Category Archives: [Education&Careers]

Premeds, chemistry professors, pedagogy, and economics.

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In comments on my earlier post in which I mused on the wisdom of having chemistry and physics courses serve to weed out an excess of premed students, Peter R. wrote:

1) There would be far fewer chemistry professors (albeit happier) if pre-med students did not take chemistry. Chemistry majors are always, and have always been, the minority of students in general and organic chemistry.

2) The idea that chemistry is a “weed-out” course is misleading, because it is not the chemistry instructor’s job to choose who goes to medical school. Our job is to determine how well our students learn chemistry. It was not the chemistry faculty that made chemistry a requirement, although they certainly benefit from it. The students “weed” themselves out.

These are observations worth discussing, not least because I think discussing them will help us become more aware of some of our assumptions about how colleges and universities ought to work.

Let’s start with the second observation first — that chemistry professors are really only charged with evaluating student performance in the context of the course requirements for the particular chemistry course they’re teaching.

I agree that this is what the job description is. You teach the class, you assess the students (with problem sets, exams, lab reports, and the like), and you assign the appropriate grade. As I’ve discussed before, there are differing philosophies on what it means to assign the appropriate grade — whether the grade is supposed to reflect something like the student’s distance from the Platonic form of “getting” the material, or whether instead it should reflect how many standard deviations the student has scored from the mean for the class, whether that mean is relatively high or relatively low on an absolute scale. But your garden variety chemistry professor shouldn’t also be tasked with determining which students are likely to succeed in medical school or to make good physicians* because your garden variety chemistry professor have very little basis for making that determination, having never been a physician or even a medical student.

However, there are a couple of things that complicate this picture.

One is that I cannot help but feel that some chemistry professors end up adopting the grading-on-a-strict-bell-curve model because of the relatively large number of premeds compared to chemistry majors enrolled in the classes they teach. The assumption is that the chemistry majors will make up most of the As and Bs on that curve, while the teeming masses of premeds will make up most of the Cs, Ds, and Fs. (Premeds who end up making As are sometimes actively recruited to consider majoring in chemistry and perhaps even pursuing graduate studies in chemistry rather than medicine>0

This in itself wouldn’t necessarily be worrisome — maybe it would just be a reasonable prediction about the range of competency and motivation in the student population. But sometimes the prediction that premeds won’t learn organic chemistry (for example) as well as the chemistry majors seems to manifest itself in a pedagogy that puts less onus on the professor to teach the material and more onus on the students to learn it their own selves.

At which point, the professor in question is pretty much only determining how well the student learn chemistry, but not doing the teaching that you might have assumed was part of the job.

On the other hand, however, I think it’s an open question how medical schools would respond if chemistry professors suddenly got very serious about teaching all of their students — premeds included — in such a way that the vast majority of them learned the course material, and learned it very well. The anecdotal reports I heard (while I was teaching in an MCAT preparation course to help pay the bills between graduate) suggested that a school where more premed students were getting As and Bs in chemistry was judged “easier” by medical school admission committees, while one where fewer premed students got As and Bs in chemistry was judged “more challenging”. If that’s true, that would seem to penalize students with professors who take pedagogy more seriously than the bell curve.

And that makes it seem an awful lot like medical school admission really are pushing the weeding out onto chemistry professors.

Myself, I think that the ability to master the basics of general chemistry, or organic chemistry, or physical chemistry, is not the sort of thing that is (or ought to be) perfectly congruent with one’s major.** If taught well, the underlying principles of chemistry ought to be intelligible to almost any intelligent person (or at least, to more than not). Assuming up front that a whole class of students one is teaching are constitutionally unable to learn the material is giving up at the very start. And regardless of the instrumental use that medical schools might get out of this stance, I think it rather undermines one’s teaching duty to one’s home department.

Now, onto the first observation, that there would be fewer chemistry professors if chemistry classes (whether “weeders” or not) were not required for admission to medical school.***

The situation is such that chemistry departments often exist to offer “service courses” to support pre-professional programs. In many universities (including my own), philosophy departments also justify their existence by their service courses (in our case, the large number of courses we offer that fulfill various general education requirements). It’s nice to be able to point to a curriculum that needs to be taught, not just by the lights of your own discipline (which, obviously, thinks that core material within that discipline is terribly important), but also by the lights of other disciplines — especially if those disciplines have multitudes of customers students. This kind of demand means that, when you get the staffing to teach the coursework that is being demanded, you also get colleagues who are doing interesting research, who can add breadth to the courses you offer to your majors, and with whom it is productive (and fun) for you to interact.

But, especially in science departments, and especially at research-focused universities, this increased population of professors also leads to an increased demand for research funding, equipment, and lab space, and an increased demand for graduate students and technicians to keep the professors’ research projects moving forward. (Those graduate students are also in demand to do the grading in all those well-populated premed courses.)

Down the road, of course, this will mean more people with Ph.D.s competing for those professorial posts**** (which only exist in the numbers they do on account of the demand generated premeds required to take the courses those departments’ professors teach) competing for the posts there are.

This is not a huge incentive for chemistry professors (or chemistry graduate students) to question the common wisdom that general chemistry and organic chemistry (and maybe even biochemistry and physical chemistry) are absolutely essential preparation for medical school.

Perversely, the supply and demand equation also seems to act against reexamining the quality of the teaching in those required premed chemistry courses. After all, if you turn out premeds who are too smart, what are the chances that the senior faculty will die off at a reasonable rate and open up some jobs for the Ph.D. chemists they’ve trained?

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*Despite this, I will confess that the slogan “Save a life: fail a premed!” gained a certain traction with the chemistry TAs in my graduate program.

**If I didn’t already think that majors and the subjects that one is good at were separable, my friend the fine arts major who took math courses for fun would have pushed me in that direction.

***The claim that these chemistry professors would be happier depends, I think, on the current state of the transaction between premeds and chemistry professors, in which the students only care instrumentally for what the professors are offering and the professors have already decided that most of those premeds won’t be able to learn the material, or that they are diluting the contact between chemistry professors and chemistry majors, or what have you. I’m not saying that the claim is false, but like most counterfactual claims, how we evaluate it depends a lot on our hunches about what other moving parts in the situation might have relevant effects.

****And before that, for postdoctoral appointments.

Science prerequisites for medical school: (uh!) what are they good for?

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Last week, in response to a New York Times article about a medical school with a program to admit students who have not taken physics, organic chemistry, or the MCAT, Chad Orzel expressed some qualms:

On the one hand, I tend to think that anyone who is going to be allowed to prescribe drugs ought to know enough organic chemistry to have some idea how they work. On the other hand, though, I would shed no tears if the pre-med physics class disappeared entirely– most of the students resent having to take physics, and I’m not wild about being used as a weed-out course for somebody else’s major program, which is a combination that easily turns into a thoroughly miserable experience for everyone. …

Still, I’m a little uneasy about people getting to be doctors without taking science in college at all … I suspect Mount Sinai has good results from this program because it’s just about the only one going, and they get their pick of the very best students, who are able to pick up what they need from “summer boot camp.” I’m less comfortable with the idea of making this a general policy– a lot of the students I see struggling in pre-med physics are struggling because of things that would not be positive features in a doctor.

Nowadays, in my capacity as a philosophy professor, I’m actually teaching more chemistry and physics and biology majors, and fewer pre-meds, than I did back in the days when I was a chemistry graduate student. If I recall correctly, all but one of the undergraduate courses for which I was a teaching assistant in my chemistry program were part of the pre-med sequence, including not only first term organic chemistry and the qualitative analysis laboratory course, but also physical chemistry for pre-meds.

I think it’s safe to say that the pre-meds were not always enthusiastic about the material we were trying to teach them.

Indeed, “What am I ever going to use this for?” was an oft heard question in those courses:

“When am I ever going to need to balance a redox reaction when I’m performing brain surgery?”

“How is knowing the difference between SN1 and SN2 reactions going to help me deliver babies?”

“What the hell does understanding how a refrigerator works have to do with orthopedics?”

I’m not that kind of doctor (nor do I play one on TV), so I’d probably refer these questions to people like PalMD or Orac or Pascale. (I will note that I recognized some nice chemical content in Pascale’s post on salt and bloat, so I’m guessing that she wouldn’t be writing any pre-meds a doctor’s note to excuse them from chemistry altogether.)

The course prerequisites for medical school, however, have been set by the medical schools. One would hope that they have some good reason for setting them — whether because they impart information and skills directly applicable in the work of being a physician, or because they impart information and skills that will be assumed in the coursework to be completed in medical school, or because they expose students to patterns of thought and problem-solving strategies that are expected to be useful to them in tackling the medical problems they will be tasked to address.

It’s also possible, I suppose, that medical schools have selected the slate of courses required for admission in order to thin out the numbers of applicants that they will have to sift through to build a class. If that’s the case, though, one wonders why they would choose just the hard-enough-to-get-rid-of-the-chaff courses that they did. Why Newtonian physics and not quantum mechanics (or hell, even E&M)? Why organic chemistry or “baby P-chem” rather than the thermodynamics course the chemistry majors have to take (followed by the quantum chemistry course those chemistry majors need to take)?

If you really want to weed them out, why not a serious first order logic course?

I, personally, think the whole philosophy of the “weeder” course is problematic. Moreover, I suspect that setting up intro science courses to “weed out” some large proportion of the students taking them from moving on to the next course in sequence (or to the professional program for which these courses are prerequisites) probably does as much to undermine students’ understanding of the course material, or enthusiasm to engage with it, as the objective difficulty of the material itself.

Maybe if medical schools have more people interested in applying to them than they know how to handle, they should do their own dirty work as far as screening applicants goes. The alternative is to create legions of physics and chemistry professors who would be just as happy not to have to deal with premeds at all.

Myself, I feel more comfortable with a doctor whose brain is hungry for knowledge, someone who wants to learn not only because it means picking up useful information about our world and how it works, but also because it’s fun. I have no idea if this kind of attitude tends to lead to better physicians or more successful medical students, but my hunch is that it may lead to human beings who are better prepared for life in the fullest sense.

That seems like an important thing even for premeds.

College kids and their plagiarism (or college professors and their quaint insistence on proper citation of sources).

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Today, The New York Times has an article about students and plagiarism that I could have sworn I’ve read at least a dozen times before, at least in its general gist.

As an exercise, before you click through to read the article, grab some paper and a pencil and jot down two or three reasons you think will be offered that the current generation of college students does not grasp the wrongness of using the words and ideas of others without attribution.

Is your list ready?
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Research methods and primary literature.

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At Uncertain Principles, Chad opines that “research methods” look different on the science-y side of campus than they do for his colleagues in the humanities and social sciences:

When the college revised the general education requirements a few years ago, one of the new courses created had as one of its key goals to teach students the difference between primary and secondary sources. Which, again, left me feeling like it didn’t really fit our program– as far as I’m concerned, the “primary source” in physics is the universe. If you did the experiment yourself, then your data constitute a primary source. Anything you can find in the library is necessarily a secondary source, whether it’s the original research paper, a review article summarizing the findings in some field, or a textbook writing about it years later.

In many cases, students are much better off reading newer textbook descriptions of key results than going all the way back to the “primary source” in the literature. Lots of important results in science were initially presented in a form much different than the fuller modern understanding. Going back to the original research articles often requires deciphering cumbersome and outdated notation, when the same ideas are presented much more clearly in newer textbooks.

That’s not really what they’re looking for in the course in question, though– they don’t want it to be a lab course. But then it doesn’t feel like a “research methods” class at all– while we do occasional literature searches, for the most part that’s accomplished by tracing back direct citations from recent articles. When I think about teaching students “research methods,” I think of things like teaching basic electronics, learning to work an oscilloscope, basic laser safety and operation, and so on. The library is a tiny, tiny part of what I do when I do research, and the vast majority of the literature searching I do these days can be done from my office computer.

I’m going to share some observations which maybe complicate Chad’s “two cultures” framing of research (and of what sorts of research methods one might reasonably impart to undergraduates in a course focused on research methods in a particular discipline).

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