COVID: fall 2022

Here we are:

And where we have been:

One data point to add to the galaxy thereof: at today’s science forum at Massey College, among the people sitting at the front the ones wearing masks along with me included the college’s chair of science and an Order of Canada-winning astrophysicist.

Author: Milan

In the spring of 2005, I graduated from the University of British Columbia with a degree in International Relations and a general focus in the area of environmental politics. In the fall of 2005, I began reading for an M.Phil in IR at Wadham College, Oxford. Outside school, I am very interested in photography, writing, and the outdoors. I am writing this blog to keep in touch with friends and family around the world, provide a more personal view of graduate student life in Oxford, and pass on some lessons I've learned here.

11 thoughts on “COVID: fall 2022”

  2. The basic outline is this: According to an article in the New York Times, Maitland Jones Jr. is one of the nation’s top organic chemistry professors. He was tenured at Princeton, wrote an influential textbook, retired and went on to teach at NYU on an annual contract basis, where he won awards for his teaching.

    This year, though, he was sacked – after 82 of the 350 students in his course signed a petition because, they said, their low scores demonstrated that his class was too hard. A spokesman for the university told the Times in defense of their decision to terminate Jones’s contract that the professor had been the target of complaints about “dismissiveness, unresponsiveness, condescension and opacity about grading. It’s worth noting that according to the Times, students expressed surprise that Jones was fired, which their petition did not call for. (Full disclosure: I was an adjunct in the NYU journalism department in the Spring 2022 semester).

    For his part, Jones says that he noticed a decline in student ability about a decade ago. He made his exams easier; an unusual number of students still did poorly on them. Then, the pandemic hit. “In the last two years, they fell off a cliff,” Jones wrote in a grievance letter to NYU. “We now see single digit scores and even zeros.”

    Jones isn’t alone in observing this dynamic. A great many experts in education have observed and quantified grade inflation and lowered academic standards. And the pandemic does seem to have turbocharged existing problems, while creating brand-new ones. Remote learning was a spectacular failure.

    https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/04/opinions/nyu-chemistry-professor-student-complaint-filipovic/index.html

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