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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

#371

Post by dnautics »

BobaFloutist wrote: post #344
CGMthrowaway wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is your issue with redirecting funding from sucky schools towards ones that deliver results, while allowing school choice for students at the same time? I may be naive but that sounds fairly good

Charter schools deliver results the same way that private schools deliver results: selection bias. It's really easy to have good outcomes when you have the ability to curate your student population. And though charter schools are regulated to make it harder for them to curate their student population, the statistical evidence is pretty unequivocal: they serve different populations than public schools, and their "bett…

> Charter schools deliver results the same way that private schools deliver results: selection bias.

Wasn't there a failing neighborhood school in LA that got turned into four charter schools that basically rescued the district, without removing any students?

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

#372

Post by BobaFloutist »

WarmWash wrote: post #159

Why do we have such an easy time accepting peoples intrinsic athletic ability and such a difficult time accepting people's intrinsic mental ability? To me this is a 1:1 comparison, but people lose their mind when I make the comparison. College isn't for everyone just like amateur league sport isn't for everyone. I feel like I am going to a minor league baseball game and seeing a shortstop on the field with the motor…

Because intrinsic ability is such a vanishingly small part of the equation that we can't know who could actually be the best until we actually give everyone a fair shot.

There might be the rare generational talent that, starting in their discipline at age 18 with no prior exposure and poor nutrition, education, health, exercise, etc, could outcompete your average loser brought up with every advantage and private lessons from age 6, but in general I wouldn't expect talent to out in those circumstances.

And school's not supposed to be about filtering for rare generational talents, at least not first and foremost. It's supposed to be about getting everyone as far as they can go, and if we separate people into "smart" and "dumb" buckets before they're old enough to ever have actually gotten a chance, some people will be stuck in the "dumb" buckets their whole life that could've been a solid contributer to society if society ever cared enough to invest in them.

Or, another way of looking at it: Everything else is made to put a thumb on the scale. Everything else is designed from the ground up to advantage the advantaged. Public school is supposed to be one of the few institutions that mitigates that, that tries to put a thumb on the other side at least a little, to help level things out. And the people with the advantages hate that, and try their hardest to thwart it, whether through private schools, through pushing public schools to make different "tracks", or whatever.

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

#373

Post by cdcarter »

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…

Can you share some credible sources on "schools banning calculus"? Googling seems to primarily show up Quora and indeed HN discussions, and no actual policy proposal or news article.

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

#374

Post by firesteelrain »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #124
zdragnar wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they not have remedial classes for these students? It's been more than 20 years, but back in my day, if you weren't ready for entry level classes (but still got in to university) you took remedial classes first.

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…

The system is working as designed. If they don’t want to provide remedial then they need some pre-admission test to weed them out. The students can try again later after maturing more or taking community college classes.

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

#376

Post by maxglute »

WarmWash wrote: post #159

Why do we have such an easy time accepting peoples intrinsic athletic ability and such a difficult time accepting people's intrinsic mental ability? To me this is a 1:1 comparison, but people lose their mind when I make the comparison. College isn't for everyone just like amateur league sport isn't for everyone. I feel like I am going to a minor league baseball game and seeing a shortstop on the field with the motor…

This broadly true but economy isn't run on NBA, NHL, MLA, i.e. a few 1000 of 5 standard deviation talent where separation is mostly genetics. Academia need to develop magnitude more passable high end workers, the genetic pool for that is large and system biases towards culture to fill 1,000,000s of 1-2 standard deviation brains. You need to hammer minor leaguers to see if they make it to rookie league or whatever level below AAA that system has demand for. Reasonable system would be to herd everyone through filtering process and throw drop outs into vocational training or soft subjects that should not be elevated on same level of STEM, not because they're less valuable people blah blah, but the pipeline should distinguish and prioritize strategic sectors.

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

#377

Post by tclancy »

smcg wrote: post #282
RealityVoid wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My grades were OK (except in bio, where I refused to acknowledge young Earth creationism) but not amazing. This is... Wild.

It's very common in US private schools.

Uh, it's been a while since I've been inside one, but I would guess it's very common in a certain strain of US private schools, not as a rule.

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

#378

Post by hedora »

999900000999 wrote: post #205
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…

>Those schools would also not be paid unless the students do well in the next phase of their education The teachers would just fill in the tests for the students. This has already happened in some places. The bigger macro economic issues would probably be the collapse of the middle class, rampant housing and food insecurity. Hirerarcy of needs and all that. Anyway with The Republicans going out of their way to restri…

> The teachers would just fill in the tests for the students.

Fraud is illegal. If the law isn't going to be enforced, then trying to fix the law is useless.

I agree about food insecurity. Nationally, it's worse now than it was during COVID. California actually made some good progress on that a few years ago:

https://www.cafoodbanks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/SB138...

I haven't checked food insecurity rates since then, but you may have noticed that food collection barrels have become rare around the holidays. At least for a few years, the food banks in Silicon Valley were truck-constrained, not food-constrained, so those barrels weren't worth the effort.

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

#379

Post by SamoyedFurFluff »

Bratmon wrote: post #354
BobaFloutist wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Charter schools deliver results the same way that private schools deliver results: selection bias. It's really easy to have good outcomes when you have the ability to curate your student population. And though charter schools are regulated to make it harder for them to curate their student population, the statistical evidence is pretty unequivocal: they serve different populations than public schools, and their "bett…

Unpopular opinion: If we have evidence that shows that keeping all the smart kids in one group creates massively better outcomes for that group, then that's something we should be doing everywhere, not something we should ban.

I believe the evidence claimed is that there aren’t better outcomes for smart kids. Schools that claim they have better outcomes just selected for kids that would always have better outcomes. Like if I claimed my basketball team has better outcomes because I got to make sure all my players were above 6 foot. These 6 foot players don’t necessarily benefit from being in a team with other 6 foot players, but I’m saying people should apply for my team because I’m doing so much better than the team that can’t make those weeding out decisions. I’m intentionally conflating the success of my capacity to select for success with my capacity to coach a team.
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