An alarm about the influence of standardized tests on American society • Hacker News Board

Re: An alarm about the influence of standardized tests on American society

#61

Post by wfo » Fri, Jun 02, 2017, 9:10 PM UTC

CogitoCogito wrote: post #23

I see many parallels with the post and my own experience. I got my PhD in math and taught many college math courses during that time. I was always saddened at the number of students that essentially viewed math as just an exercise in the memorization of algorithms (memorize differentiation and integration rules and chug away at problems). I would avoid teaching this way and instead give them fewer, "deeper" problems…

Very good points, I think fundamental to this is the reliance on the weird mixed theory/application version of calculus that is taught in our institutions: a great deal of it is generally just developing a bag of tricks to help you find analytic solutions for integrals of elementary functions. The reliance on calculus at all is I think because of this fact: calculus provides a huge number of problems which are easy to design and can be made easy or difficult to solve depending on the arbitrary tricks they require, whereas a theoretical approach would require fundamental proof-based analysis questions which are far more difficult to both design and solve. And a numerical approach while extremely informative useful and natural isn't suitable as a "mathematics IQ test" weed out course that many people seem to want calculus to be.

Indeed the math subject GRE was (when I took it) primarily many, many tricky calculus questions with a very strict time limit, because these problems are fairly straightforward to write and standard.

Re: An alarm about the influence of standardized tests on American society

#62

Post by watwut » Fri, Jun 02, 2017, 9:12 PM UTC

kartan wrote: post #41

watwut wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think American developers are non creative non social people? Both conference/hackatlon/meetup culture and startups who sell themselves to potential employees on cool cultures suggest that American developers are way more social then they like to admit. Non-social people tend to produce culture that is less fanatic to various socialization ways. Add to it companies that really follow agile processes extrem…

> conference/hackatlon/meetup culture and startups who sell themselves to potential employees on cool cultures suggest that American developers are way more social then they like to admit That's my point. They are social, but they can't be like that in companies that value long hour days and weekend work. It is not the developers that are not social, but that "old fashioned" companies force them in a more restricted,…

It is startups who require the most hours per week and proof of out of work passion, not just old fashioned companies. Maybe even not mostly old fashioned companies. I think that stereotype of non-creative non-social developer is largely overblown - fed more by movies and gossip then actual reality. I have seen some statistic about developer being more introverted then general population, but that is about the difference. Introverted does not mean non-social.

I don't really know what you mean by traditional waterfall model and creativity - waterfall was more of process organization. Whether you get to be creative or not depends mostly on business company works in and personalities involved. You can not be creative if you implement insurance calculation and you can be creative when you are styling cheezy art shop.

Re: An alarm about the influence of standardized tests on American society

#63

Post by merpnderp » Fri, Jun 02, 2017, 9:13 PM UTC

SeeDave wrote: post #58

jbscpa wrote: post #15

My spouse is a classroom educator. Her school participates in Great Expectations program. http://www.greatexpectations.org/ It is a character development program "that provides teachers and administrators with the skills needed to create harmony and excitement within the school atmosphere" There are 8 Expectations at the elementary level 1. We will value one another as unique special individuals 2. We will not laugh…

>2. We will not laugh at or make fun of a person's mistakes nor use sarcasm or putdowns. I would have appreciated this as my public school experience was rife with negativity, sarcasm, snark, jeering, insulting, etc. I'm not sure what causes such anti-social behavior but I dream of a day where all students can be kind, considerate, polite, and supportive of one another.

My school wasn't rife with it. Maybe only half my teachers used sarcasm, mockery and negativity towards students.

Re: An alarm about the influence of standardized tests on American society

#64

Post by csa » Fri, Jun 02, 2017, 9:15 PM UTC

triangleman wrote: post #5

pnathan wrote: post #2

The ancient Western word for this is virtue : to cultivate virtues as part of an education. It's not a novel concept, but it rather got shot in the head in the postmodern revolution in education, and we're a lesser society for it.

Do you have links to old educational material where this sort of thing was part and parcel of the pedagogy? I am interested in getting into homeschooling, especially focusing on character development. I suppose an emphasis on the humanities would be a good first step, but I don't know where to find the "leading lights" in this kind of old-school education.

I would look into experiential education/learning.

Dewey is considered the modern father of experiential education. The main text is Experience and Education (1938). Kolb (and many other folks) have written on this topic more recently.

When done well, this is an amazing way to learn.

Re: An alarm about the influence of standardized tests on American society

#65

Post by stcredzero » Fri, Jun 02, 2017, 9:17 PM UTC

...IQ tests and college entrance exams like the SAT and ACT are essentially selecting and rewarding “smart fools”...

A lot of coding pathologies and programming language pathologies seem to be the product of such "smart fools." (Mea culpa!) There are many things which seem like good, elegant ideas, which don't work out well in practice.

Come to think of it, a big chunk of, "The devil is in the details," can be translated to, "The hardest problems are the emergent problems."

Re: An alarm about the influence of standardized tests on American society

#66

Post by shmageggy » Fri, Jun 02, 2017, 9:17 PM UTC

> I think it’s hurting everything. We get scientists who are very good forward incrementers—they are good at doing the next step but they are not the people who change the field. They are not redirectors or reinitiators, who start a field over. And those are the people we need.

I doubt the problem is with the scientists. I know and work with lots of really smart and creative people in an academic environment, and I'm sure some of them would be capable of redirecting, reinitiating, of starting a field over -- were they given a chance. But just try to get funded for anything at all that isn't incremental and see how well you do. Scientific funding is so scarce, and becoming more and more so, that funding agencies only approve grants that are practically guaranteed successes, and those tend to be the incremental ones.

Maybe narrow testing is responsible for the plague of incremental science, but if so it's probably not the scientists' fault, but more likely because we've cultivated a society that isn't creative and thoughtful enough to appreciate the value of really novel science.

Re: An alarm about the influence of standardized tests on American society

#67

Post by watwut » Fri, Jun 02, 2017, 9:18 PM UTC

lightsighter wrote: post #47

pirocks wrote: post #18

As a high school student I find the hating on the SAT/ACT a little concerning, since once you remove standardized testing, admissions is primarily based on GPA(which imo has massive flaws the most important flaw being lack of consistency across schools). Also this article doesn't sound all that "scientific" to me.

I agree with you, but if I were an admissions officer I would also like to see the SAT/ACT be two different numbers: one being your score when you took it as a freshman and a second from late in your junior year so I can see the delta. If you're a great test taker and both scores are equally high I can see that, but I can also see the case where someone with a very low initial score might have improved it greatly to…

Or maybe they have high IQ, but were unmotivated to study for or perform during the test the first time. Maybe they had just bad studying strategy for the first time and wised up second time.

Low IQ would mean that studying wont help you - leading to low results consistently. High IQ means you are capable of good results. The rest is down to a lot of factors that are not IQ.

Re: An alarm about the influence of standardized tests on American society

#68

Post by stcredzero » Fri, Jun 02, 2017, 9:19 PM UTC

grandalf wrote: post #59

While standardized tests are criticized for rewarding general intelligence at the expense of other strengths, it seems that college admissions has been steadily devaluing general intelligence over the years. Correspondingly, the alphabet tests increasingly reward rote memorization, diligence, and repeated practice at the expense of general intelligence. When I was in college the most disturbing trend was students who…

When I was in college the most disturbing trend was students who expected all tests to be things that they could study for using the technique of rote memorization and diligence.

I remember being accosted by a squad of students, who were there to make sure I was going to be a good little TA and run my course according to those "rules."

Re: An alarm about the influence of standardized tests on American society

#69

Post by watwut » Fri, Jun 02, 2017, 9:21 PM UTC

pirocks wrote: post #18

As a high school student I find the hating on the SAT/ACT a little concerning, since once you remove standardized testing, admissions is primarily based on GPA(which imo has massive flaws the most important flaw being lack of consistency across schools). Also this article doesn't sound all that "scientific" to me.

In addition, admissions based on GPA means that students are motivated to choose easy classes and lenient teachers whenever they have choice. IMO, system should not punish students for choosing out hard classes - if anything it should reward that.

Re: An alarm about the influence of standardized tests on American society

#70

Post by dmix » Fri, Jun 02, 2017, 9:24 PM UTC

stcredzero wrote: post #65

...IQ tests and college entrance exams like the SAT and ACT are essentially selecting and rewarding “smart fools”... A lot of coding pathologies and programming language pathologies seem to be the product of such "smart fools." ( Mea culpa! ) There are many things which seem like good, elegant ideas, which don't work out well in practice. Come to think of it, a big chunk of, "The devil is in the details," can be tran…

> There are many things which seem like good, elegant ideas, which don't work out well in practice.

Do you have any good examples of this in programming?

I'm starting to see a lot of the great parts of languages like Haskell, Erlang, Clojure, and other FP languages starting to flow upwards into more popular languages or in new more accessible forms (Elixir, Swift, Kotlin, Rust).

It's possible that many of the good, elegant ideas aren't exactly the wrong solution but are stuck in less accessible, fringe, or merely unpopular languages/platforms. Which might be more about the nature of how languages are adopted rather than the individual attributes and qualities of the language.