And some of the student complaints laid out in the petition might strike those of us who went to college in the Before Times as a bit unrealistic: They noted that Jones did not offer extra credit and that he did not make his lectures available via Zoom. Students who completed their high school years during the pandemic, Jones observed in the Times report, seem to have no idea how to study. We, my fellow progressives, must admit it Students in districts that closed down the longest during Covid-19 have experienced the most significant learning losses, studies and tests show. Remote learning was a spectacular failure. And the pandemic does seem to have turbocharged existing problems, while creating brand-new ones. A great many experts in education have observed and quantified grade inflation and lowered academic standards. Jones isn’t alone in observing this dynamic. “We now see single digit scores and even zeros.” “In the last two years, they fell off a cliff,” Jones wrote in a grievance letter to NYU.

He made his exams easier an unusual number of students still did poorly on them. (Full disclosure: I was an adjunct in the NYU journalism department in the Spring 2022 semester).įor his part, Jones says that he noticed a decline in student ability about a decade ago. It’s worth noting that according to the Times, students expressed surprise that Jones was fired, which their petition did not call for. 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.

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. 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.

is one of the nation’s top organic chemistry professors. The basic outline is this: According to an article in the New York Times, Maitland Jones Jr. Jill Filipovic Courtesy of Jill Filipovic

Nyu zoom sign in