Cal State will no longer require math and English placement exams • Hacker News Board

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

#241

Post by ouid » Wed, Aug 09, 2017, 6:07 PM UTC

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…

Just because the dumbest people participating in university courses have gotten a lot dumber doesn't mean that anyone else is affected by this change. Lowering the bar for acceptance is not the same thing as lowering the quality of education.

Hell if anything, universities are making up for the massive shortcoming of public schooling by offering courses to people who would not have otherwise received anything resembling an education.

As for the degree mill statement, who cares? Since when do degrees matter anyway? If destroying the integrity of the accreditation system results in more people getting an education, then so be it. Accreditation is almost never anything more than a racket anyway.

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

#242

Post by kaitai » Wed, Aug 09, 2017, 6:08 PM UTC

cyrks wrote: post #207

gruturo wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The US should strive to have better standards -- but it seems that there are interests that aim to have a less-educated population. There are strong forces thwarting the establishment of a well-paid and well-educated teaching profession in the US, strong forces against having standards in education (witness the fight against Common Core), and then strong forces determined to co-opt any minor successes in that direction (witness the crap materials produced by our major ed publishers labeled "common core", and the incredible profusion of badly-written tests that are in the end only designed for profit).

The US citizenry allows this, overall. Partly there is the manipulation of reasonable desires for "freedom" and "local control," and part of it comes from the social attitudes toward math and science that lead to STEM being disproportionately dominated by children of immigrants in the US.

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

#243

Post by dragonwriter » Wed, Aug 09, 2017, 6:08 PM UTC

0x10101 wrote: post #229

dragonwriter wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You're right that there is some flexibility, but the basic move is to grant credit for remediation [see below]. Whether that means turning the intro courses into multiple semester courses or giving credit for summer prep. The problems with basing placements on high school grades is why they had to create the assessments in the first place. The better solution is the early assessment program, but since California has…

> but the basic move is to grant credit for remediation [see below].

Your quote does not really support that description; it suggests that they will be directed into either non-remedial for-credit courses with additional tutoring or other support, or courses with the same content (and credit) as non-remedial courses but a stretched timeframe. The former is clearly not credit for remediation (the only “remediation” is outside of the for-credit classwork), the latter arguably could be described that way but the content is not remedial, only the manner of presentation.

> since California has eliminated the high school graduation exam requirement, it gets harder to see which college bound student needs help in the 11th/12th grade level.

It was suspended through 2018, and there is a recommendation to repeal it, but the exit exam wasn't based on current curriculum standards and the other assessments (including several in eleventh grade) that are aligned with those standards aren't being eliminated. So I don't think it has any bearing on how hard it is to identify students falling behind.

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

#244

Post by kaitai » Wed, Aug 09, 2017, 6:09 PM UTC

mannykannot wrote: post #175

richardknop wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha thanks. I am from Slovak Republic originally. I don't think our schools are that good to be honest but I think there is a stronger emphasis on math/physics and technical skills in schools in Eastern Europe. Probably historical reasons.

I have always thought (guessed, really) that it is because Eastern Europe (and, more recently, many parts of Asia) recognize something that the West sometimes forgets, even though that is where you will find the strongest evidence for it: technical competence can lead to radically better lives.

Another factor: I know several people who went into math because it could not be politicized. There was not a party line to toe.

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

#245

Post by kaitai » Wed, Aug 09, 2017, 6:11 PM UTC

nradov wrote: post #194

talmand wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny, my kids' math teachers have all stated to me, in public not whispers, they hate the "new math" and it is inhibiting them from teaching math correctly. Since I wasn't educated in the "new math" as a kid I have difficulties helping my children with their homework, which the teachers also admitted to being a problem. Typically I just show them how to solve the problem the way I learned and they pick it up much qu…

The Common Core math curriculum is actually quite good and based on solid academic research on how to best teach those concepts to the majority of kids. Most of the parents complaining about it just haven't taken the time to read through their children's textbooks and understand the alternative techniques.

Agree that Common Core is good as a set of standards and as a set of teaching methods. However, I know how some ed companies put together their "common core" materials -- just permute existing crap and relabel. There is a lot of bad material out there with the Common Core label.

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

#246

Post by panda88888 » Wed, Aug 09, 2017, 6:24 PM UTC

wl wrote: post #197

cafard wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Common Core use what we called "the new math" back in the 1960s? (Tom Lehrer's song is probably as good an intro as any.) Good math teachers seem to be hard to find. That was true in my school days also.

There's some similarities. The old new math was all about learning abstractions early. The new new math is all about approaching math problems from many different angles to build a sense of when you'd use certain techniques and why they work. The common thread is a lack of emphasis on rote application of algorithms without explanation of how they work. Arguably, that's less important in the era of pocket calculators…

I dislike the lack of emphasis on rote memorization. IMO the correct approach should be 1) understand the concepts, then 2) practice until such concept becomes muscle memory, which will serve as the foundation for the next level.

This is the same approach that sports/martial art/artisans use (deliberate practice, etc). The concepts are tools, and being able to use those tools intuitively and instinctively is key to advancing to the next level.

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

#247

Post by kaitai » Wed, Aug 09, 2017, 6:26 PM UTC

PeterisP wrote: post #102

vostok wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a great point. It's certainly possible to design a bad placement test.

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.

It is soooo hard to design a good multiple choice math test. I am trying to do exactly that right now, and resign myself to knowing that it will just be one non-comprehensive piece of evidence.

I did not-so-well on the math subject GRE myself. It was the first time I'd done multiple choice higher(ish) math questions and I just didn't train to triple-integrate fast enough or answer questions about the properties of ring homomorphisms. Write a proof? Sure! I did fine actually getting the PhD. I also placed into 'remedial' math at Caltech according to their placement test; fortunately they let me switch out and up in the first week as it really wasn't appropriate.

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

#248

Post by indigochill » Wed, Aug 09, 2017, 6:36 PM UTC

kaitai wrote: post #244

mannykannot wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have always thought (guessed, really) that it is because Eastern Europe (and, more recently, many parts of Asia) recognize something that the West sometimes forgets, even though that is where you will find the strongest evidence for it: technical competence can lead to radically better lives.

Another factor: I know several people who went into math because it could not be politicized. There was not a party line to toe.

They should hear about the Pythagoreans' discovery of irrational numbers (in which the discoverer is said to have been drowned at sea for undermining their belief that only positive ratios could exist): https://brilliant.org/discussions/thread/discovery-of-irrati...

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

#249

Post by kaitai » Wed, Aug 09, 2017, 6:38 PM UTC

userbinator wrote: post #19

The hope is that these efforts will also help students obtain their degrees sooner — one of the public university system's priorities. Cal State has committed to doubling its four-year graduation rate, from 19% to 40%, by 2025. 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…

I think this is not fair.

First, many college remedial courses don't achieve their aims. They have high DFW rates (D means you can't progress, as C or better is usually the prerequisite, F is fail, W is withdraw). Their graduates often don't do that well in the next class anyway.

Second, there is a lot of evidence that providing good teaching and targeted intervention in the 101 class (rather than the remedial class) increases achievement and advancement. One really interesting example is the Wisconsin Emerging Scholars program. It is not remedial, but it does take students who are no more prepared for calculus than any other students and ask them to spend more time on the harder material in class, and these students do better. Many WES students are from demographics with lower math achievement in regular classes.

While remedial classes have face value, they don't actually have a track record of success! Why persist with something that does not achieve what it aims for?

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

#250

Post by kaitai » Wed, Aug 09, 2017, 6:42 PM UTC

samcodes wrote: post #89

I TAed at a Cal State and worked in the math tutoring center. If the tests were like other standardized tests I encountered there, they probably were not a very good measurement of anything. And the remedial courses, best I could tell, did not help. Some people seem to be interpreting this as lowering the bar. That position supposed that these tests are more accurate measurements than grades and SAT scores. I believe…

Your second paragraph is spot on. These tests are not very accurate, and students who see a bunch of remediation rather than progress in front of them often quit or switch majors, rather than gearing up and doing the math that is required!