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Who Gets to Graduate?
41–50 of 149 posts
Re: Who Gets to Graduate?
#42Vanessa averaged A's in high school but tested a 22 on the ACT: she was the top of her class, but her class was very far behind the students in the rest of the country. Her high school was clearly ineffective and set her up for failure on her first test. Good for her for sticking with it and working through/around/with a terribly unequal system that disadvantaged her from the start. Perhaps instead of an SAT or an AC…
Wow, did you really just say that state schools are easy, while private school are complex, and then use the phrase "private school caliber students" to punctuate that judgment? I went to a private college. I am not better than my friends who went to state schools.
It's not even that any person is better than another... Classes at elite public schools like Berkeley, UCLA, UMich, etc. are more demanding than at any but a few private colleges.
Re: Who Gets to Graduate?
#43further reading on getting dramatically underqualified students to graduate anyway: http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/blackelite.htm At some point, you wonder: what if we gave the same level of support to the qualified students?
Did you read TFA? It's not talking about "dramatically underqualified" students.
> If you compare college students with the same standardized-test scores who come from different family backgrounds, you find that their educational outcomes reflect their parents’ income, not their test scores.
Re: Who Gets to Graduate?
#44The distribution of grades ... didn’t follow the nice sweeping bell curve you might expect. Instead, they fell into what he calls a “bimodal distribution.”
This is a phenomena also encountered in European universities. I know for a fact that it occurs in Physics and Math, since our professors were in the habit of showing us performance statistics.They even tend to adjust the grading accordingly. That is you get a B approximately at the first peak and fail if you are significantly behind the second peak. I don't think it nescessarily has to do with income / prior education.
Re: Who Gets to Graduate?
#45further reading on getting dramatically underqualified students to graduate anyway: http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/blackelite.htm At some point, you wonder: what if we gave the same level of support to the qualified students?
As a general rule, "qualified" students are much more likely to exhibit the behaviors this program implements: house them together, encourage them to form study groups, provide them with mentors and tutors, meet with them regularly to stress the importance of academic achievement, monitor their progress closely, involve them in research, take away their scholarships if they fail to make a "B" average, they will perfo…
> As a general rule, "qualified" students are much more likely to exhibit the behaviors this program implements
Well, yes.
So the idea here is to take a bunch of underperforming students and invest money and effort into them in the hopes of raising their performance.
Suppose we invested similar amounts in students who were already not failing. We might see an increase in their performance too. Would that be valuable? More or less so than this?
Re: Who Gets to Graduate?
#46This is interesting because it shows a specific mechanism by which smart kids of non-college-educated parents drop out. She failed a test in her first month in college, and her mother told her maybe she wasn't meant to be there. I vaguely remember failing a test early in college too, but it never would have occurred to my (intelligentsia-class) parents that I wasn't meant to be educated. I can only imagine how discou…
Her mom's doubt certainly makes things worse, but I think the mechanism in motion in this case is best described by Eric Raymond's "Curse of the Gifted" [0]. She's smart, intuitive, and hadn't had any trouble in academia before. When things get really complicated in college, everything collapses, and it takes a lot of effort and support to get back on your feet. Having college educated parents helps with the support…
Quick fact check: she's not smart. She's smart only in comparison to the rest of her high school, and the article points out she was admitted under UT's affirmative action program, wherein (for Austin) if you outperform 93% of your high school classmates, they let you in. But the article also points out that she scored the equivalent of a 1030 on the SAT. She's barely above average for the ACT-taking population of Texas as a whole (she scored 22 vs a state average of 21).
Re: Who Gets to Graduate?
#47Vanessa averaged A's in high school but tested a 22 on the ACT: she was the top of her class, but her class was very far behind the students in the rest of the country. Her high school was clearly ineffective and set her up for failure on her first test. Good for her for sticking with it and working through/around/with a terribly unequal system that disadvantaged her from the start. Perhaps instead of an SAT or an AC…
Do you not think the SAT/ACT work well for measuring aptitude? Quite a bit of research has gone into these tests, although the organizations behind these tests are not very forthcoming about what they measure (for example, the FAQ on the ACT’s website claims that the ACT is an “achievement” test and the SAT is an “aptitude” test, which is a bunch of crap, since they’ve both been shown to be highly g-loaded and are pretty similar tests). Unfortunately, the College Board is yet again making changes to the SAT, presumably for political reasons (e.g., no longer asking questions about “obscure” vocab words) and won’t really have the data to know how these changes affect the test until they’ve been giving it for several years, so that sort undermines my confidence in the groups behind these exams, and/or makes me think that they’re useful only because it’s apparently pretty difficult to make a test with absolutely no correlation with aptitude, despite the political factors at play, not because they actually have a coherent model of what they’re trying to measure and how to do it.
Re: Who Gets to Graduate?
#48further reading on getting dramatically underqualified students to graduate anyway: http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/blackelite.htm At some point, you wonder: what if we gave the same level of support to the qualified students?
Did you read TFA? It's not talking about "dramatically underqualified" students. > If you compare college students with the same standardized-test scores who come from different family backgrounds, you find that their educational outcomes reflect their parents’ income, not their test scores.
The article is talking about supporting students who are admitted to a flagship school in their affirmative-action program despite being below the 25th percentile for students at that school. It specifically calls them out as being in the bottom quartile. It lists the human-interest protagonist's appallingly low standardized test scores. What more do you want here?
According to http://www.parchment.com/c/college/college-1572-University-o... , the 25th percentile student at UT Austin (entering in 2011, I think) scored 540 verbal and 580 math on the SAT (annoyingly, this doesn't mean that the 25th percentile student scored 1120 overall, but it's the closest thing I could find). The girl in the article scored the ACT equivalent of 90 points lower. But she's not dramatically underqualified?
Re: Who Gets to Graduate?
#49> It may seem counterintuitive, but the more selective the college you choose, the higher your likelihood of graduating.
I hope they controlled for the admission criteria here. Otherwise, the obvious reason to see a correlation like this is that more selective colleges select students who are better at studying for tests (and therefore more likely to graduate).
Re: Who Gets to Graduate?
#50An academic paper summarizing studies on the effect of attitude interventions like those discussed in the OP:
https://labs.la.utexas.edu/adrg/files/2013/12/REVIEW-OF-EDUC...
Positive feelings of belonging and capability seem to be a surprisingly powerful form of race and class based privilege.