61–70 of 149 posts
The distribution of grades ... didn’t follow the nice sweeping bell curve you might expect. Instead, they fell into what he calls a “bimodal distribution.”
Vanessa 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 pr…
Prior changes to make the test more fair for speakers of dialects other than Standard American English were also good, even if they were "political".
> 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).
a) has this study been reproduced (i.e. the Dashboard business) b) still smells like Lysenko-ism
Nope. Did you notice the part of the article where they declared victory and extended the program to all students?
> A rise of four percentage points might not seem like much of a revolution. And Yeager and Walton are certainly not declaring victory yet. But if the effect of the intervention persists over the next three years (as it did in the elite-college study), it could mean hundreds of first-generation students graduating from U.T. in 2016 who otherwise wouldn’t have graduated on time, if ever. It would go a long way toward helping David Laude meet his goals. And all from a one-time intervention that took 45 minutes to complete. The U.T. administration was encouraged; beginning this month, the “U.T. Mindset” intervention will be part of the pre-orientation for all 7,200 members of the incoming class of 2018.
How nice of them. Besides helping out the student body, this also spares them the risk of having to falsify a cherished idea.
For everyone who can't be bothered to read the article: 'The second trend is that whether a student graduates or not seems to depend today almost entirely on just one factor — how much money his or her parents make. To put it in blunt terms: Rich kids graduate; poor and working-class kids don’t.' --- 'But the disadvantaged students who had experienced the belonging and mind-set messages did significantly better: 86 p…
http://www.nationaljournal.com/thenextamerica/education/inte...
Asians in Alabama graduate at higher rates than whites do.
For everyone who can't be bothered to read the article: 'The second trend is that whether a student graduates or not seems to depend today almost entirely on just one factor — how much money his or her parents make. To put it in blunt terms: Rich kids graduate; poor and working-class kids don’t.' --- 'But the disadvantaged students who had experienced the belonging and mind-set messages did significantly better: 86 p…
IQ is correlated to wealth and IQ is hereditary, so it follows that children from wealthy parents would, on average, have higher IQ than their classmates.
This 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…
Many kids in college have those moments. What the data tells us is that the ones with the social and economic infrastructure in place to see it for what it is - a minor setback - tend to graduate more. That indicates to me that it is inaccurate to elevate this phenomenon higher than the social and economic support structures.
For everyone who can't be bothered to read the article: 'The second trend is that whether a student graduates or not seems to depend today almost entirely on just one factor — how much money his or her parents make. To put it in blunt terms: Rich kids graduate; poor and working-class kids don’t.' --- 'But the disadvantaged students who had experienced the belonging and mind-set messages did significantly better: 86 p…
IQ is correlated to wealth and IQ is hereditary, so it follows that children from wealthy parents would, on average, have higher IQ than their classmates.
When you read about those gaps, you might assume that they mostly have to do with ability. Rich kids do better on the SAT, so of course they do better in college. But ability turns out to be a relatively minor factor behind this divide. 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 Te…
This 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…
As long as you know the grade is not representative of you, you're all good. WTF that level of external validation seeking will destroy you.