51–60 of 164 posts
At Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg Sweden 80% of the students would pass the entrance exam in the 60s. These days it's reversed, only 20% pass. I was told this was the case around 2005 when I studied there. The exam has not changed in difficulty.
Has what students are expected to know changed since the 60s? For instance, have there been any, I dunno, new developments in technology over the past 60-odd years?
PISA data show that students who use AI for specific schoolwork tasks, such as summarising texts, drafting or conducting research, attain lower scores in science than students who do not use AI. See graphs on PISA 2025 homepage : https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2025-results-volum... So much for all the EdTech startups that want you to use their AI teachers. Seriously, this should be a major signal to keep s…
PISA 2025 was the largest assessment to date, involving 760 000 students across 91 countries and economies.
Framing this as a pattern across the entire industrial world is a bit misleading. Looking through the data at Math Scores since 2015 shows big country level split: Japan: -3 S Korea: -1 Singapore: +1 Taiwan: +9 --- Germany: -45 France: -38 Sweden: -33 US: -10 This is an issue with the western industrialized world. Which ought to make the analysis simple since we can look at what those countries have done differently…
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Yeah, it's useless to look at time-series changes in this data without accounting for the fact that, e.g., 29% of students in Germany now have a migration background. A huge chunk of German students are growing up with parents who don't speak German at home, of course that's going to cause test scores to decline.
Framing this as a pattern across the entire industrial world is a bit misleading. Looking through the data at Math Scores since 2015 shows big country level split: Japan: -3 S Korea: -1 Singapore: +1 Taiwan: +9 --- Germany: -45 France: -38 Sweden: -33 US: -10 This is an issue with the western industrialized world. Which ought to make the analysis simple since we can look at what those countries have done differently…
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That's quite funny, but the new recruits at my work place are super smart and full of piss and vinegar. Much more motivated than some of the older workers. The problem is that they will work lots of unpaid overtime, and they have no idea about work boundaries and being exploited by employers.
Depending on the education/age of new recruits, you might not have seen much of the, younger, lower scored cohort, because the sharp performance drop only really started after 2018 (so the oldest affected people are around 22).
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> Makes sense. The kids can see that education isn't really going to be a sellable skill when AI ends up coming into full force. If true, this is a disastrously foolish thing to believe. Education is only going to become more important as supervising increasingly advanced AI agents becomes more difficult. We need people who understand all different domains of human endeavor at the deepest level possible. I mean, what…
It's not clear if it is foolish. The situation will probably be like with airline pilots. The plane is mostly an automated system, but we simply don't let automation to work through exceptional situations, without human review. Therefore, lots of pilot training (and their presence) is still required. But it's also hard to guess what exactly skill should the pilots have. It's clear that lots of things from manual airc…
>In 1997, American Airlines captain Warren VanderBurgh gave a lecture warning about the dangers of autopilot. He titled it "children of the magenta line," after the magenta coloured course line the flight computer draws across a cockpit display. He noticed that pilots were so used to following that line, to managing the automation rather than actually flying the plane, that they lost their own skills to manually fly the plane. This wasn’t a problem until it was a problem.
>VanderBurgh’s concern was not about autopilot itself but rather the complete dependency on autopilot at the expense of the internal knowledge of how it works and the loss of the judgment to know when to use it. In 2009, his warning came true in the very worst way possible over the Atlantic. When Air France 447’s sensors iced over, the autopilot handed a perfectly good airliner back to its crew, the pilots, confused and out of practice, stalled it into the sea.
-https://carlhendrick.substack.com/p/children-of-the-magenta-...
Children Of The Magenta Line -https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ESJH1NLMLs
Framing this as a pattern across the entire industrial world is a bit misleading. Looking through the data at Math Scores since 2015 shows big country level split: Japan: -3 S Korea: -1 Singapore: +1 Taiwan: +9 --- Germany: -45 France: -38 Sweden: -33 US: -10 This is an issue with the western industrialized world. Which ought to make the analysis simple since we can look at what those countries have done differently…
I see news and forums claiming the problem is screens/smartphones and social media. Given the big gap between the east and the west... does anybody know if these are somehow less used/abused in asian countries? Any other reason why this gap might happen? Thanks
If some third type of country didn't do doomscrolling but ignored their homework to play outside, that's better than scrolling but it's still not homework.
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That's quite funny, but the new recruits at my work place are super smart and full of piss and vinegar. Much more motivated than some of the older workers. The problem is that they will work lots of unpaid overtime, and they have no idea about work boundaries and being exploited by employers.
Sounds like they're trading excess energy for accelerated development. Where do I sign up?