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

latimes.com

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

#221

Post by throwaway613746 »

kubb wrote: post #214
hedora wrote: post #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 ex…

Why do you even need higher education if you can brain drain educated people from India?

[dead]

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

#222

Post by delta_p_delta_x »

swiftcoder wrote: post #170
mlsu wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s definitely actively bad to involve a device in the vast majority of education. And, it’s a purely selfish thing by tech companies to insert themselves into education. A student should not see a computer until college or vocational school unless they are taking e.g a high school programming or electronics class.

> A student should not see a computer until college or vocational school unless they are taking e.g a high school programming or electronics class. Are you really trying to put the genie back in the bottle to the extent of making high schoolers write all their coursework by hand? Or maybe we should bring back the typewriter for distraction-free essay writing...

> making high schoolers write all their coursework by hand

You make this sound like it is some long-gone practice. I was writing maths by hand as recently as 2020 in university, for my CS-associated maths courses (linear algebra, calculus, physics for computer graphics, etc).

In pre-university essentially all coursework was done by hand, and the national exams are all still handwritten.

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

#223

Post by f13f1f1f1 »

Catloafdev wrote: post #219
hedora wrote: post #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 ex…

This is absurdly problematic. Your solution is basically handicapping the schools with kids that perform worse and then potentially closing them? That doesn't solve the problem, this is just pro-Charter School propaganda that ignores the real-world effects of these positions. You've identified a real issue with the 'equality' vs 'equity' concept, that doesn't lead to 'Close public schools and switch everything to Cha…

[flagged]

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

#224

Post by account42 »

throw9494krrj wrote: post #78
scarmig wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

No, moral is to make student loans subject to regular bankrupcy. Student should be also able to get refound, if university misrepresents or lies about their job prospects! Universities are business as any other!

At that point you don't have a loan, you have a subsidy. That's OK though, many countries do have that.

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

#225

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

vkou wrote: post #188
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The processes for delivering remedial classes no longer work at the scale required. UC San Diego published a detailed report of what's happening at their campus ( https://senate.ucsd.edu/media/740347/sawg-report-on-admissio... ): their remedial math placement grew from 32 students in 2020 to 921 students in 2025, 665 of whom placed into an extra-remedial course covering grade 1-8 math which had not previously been ne…

Is there a shortage of students who have a grasp of elementary school math, who apply to UC? Instead of admitting the captain of the ping-pong team (who can't count past 21 - or past ten without pulling off his boots), maybe admit any one of the students who... Did not have the extracurricular pedigree, but actually applied themselves and passed Math 12? Surely, there's more than a few hundred of the latter in Califo…

You're misunderstanding the problem. It's not that the UCs are admitting a bunch of special exceptions who failed out of high school math; these are people who got decent grades and are supposed to know the material.

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

#226

Post by amluto »

ryandrake wrote: post #68
hedora wrote: post #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 ex…

Measuring (and funding) schools based on student outcome is fraught because a student's performance / preparedness for the "next level" is not entirely a function of the school. There are other significant parameters, including parental upbringing, home life stability, neighborhood safety, friends, hunger/nutrition, various trauma and abuse, the list goes on. I'm sure it's been studied, but I'd bet "school quality" i…

It’s also fraught because schools will spend increasingly large fractions of the time preparing kids for tests instead of teaching them anything.

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

#227

Post by [deleted] »

Catloafdev wrote: post #219
hedora wrote: post #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 ex…

This is absurdly problematic. Your solution is basically handicapping the schools with kids that perform worse and then potentially closing them? That doesn't solve the problem, this is just pro-Charter School propaganda that ignores the real-world effects of these positions. You've identified a real issue with the 'equality' vs 'equity' concept, that doesn't lead to 'Close public schools and switch everything to Cha…

[deleted]

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

#228

Post by smcg »

skydhash wrote: post #195
account42 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now that's just needlessly extreme in the other direction. Students will be seeing devices much earlier than that just because their peers will use them so it makes sense to educate them on their proper use and dangers much earlier than college. It just doesn't make sense to cram them into every subject because not using one is outdated.

Students also see power drills and cars, and schools don’t use them as part of the curriculum. I have a lot of computing device and still believes in real books and pen or paper for learning anything. The mechanical actions and the physical presence really helps in retention of the materials. Even those TI calculators can be overkill. I’ve only used one in college, and it was for a few exams about polar coordinates a…

shop class and drivers ed used to be offered by schools...

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

#229

Post by layer8 »

nathan_compton wrote: post #211
layer8 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can’t it run restricted to a single application in kiosk mode? Unless the application itself provides distraction, what would be distracting?

I friend of mine once made an observation that really stuck with me: a kindle is not a book: it is simultaneously all books at once. If you lock it to a single book, its still all books at once, but with a lock on all the others. Also, why not use paper?

I’m not an advocate of using tablets in class, I was just curious where the parent is seeing unavoidable distractions, compared to traditional tools like for example textbooks and calculators.

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

#230

Post by bgc »

randusername wrote: post #217

> 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 I was annoyed to not find specifics. I would be surprised if the K12 school board and university STEM professors are in agreement about what middle school mathematics is. Trig comes t…

The November report mentioned in the article goes into (disturbing) details: https://senate.ucsd.edu/media/740347/sawg-report-on-admissio...
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