In my experience labelling someone as smart, just because he/she finished college and got a job, is a mistake or a bad assumption. I have plenty of ex-classmates who ware A students trough high school and college, but they fail miserably at anything that requires thinking, common sense, or coming to conclusions on your own. They ware just good at learning things from books, remembering them word by word but not understanding a thing they just "learned".
Same experience here. I know a lot of people that are not even good at learning word by word but somehow manage to go through university
I can add my experience for jobs too: most of the times people get jobs because employers do not bother to verify if they are good or not. This has sadly happened in half the companies I've been. Where I'm working now there are a couple of persons working as developers that don't know how to program and don't even have a background in programming or computer science just because the two non technical founders did not bother to have some technical guy at the interviews to verify the candidates.
Same here. I knew people who memorized their way through their mid-term and final exams, but couldn't explain any of what they'd memorized.
That applied to some of the professors also -- one even put a question on a mid-term for biochemistry asking for the rate of a reaction at equilibrium (no joke). When questioned about this, the TA proctoring the test simply didn't understand what was wrong with the question.
My chemistry is extremely rusty, but I thought that even if the reaction was at equilibrium, there is still a rate of reaction--it's just that the forward and backward reaction rates are the same, so there's no net change.
(anyone with a better knowledge of chemistry please correct me if I'm wrong)
The rate of the reaction would be the net, which is by definition 0 at equilibrium, as you described. So the answer SHOULD have been 0, but to be a question worth putting on a mid-term for biochemistry, the question should have specified starting concentrations of the various components (reagents and products) in the solution.
More to the point though, the person who wrote the exam didn't understand why the equilibrium part mattered...
Comments
In my experience labelling someone as smart, just because he/she finished college and got a job, is a mistake or a bad assumption. I have plenty of ex-classmates who ware A students trough high school and college, but they fail miserably at anything that requires thinking, common sense, or coming to conclusions on your own. They ware just good at learning things from books, remembering them word by word but not understanding a thing they just "learned".
Same experience here. I know a lot of people that are not even good at learning word by word but somehow manage to go through university
I can add my experience for jobs too: most of the times people get jobs because employers do not bother to verify if they are good or not. This has sadly happened in half the companies I've been. Where I'm working now there are a couple of persons working as developers that don't know how to program and don't even have a background in programming or computer science just because the two non technical founders did not bother to have some technical guy at the interviews to verify the candidates.
Same here. I knew people who memorized their way through their mid-term and final exams, but couldn't explain any of what they'd memorized.
That applied to some of the professors also -- one even put a question on a mid-term for biochemistry asking for the rate of a reaction at equilibrium (no joke). When questioned about this, the TA proctoring the test simply didn't understand what was wrong with the question.
My chemistry is extremely rusty, but I thought that even if the reaction was at equilibrium, there is still a rate of reaction--it's just that the forward and backward reaction rates are the same, so there's no net change.
(anyone with a better knowledge of chemistry please correct me if I'm wrong)
The rate of the reaction would be the net, which is by definition 0 at equilibrium, as you described. So the answer SHOULD have been 0, but to be a question worth putting on a mid-term for biochemistry, the question should have specified starting concentrations of the various components (reagents and products) in the solution.
More to the point though, the person who wrote the exam didn't understand why the equilibrium part mattered...