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Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM

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Re: Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM

#51
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Professors who fail large swathes of their classes get in trouble.

That is the entire problem in a nutshell. You cannot reject more than one or two students in a year or the school will reject you.

That's a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself.

Treating universities as a system, it is deeply problematic and even immoral to saddle students with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt to enter programs that it is entirely predictable that the student will fail at.

The solution is to use all the methods available to predict how successful the student is likely to be after matriculating, not to water down curriculum to the point where the most marginal student in the class will pass.

Re: Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM

#52

> “We now observe preparation gaps so severe that instructors must reteach middle-school mathematics while simultaneously teaching the material students need for sciences, engineering, economics, and other quantitatively demanding fields,” they warned. i dont understand why the teachers would go out of their way to reteach middle-school math. i teach. my courses have prerequisites. if a student somehow makes it into…

It's a different country and a different time, but when I studied (a natural science) there were dedicated courses at the start for refreshing high school math. Those were optional, and covered relatively simple topics. There was also a real math lecture that went into topics above high school math, but also contained some repetition. All other courses mostly relied on what was contained there. So I would fully agree…

>So I would fully agree, but I'd also be a bit surprised if you don't have any dedicated "math for scientists"-like courses to cover the stuff usually needed.

we do! those are dedicated courses, where it is expected that the students are taking it to catch up (i.e. no prereq)

students can also drop a course within the first 4 weeks for no penalty, and retake it in a later semester if they figure out they they are behind and would not perform well.

Re: Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM

#53
This doesn't surprise me at all. From what I can tell, California's education system has moved from "equality" (which I would define as providing similar opportunities to all the kids) to focusing on "equity" (which I think they define as dictating the same outcome for all kids).

To get an idea of how off the rails this has gotten, go read up on their statements trying to justify banning high school calculus. They explicitly (in the abstract / introduction of their plan) reject the idea that some kids are more talented at some things than other kids, so if you can compute a derivative by 12th grade, it's due to racial discrimination benefiting you or something. On a related note, instead of writing some Rust code, today, I think I'll go paint a Banksy or something after I finish my coffee.

That plan caused a lot of uproar and was blocked before being implemented.

Anecdotally, when I asked our local public school for a copy of the curriculum, the teacher said they just teach common core. If you go to the common core website, somewhere towards the top it makes it clear that it is not a curriculum, and just meant to be a lower bar that gets supplemented.

Personally, I think all funding in California education (other than terminal levels like 4 year bachelors and up) should be a function of the percentage of students that succeed at the next step.

If a local district starts losing funding, then it would have to close / shrink schools, and people from outside the educational system would be allowed to establish independent (secular) charter schools within the district.

Those schools would also not be paid unless the students do well in the next phase of their education. This solves the problem of trying to use this as a curriculum back door for climate denial and Islamophobia (or whatever the red states are pushing).

Re: Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM

#54
post #38
post #28

I used to teach high school math. There was a big push for doing everything digitally. And admittedly, for some topics the use of technology in the classroom or at home can really be a benefit, for instance visualizations or interactive exercises. But having a digital device in class was the number one cause of distraction every time. For a lot of things, good old blackboards are just fine as are pen + paper exercise…

I am thinking why not use the iPad simply as a letter pad with infinite pages? the new iPad with the new iPad pencil can do that and I am sure with the right software you can write, erase, rewrite as much as you want? What am I missing?

That's being done, but it would not be sufficient to satisfy the powers that be.

Re: Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM

#55
post #38
post #28

I used to teach high school math. There was a big push for doing everything digitally. And admittedly, for some topics the use of technology in the classroom or at home can really be a benefit, for instance visualizations or interactive exercises. But having a digital device in class was the number one cause of distraction every time. For a lot of things, good old blackboards are just fine as are pen + paper exercise…

I am thinking why not use the iPad simply as a letter pad with infinite pages? the new iPad with the new iPad pencil can do that and I am sure with the right software you can write, erase, rewrite as much as you want? What am I missing?

You can just use a pencil and paper, and it's a lot cheaper?

Re: Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM

#56
post #36

"The surge in math deficiencies after dropping the SAT highlights a systemic issue: grade inflation. Without a standardized baseline like the SAT/ACT, a 4.0 GPA from a high school with relaxed standards looks identical to a 4.0 from a highly rigorous one. Paradoxically, removing test requirements harms underprivileged students the most. Preparing for the SAT requires a book and an internet connection. In contrast, bu…

The problem is as never the tests. It was pretending that the difference between a 600 and 625 (or whatever) really predicted anything. It was the silly idea that with tests you could produce a fair ordering of students based on potential to succeed.

who uses SAT scores as "potential succeed"??

Re: Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also from my link: > factors specific to one's personal conditions should not interfere with the potential of academic success

Sure, but the reality is that such conditions do interfere with the potential of academic success, as much as proponents of equity like to argue otherwise. If I had a severe brain injury as a child, or my mom drank and did a ton of drugs while pregnant with me, or any number of other reasons, I will probably be far less academically successful than in the counterfactual reality where I didn't get a brick dropped on m…

In your scenarios, equity proponents would tend to advocate for things like extra testing time, access to tutoring, etc.

(And systemic efforts to prevent dropping bricks on childrens' heads in the first place.)

Re: Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM

#58
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Professors who fail large swathes of their classes get in trouble.

That is the entire problem in a nutshell. You cannot reject more than one or two students in a year or the school will reject you.

>You cannot reject more than one or two students in a year

this seems absurdly low, from my experience. but i have only taught in one school, so maybe we're the outlier? i would say one to two failing students per course is the baseline, not the cap.

can you share where you are getting this number from? is that the guideline where you teach?

Re: Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM

#59
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is the direct inverse of what's actually asserted by people talking about equity. From the wiki article you linked: >Equity is equality of outcome for all subgroups in society. Equity proponents believe that some are at a larger disadvantage than others and aims to compensate for this to ensure that everyone can attain the same lifestyle.

If you hold a race, but some people start further behind others, they have a longer track to run. I think we can agree that to call it a fair race, we'd want to accommodate for the track length.

Sure, but if some people are faster than others because they have longer legs or because they've trained more etc. then people without such advantages aren't given special accomodation. It actually runs in my family that we have very short legs in comparison to our torsos. For example I'm 6' tall but look like I'm 6' 4" or thereabouts when sitting down next to someone with more normal proportions. In spite of this disadvantage, one of my brothers did cross country in high school and still runs half-marathons every year or so. He doesn't demand to be given a head start or to have time subtracted to accommodate his inherent disadvantage, because that's the difference between equality and equity.

Re: Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM

#60
post #36

"The surge in math deficiencies after dropping the SAT highlights a systemic issue: grade inflation. Without a standardized baseline like the SAT/ACT, a 4.0 GPA from a high school with relaxed standards looks identical to a 4.0 from a highly rigorous one. Paradoxically, removing test requirements harms underprivileged students the most. Preparing for the SAT requires a book and an internet connection. In contrast, bu…

The problem is as never the tests. It was pretending that the difference between a 600 and 625 (or whatever) really predicted anything. It was the silly idea that with tests you could produce a fair ordering of students based on potential to succeed.

Any working system has to rely on some arbitrary rules. Drawing a line between students who scored 600 and 625 is still infinitely better than drawing it based on the decision-makers' moods.
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