the Christian Right to the ‘practical’ train me to make money wanted by the middle class , to the feel good self realization wanted by the liberal left.
In my country When education was not seen as a product, the consequences were disastrous. The low salaries the government could afford to pay attracted the worst set of people into the teaching profession. Recently the governor of a state fired 20,000 teachers who couldn't pass an assessment test for 8 year olds.
@@stinger4712 In my country, higher education is for free, you just have to pass the entry exams. It's unimaginable that a mob of students would ask the university to fire a professor and the university would do it. We can wish for more dialogue with the student, the professors shouldn't treat the kids unfairly, the exam requirements should be transparent etc., but the universities stand behind their staff because they don't have to follow the market rules ("if the students complain, we lose money").
Exactly, thank you! According to the guests, it's the parents' fault, or the trophy generation fault, but neither of them addresses the fact that the US higher education system is a corporate system where money matters first and the students are treated as "clients" who have all the rights whereas the staff is mere "necessary evil" that must be somehow paid (because you can't cash in money from the students if you don't teach them) but they have no rights. We can all get angry at spoiled students but it's ultimately the university who fires a docent because the kids complained.
Education has to be a product to get the best professors/teachers but, 60k vs 20k. This is no longer capitalism. This is piracy aka privatization. Schools here get so many tax breaks that they should not get, charging this kind of money.
If a professor wants to be wealthy, maybe they should have been a lawyer or a doctor. 60k vs 20k is absurd.
Certain things should not be on the 'for profit' model. Competition is good, and I get that. Try and make schools (hospitals, prisons) improve their outcomes, but the same bad practices that lead to VW emissions scandal or the Wells Fargo fraudulent accounts scandal can be practiced by teachers, doctors, and wardens when the product is an actual human life - even yours.
Do schools need to run efficiently? Absolutely. Are teachers underpaid? Certainly any good ones are. Is it wrong to want the school to practice what they preach about using a little petroleum as possible and recycling what they can, only with tax dollars? I don't think so.
When a university costs $70,000 a year, where does the money go? If your classroom has 20 students, that is $1.4 million for M-W-F, 9-11. That same professor teaches say one other class that day and 2 more on Tue-Thur. That is $5.6 million. Okay, you need an actual classroom big enough to hold 20 people, and to pay the professor. Where does that translate into that kind of money? Where is it even close? And that doesn't even touch on classes with 300 students in them.
This exchange ignores that it is possible to build systems with high standards AND provide necessary support to achieve those standards...
As someone in academia, I’ve seen the the difference from COVID in college entry classes. When I took anatomy at community college, we knew the instructor was hard but fair. Only five students passed out of 30/35 and it wasn’t an issue in 2010. This mentally is also being seen in K-12. We are lowering teaching requirement standards due to shortages instead of supporting them while also allowing parents to bully and have their way.
When I was at Penn State, freshmen engineering majors were informally know as pre-business, because a large portion didn't make it through those first year engineering classes.
There's something I think these kids haven't learned that the parents need to explain too. Failure is not absolute failure. If you applied yourself and still failed, that's an opportunity for maturity.
Some parents are so laser focused on their kids passing that they make failure seem like an irreversible stain on their records. So instead of using failure as an opportunity to learn, they're told that if they fail, it's because everyone else is wrong and they are right.
Wasn't it Churchill that said “Success is not final; failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” apparently Americans lack courage?
well.. my late high school professor once said: there are only two kinds of people in this world: "those who find excuses and those who search for solutions" ... i guess those parents are first kind of people and they learn their kids to behave same way.. :) btw. one other teacher said something similar: "the biggest book on the world is not Bible or some Encyclopedia but Book of excuses" :) that can be applied on both parents and kids these days, especially during pandemic when schools were closed - no one has forbidden to kids to open books and learn on their own, they didn't need to wait for teachers or online classes to start - lots of people used this relatively mild situation just as excuse for their laziness
@@vidsbyme2590 Lack common sense, not lack courage. We have boatloads of courage, especially the more one lacks the aforementioned common sense.
You live in a fantasy world where no one holds an F against you and you get to retake the class for free.
I don't like how the immediate assumption is that the professor was right when he said the students forgot how to study, discounting entirely the possibility that the students and the university were right when they all said that the professor forgot how to teach.
Helicopter and bulldozer parents this is ALL your fault. Let your children fail. Let then make poor choices. Let them learn!!!
Agreed, but just not parenting, is just as bad
Amen!!! 👏👏👏
Do you have children?
@@ptv8113 Do you? Do pray tell the best way to raise kids.
@@EddyA1337 is that a no?
I never realized how funny Christie is.
He’s ironically a decent guy in person. But elsewhere? Ugh
He's a funny guy. During an interview on Letterman years ago, he pulled a donut out of his vest pocket and started eating it. Brought the house down...
still havent
I flunked organic once, had to wait a whole year to take it again. Went from an F to a B.
I took Computational Aerodynamics course in my bachelor's. It was the toughest course my entire batch had ever elected. More than half ran out during the switching period, rest of us bled through the course and the course was never made easier regardless of our endless imploring to our very talented professor. Honestly, I am better for it. I look back at the time when I successfully passed this course with an A and any challenge seems small in comparison.
I work as a desk clerk at a hotel in Miami Beach. I think all kids should work front desk one season. Afterwards they would be able to face ANYTHING service related, public related. It is like soldiers. They are not ready until they "see the elephant". And then they ARE soldiers. Hardening is hard, but we either sweat in training or bleed on the field. Because we will all go to the field eventually, including the kids that live in their parents' basements until they are 40. They WILL go and bleed like stuck pigs.
And if you had failed CA you would have realized it was not for you and moved on while you still had time.
Amen brother! Felt the same with Computational Fluid Dynamics and my projects.
As someone who was premed in college and took and passed organic chem I and II, I have to say that the subject is ridiculously difficult. I loved nonorganic chem. I’m a good student, I studied all the time, A’s in almost every class, yet those were the two classes that really tripped me up. It’s not the professors’ fault. The students need to sink or swim, and perhaps modify their study habits.
Thanks. I wondered how hard the class was. Science classes never seemed to me as hard as literature classes because the answer to the former’s test question was in the book or teacher’s lecture. After trying to read my literature teachers’ minds for 4 years, I took a computer class and thought I’d entered a new world.
I might also add smaller classes, tutoring, extending the class to two semesters and adding 1/2 practical application etc. I have to wonder if the school tried to solve the problem or just remove the problem. Sounds like the latter. In the letter the students never asked for the teacher to be removed.
I remember hearing about how difficult organic Chem was, and a decent number of students would drop the class. I guess with the obscene prices of tuition dropping a class isn’t much of an option anymore.
Calculus nearly derailed me…..
I always heard Organic Chem was the cut off for Med School. If you failed move on to something else. No doctor for you.
The kids I taught always knew the word No. Sometimes, the answer is simply No.
I went through organic chemistry and all of the upper level sciences and went on to a doctorate. I can tell you from experience taking hundreds of final exams over 8 years of school that it is completely possible for a professor to become extremely out of touch and to write exams that are nearly impossible to study for. An organic chem book can be 400-500 pages. Imagine a professor taking a tiny part of one little paragraph from that book and asking it on an exam. There’s simply not enough time in the world to efficiently prepare for an exam when someone does this. I’ve experienced classes where you essentially had to memorize a textbook word for word to pass because every picture, of word, every diagram was fair game. It teaches absolutely nothing. Other times you take ungodly amounts of hours memorizing hundreds of pages of text and they don’t even put a single question from it on the exam. It’s maddening. And keep in mind that all of this info is absolutely worthless later in life when you become a doctor.
At a time we need to demand the most from society for our survival, we require the least
Im a chemical engineer and loved organic chemistry. I will note the the premeds in the class we're more likely to cheat on homework assignments and find old exams rather than actually learning the material. It kinda scares me that these hyper competitive neurotic types will one day be people I take medical advice from...
When I was in grad school I had a roommate who was a Biochemistry grad student. He was the teaching assistant for the organic chemistry class taught to pre-med students. He didn't have much nice to say about their skills or study habits.
Not every brilliant scientist is a good teacher.
Let me tell you Bill, as a Millenial (age 29) I cannot stress how little importance a gold star sticker I got for participation twenty years ago has on my life. It had no impact on my worldview. It's completely irrelevant to me, you're not making a mind blowing revelation by telling a grown man that his participation trophies didn't matter, we already don't care about them.
Love how bill can sit down with even people like Chris Christie and still have a laugh
That would be a bridge too fall for people in the bubble
@@Antonio-yg7io It really shouldn't be. At least Christie appears sane (here) and is somewhat self-deprecating. These are the kinds of conversations people that have any critical thoughts in their head should be having with each other exactly BECAUSE it's uncomfortable because it forces you to press back against your inherent biases when someone is directly in front of you.
@@sgenetti77 I was making a bridge-gate joke
@@Antonio-yg7io he did not answer exactly to you but to the general apprehension
you can't polish Christies shoes
In our province we had a very good education system. Then in the late 80's early 90's it changed drastically. Kids with behavioural issues we no longer in a separate class. It would be cruel to separate them for the other students and friends, even though it completely disrupted the class. Then it was kids could not fail no matter what (didn't matter about attendance or grades), because it would not be good for their social development. I dealt with kids who went through the educational system and "graduated" but could not read or write at all. These kids tried to go to university and failed miserably (our university has over 50 percent drop out rate). Professors would come from other provinces or countries to teach and were so frustrated on how much they had "dumb" down the curriculum. Students who were studying to be teachers wrote the most atrocious papers and the T.A. could not penalise for grammar or spelling. If the T.A. could not understand what the paper was trying to say they had to talk to the student for them to clarify and then mark the paper on the clarification.
The most insane thing to me is when people like Bill and Melinda Gates give donations towards things like equitable math. I can understand some blue haired humanities professor trying to argue that 2+2=5 because she's never had to do anything important in her life, but you'd think the a founding member and long-time CEO of the world's biggest software company would understand that no, not all answers are in some way correct. There are ancient gods that are more forgiving than source code.
Our school was in the top 6 in the country many years. We all,were stoned and doing acid while getting good grades! Im bills age.
Pathological altruism. Seems "kind" at the time but degenerates into this kind of scenario
Having taught for a number of years at Hunter College of the City University of New York, I can tell you that this issue is typical of Pre-Med students. I was continuously and relentlessly bombarded by the pleadings of pre-Med students for higher grades and opportunities for extra credit. The rate of such appeals by pre-med students was always far, far greater than that of other majors. In fact, it almost never happened with other majors. And if I did ever agree to accept an extra credit assignment, invariably the quality of the work was only mediocre. But that never stopped the pre-med student from begging for an A in spite of the fact that the extra work didn't justify a higher grade. More mediocre work still averaged to a mediocre grade.
They would not be able to handle my O. Chm and Biochemistry professors. Average grade was around 60. The classes were difficult and after I took the MCAT I no longer hated my O. CHM professor.
Ok but when have you actually used that knowledge since? Never.
@@ianfisch7289 You'd be amazed how many times you review blood work, test results or therapeutic treatments and apply all your science classes. As an RN I used Algebra, chemistry, A&P and microbiology every single day. What i remember most from my Organic Chem class was it was the first semester the professor was teaching after spending 15 years in the lab studying the effects of marijuana. 😁 I remember him wearing lavender overalls with dark purple flowers on the back pockets. It's been a while so....
I'm a part time manager in a large food pantry that also serves our local poor in other ways. Many of our volunteers are HS kids. Technically they are forced to volunteer in order to graduate. Anyway, the inability for many of them to do the most simple things like fill out a form w/o mommy or daddy doing it for them is astounding. I often get a parent start to talk for the child and I don't answer, I look at the kid and answer. If I then ask a question of the kid, the latter often looks to the parent or the parent answers!
Not long ago a girl asked if she had been there an hour. There a conventional clock on the wall. I asked what time she got there, she told me. She could not tell, 75 minutes later, if she had been there an hour.
I know old people have always griped about the younger generation. There are lots of kid volunteers that work hard, are smart, and I hope will be the leaders of the next generation. But damn, I'm sure kids are a lot dumber, generally speaking, that when I was in HS.
Every generation is sure of that. Every generation is sure that they were better, smarter, stronger, more resilient than the generation that replaces them. It’s nothing new and it’s no more relevant or accurate than it’s ever been.
If Bill wanted to have a discussion about college, why doesn't he invite a young person who has taken classes at one in the last 30 years...
Parents should realize that there is good from both sides. I would strongly encourage children and boost there spirits when they are down. But also only give them accolades when they earned them.
My parents were very cold and discouraging towards me and even when I achieved something it wasn’t a big deal.
I wish they took the time to build my confidence as a child, it’s a lot harder to build it as an adult. Sometimes a kid needs the encouragement even if it’s a participation trophy.
That being said I never received a participation trophy in my life.
Can we talk about the underlying seriousness in Chris Christie's tone of voice saying he "Can't wait!" Atta boy!!
If one person fails a class, they’re a bad student. If the whole class fails, the professor is bad.
Why do they create a problem where one doesn`t exists? I got two little league trophies in 1962. One for making the all star team and the other was for playing on the Dodgers, ie. my participation trophy. They both sat on my shelve for years and had equal value.
The US is not a participation trophy society. Not at all. The competition to get into top universities is tougher than every then students have to pay staggering fees so that their professors (me) can only teach two courses per semester. I teach at a university ranked about #100 and my students are fine except for not talking to each other. They could be executives or scientists. They write well, their Math is good, they are polite. Many start companies. The big problem I see is that they have no social interaction at all. I have to assign them to be friends to each other.
$74,000 and $72,000 per year!! THATS the problem
Organic Chemistry is a filtering course for med school applications. Every doctor I know doesn't remember anything from organic chemistry. It is very possible that the teacher literally was making the class too hard. In the school I went to in 2003, one of the organic chemistry teachers lost his tenure because the entire class failed the exam. That course specifically can be made to be "too hard" on purpose without actually teaching the material properly.
I would be interested in how many students, in terms of percentage, failed the course. If we are looking at a 65 -70% fail rate, it could really be too hard. Who knows what the professor was told for the course, but organic chemistry is supposed to be a really difficult class to weed out poor performers before the more complex medical and science courses. That said, it should be possible to pass the course without being an expert in the field. If nearly everyone in a course fails the class, is the realistic assumption to assume all the kids in the class are idiots or is it that the course and professor failed to prepare the students to pass the class (test outside the required lecture and course material or far outside the normal requirements). Factoring in the costs of college, making an impossible course that forces students to spend a longer time in college isn't a negligible event, it has major repercussions in the overall costs of college and severe impacts to students with scholarships trying to get through college.This is our problem, a news story designed to invoke particular emotions without providing all the information to allow for an informed decision. It could be what they are trying to portray, a bunch of petulant kids and parents complaining about failing and the wrongful termination of a professor or it could be a class that barely anyone passed and the students letting the administration know. To be fair, I couldn't find the initial story and they could have included this information, but this segment did not.
Seeing how gen z turned out... I'm working hard to raise my son to not be that way. He's only 3 and he's autistic but I already have discipline, guidelines, rules, boundaries etc.
I agree with some of the comments that question the instructors ability to teach, and do think there should be a standard for the ability to teach.
I took a year of organic chemistry and biochemistry as a part of my major. Organic chemistry 1 was so confusing, I had no homework assignments-only tests, and the professor kept saying "don't worry, there will be a curve" all semester long as none of us understood.
I used my one-time emergency drop to drop the class literally the day before the final- because my grade was somewhere around a 38%. I thought there was no way I would pass even with a curve. Well, while the class was taking the final, the professor sent out the curve of everyone's grade no including the final. He obviously didn't receive the memo that I dropped because I got a grade: B-. My 38% was brought up to a B-. I was livid. Not because I had dropped, but because it meant that the class didn't understand. And while only a few of us had to actually know the material for the next level up (or 2 levels in my case), there was no way in hell I would be able to pass level 2 or 3 knowing 38% of level 1....to turn a 38% into a B-?!?! No. This professor failed. He failed all of us. I took the course again in the summer, with a professor from the local state school allowed to teach at the big-time school, and got a genuine B+ curved up to an A- after the final. The state school professor could teach organic chemistry 1. The big-time professor could not.
For those who don't know what "the curve" is, it's a way of taking raw performance data and applying the "Bell curve" to it. So students are measured compared to each other, rather than static standard. A static standard like > 90% = A, > 80% = B, > 70 = C, and so on. With a curve applied, the top 3% of students with the highest score becomes the 97th percentile, even if the "highest score" is 85%. The following ~17% become A to B+ percentile, then the next ~32% become B to C+ percentile, then the next ~17% become C to D+ percentile, etc so you end up with this "Bell curve" of ranking student performance. It's used to act as a buffer between bad teaching and bad exam questions. If a topic is discussed that only zero to a couple people understand, then it's not the students fault for not understanding, and the Bell curve would reflect that. It becomes the teacher's fault for not know how to teach effectively and not the student's fault or hitting all their GPA's negatively. It is used in colleges everywhere as a way of not-punishing the students for trying new teaching methods, or for not punishing students for material poorly covered that ended up heavily impacting an exam. In practice, a Bell curve usually only raises grades by half a letter (a B becomes a B+, or a B+ becomes an A-). Raising a whole letter would be - in my day - considered an extreme but could happen. For example, the semester when 9/11 happened, college kids everywhere would've happened cause a whole class who normally would have earned a B average suddenly is getting a C average in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.
So for my 38% ending up in the top 20% of the class, that meant 80% were actually scoring as-bad or worse than I did. In other words, no one was learning or passing the material, but our grades were "altered" to look like we were....and there were +150 students in my class.
ORGANIC CHEMISTRY WAS TE HARDEST CLASS I HAD EVER TAKEN. Don't think any organic class is easy. Thank God for the curve
Wow! Unheard of. I started pre-med at my university in 1998. I graduated third in high school with strait As in my class. Unfortunately my parents sent me to Christian school for 11 years, and despite my good grades, they didn’t teach science well. In chem 101, there were 300 kids in my class at the university. The professor power pointed the whole class at a rapid speed. I hired a foreign grad student to tutor me for the final and barely got the first B of my life. For the next semester I signed up for the professor who wrote the book. It was a hard fight to pass the class. There were whole sections of my biology class that my high school never taught, Neanderthals and evolution. I was told to filter biology through the Bible in high school. The dean called me in and asked if I had what it took to be a doctor. I went back to my dorm and searched the book of majors for a new career and became a successful wildlife biologist. Could I have been a doctor if I went to public high school? Maybe. Or maybe I just couldn’t grasp chemistry at a high enough level to do the job.
Give me a break, how old are you? NO Christian schools teach HS science like this. Christian schools have higher standards than public school. And homeschoolers blow them all away on testing and college admissions.
Giving participation trophies to 6-7 year old kids is a good thing. It's a problem only when it continues as they grow up. The competition should intensify.
Helicopter parents aside, something that really lacks at the university level is people with the actual ability to teach. For some reason we say that while people are extremely gifted in their own disciplines, that automatically makes them qualified to teach it. The further couldn't be from the truth. I struggled through my computer science degree enough back in the day trying to learn it from computer nerds with no ability to convey material.
+1 to this point. The number of professors I had at university who were simultaneously excellent researchers and terrible teachers was astounding.
From what I understand its a similar issue with this professor. The professor taught at NYU for 10 years and said he saw a decline in student performance with a drop off during the pandemic. The main complaints from students were that he was dismissive of their concerns, unclear grading, and did not seem to even try to help them. Hell they didn't want him fired and were surprised the university did so. Seem the guy was riding on his laurels.
@@SEAZNDragon Not a good sign when you go from Princeton to NYU.
I am a professor and I agree with you. My Ph.D. was four years of learning to produce publishable research. I then spent 80% of my time teaching with no training at all. Any elementary school teacher has better preparation for lesson planning.
@@soulscanner66 heard the same from a retired professor commenting on the situation. NYU, great liberal arts school- but not a place for the sciences.
And I have a son at Texas A&M with FASLA funding and I pay $7000/year. Just stop sending your kids to private colleges!!
I think the average college student, at least in the STEM fields, spends just as much time if not more studying than our parents’ generation. And because of the internet, the expectations for content covered and the scope of the projects has only gotten larger.
Having hard courses is fine, but professors that assume students should spend 25 hours a week only on their course, and then still give out C’s to most of the class, should really re-consider if that’s necessary and constructive.
Getting degrees is easier than it used to be precisely because of the internet. I went to college for the first time and completed a four-year course after years of working in a menial job and after getting my honours degree, i feel like if i can do it anyone can, and i didnt work that hard for it either. The one thing i did notice is that lecturers are incredibly lenient and todays young men and women are lazy and have very little going for them in terms of common sense and critical thinking.
Well, that lies the other problem, grade inflation. For most of academic history, Cs were seen as the "passing" grade and was the expected average that many (if not most) students were going to get. That is why you see so many stories of past famous people "x or y had bad grades when they were in school", because that was what they gave out then. "As" were rarely given and only to truly exceptional folks.
However, of course everything has change. A = average and everything else is failure. The average GPAs for colleges has surged. That philosophy has basically overtaken everything from Uber Ratings (5 or bust) to Amazon reviews.
@@paulinegallagher7821 I think that's complete BS and unsubstantiated.
Participation Trophy discussion aside, from a market perspective you are receiving increasingly less for increasingly more. Sooner or later it has to go bust
That reason for firing seems simplistic and dumb. It is possible there was another reason they are hiding because its embarrassing. I must admit Christ’s joke about turning his kids into New York Mets fan so they know pain and disappointment from the beginning was funny as hell😂😂
The petition did NOT ask for the Professor to be fired. That’s a lie.
Excellance and merit. The cornerstone for every advanced society
Agree but we also have No Child Keft Behind to thank. We are seeing the results of an entire generation of students being taught that lassoing a standardized test is the goal, There is no standardized test worthy of being the ultimate measure of a child’s success.
That's an ironic thing for you to say. You need excellence in spelling.
@@rustytrombone8011 Thanks for that:-) I relied on Siri and she let me down. Point taken though.
I was born mid 70's and we had participation trophies so please stop acting like we are holier than thou. If anything I feel like alot of this is the break up or nuclear families and adults wanting to compensate their kids for their own failures. They are still compensating. I've made the participation trophy argument myself but I've learned it's really bigger than that.
Organic Chemistry was one of the hardest sets of courses at my university. It weeds out the pre-meds who can’t cut it. This is supposed to be a hard course. I had a very mean professor in one of my o-chem classes & he definitely wouldn’t be allowed to behave the way he did back then but the class should still be very hard.
Maybe the guy was a crappy professor, maybe he didn’t know how to teach, maybe he wasn’t fired but his contract was simply not renewed
To be clear, the petition did not ask for the professor to be fired. NYU did that on their own. I think the students wanted a second chance with more assistance available for study and mental health in order to pass a class with far less impervious passing standards.
And as for the professor noting students now having an inability to read exam questions, that should be a major alarm, because reading comprehension is a basic requirement for any college. Either the material is too incomprehensible or more students than ever need remedial English, or perhaps both.
Dude just pass the test get better grind
If the highest paid position at a school is a coach then it isn't a school
I am so sick of being labeled the participation trophy generation. We didn’t ask for participation trophies, they were given to us whether we wanted them or not. Blame the generation that gave them to us.
They were.
I played sports throughout my youth and never once got a participation trophy. I'm not even sure they are a real thing.
Ok blame your parents.
It's exaggerated.
I do... my Gen. Thankful my daughter has parents ten years older than l.
I took stats at least 4 times in college. It was my poor study habits that made it hard. I finally barely passed. Took it again in grad school when I was more mature. Passed with flying colors. Work harder!
Don't get Chris Christy high, he'll get the munchies!
This guy thinks that the 70k fees children are changed at their Universitues are too much. I wonder how much he is charging for his Services. Doesnt he find that he us also charging too much?
We had participation trophies in the 1980s. This is hardly a new phenomenon.
Electrical engineering and Chemistry was our "weed out" course. The C curve was usually around 35-40. We knew it and toughed it out.
To be fair, from what I read, the kids didn't ask for the professor to be fired. NYU did that on their own.
When I was in school, there was a professor who was constantly on sabbatical working on a Shakespeare cross-reference database and he was an internationally known Shakespeare expert. His classes were known for being really hard. When he finally came back from one of his many sabbaticals, I signed up for his course immediately and I'm glad of it. His reputation was deserved and I'm a better person for it.
NYU didn’t renew his contract after the complaint which is effectively a firing when you look at the circumstances.
@@The_Real_Grand_Nagus actually we do know. The entire story has been made public. And the notion that it might be because the whole class is failing is ridiculous because as we know, his classes were obviously very successful prior to Covid or else this would have happened sooner. Facts are facts.
They didn’t ask him to be fired, they wanted their grades. Same thing. There’s plenty of facts about this story out there. Just have to read.
As a recent college grad with some knowledge of orgo chem, that is an extremely complicated course. I wouldn't't necessarily agree that college students are complaining about how hard things are but some people don't realize that not all teachers and professors teach the same and I think that may be one reason but then again this is up to both student and teacher. I also agree that college students really do not know how to study. In a number of my classes, my professors pointed out to the class that we had no idea how to study and all students agreed.
I am parent of kids who got bunch of participation trophies and I can tell you that neither parents nor kids ask for trophies or take them seriously. Trophies are piece of plastic given by an organization as a "thank you parents for paying us." Kids today are the same as kids have always been. In many ways they have it tougher. What changed is that universities have became for-profit organizations, so they overact in fear of losing costumer.
Well when the Majority of the class not doing well, it is the professor, you can't have the entire class failing or not interested in the class. I have two kids just graduated from U of M, there are some Great professors and some are some are lazy and not interested in teaching. (Teaching is a Talent,not knowing the material only)
And this is how America finds out that kids that have money to pay for school and kids smart enough to go through that school are not the same group. The more expensive a school becomes the less you get people that are part of one group and not the other.
Bill doesn't quite have this right. Word is, the students didn't ask that he be fired. No idea if his course was appropriately difficult or not. If it was, this is silly. If it was a professor teaching an intro class like it was a second year med school class, that's something else.
To be clear, the school is not renewing his contract. But by any other name it's still a firing. For the worst of reasons: NYU doesn't want to piss of parents and legacy donors. Gotta keep the gravy train rollin'.
He was let go against the chemistry department’s recommendation. The students, the majority of which are pre-med, had a petition running to get rid of him. The director of undergraduate studies in that department, emailed the professor saying there was a plan to let students have their grades reviewed or the possibility to withdraw retroactively from his class. This is an insult to any teacher...
@@purplehaze8557 Again, the reporting has all been that the petition didn't call for his termination. That appears to be an assumption some people have made.
4:16 This is no joke the answer. People like me were not blessed with dopamine and without adderall you can only be so competent if you have a poverty of natural dopamine.
For the record the petition wasn't to have the professor fired so Bill got that part wrong
the petition was to make the course easier. The professor refused, so they fired him.
@@bl4ckst0ne The university declined to renew his contract but the students didn't specifically petition to make that happen. He was also 84 so I'm not surprised the university decided to go with someone a little less geriatric and set in their ways
@@Hassingerjeff Uh oh. I hope Maher doesn't see you calling someone geriatric. He might ban you from his page. For someone who loves the truth he hates when people call old people old.
Wouldn't be the first time for Bill to ignore basic fact so he can slam something. I look up the story to fact check myself and found the students were basically "Hey prof I'm having trouble understanding the course" and he blew them off. You think at some point he would have thought: "Hmm, yeah O Chem is hard but if a fourth of my students are not getting it I wonder why?"
@@nickbarcheck1019 Well, it's one thing to state the obvious (older people are old!), and another one completely to use this fact as a pejorative. And ageism is a very real problem in our society. Calling someone geriatric isn't acknowledging that that person is an older citizen, with all that entails - including the wealth in experience and knowledge. It's just dismissive and offensive, and frankly quite myopic too.
Chris Christie cracks me up. "You're a funny guy! No really, you're a funny guy!" LOL...
This could very much depend on the context. Was the exam unreasonably hard? There actually are professors living in their ivory tower thinking their subject is the most important one asking students to learn some obscure information. Organic chemistry is actually not that important for Medicine students.
As a med student, it’s more important than u think.
My son plans to do his graduate studies overseas. It will cost him a few thousand dollars a year.
The best thing that a parent can do is to try and instill moral values & a proper work ethic in their kid(s) from as young of an age as possible. The rest should take care of itself.
Isn't that what republicans say they are doing?
@@vitd5283 It seems to me the republicans say one thing and do the opposite. For them school is not about education, but a way to sort out those who have rich parents from those who haven't, so that those on top in society can position their kids in the top of the society again, just like the school system in UK does and has done for generations.
@@vitd5283 While living like a bunch of amoral, anarchists ready to overthrow the results of a legal election because their clown didn't win.
When I went back to university in 2008, I was completely unprepared for the seismic shift that had occurred since 2001 when I finished my education degree. My fellow 1st year graphic design students, ranging in age from 17-28 with a single outlier, me, a 53-year-old woman. At first, I thought this was a joke or some sort of performance put on by the faculty. There was a row of "older people" standing at the back of the classroom studio on the first day. Typically, this is the day that profs hand out the course outline including assignment and exams schedule … you know, the RIOT ACT. It didn't happen that way.
After the course outline sheets were distributed, the older people at the back of the room began throwing questions at the prof. Questions about supplies. Workload. Concerns about safety … These were PARENTS!! Okay, let's say it is caused by parents, a Katty quite accurately guessed. The students could have said something, either then or in our first class. They didn't. What's even worse is that our course kept getting watered down because students would complain about how hard it was. So the profs would cut assignments from the "riot act" outline. We should have covered so much more than what was even in the original outline - things like contract law, ethics in advertising, etc. Instead, by the time I graduated with a BA in graphic design (honours :/ ), my degree was barely an overview of all the seminars and online courses I'd have to take since then. I graduated with a $20,000 student loan debt along with the now 21-32-year-olds that said, in 2008, "why should we vote. We have everything we want," when I talked about protest & voting, being a child of the 60s-70s. I warned that any gains could be lost … and I lost their interest. As I listen to Bill Maher talk about the younger people, my head explodes. I could even say LITERALLY EXPLODES because that same age group as my fellow students - the ones I taught grade 10 math when I was a teacher, the ones that argued "when will we ever need math " - they whined that they were being ridiculed for using the word "literally" wrong, so WEBSTER CHANGED A DEFINITION TO APPEASE MILLENNIALS.
I am literally ready to blow my brains out. Now you don't know if you should call crisis support or hand me a joint. We literally have no way to say if we are speaking literally or metaphorically.
I've heard similar horror stories about helicopter parents attending their child's university classes. Insanity.
To be fair Webster changes definitions based on published material. They didn’t do it to “appease millennials”. They have plenty of words in there that were completely made up by authors. Quidditch for example. Some of us millennials realize how stupid the others are. But the older generations don’t get to claim they did better. Every major cataclysm we face today was brought about by selfish, present focused, decisions… we didn’t make.
I agree with Mike -- dictionaries merely report how the language is currently being used, and they've been doing that ever since there have been dictionaries -- because language keeps changing, which is why we're not communicating in Anglo-Saxon.
@@mikeximenez5285 "Published material?" what published material changed the vernacular according to Webster and only Webster?
If I say something & then qualify it by telling you that I'm speaking metaphorically, what is/are the other options?
Whatever Chris Christie is eating I want some. He looks the same age he did 10 years ago. He's probably eating the whole pig uncooked.
I have to say, as much as I may not care for Chris Christie, he has a good point, as do those who place responsibility for the PTC on the parents to the point where their kids expect something just for showing up. That being said, I would have liked to hear how he teaches. I took organic chemistry as a CUNY student, and I struggled. I'll admit, as much as I love math and science, this was particularly challenging. However, my professor welcomed any opportunity to sit and discuss where I needed to improve. At semester's end, I think I got a C+. I wasn't enthusiastic about that, but I was just glad I didn't fail. If this professor is condescending or behaving in a way that's unprofessional, the students may have a case. In the same breath, the way tuition has skyrocketed, it's almost like a diploma is a product, rather than a reward. It sounds like our education system could use an overhaul. I'm not necessarily unopposed for everyone getting a prize in a competition; I just don't think they should be equal prizes. There's a tremendous difference between the student who just takes up space and scrapes by with a "D" than the valedictorian.
One thing she forgets is that British universities cost less because the government subsidies them. Foreign students don't get that help and their tuition will cost much more.
Universities cost a fortune everywhere.
You actually rarely use organic chem in medicine. I think it persists because it’s a test of will and teaches a certain way of thinking.
Great show Bill!!! Really enjoyed the banter between you and Chris! Maybe you can get him to club random!
...no more waiting... contact buzz at a minimum.
Dude if these med students think organic chemistry is hard, they want to try Physical Chemistry.... loads of people I went to Uni with got A grades in Organic Chemistry, but almost everyone on the course struggled a fair bit with Physical Chemistry. Physical Chemistry is like chemistry, maths and physics all in the same place....
For 50k-70k a year I would expect competent TEACHERS not lecturers to impart classes.. people that actually care that students learn. If 50% of your class fails probably the problem is you
Spoken like a trophy non-earner
In colleges and universities, you are supposed to learn the curriculum by yourself. They may make a shitty exam sometimes, but in most cases, it is your own fault if you fail.
What if he was a bad teacher?
Participation trophy society nailed it. I stopped signing up for my bowling league when they started participation trophies, luckily I was old enough not to be impressed by a trophy I didn’t earn and I thought it was embarrassing. Bowling was always fun and I only ever went to the banquets because a pack of wild dogs couldn’t keep my grandma from getting dressed up for a dinner celebrating the kids. Was never disappointed about not getting a trophy, we knew what teams were in the top 3 and who’s averages were the highest in the final weeks of the season. I don’t just blame the parents, they got it from the media and representatives that pushed that crap. It’s still happening btw, a girl in medical school last year never went to class and her mom demanded she should still get to take finals, she did then she made a scene at graduation when she didn’t think enough people clapped for her. Sensitivity will be our downfall.
Can’t believe no one followed up on why Christie’s kids don’t attend less obscenely expensive universities, since that comment was what prompted his anecdote.
3:12 every parents in USA need to make their children Detroit Lions fans.
I’ve already begun that process with my 3 lol.
Chris, NJ needs you!!!!!!
There has to be a balance though. Some courses are hard but they’re made extra hard by the professors if they have tenure and can establish their own rules for the course.
We had professors who taught you that 1+1=2 but on the test wanted you to calculate the mass of the Sun if airplanes are purples. There’s also the question of how engaging they are. In math, I took two courses with the toughest professors of the department. I scraped by with a C in both courses but man they were great and engaging. And I had other professors who had no reason to teach because they just read a powerpoint slide.
All about a balance BUT I agree that this latest generation is becoming very soft and expects everything handed to them. Even with Millennials it was almost a thing.
uh, ok. your premise is really odd.
It is better to have your first disappointement as a toddler than as a college student. As any beautiful skill, coping with disappointement is something you have to practise.
I used to teach at a large university and about half the students failed Calculus. We were told we had to address this somehow. It seemed Pre-Calculus was too hard too. A new fundamental class, which was really elementary and high school math, was introduced to prepare students for Pre-Calculus. I taught that class one semester, and had a girl come in to see me during office hours, students rarely came in during our mandatory office hours, crying that she did well in honors math classes in high school and couldn't understand how she was failing.
One semester, I took over a "Math for Elementary School Teachers" class in the College of Education and I think I found the problem. I was teaching about fractions and a student stood up and screamed that they couldn't understand at all! I later taught HS level courses and found that most primary and secondary level teachers were just clueless.
I find calculus to be very binary in understanding, you either completely get it or you don't. I took calculus at the university level without having taken it at the highschool level first (big mistake). I've never had a decent professor actually tell me what it ACTUALLY means when 2x is the derivative of X^2... People who took it at the highschool level go into university with a very basic understanding of what it means. A good highschool calculus teacher is worth their weight in gold.
@@Paraaronoid Because they are so rare.
Good and interesting conversation
$20,000 to go to Cambridge?!?!? 😳😱
Oxford and Cambridge used to be free for ages. Of course, only the extremely clever and/or extremely privilaged could ever test in, so upper class highschools cost more than US private universities...
Yeah, unlike America other countries don't have their athletes subsided by the rest of the uni. I.E. It doesn't spend 3 mil a year on a football coach.
Notice how they put (R) next to republicans, but not (D) next to democrats.
Yes, yes the students at NYU are totally expecting to just pass chemistry with no work. Yup this is realistic and totally happens at NYU.
I taught at a private college a few years ago. I was not allowed to give anyone a "bad" grade which is anything but an A+, A or B+.
I had a physical chemistry teacher who gave everyone an F but two who got C and B because he was “disappointed”
He got fired but I knew some of those students who got Fs that were remarkably intelligent. Their GPAs got ruined because the grades at state universities in my state stayed no matter what. Getting an A in Physical Chemistry is truly an honor but having that honor stolen is almost like getting intellectually graped
Graped?
@@nadiasilvershine4630 comments with “trigger words” are removed if reported by someone. 🍇 emoji is commonly used
Yea, these types of professors do exist, and this is why complaints about a class being too 'hard' should not be dismissed so easily like Bill does here. If a professor is feeling spiteful, they can dock points for anything. I've had a math professor that docked points for showing all of the steps in my correct answers, when we were specifically told to show our work. Most don't do dumb crap like this, but some do.
Christie is great! bring him back on the show
I acknowledge organic C is painfully hard and usually half the students fail. It is a weed out class.
I acknowledge that pre covid this teacher had accolades.
However, we must all adapt and evolve. By that I do not mean dumb down the class or lower the bar.
What has gotten swept under the rug is that this teacher could have done some things to aid his students but would not do so and that seemed to be a big part of the student petition and a big reason he got fired. You always want to be there for your students when you can.
The biggest thing we college instructors can do to aid our students is have lectures online especially the ones we had to videotape during covid. I include them for my in person classes so if the students find they did not understand something they can go to those lectures and watch and rewatch them until they understand.
By the way this is not giving the students a chance to be lazy but giving them another avenue to put in some work and the best students absolutely will do it and love that those online lectures are there even if they find they don't need to use them.
Plus for those of us who put in the work during covid, we have that already for them and are doing our students a disservice if you do not let them use it. We are in an online age and we have to adapt to that. If you cannot you will at some point find yourself on the outside.
Now did the university overreact? It is hard to tell but I can see the universities side in this.
To show my bias in this I teach Astronomy at a university.
I totally agree with you, but you better get the VPs of Finance and IT on your side - All that storage isn't free.
I will say there was one time in my college years on the 80's that I had to go to the library to find and old text book because the teacher and the book were not getting the point across to me and several of my fellow students. Sometimes a different POV helps.
@@brianmiller1077 At our school we have that infrastructure built into our Canvas system.