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What the elite expect and receive from an Ivy League education
191–200 of 206 posts
Re: What the elite expect and receive from an Ivy League education
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, I think what's more likely is these people will be fine since most jobs are obtained primarily based on prestige and connections, and keeping an elite job once you have it just requires minimal competence. The more elite your job, the less you are punished when you fail (CEOs, for example, get bonuses when they fail). The people who are in for a rude awakening are those that think working hard and being very sm…
I agree with you to an extent. It's my experience in engineering that you can start a company alone based on your specialized skills. I'm not sure you can do that on business skills alone. I suppose it depends on what path you want to take.
Agreed -- though for many businesses you need capital. Engineering students by and large are far less likely to have it, students rarely go to engineering school and work that hard if they know they will inherit wealth or a business. Software is something of an exception to that rule, though not completely.
Re: What the elite expect and receive from an Ivy League education
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
The true answer is: No grades should matter except the final exam and you should be able to take the final exam as many times as you want. (With a reasonable minimum period between retakes, possibly increasing each time.) If you take AC motors, and fail, and study your ass off and six months later can pass it with 100%, shouldn't that really be... your actual grade? Isn't a grade supposed to represent your ability an…
Taking the exam as many times as you want is a bit unfair to the professor, who has to concoct a new exam each time. If it is the same exam taken multiple times, then it is what is known as an "infinite time" exam which has a deleterious effect on students, as they will be more or less forced to spend infinite time on them. Besides, taking a month to solve a single calculus problem that should take 15 minutes is a pr…
How about periodic testing, once every 6 months? Let previous classes retake a final. That's basically the same test load as before. (Another variation could be only giving partial credit. But it's going to be fairly clear who is trying to succeed and who is trying to game the system. Hence my suggestion of increasing lengths between subsequent testing.)
Also, students are rampantly cheating by leaking previous tests. I saw it every day on campus. TA's leak tests to students and they're printed out before every exam (as the risk is too high to NOT look at a test in advance because your grades = your future in college). I've literally been in classes where everyone had last semesters final printed out... in the room before we took the current final. So the impetus is already currently on you, as a teacher, to have tests with permutations to prevent cheating.
Additionally--while I'm sure many teachers would object--tests shouldn't necessarily be written by the teacher. The teacher isn't teaching their own class, but a class meeting the departments requirements. So if students are being prepared (and not learning very specific permutations of general topics) they should be able to solve problems written by other teachers / test makers. So (on the bright side), teachers shouldn't actually be burdened at all by the testing. That could be someone else's job.
Now, of course, all of this has plenty of practical considerations that would need addressed. How do you permutate a QUALITATIVE question? And how do you easily grade highly permuted (per-person) tests? But just because there are unsolved issues, doesn't mean the underlying (god forgive me for saying using this term:) "paradigm shift" is unsound. It's just different and requires some new solutions to new issues.
But as programmers, we of all people, should be able to figure out how to further automate testing. But I think we really should decouple the idea of "testing" from "occurs at the end of class." I mean, why do we test all finals at the same time during the super-stressful "finals week"? Simply because it's practical. Except it was designed as "practical" before computers and automation were within the hands of every living person. Surely, students would test higher if they could study for a single class's test at a time and without worrying about it occurring during a family or health episode.
And what's a test for except hopefully proving that a student understands the material--but we all know thanks to "teaching to the test" culture that many students can cram for a test and then forget it within a month. But now I'm getting way off the original topic.
My thesis statement is simply: Re-testing finals is practical in modern environments and beneficial and incurs (almost) no additional flaws that the current setup doesn't also exhibit--like cheating.
Re: What the elite expect and receive from an Ivy League education
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is Harvard really considered more prestigious than Oxford or Cambridge? That doesn't follow my perception.
As an american, yes. I'd say Harvard and Yale are much more prestigious than oxford or cambridge. Most americans don't even know what oxford or cambridge is. It's also been my experience that most chinese/asians prefer harvard/yale/ivy league and of course our top engineering schools ( MIT/Cal Tech/etc ). Stanford and Carnegie Mellon also seem to be very desired by chinese/asian students as well due to prominence of…
No, I'm American. I've always thought that Oxford and Cambridge were much more prestigious than Harvard. If I had 2 resumes come across my desk, one from Harvard and then other from Oxford, I'd be more impressed by the Oxford one. I don't know if that is because of the fascination that I have for many things British (which is strange since my ancestors started leaving from there to the Americas in the early 1600s - I assume if they liked it there they wouldn't have left) or it may be that I've read too many books that take place in England (for some reason Oxford pops up a lot in many different novels).
Re: What the elite expect and receive from an Ivy League education
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've actually seen similar things happen at public schools; I think students may also intuit that very little incentivizes profs to grade honestly: https://jakeseliger.com/2015/01/13/what-incentivizes-profess...
I believe average GPAs are much lower at Berkeley and UCLA than they are at ivies though, is that correct?
Yes when I went there but dependent on whether it was graduate or undergraduate and department. Undergraduate lower division CS classes were graded assuming a normal distribution (standard deviations from average). In my opinion, it was mostly used as a weeding out process. Graduate classes had much higher grades, mostly As, some A-s... few B+s. I heard that undergraduate Chemical Engineering had especially hard grading. It was supposedly hard to maintain a B average in that major and that major had students coming in with much higher average SAT scores and GPAs.
Re: What the elite expect and receive from an Ivy League education
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
Taking the exam as many times as you want is a bit unfair to the professor, who has to concoct a new exam each time. If it is the same exam taken multiple times, then it is what is known as an "infinite time" exam which has a deleterious effect on students, as they will be more or less forced to spend infinite time on them. Besides, taking a month to solve a single calculus problem that should take 15 minutes is a pr…
How about periodic testing, once every 6 months? Let previous classes retake a final. That's basically the same test load as before. (Another variation could be only giving partial credit. But it's going to be fairly clear who is trying to succeed and who is trying to game the system. Hence my suggestion of increasing lengths between subsequent testing.) Also, students are rampantly cheating by leaking previous tests…
Professors do need to permute the tests so that people won't just look up last year's final. But permuting them once a year is a very different proposition than permuting them an endless number of times as students demand to retake the test.
There will always be cheaters. That's why companies, as part of the interview process, ask basic knowledge questions. It weeds out a lot of the cheaters and frauds. I hear people all the time desperately try to justify cheating. I don't care if people cheat, but I wouldn't hire any of them, and I doubt many employers would.
Sure, there'll always be bad tests and bad teachers. If one could be "taught to the test" then it's a bad test. It can certainly be true that one could pass the test and yet fail to understand the material, but I'm not convinced that people can master the material yet flunk the test.
But testing, in general, works. For me, I know that the pressure of final exams would motivate me to learn the material. No pressure, no learning.
40 years after I graduated, I'd surely flunk every final if I retook them cold today. I just finished taking the MIT 18.01 calculus class online. I was surprised at how easily the stuff came flooding back into my head. It's still there, I just had to chip the rust off :-)
Re: What the elite expect and receive from an Ivy League education
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
As you feel so strongly about this issue, I assume that you will not sit around and be complicit now that you are aware of the realities but instead will put in the hard work to marshall a campaign of change.
Should I have to be ready and willing to start a campaign every time I learn of something is unethical? Am I not allowed to call out obviously unethical behavior without offering myself as tribute to correct it? If I call you out for littering do I have to clean the whole planet? Sorry this feels bad man, I don't think you are a dirtbag but I think you did a bad thing. Done plenty myself, my crosses to bear, but alwa…
Cheating is unethical. Choosing to not aggressively grade because the costs (time away from your PhD work) exceeds the benefits is not. I put in what was expected I just didn’t put in more. My moral obligation was to my PhD work, not some grading crusade. No crosses to bear here.
Re: What the elite expect and receive from an Ivy League education
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, at least for the tech companies. Grades are irrelevant at FB/MS/Google.
Again, I have no anecdotal experience, but I have a hard time believing that the new hires for those 3 companies are anything but students from top-tier colleges with near perfect grades. To be fair, I'm sure a couple of years of work experience and they probably don't care as much.
You might want to be more flexible in your beliefs. You're very wrong.
Re: What the elite expect and receive from an Ivy League education
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except when it comes to writing programs, the homework is the only thing that even remotely demonstrates your utility to an employer. I would go as far as to say that exams should not count, only homework should.
What? What employer has ever looked at a potential hire's homework? If you don't grade exams but grade homework, then homework just becomes a take-home exam...
I didn't suggest that an employer looked at homework. But now that you mention it, I have personally done that when it was made available on github.
Re: What the elite expect and receive from an Ivy League education
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's no merit to this biased pile of shit. You may no particularly like the author's point of view -- but you looked carefully, you might have noticed it was placed in he "Perspective" section, which as the name implies, is dedicated to expressing what are commonly known as "points of view" -- otherwise known as "biases". Which, forming the very core of our cognitive processes as they do, are very far from flaws -…
The fact that journalists are inherently biased as humans does not imply that we should not strive toward the opposite. I dont care either way for the author's point of view. I am bothered by the fact that a news source publishes so much in opinion, and that people end up more polarized after the article, not because of its factual content, but because of its vitriol. I believe it irresponsible to create and publish…
I think I get where you're coming from. But I didn't see the piece as 'vitriol', and I don't see HuffPo (while often annoying) as being anything like Breitbart (which puts out nothing but pure drivel and propaganda). Or the WaPo as comparable to either of those two.
Sorry for the rant.
Nothing to be sorry for; you're just being honest (both intellectually and in your opinions). And HST himself would probably agree that that's all that matters.