Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Cal State will no longer require math and English placement exams

latimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 278 posts

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

#201

Post by RonanTheGrey »

matt_wulfeck wrote: post #192
midnitewarrior wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It matters if they have professors that grade on a curve. Take all of those students who wouldn't pass the math entrance exam and put then in the same College Algebra class. They are all terrible students but the curve grading passes 80% of them. > allow students to have a shot at taking actual credit courses rather than being forced into noncredit remedial classes they may not actually need If the placement tests ar…

> If the tests are flawed, fix the tests, don't eliminate them. The tests are fine and we know it. The students are bad and so are their parents, who were also bad students. Source: I was a bad student who had to change a lot in life. Magically when my attitude towards school changed so did my grades. Teachers can only do so much yet burden almost all of the blame.

> Magically when my attitude towards school changed so did my grades.

Funny how that works.

"Why won't you learn?!" "It doesn't matter to me!" is not a recipe for success.

I appreciate what you said. Made me want to jump out of my chair and clap. But then I would have been escorted to the loony bin, so...

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

#202

Post by vondur »

One of the main drivers for these initiatives is to reduce the time of graduation for students, which I believe was 46% graduation rate within six years. When you add in the mix of minority students who aren't properly prepared for college level courses, you get the really low grad rates in the CSU system. The longer you have students taking classes, the more money is costs the CSU, so they have an interest in lowering that number. Of course, the way they are going about it is bad in my opinion. Professors are pressured to not fail students in key classes that tend to slow down the graduation rates. One way to do that is to have non-tenured faculty teach these courses, who can be let go for not enforcing these practices. Lecturer's are hired on a contract basis, and may not be rehired. I've seen some lecturers on one year contracts. Some of this is not completely a bad thing in my opinion. I remember losing half of an Organic Chem class by the middle of the semester, due to the sink or swim mentality in many of the sciences/engineering faculty.

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

#203

Post by wbl »

vostok wrote: post #85
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…

Is there a real issue here? First of all, isn't failing the placement test prima facie evidence that you need remedial courses? Second, at least my school generally gave you enough rope to hang yourself if you wanted to. You want to take arguably the hardest undergraduate math class in the US? Well go ahead...

The students taking Sally's class all knew what they were in for and many had been preparing for it for all of high school.

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

#204

Post by dragonwriter »

0x10101 wrote: post #170
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…

"Graduation requirements have not changed. Students still have to pass the same amount of classes. " This is where you are wrong. Classes such as remedial English or basic mathematics did not used to count for college credit, they now do. Therefore students can graduate with a lower level of performance than was previously possible.

Incorrect; this is not granting credit for existing remedial courses, it is eliminating the existing set of remedial courses, and the testing and other policies aruoud them, and requiring new models (but not dictating one single model for all campuses.)

There area number of alternative remediation models that have been used in other institutions without the problems experienced by the current CSU remedial ed program that campuses may be guided by. This is all expressly laid out in the article.

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

#205

Post by remline »

vondur wrote: post #202

One of the main drivers for these initiatives is to reduce the time of graduation for students, which I believe was 46% graduation rate within six years. When you add in the mix of minority students who aren't properly prepared for college level courses, you get the really low grad rates in the CSU system. The longer you have students taking classes, the more money is costs the CSU, so they have an interest in loweri…

My University had a policy of letting you retake things and take the new grade. In the modern world, I think you should be able to retake the tests and rely on MOOCs. I'm not at all a fan of allowing failure to pass or even average for a first attempt in a hard subject to pass. I had a few courses that I should have failed and I never revisited them because I got a B or even an A.. Today I am falsely educated in most of those subjects.

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

#206

Post by aianus »

VLM wrote: post #148
mamon wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. If you distributed the students admitted to Harvard among other universities their education would be impaired by the fact that the professors would have to dumb down the material taught in their classes to their less bright colleagues. Not to mention that the professors themselves would not be as smart and accomplished as Harvard professors.

"the professors would have to dumb down the material taught in their classes to their less bright colleagues." A fascinating side effect of open courseware and online lecture videos is the elimination of that peculiar historical belief. For example, per video evidence, the kids in Professor Strang's linear algebra classes are definitely not observably smarter than the kids I met in my linear algebra class. There is a…

Counter-anecdote:

I passed University physics by watching MIT OpenCourseWare lectures and those kids learned in a week what took us three...

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

#207

Post by cyrks »

gruturo wrote: post #146
StanislavPetrov wrote: post #95

Earlier 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…

> US students ranked 38th out of 71 countries in math, and 28th in science. Kids in Hungary and the Slovak Republic outranked us. I understand the spirit of your example, but mentioning esp. Hungary is quite out of place. I work in an international context and have many colleagues from all over Europe - and the Hungarians absolutely kick major ass (Apologies to the HN community for the choice of language).

That is exactly the point. When the US has the #11 world GDP/capita and Slovakia has the 39th ranked GDP/capita (at 55% of the per capita GDP compared to the US), shouldn't the US strive to have higher educational standards? It's not down putting the Slovak educational system, it's more of a shot at the US system and the lack of emphasis on educational rigor.

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...

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

#208

Post by tyywebb »

jonbarker wrote: post #171
davidreiss wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying college students should be able to pass remedial math and english tests isn't elitism. If you can't pass a basic remedial test in basic math and basic english how are you going to take college level courses? Where are you getting elitism from? Having some basic minimum standards isn't elitism. It's having standards.

It's elitism when you realize being born into the wrong school district and/or with the wrong parents may increase your chances of not being able to acquire those basic skills.

What we should really do is drop all grading systems and test scores entirely. They are flat out bad for people's self esteem. So long as people show up to class sometimes they should get a special badge they can put on that says "I went to college!"

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

#209

Post by cyrks »

onion2k wrote: post #125
dragandj wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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:/…

While educational spending per student is higher in the US, the travesty is where that money is spent. It's not all spent on the students. If it were, the US wouldn't have the (overall) terrible public educational system that it has.

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

#210

Post by dvt »

vostok wrote: post #87
aphextron wrote: post #84

The 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…

> The UC system is still the most prestigious, selective public university system in the world, and this will not affect that. Is the UC system more prestigious than Oxford, Cambridge, LSE, Imperial, or top prepas/grandes ecoles? Even the most jingoistic American wouldn't argue that the UC system is more prestigious than Oxford or Cambridge for undergraduate studies.

You're confusing a public school system with individual schools. Of course UC Merced is not on the same level as Oxford or LSE. But Berkeley and UCLA certainly are[1].

[1] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankin...

Post reply on HN