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Bill Gates Says There Is Something Perverse In College Ratings

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

#91

Post by gems »

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 undergraduate computer science program is fucking awful.

1. As you say, the introductory classes are enormous. For the math classes this means less feedback on your assignments. What this also means is that you have other undergrads grading your work. If that doesn't terrify you, then it should.

2. Inadequate preparation. Similar classes in other departments have more prerequisites. I'm currently attending a machine learning class where more than half the class is probability-illiterate. Take a look at how the core math curriculum is taught (algebra, analysis)

3. Professors and graduate students are out of sync about the material and assignments, which leads to situations where nobody can answer your questions. See cs162, cs61c. I've heard similar rumors about 161.

4. Only 5-10 upper division undergraduate cs classes. Interested in type theory? Practical encryption? Computer algebra? You're out of luck. Most other universities seem to offer a lot of variety.

5. Less treatment of the fundamentals. Our systems class no longer goes into any depth about malloc. They've replaced it with a section on map reduce. Similar situation with the operating systems class and I believe the security class.

6. The people who rise to the top are the people who were probably going to be successful anyway. That's just my experience/bias though.

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

#93

Post by andreasvc »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #89
ChuckMcM wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One can never guess what is going to be projected into one's writing. Tokenadult pointed out some things that MET figured out were highly correlated with effective teaching, he quoted them with : "Of the 36 items included in the Gates Foundation study, the five that most correlated with student learning were very straightforward: My wife and I home schooled our kids through "8th" grade, they went to the local high sc…

You are confusing cause and effect, the factors are already present in families who are dedicated/resourceful enough to consider homeschooling, so homeschooling simply has no effect in that case. It is already known that the most important factor in whether a kid learns or not is their home situation. These studies are on the effectiveness of schools assuming the home factor can't be changed easily by society.

While you are right that the background of homeschooled children may be a confounding factor, you are overreaching when you (seem to) claim that this rules out the possibility that being homeschooled contributes as well.

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

#94

Post by Zigurd »

sageikosa wrote: post #40
Zigurd wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would work for MBAs and perhaps JDs, but why tip the scales against, say, a med school that produces great GPs but not many cosmetic surgeons? A money-based measurement is also heavily canted toward the "old money" set and their legacy admissions to their alma maters. Money isn't everything. And often it isn't even accurate at measuring how well a school equips students to make it on their own.

"Things like" would count things that mattered per category. If you wanted to go into pure science, most likely you'd be concerned about the freshman average GPA, the % of graduates who change majors, and the graduating percentage that find employment as researchers and educators. Medical school costs (and the insurance load to practice medicine) are already tipping the scales against GPs (low return on educational i…

Maybe the problem is that, for many kinds of education that are useful and/or beneficial to society, money is a poor measuring stick and market forces are not a desirable influence.

The effect on GPs you describe is already driving a health care crisis in the US. We may be left with an overhang of specialists who will surely argue their education should not become a "stranded asset."

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

#95

Post by eli_gottlieb »

JPKab wrote: post #58
davmre wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 incomin…

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.

That's not a specific university. That's engineering schools in general. "We'll throw you head-first into the ocean, and see if you survive. If you do, congratulations, you've learned to swim!"

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

#96

Post by eli_gottlieb »

gems wrote: post #91
davmre wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 undergraduate computer science program is fucking awful. 1. As you say, the introductory classes are enormous. For the math classes this means less feedback on your assignments. What this also means is that you have other undergrads grading your work. If that doesn't terrify you, then it should. 2. Inadequate preparation. Similar classes in other departments have more prerequisites. I'm currently attending a mach…

4. Only 5-10 upper division undergraduate cs classes. Interested in type theory? Practical encryption? Computer algebra? You're out of luck. Most other universities seem to offer a lot of variety.

I know of almost no university besides maybe MIT where there's no bias in the teaching and research towards certain fields and away from others. It's quite unfortunate, but you have to choose your educational institution based on what specialties you want to enter.

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

#97

Post by eli_gottlieb »

carbocation wrote: post #49

I don't mean to be incredibly dense, but I'll risk looking that way here. When you're at the elementary school level, I understand that there are easily quantified skills that we believe all citizens should possess. Standardized tests seem reasonable for standardized knowledge. Once you're at the college level, what is the goal? What is the thing being maximized, the thing that can be measured and tested and presumab…

The only thing you're really missing is capitalism itself, which demands that everything be put on a quantifiable measure in order to justify its existence to the ultimate quantifiable measure, money.

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

#98

Post by seanmcdirmid »

andreasvc wrote: post #93
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are confusing cause and effect, the factors are already present in families who are dedicated/resourceful enough to consider homeschooling, so homeschooling simply has no effect in that case. It is already known that the most important factor in whether a kid learns or not is their home situation. These studies are on the effectiveness of schools assuming the home factor can't be changed easily by society.

While you are right that the background of homeschooled children may be a confounding factor, you are overreaching when you (seem to) claim that this rules out the possibility that being homeschooled contributes as well.

Perhaps. Separating out the home factor of homeschooling to get some useful truth seems quite impossible.

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

#99

Post by electronvolt »

gems wrote: post #91
davmre wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 undergraduate computer science program is fucking awful. 1. As you say, the introductory classes are enormous. For the math classes this means less feedback on your assignments. What this also means is that you have other undergrads grading your work. If that doesn't terrify you, then it should. 2. Inadequate preparation. Similar classes in other departments have more prerequisites. I'm currently attending a mach…

//1. As you say, the introductory classes are enormous. For the math classes this means less feedback on your assignments. What this also means is that you have other undergrads grading your work. If that doesn't terrify you, then it should.//

As someone who is an undergraduate TA (for computer science), this doesn't terrify me any more than overworked and underpaid graduate students grading assignments, or overworked research faculty who don't have any incentive to grade well. My anecdotal experience has been that it's generally the top 1-3% of undergrads who end up TAing or grading (in CS, at UVa; mileage elsewhere may vary), and those who do take it pretty seriously (here, at least, we're paid and it's a job). Most of the people I've TA'd with (and myself) take at least one graduate course and actually know the material better than most graduate students (since we've taken the course and universally done very well in it). UVa also rotates graduate TAs out after a year (to research or other things), whereas undergraduate TAs can stay on the same course for two or three years, which offers much more continuity for the professor and fewer TAs who are completely lost. I might be biased (see also: I get paid to do exactly what terrifies you), but I think that if the undergraduates aren't just unpaid volunteers, you get better results than using graduate students for the same things. Unpaid volunteers are much worse: you don't have to pay much, but paying someone for something makes it a job, which switches people's headspace from 'I can drop this' to 'This is my job, and I will do it well'.

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

#100

Post by yummyfajitas »

carbocation wrote: post #49

I don't mean to be incredibly dense, but I'll risk looking that way here. When you're at the elementary school level, I understand that there are easily quantified skills that we believe all citizens should possess. Standardized tests seem reasonable for standardized knowledge. Once you're at the college level, what is the goal? What is the thing being maximized, the thing that can be measured and tested and presumab…

Once you're at the college level, what is the goal?

Good question. The lack of a good answer certainly undermines the justification for colleges continued existence and pervasiveness.

Tangentially, I'd argue that any institution which can't even define it's goals should not receive any taxpayer dollars.

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