Friday, July 30, 2010

More medical school organic

The "newspaper of record" this morning has an article titled "Getting into Med School Without Hard Sciences" in which they report on an article from Academic Medicine.  The story is about a program that Mt Sinai has run for the last 20 years that offers slots in the medical school to students from the humanities who don't take organic, physics, or the MCAT.  Only the last six years of students are used in the analysis.

Well, actually if you read the Academic Medicine article they do take an eight week principles of organic and physics in medicine course at Mt. Sinai, the summer of their junior year.  The course get six units of credit for the organic part and two for the physics.  I would love to see the syllabus of the summer course to learn what topics they cover and to what depth.

The authors also write:
We acknowledge that these disciplines have educational value for future physicians and scientists, but we contend that admissions committees pay them too much attention and that far too much time is devoted to them in the undergraduate premed curriculum.
Of course the Times article does not mention the summer course or the acknowledgement that these courses have any value.  This abridged version of the article will no doubt be used to pressure changes in the programs at undergraduate institutions and at medical schools.

One thing that the articles and their authors don't address is the fate of students who don't get into medical school and took this limited curriculum.  One argument for breadth in an undergraduate curriculum is the recognition that those that fail to make it to medical, pharmacy, or dental school should still have skills to earn a living with their degree.  I would be very curious to see what happened to those who did not make the grade.

T.S. Hall

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

The endangered teacher-scholar

The International Changing Academic Professional study results were announced this month.  The study is really about the morale of the professorate and the life of academics world-wide as they see themselves.  In the brief report in Inside Higher Education the last line caught my eye.
Locke also highlighted an increasing "division of academic labor” and speculated that UK academics who undertake both research and teaching may now be in the minority, as they already are in the U.S.
The teacher-scholar model is the one that traditionally has been applied to MCU and many PUI faculty hires.  In recent years, I have noticed that faculty are being put into teaching slots or research slots with little or no room for the teacher-scholar.  Folks like me who went into the profession to be teacher-scholars find ourselves torn to pieces as we try to avoid being put into one slot or the other.

Teaching feeds my desire to help people achieve their dreams through thoughtful work and acquired skill.  Research feeds my desire to solve puzzles and add to the field of knowledge that I teach.  To the extent that teacher-scholars are being asked to choose, they are often being told to become teachers only in order to give limited research resources to the newly hired people in the research slots.  I know a number of teacher-scholar types who lament that they are no longer supported to be teacher-scholars and have become second class citizen in their own departments because their focus is not primarily research.  With the increase in lecturers on many campuses, particularly at public institutions, I wonder if we are headed the way of the RO1s where many undergraduate lectures are taught my lecturers with security and the tenured faculty are only the research faculty.

I do believe that teacher-scholars add something to the classroom, in that they bring in the scientific process of questioning assumptions and showing how our ideas are based on best evidence to date, but subject to new ideas.  Being engaged in research keeps these things in the front of your mind and brings the excitement of discovery and passion for moving the field into your face and talk.  Teachers who are disengaged for the processes of scholarship just can't do this as well.  Perhaps having more teacher-scholars would reignite some interest in science careers.

So, cheers to the teacher-scholar.  May your value be appreciated before you are gone.

T.S. Hall

Monday, July 26, 2010

MR5 - What Med Schools Want

I recently received the MR5 report from the American Association of Medical Schools showing the results of their study of what in the opinion of medical school faculty, residents, and medical students is of importance in the undergraduate courses.  Organic as a general topic falls in the category that is between "Somewhat" and "Moderately" important.  Physics, General Chemistry, and Biochemistry are all viewed as being of greater import.

The "organic" topics considered "very" to "extremely" important were Nucleic Acids, Lipids, Amino Acids and Proteins.  Between "Important" and "Very Important" are Carbohydrates and Phosphorous Compounds.  The next group of topics, in order of import, are Molecular Structure and Spectra, Covalent Bond, Carboxylic Acids, Alkanes, Alcohols, Amines, Acid Derivatives, Separations and Purifications, Aldehydes and Ketones, Sulfur Compounds, and Phenols.  Every other chapter in the organic book is on the low end of the "Somewhat Important" category.

Given that Biochemistry was the highest rated general topic (above both Biology and Cellular/Molecular Biology), it should be no surprise that the biochem topics at the end of the organic text are rated as being of the greatest import.  The thing is most of the faculty I know give cursory, at best, coverage of these topics.

There are three reasons commonly cited for this:

1) Just because some of the students are premed, does not mean that they or the rest of the class will make it to med school.  These folks may be glad to know the rest of the material.
2) It's an organic class, not a biochem class!  We are here to build the foundation, not the roof.
3) By the time we get through all the other material, there isn't much time left to do more that introduce these topics.

It will be interesting to see how this survey influences to the MCAT, organic textbooks, and our teaching.  The medical school bound have held the organic lectures hostage for some time.  Perhaps it's time to do as some neighboring institutions have done and split the pre-health professions majors off into their own bio-organic class.

T.S. Hall

Thursday, July 15, 2010

Colorado leads the way down

The state of Colorado is about to put into law the most important legislation ever seen in our effort speed up the nation's educational race to the bottom.  The Colorado law will be copied by other states until we eradicate all thinking and science from the educational process.  The law will tie teacher pay and their continued employment to the progress of students on achievement tests.

Now, I am not against students making progress, but the achievement tests don't measure anything but short term memorization.  That's not educational progress!  So, my first issue is that the law is based on a false premise that the tests have actual value.

My second argument, and the basis of my belief that this is a significant step toward eliminating the type of education that will make America competitive in the world marketplace, is that if your pay and career are dependent on getting the kiddies to do well on the test you will teach the test only.  Hammer away at memorizing the material for the test and forget about teaching thinking, or science, or any of the other things that are not on the test.

It's call survival.  If you lose a job under this law, who will hire you.  Your career will be over.  You have to make sure you meet the numbers or you wasted all that time in college getting as education degree.

But I am open minded.  I will agree to support the bill with the amendment that members of the state legislature and the Governor be held to the same standard.  If the state does not make progress toward achieving utopia each year the elected officials pay will be cut and once their terms end they will be banned from participation in any elected office for life.

Hell, lets throw the parents into the amendment to.  Kids not up to snuff for a couple of years, we have to cut you off from having more kids.

(No budget in California by the constitutional deadline every year?  Banned from public office for life and cut of from having kids.)

What's that you say?  Elected officials can't control all the factors that might hinder the achievement of a Utopian society.  Parents don't have complete control over their kids development.  Well neither can teachers control all the factors that effect student progress.  Parents and state governments continue to dump more requirements on teachers and provide less resources, yet have the audacity to complain about the results they get.

One of our nation's biggest problems is our constant blaming of others, while we ignore our own complicity in the problem.  Another is that we want everything for no cost, but want to get paid richly.

T.S. Hall

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Student Cheating

I have been reading a lot lately about plagiarism and student cheating and the extent to which campuses and faculty are going to identify and stop cheating.  Interestingly, some campuses and some faculty have come out against the routine use of programs that search submitted work of plagiarism, such as turn-it-in, on the basis that the use of these programs presumes that cheating is going on and treats the student as someone who can't be trusted.

First of all, over 60 percent of students admit to plagiarism at some point in their academic careers.  So, students are cheating!  To not look for it on the basis that doing so suggests that students can't be trusted is to deny reality.  Doing nothing also encourages the activity.  It's a wink and a nod.

I have previously pointed out that some of my local institutions that use on-line coursework do nothing to ensure that the students taking on-line tests are actually the students registered for the course or are not being helped my a battery of friends siting behind them as they take the test.

We need to recognize that our failure to ensure the quality of our product diminished the value of that product.  Ensuring the value of our course grades and degrees will cost us money, and may mean that not everyone gets a college degree, but having over half the students cheating also has a cost.  Can we accept the cost of lower productivity or incompetent action by people who passed classes and got degrees without having to master their field of study.  I think not.

T.S. Hall

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Degree Economics

A colleague was lamenting today about the dearth of freshmen at new student orientation who have any interest in chemistry or biochemistry.  I am not talking about the entire university freshmen class.  I am talking about the chemistry and biochemistry majors.

Yes, when asked to raise their hands if they were interested in a career in chemistry or biochemistry, none of the future majors aired an armpit.  Digging deeper my colleague discovered that the students are not interested in science or a life of the mind.  They indicated that what they are interested in is MONEY.  They are only chemistry and biochemistry majors in order to gain access to pharmacy school, medical school, etc.

I don't blame them in this economic climate for being concerned about jobs and career security.  The lesson here is one for our political and scientific leaders.  If we believe that we will need more graduates in the sciences un order to remain competitive as an economy, we need to recognize that the current economics in our society don't send this message to our young scholars.

T.S. Hall

Saturday, July 10, 2010

Thesis Reading: MS vs PhD

Recently I was reading thesis/dissertation chapters from both my own MS candidates and a PhD candidate from a local RO1.  The RO1 thesis chapter had previously been approved by the PhD mentor and the candidate was asking me to proofread and make sure the science was clear.  The differences between the two readings may say more about the individuals involved than the general differences between MCU's and RO1's, but they may be worth exploring.

The most striking thing I noted was a general tendency in masters thesis to place emphasis on how the study fits into the larger picture of the science, while the PhD dissertation writing assumed that the context within the field need not the elaborated upon and that the relevance would be clear to the reader.

Being in the midst of inviting speakers for the Fall seminar series on my campus this dichotomy in presentation style reminded me of the differences in presentations given by RO1 faculty and MCU and PUI faculty who come through my department.  Many RO1 faculty, including those coming through specifically on graduate student recruiting trips, blow the undergraduate and masters students away early in their presentations by not making the contextual issues clear or by coming back to the context during the lecture.  MCU and PUI folks generally show less of this tendency.  One could make the case that such differences owe something to the much greater focus on undergraduates that MCU and PUI faculty have in their day-to-day work.  These faculty have a better knowledge of were the audience is intellectually coming from.

I wonder if the difference may also owe something to the stage of science most MCU and PUI faculty are forced to practice by the resources at their disposal.  Given the difficulty in competing at the basis research level we tend to move toward application to justify our work in grants and to attract students into the lab.  Once indoctrinated into this way of thinking about our scholarship it begins to color all our output from how we present our own work to how we train our students to present their thesis.  I suppose that in a sense we are back to the hammer problem where our thinking becomes focused by the environment we are in, for good or ill.

As we extend and accept seminar invitations to/from our colleagues it would be good to keep in mind the environment in which the talk will be presented and the our goals in hearing or giving the talk.

T.S. Hall