Not to harsh on former colleagues (OK, maybe just a bit, but most are engaged in student outcomes and care about their students), because it’s the system that, at many schools, puts papers and funding ahead of preparing students to function in a career once they graduate. Which is extra sad because you trash the reputation of your own program when you send out graduates who can’t interpret data and lack the skill set to author a paper on their own. I have had conversations with folks from Fortune 50 companies who basically blacklisted any job applicant from certain schools because their prior hires from those schools had been so poorly prepared. The disconnect between expectations in school and industry, particularly safety and technical writing (two of the least emphasized parts of chemistry curriculum in my experience), is astonishing and this circles back to the communication discussion of my last post. We need our students’ future employers to come to us and tell us what they look for in students and what they see as missing, and that rarely happens. And we need to pass that along to the students and to the high schools.

There is some good news though. Even at research intensive universities, students doing undergraduate research towards those papers and grants can have a awesome experience as  many of my peers and I have had. But when we are dealing with a program with hundreds of STEM students passing through classrooms each year there aren’t enough teaching resources in the world to provide all the support (and rigor) that’s required.  In addition, star researchers do not automatically make star classroom instructors. The traditional “50:50” research:teaching appointment needs to be reexamined. Let faculty do what they are best at - some will be best at teaching and carry that end of the department load while others may carry more research load - it can all add up to the target split instead of allegedly holding everyone to the same (window dressing) “standard”.  Teamwork, imagine that.  Some schools are enlightened that way and I’ve encountered a few that now have more than one “teaching” tenured position, but there is a LOT of work to be done yet. 

So many myriad factors in this conversation that’s for sure. And there is not one single or set of easy answers or factors that addresses the overall concerns or issues. But we need to try, of course!

Rob Toreki

PS: Students in that 1993 course rose to the challenge when I presented it to them. They realized the rigor was necessary for success. And while they may have not liked it along the way,  so many thanked me later, particularly once they got jobs in industry. Another thanked me with an analogy how his other courses never taught them to think: That if he was dropped on a desert island with a set of tools, he would know know how to use them to survive.

PPS in response to a couple comments,  Yep, it’s easy to harsh on students.  Perhaps it’s what we do because the bad experiences can be so mindblowing.  We can bend over backwards to try and make things easy for students and too often they persist in not making the effort.  For example, I gave an exam that had a really low mean. I put aside the next day’s lecture and spent the class period working through the exam questions one by one, showing how a good student could have predicted there would be a question exactly like this one and how to reason the answer from basic principles if needed. I wrote and posted a detailed answer key with the reasoning explained. And the students agreed in class that it was actually a fair test.  And then, I let them take a makeup test to replace their grade if they wanted.  I gave them the same exact test. No changes or edits. And I still had students fail.  You can drag the horse to water and dunk its head in the trough, but you can’t make it drink.  We aren’t condemning “all kids thee days” but It’s far easier to vent frustration than it is to share the pedagogical joy of having heard a spinning cog drop into gear as a concept finally hits home in a student’s brain.  Instructors are rarely publicly rewarded or celebrated for our (usually unseen) successes whereas we are readily vilified on uniformed or unjust grounds. A defensive reaction is natural.