Dealing with Mediocre and Poor Grades in College

In this Boston Globe article, Maitland Jones Jr. revisits his highly publicized firing after many of his NYU students complained that he was giving too many low grades in his organic chemistry course. For years, says Jones, he had engineered the difficulty of his tests so the average grade was 65, or a B/B-. There were complaints, but Jones believed that getting a 65 wasn’t the end of the world – and certainly wouldn’t prevent a student from getting into medical school. “It has always seemed to me,” he says, “that getting about two-thirds of difficult material right was actually pretty good in an introductory course.” 

But over the last decade, students’ grades on his tests declined, and then plummeted during the pandemic. Jones made his tests easier, but grades were still low. As Covid waned, he continued to give less-demanding tests, but students’ grades didn’t rebound. A bi-modal distribution emerged: there were single-digit grades and zeroes, and at the upper end of the distribution, where high-achieving students had previously been scoring in the 90s, there were a number of 100s. 

The very low grades were obviously a cause for concern, but Jones was also unhappy about the 100s. Why? Because with a score of 100, students believed there was nothing more to learn. Previously, when students scored in the 90s on a harder test, they would scrutinize the questions they got wrong – questions designed to get them working at the limits of their knowledge – and learned from them by further study, coming to office hours, re-watching lecture videos. High-scoring students were stretched by that process, says Jones, and serious learning took place.

Reflecting on the bitter complaints he received about his tough grading policies at NYU, Jones is concerned about students’ ability to handle difficulty and failure. “I fear that many of today’s students have little or no experience in climbing out of holes,” he says, “or recovering from adversity. Possibly, they have never felt they were in a hole. Digging out of holes is a critical life skill.”

When Jones was in college, he hit the wall in difficult math courses. “I could struggle and pass,” he says, “but not easily. I could not internalize the concepts and had to survive by blindly learning how to solve certain kinds of problems. Anything else was out of reach. It was clear that for me, heading toward math and physics was a bad idea. I wish that weren’t true, but it was.” 

For students who were getting zeroes or single-digit scores in his organic chemistry course, the first step is “not complicated,” says Jones: “Go to class. Sit in front. Go to office hours with your problems… Take notes.” And don’t be afraid to say you’re struggling and ask for help. “If you follow those suggestions and things still don’t work, do what I did and change direction. You are not a bad person if you don’t fully grasp chemistry; go find what does work for you. Among other things, college is for discovering what you were born to do.” 

“I Got a 65 on My Chemistry Exam. Is My Future Ruined?” by Maitland Jones Jr. in The Boston Globe, February 14, 2023