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.
We had an analogous situation at my university where the Computer Science department was offering service courses in introductory CS and programming for – among others – chemistry majors (budding chemical engineers, really). And that really opened my eyes as to how much attitude on the part of students really matter.
For some reason, the chemistry students were always really resentful of the programming course, much more so than other science students. Not really sure why. It’s not the connection to math; if anything, high-level chemistry is among the most math-heavy subjects out there. And chemistry is one of the major users of large-scale computing facilities, to run heavy numerical simulations. Those students could pretty much expect to spend a good part of the next four years running Matlab, R or similar tools, and yet they resented learning the basics.
And that resentment really matters. Chemistry students are no dumber than any other science students, but they failed at a far greater rate. The attitude of “I hate this.” as they sat and got nowhere on a simple programming assignment was likely the main culprit. One friend formulated it as a slogan: “It’s amazing what you can’t do if you really don’t want to.”
Up front, this is coming from a biology grad student who took chemistry, et al. courses as required services courses, but also enjoyed them, and wishes he had 50 years to just take undergrad courses in various disciplines (math, philosophy, and especially (bio)ethics were my other favourites).
The “Why do I need this? When will I ever use this?” attitude is so incredibly common among undergrads, and I spent four years trying to convince my classmates of the following. What distinguishes a scientist from a technician, a doctor from a nurse/nurse practitioner, an engineer from a mechanic/contractor/etc. is the depth and background of knowledge. I know first hand that my friends who graduated from a technical college with “only” a diploma to my degree run rings around me getting stuff done in the lab or the field. But ask them to develop a novel protocol, and they either can’t, or just modify existing protocols that they know so well and miss (to me) obvious drawbacks or flaws.
I have had several conversations of the “Well of course that protocol won’t work for that sample type! The intermediate reaction will be interfered with by X, causing the instrument to report an erroneous value when it starts picking up product Y, instead of the product Z it normally measures.” – “Ummm… what?” sort. That is the kind of problem solving you can only do if you have the background in general chemistry, biochemistry, physics, and analytical chemistry that lets you understand what is actually going on inside the test tube, rather than just knowing (way better than I do) how to do a predetermined protocol precisely and consistently each time.
But alas, we attach a societal prestige to a university degree, and give jobs to the people with the “higher” qualifications. I, however, would hire a technical college grad over someone fresh out of undergrad for a tech position anyday.
Medicine (as I understand it) is messy, and every case is unique. You can’t always apply a predetermined protocol to every patient, and THAT is why premeds need to take chemistry.
First, the website is wonderful, it’s a neater, sweeter land. Your new picture and words about yourself are also wonderful, including additional lilt and verve. Congratulations, I hope you have a long and happy sojourn.
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I was a teenage werewolf. No, I was an honors Chemistry major for two years. I was 17. Like Robert Penn Warren, I preferred English later. I did take organic. Pre-pharms were weeded in organic where I went. The professor, an honest bloke who talked very like a buffalo pitching fastballs, told us the number of pharmacy spots available. The competition was grim, and by mid-term I was reading in a huge book by Morrison seemed like most of the day, and in Morrison’s study guide, and in a general organic study guide. Hardest course ever. I made one of those high grades some are talking about, not from interest, but from fear of failing, and not right away, and at a torture cost, like waterboarding, to my sanity and my social life, all due to Chemistry which had also gotten me into German. I found that I preferred French. Oh so young.
Now to change gears. I told you that so I could tell you this:
I’m not young now, and am nobody’s fool, except my immediate family’s. In this world there is one less pharmacist than there could be, weeded. According to the Chemistry professor quoted above, I did it. Ha ha to that. Now I know to a reasonable moral certainty that those pre-pharm students were badly mistreated, and as a result I was mistreated with them. Whose fault was that? Was it the fault of the professor, who could not speak in paragraphs and had no concept of a beginning, middle, and end, a benzene ring? Yes. He should have balked. Was it the fault of the department head? Yes. He should have balked. Was it the fault of the pharmacy school and the conveying bureaucrats? Yes. The professional school should have done the weeding. The perpetrators claim that weeding in professional school is a waste of everyone’s time and money, that earlier weeding is better for all including the weeded, a claim that begs to be challenged.
Therewithin lies a flimsy assumption, that those who are weeded by organic are the same ones who would be weeded in med (or pharma) school. Do we know that? We don’t know that at all. Allowing liberal arts students to enter med school without organic (a previous post) flies in the face of that old-time assumption, and some profs are threatened by that. Their haughty assumption is that stupid goes to the bone. No it doesn’t. I’ve just referred to one stupid Chemistry professor, for generic illustration. Not to the bone. He knows some Chemistry.
I confess to having a great self-serving personal contempt for any Chemistry professor who shirks his responsibilities, evades like a coward, and claims he’s just letting the students weed themselves. I think he’s a scoundrel and a mountebank, a cheapskate, a picker, and the Boston strangler. Others may differ.
“Institutions do far more damage to persons than individuals do. Individuals think they are following orders.” I pass that on.
The separation between chemistry majors and the premed types is sometimes physical as well as just in the mind of the professor. At my undergrad institution, chemists took general chemistry and organic chemistry courses that were restricted to chemistry majors; these were generally smaller sections taught by professors with a strong commitment to teaching. Meanwhile the (non-chem major) premed hoi polloi, along with molecular biology and physics majors, took their general and orgo classes in gigantic lecture sections taught by a motley assortment of professors, some of whom were good teachers and some of whom were not.
Since I started this, I suppose I should add my further thoughts, since my comments were necessarily brief.
Janet, I agree with both of your analyses. My intention was to say that chemistry professors are _primarily_ charged with teaching chemistry and evaluating progress in learning that chemistry, not with keeping students in or out of medical school. We also write many letters of recommendation, where the primary consideration then becomes (using the story a professor once told me) a thought experiment, in which you imagine that student ten years from now looking down on you just before you go under for surgery. Should that student become a doctor? Do they have the temperment and ability to succeed in medical school? But we aren’t really qualified to judge a full-scale application to med school. The best we can do is to describe 1) what we know about the student’s knowledge of chemistry and 2) what we know about their general attitude towards learning and their dedication to coursework as evidenced in the course and what we know about them from interaction outside of the course.
It’s almost bizarro-world when medical school admissions see lots of As and Bs, and assume the course was easier, meaning that the applicants haven’t really learned chemistry, and many Cs and Ds indicate the students were challenged. There is so many assumptions in these claims–at the level of the individual, the instructor, and the school–that it’s hard to know where to start.
I totally agree that there is an strong incentive, especially at large RI schools, for chemistry professors not to change the system. The large number of existing chemistry professors–especially those not in organic chemistry–depends on service courses and a large number of non-majors. My point was simply that if, somewhere in the counter-factual past, medical schools had not required chemistry for admission, the number of chemistry faculty would certainly be much smaller that they are today. In fact, historically, chemistry faculty started in the medical schools, and only in the nineteenth century did they move away.
My university had an organic chemistry course for nurses, which many of our biology secondary eduction students took. I understand it was slanted toward issues of interest to nurses.
My primary care physician and my dentist were both ex students, so I knew they were competent.
Our college has a chemistry course for nurses also, and we recently decided to accept it as the chemistry requirement for biology majors as well. These courses have been around a long time; my father taught one. So the idea that chemistry departments would lose faculty if organic chem were not a prerequisite for medical school is not necessarily accurate; there’s nothing to keep chemistry faculty from developing specialized courses for premeds and other health curricula, if only med schools accepted them. Does anybody know whether medical schools accept such classes?