Rutgers rethinks chemistry course, adds online classes amid high failure

[Tango Two]

At Rutgers University, there are few undergraduate classes as brutal as Intro to Chemistry.

First-semester freshmen often take the class in lecture halls with more than 400 students. Many struggle to grasp the concepts in the fast-moving course, which is a requirement for most science majors.

By the end of the semester, about a quarter of students will either flunk chemistry or drop the course.




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Rutgers rethinks chemistry course

 

[PeteGiam07]

After failing "General Chemistry for Engineers" my 1st semester at Rutgers. I went on to take General Chemistry on Cook/Douglass since I wasn't going to become a chemical engineer.

That being said, although not as hard as the engineering course, the hardest part of General Chemistry was the class size and not being able to understand the professor's indian accent! It was so hard to grasp anything, I'm glad they are finally looking into it.

Oh and the class was so large many students the 1st month (before kids transferred out) would be sitting in the aisles for seats. This was back in 2003.

 

[retired711]

Supposedly one of the advantages of being a student at a "research university" is that one comes into contact with distinguished members of the faculty. This was true of the Chemistry 1 course at Berkeley, which was taught by a very famed researcher who was also an excellent teacher. (And I don't think the class was too big for a single lecture hall, and Berkeley didn't have anything approaching a 400-seat classroom.) And in those days -- we're talking the late 1960s -- TAs were generally from America and so knew the language. It looks like the research university concept perhaps serves the elite student well, but not everybody else, who must take a course in a massive class with a TA who can't speak English to save his/her life.

 

[jcg878]

There is a lot of pressure in higher education to change the instructional paradigm. I hear in-vogue terms like 'flipping the classroom' at least weekly and have bought into moving away from the passive "professor lectures, students listen" modality. I tried having a live twitter feed in the classroom this year to encourage shy students (in a class of 140) to ask questions. The first question involved asking me to inspect a rash if someone bent over for me. It went about that well.

Rutgers has a lot of tough love courses like General Chemistry. I really hope the increased grades are really due to improved instructional methods, not lowering the bar. The Stevens' 97% pass rate seems really high for an introductory chemistry course filled with people who have to take it for their major that they are likely to change anyway. I hope RU doesn't go that way.