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Cal State will no longer require math and English placement exams

latimes.com

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Re: Cal State will no longer require math and English placement exams

#151

Post by dsfyu404ed »

posguy wrote: post #122
halfnibble wrote: post #51

If 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-…

You talk about "nasty ass diseases" and them go on to talk about the religious affiliation of those schools.

The obvious XKCD notwithstanding, I hope the humor and stereotype reference there is not lost on readers.

Re: Cal State will no longer require math and English placement exams

#152

Post by dsfyu404ed »

choonway wrote: post #13

More students = more $. Do you really think they care about whether you pass or not?

Yup. Schools make money by being bottom heavy. Classes with hundreds of students make money. Classes with tens of students lose money. Allowing people to enroll in programs they're not prepared for results in more people who drop out or change majors after taking a semester or two of classes with a high profit margin.

Re: Cal State will no longer require math and English placement exams

#153

Post by jononor »

dom0 wrote: post #128
mamon wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 che…

Often there are ways to deduce the likely correct answer due to the way the questions and alternatives are formulated.

Re: Cal State will no longer require math and English placement exams

#154

Post by dsfyu404ed »

drewbuschhorn wrote: post #15
xienze wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's amazing that there's such a thing as remedial classes in a university, but hey, how else are we going to get an adequately diverse student body?

Eh, numbers seem to match up with national numbers, and there's not a huge difference between ethnicities https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d12/tables/dt12_270.asp The scary one to me is "field of study: education" : 41.1. 41% of future teachers need remedial education? Wonder how that stacks up to other countries.

Education, psych, business, english, journalism, etc are buckets that catch a lot of people who don't know what they want to major in but go to college because "that's what you do"

Re: Cal State will no longer require math and English placement exams

#155

Post by Mvandenbergh »

danieltillett wrote: post #106
rodgerd wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Let's just drop meritocracy all together. Everything is subjective, right? You mean it sarcastically, but you are literally correct. What has "merit" in so-called meritocracies is entirely subjective.

Unfortunately not. The reason meritocracy has “won” over the last 200 years is those societies that didn’t embrace it lost the wars that were fought.

Nonsense. The Chinese have had a meritocratic civil service for ~1500 years. They spent the early 19th century being thrashed by the British who only established an exam based civil service in 1850s.

The Napoleonic French were a lot more meritocratic in their military and civilian career structure than the British who beat them on the seas.

Re: Cal State will no longer require math and English placement exams

#157

Post by 0x10101 »

bloaf wrote: post #8

This is part of a long and slow change in the role of higher education. Previously, college was seen as being for people who academically deserved it. College was not for teaching high-school level concepts, it was for teaching advanced concepts to students who had already demonstrated some bona fides. Now, it is seen as an extension of high school; the onus is on the college to mold all comers into more educated and…

This problem is exacerbated by the suspension of the high school graduation exam. http://www.cde.ca.gov/ta/tg/hs/

Re: Cal State will no longer require math and English placement exams

#158

Post by _delirium »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #150
crispyambulance wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I suspect that the real reason the students "don't need" remedial programs to complete their degrees is that the specific degrees are actually vocational rather than academic. An incoming student that can't write a cogent essay or do basic math problems simply isn't ready for any traditional degree program. The best they can do, if they're not going to grind through remedial courses, is to start training for a j…

>Yes, I suspect that the real reason the students "don't need" remedial programs to complete their degrees is that the specific degrees are actually vocational rather than academic. x2. The more academic requirements of a 4yr degree are not strict necessities of those fields. If college is going to stand in for vocational school then it's a waste of time/effort/money to make those students take what amounts to academ…

It's not clear that even needs to be handled at the university level in that case, though. Community colleges already offer a range of vocational programs, with faster completion and much lower costs. This seems like purely some kind of prestige treadmill, where people really want a CC degree but employers demand a 4-year university degree, so we need to start offering 4-year university degrees that are CC degrees in disguise to bridge the gap. An alternate approach might be to convince people and employeers that a vocational CC degree is perfectly valid and respectable. But that's probably harder to do, so I don't really blame people for going this route, just seems not really ideal.

Re: Cal State will no longer require math and English placement exams

#159

Post by ebola1717 »

StanislavPetrov wrote: post #95
aphextron wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The implicit message here seems to be, "let everyone pass through the system regardless of how qualified they actually are, but we'll have to lower the bar to keep grades and graduation rates high." No. You are completely missing the point here. Graduation requirements have not changed. Students still have to pass the same amount of classes. What this will do is allow students to have a shot at taking actual credit…

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…

Those studies are based on high school students...

Yes lower-ed degree mills are a huge issue, and need regualating, but that hardly applies to CalState, which is a top tier public school: https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/cal-state-la-1140

Re: Cal State will no longer require math and English placement exams

#160

Post by mathattack »

This seems like they're focusing on the wrong metric. They look and say, "Graduates earn more money" and say "ok, for the best NPV, let's reduce the cost and increase the graduates".

The problem is they mistake causality with correlation. If you focus strictly on graduation, without improving the students, then you will find that graduates will earn less. This same problem happens in high school - lowering the standards of students does improve graduate rates, but not necessarily life outcomes.

An extreme example of this is to observe, "On days when there is a lot of ice cream sold, violent crime is higher, therefore let's make it harder to sell ice cream." The reality is hot days cause the rise in both ice cream sales and violent crime. If you only address the visible metric of ice cream sales, you miss the underlying cause.

This abuse of statistics is rampant in education.

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