Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bill Gates Says There Is Something Perverse In College Ratings

forbes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 113 posts

Re: Bill Gates Says There Is Something Perverse In College Ratings

#51

Post by ivansavz »

I am all for edumetrics but there doesn't seem to a way to get a good signal on a general "teaching skills" metric. Does such a metric even make sense? I would assume that a proper metric for a teacher would be dict like {"cares":"5*", "energy":4, "perceptibility":3, "subject_knowledge":5, general_knowledge:3}.

Furthermore I am not sure how school boards and schools will use the metrics. Should you fire a teacher because some data fit decided that you are a bad teacher? No way! Anyone who is willing to put in the energy and spend time with kids teaching them stuff should continue to do it. Metrics for self assessment YES, but metrics for firing teachers NO.

Also, the whole idea of "Value added" score has been called bullshit upon here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5059737 --> http://garyrubinstein.teachforus.org/2013/01/09/the-50-milli... . [ quote: ... the correlation is so low that I, and many others who have created similar graphs, concluded that this kind of measurement is far from ready to be used for high-stakes purposes like determining salaries and for laying off senior teachers who are below average on this metric. ]

The author basically says that there is no correlation of the "value added" metric that a teacher brings from year to year.

This lack of correlation is masked in the report "Measures of Effective Teaching" because "they averaged the predicted and actual scores in five percentile groups. In doing this, they mask a lot of the variability that happens" to make it look as if "value added" is a good stable metric.

Re: Bill Gates Says There Is Something Perverse In College Ratings

#52

Post by ChuckMcM »

tokenadult wrote: post #38
Irregardless wrote: post #20

> “The report concluded that there were observable, repeatable and verifiable ways of measuring teacher effectiveness,” wrote Gates in the letter. Anonymous student surveys that asked such questions as “Does your teacher use class time well, get class organized quickly, help you when you are confused" – were proven to provide useful feedback as were reports from trained professionals observing teachers at work. Stude…

There was an earlier Hacker News submission about the Gates Foundation research on teacher effectiveness, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4559682 linking to an article that reported details of the methodology. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/10/why-kids... I looked up other research on the matter for the reply I posted in that thread. From the article submitted then, this is one way this process…

And this is my hypothesis on why home schooling otherwise normal children is so much more effective than primary school education.

1) Kids between the ages of 5 and 13 often do treat their parents with respect.

2) Kids between the ages of 5 and 13 often do what their parents tell them to do.

3) Home school kids stay busy and don't waste time because the parent(s) aren't going to let the time go to 'waste'

4) Home schooled kids stay on subjects until they understand them and move on as soon as they do, this means little down time or 'review' for other students slowing them down.

5) Home schooled kids go through an correct all the mistakes and talk about how they made them in the first place and work on ways to avoid them in the future.

These all relate to the relationship the child has with their parent/teacher, the teacher is really invested in the child's success, and the precise pacing of subject introduction which is tailored to the student's ability to take in new concepts. The more you generalize more students per teacher, more teachers per student, the harder it is to keep these things optimized.

Re: Bill Gates Says There Is Something Perverse In College Ratings

#53

Post by ok_craig »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #5
davidroberts wrote: post #3

"Bill Gates, the world’s most generous and influential philanthropist." Good thing this writer is unbiased.

This is probably objectively true.

I know the comment you're responding to wasn't that great, but this really isn't "objectively true." He's done a lot of good for sure, but to simply accept his contributions as "the most generous and influential" because of his fame and the money behind it, is to discredit lots of other brilliant philanthropists.

For example, wasn't there just an article on HN within the past week about Norman Borlaug, whose agricultural techniques helped prevent hundreds of millions of people from starving? That doesn't seem less significant.

Re: Bill Gates Says There Is Something Perverse In College Ratings

#54

Post by MordinSolus »

davmre wrote: post #23
Cookingboy wrote: post #6

The currently most cited US college ranking is done by U.S News, which is heavily favored toward small private institutions from the east coast. I always find it irritating that a world renowned research power house such as UC Berkeley can't even make it into the top 20 ranking, where as schools such as Emory and Vanderbilt are ranked higher. It ALMOST feels like an east coast old money circle-jerk. I guess with the…

Have you ever been to UC Berkeley? As a current grad student here: it's a fantastic research university and a beautiful campus, but the undergraduate experience is terrible. Classes are giant and there's very little faculty/student interaction, because the focus of the faculty is, for better or for worse, not on undergraduate education. Yes, there are some incredible undergrads and some great opportunities for the 0.…

> Classes are giant

Current CS undergrad at Berkeley. This is the main problem I have with Berkeley. You can interact with the faculty plenty (at least in my experience), especially when you get to your upper division classes. I don't really do that much anyway and care more about how well professor's lecture than anything else.

The problem is that it's becoming increasingly difficult to get into the upper division classes you're interested in. There are just too many people and not enough space. My smallest class is 30 people, but it's a graduate level course, while my other two upper division CS classes have 400 people and 315 with 75 on the waitlist. I thought my classes would get smaller as the semesters went on, but that has not been the case.

Re: Bill Gates Says There Is Something Perverse In College Ratings

#55

Post by dkl »

davmre wrote: post #23
Cookingboy wrote: post #6

The currently most cited US college ranking is done by U.S News, which is heavily favored toward small private institutions from the east coast. I always find it irritating that a world renowned research power house such as UC Berkeley can't even make it into the top 20 ranking, where as schools such as Emory and Vanderbilt are ranked higher. It ALMOST feels like an east coast old money circle-jerk. I guess with the…

Have you ever been to UC Berkeley? As a current grad student here: it's a fantastic research university and a beautiful campus, but the undergraduate experience is terrible. Classes are giant and there's very little faculty/student interaction, because the focus of the faculty is, for better or for worse, not on undergraduate education. Yes, there are some incredible undergrads and some great opportunities for the 0.…

Agree 100%. I went there as an undergrad and I hated it, except for my comp sci courses, which I loved. The department was young then, and it was a completely different experience being there during the rise of BSD.

Re: Bill Gates Says There Is Something Perverse In College Ratings

#56

Post by jmharvey »

If the primary benefit of attending a good college is education from professors, then yes, there is something perverse in the rankings. But I'm not sure that's how college actually works.

At the undergrad level, a particular class at one college is likely pretty similar to a class at another college. And aside from a few exceptional students, you're likely to be able to find whatever classes you're looking for at any college you care to attend. There are more competent people who can teach, and want to teach, intro to Shakespeare, or second-semester thermodynamics, or whatever, than there are teaching positions available.

Most of the benefit you get from choosing college A over college B comes from your interactions with your peers. Some of this is just people working together on class projects, but a lot of it is the pervasive culture of a place. At some schools, people will hang out and talk about political theory. At others, there's a culture of making art. Some places care more about sports. And at some schools there's a culture of building things. Actually, at most schools, all of these things happen to some extent, but you're more likely to encounter them at some places than at others.

And if that's the benefit of college, then it absolutely makes sense to say that the best colleges are the ones with the best students.

Re: Bill Gates Says There Is Something Perverse In College Ratings

#58

Post by JPKab »

davmre wrote: post #23
Cookingboy wrote: post #6

The currently most cited US college ranking is done by U.S News, which is heavily favored toward small private institutions from the east coast. I always find it irritating that a world renowned research power house such as UC Berkeley can't even make it into the top 20 ranking, where as schools such as Emory and Vanderbilt are ranked higher. It ALMOST feels like an east coast old money circle-jerk. I guess with the…

Have you ever been to UC Berkeley? As a current grad student here: it's a fantastic research university and a beautiful campus, but the undergraduate experience is terrible. Classes are giant and there's very little faculty/student interaction, because the focus of the faculty is, for better or for worse, not on undergraduate education. Yes, there are some incredible undergrads and some great opportunities for the 0.…

The US News rankings have a very negative incentivization for schools also. One of the things that my alma mater, Virginia Tech, used to do to (and I'm sure still does) is lure top tier students into their (admittedly great) engineering program. However, they then use a bootcamp style, much harder than necessary first year "weed out" program for the freshman engineering students. The effect is that 50% of the incoming engineering students fail out or are forced to transfer to the school's less prestigous programs, particularly business. The relatively high SAT scores of these students then allow these other schools to inflate their rankings with US News. By the way, I know for a fact that Perdue and a few other state schools with good engineering programs do the same thing.

The first time I saw videos of top tier freshman engineering, math, and comp sci courses, I was schocked. The problems were manageable, the pace was reasonable, the teachers were engaging..... and when I saw the course material and realized the tests were easier than the ones I took at my much lower ranked school, I realized I'd been had.

The worst, most socially irresponsible aspect of this practice of "funneling" and "trapping" your students into less desirable majors is that students who otherwise would have been engineers end up learning less useful things. Virginia Tech, and schools like it, are responsible for making the world have less engineers than it should.

Re: Bill Gates Says There Is Something Perverse In College Ratings

#59

Post by jlgreco »

ryguytilidie wrote: post #25
elliptic wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably not for useful definitions of "generous," which should take into account the actual utility (in money or time), given away. Someone who donates half of their life savings of 50k is (I would say, at least) more generous than someone who donates 90% of 1 billion.

I would not define someone who gave 25k as more generous than someone who gave 900million, no.

Would you define someone who gave away until they only had 100million remaining as more or less generous than someone who gave away until they only had 25k remaining?

How about if the person with 50k gave away 25k, but the billionaire gave away double that? Who is more generousness in that case?

It seems fairly plain to me that utility of what was given away is by far the most important factor in determining generosity.

Re: Bill Gates Says There Is Something Perverse In College Ratings

#60

Post by bvcqw »

the_watcher wrote: post #41
sageikosa wrote: post #2

Unless the metrics used for the ratings are based upon things like per capita salary x-many years after graduation (broken out into specific fields of study and private/public sectors), then it all comes down to either a popularity contest, or a measure of how well a school's policies reflect the latest "progressive" education practices. In other words, unless it shows what the student "gets" out of the experience wh…

When you measure by these metrics, you end up getting the law school scam, where schools employ unemployed graduates for juuust long enough to count them as long term employed, and only make an effort to collect the salary of highly paid graduates (and use "reported salaries" as their denominator, not total grads)

Nothing wrong with employment.
Post reply on HN