I always thought degrees were useless, was just ahead of the curve (they still taught useful skills until now)
Cal State will no longer require math and English placement exams
121–130 of 278 posts
Re: Cal State will no longer require math and English placement exams
#122If you live on the West Coast and want your children to be able to read Hacker News, then you better send them to a private school.
More like its a quick way to get your kids sick with some nasty ass diseases, West Coast private schools are a petri dish with a ton of unvaccinated kids.
Considering the Catholic Church runs most of these schools, the local diocese need to crack down and not endanger their student body with these nasty ass, bug chasing parents & their unvaccinated children!
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/09/wealthy-l...
Re: Cal State will no longer require math and English placement exams
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
Palo Alto Avg. Income: $126,771 Inglewood Avg. Income: $43,394 Wouldn't it make sense to compare like-to-like, and choose two schools in areas with similar incomes?
Just btw. but in Germany ~43,000$ would be considered a not too bad income, certainly not an income where one would expect people to have ~2.5% math proficiency.
Sure, but a drink in Germany isn't going to run me $7 to $12, it would be less than half that usually. In a major city in the US, your living standards on $43k a year will be much lower than in Germany.
Re: Cal State will no longer require math and English placement exams
#124If you live on the West Coast and want your children to be able to read Hacker News, then you better send them to a private school.
Reading HN is no problem, understanding it is! /s
Re: Cal State will no longer require math and English placement exams
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, you are missing the point. For many years now, admissions standards have been so low that rather than teaching the courses they are scheduled to teach, college professors are forced to offer a remedial review of information that should have been mastered in high school. Many, if not most, high school graduates are functionally illiterate, lacking the basic reading and writing skills we took for granted in the rec…
Why would that be surprising? Hungary and Slovak Republic are countries with long traditions of strong education.
It's surprising because the per capita expenditure on education is higher in the US than pretty much everywhere else[1]. Assuming everything else is approximately equal (there are enough teachers, teachers havw proper access to materials, the intelligence of children is the same, etc) it implies that either spending more on education has a negative impact or that the US is using the wrong teaching methods.
[1] http://www.politifact.com/florida/statements/2015/apr/21/jeb...
Re: Cal State will no longer require math and English placement exams
#126Let's just drop meritocracy all together. Everything is subjective, right? Seriously though, I'm worried about our future as a spieces. The knowledge and technologies we have developed, which require nurturing. We nurture modern civilization by making sure the smartest get into positions where they can express their intellect. Part of that process needs to be keeping rigours standards in place when it comes to educat…
Nowhere does the article say they are lowering standards. They are just changing how they handle students who need extra preparation in English or math. Before: give them standard English and math tests, and if they do not pass make them take a year of non-credit remedial classes before letting them take any credit glasses. After: everyone can take credit classes. For those that need extra work in math or English the…
> Nowhere does the article say they are lowering standards. They are just changing how they handle students who need extra preparation in English or math.
Just re-read the sentence dispassionately.
You do realize that these are people who would flunk TOEFL if the TOEFL was a requirement the way it is for foreign student? Why are we accepting people who fail basic English into a university that has English as a primary teaching language? What are going to be the classes that these students would be taking concurrently with "Expressing yourself in paragraphs 49"? All of the soft sciences require papers that are graded. So they are out. Hard sciences? Nope, they are require algebra and our students cannot do basic algebra ( let us not pretend that universities have math proficiency requirements for admissions - it is just basic algebra and some geometry plus ability to reason ) or do basic problem solving. So I guess those classes would be yoga and basket weaving.
And in just 6-7 years ( these people won't graduate in 4 ) we would be wondering why is that we are having so few people getting jobs in STEM fields.
Re: Cal State will no longer require math and English placement exams
#127The level of elitism in this thread is staggering. Should kids that are not at the top of their class be left to work in the salt mines? Do we just abandon the idea of educating people and make all universities a private "smart people only" club? The CSU system's mandate is to provide accessible education to all Californians . Ragging on them for working towards that goal makes no sense. The UC system is still the mo…
> Should kids that are not at the top of their class be left to work in the salt mines? This is the canonical definition of a strawman argument. How about looking the issue differently: what can education do to make students better at Math and English? Focus on these two disciplines.
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Re: Cal State will no longer require math and English placement exams
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
It also seems that the now increasingly common format of multiple choice quizzes would be a "railroad" to designing bad placement tests - ones that verify remembering irrelevant details and how things are named/ordered/classified versus ones that verify skills and understanding of core concepts.
Quizzes (both single and multiple choice) are the worst possible way of testing student's knowledge, because they are sooo... easy. Trouble here is that human memory is an associative memory - being given one piece of information helps you recall other, related piece. So when the correct answer is written down just few lines below the question you'll probably be able to identify it, even if your overall recall of the…
> Quizzes (both single and multiple choice) are the worst possible way of testing student's knowledge, because they are sooo... easy.
Very much depends.
"Name members of X" is an easy question (unless there is a great amount of material that could be covered).
"Mark the following statements as correct or incorrect. Correct classification adds, wrong classification deducts points." can be a quite difficult type of checkbox-test.
Re: Cal State will no longer require math and English placement exams
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is so completely wrong. Wars are won and lost for many, many reasons. Food, resources, location, coincidence, weather, politics, sheer luck. This is the sort of crap people complain about whenever the meritocracy comes up. Sorry, but merit is not whatever you want it to be after the fact when you point to something that succeeded. That's called the Texas sharpshooter fallacy.
Yes wars have been won and lost for many reasons over history, but since the development of meritocracy (last 200 years) those societies that have embraced it have won all the important wars. Do you really think the nobility just rolled over and gave the middle classes all the power because they asked nicely? Edit. Actually that is exactly what merit is. Meritocracy is not rule by the just, but rule by those most lik…
Can you give examples of societies that have embraced meritocracy? I can't think of any off the top of my head.
Re: Cal State will no longer require math and English placement exams
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
In which departments have you seen that? [Not denying, genuinely curious]
i've seen some pretty shitty grad students but i don't really blame the grad school. a lot of non-cs undergrads go into cs grad programs with barely any programming experience. in my experience, the grad programs don't teach them the fundamentals (assuming they know them) but instead teach very specific niche areas. They end up never learning basic programming fundamentals.
Obligatory coding horror reference: