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Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

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Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#261

Post by Dove »

worklogin wrote: post #182
Dove wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was once told of a similar situation in a high school: AP classes were worth 6.0 in your GPA, while regular ones were worth 4.0. The valedictorian wound up being the person who realized this, took as many AP classes as possible, and as few regular classes as possible . It is massively stupid and unfair -- but there is a part of me that sees that as preparation for real life, a great deal of which is run in stupid a…

Why is it unfair? The AP courses are more challenging, and therefore get more weight. Isn't the valedictorian (theoretically) the smartest kid in the school?

If you have all your graduation requirements fulfilled, the system penalizes you for taking any further classes. You improve your GPA by taking a quarter of Nothing/Study Hall if you can't get another AP class.

And indeed, I believe the valedictorian did exactly that, for exactly that reason.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#262

Post by conistonwater »

japhyr wrote: post #3

I teach high school, and a colleague of mine went to an education conference a couple weeks ago. She was sitting at a table with three elementary school teachers. They were talking about how to gauge student progress when the students had taken a 100-question test, and a 50-question test. None of the three teachers realized that you had to scale the test scores before making a comparison between the two tests. These…

This is consistent with this review [0] I once read of a book [1] about mathematics teaching in elementary schools.

[0] http://www.ams.org/notices/199908/rev-howe.pdf

[1] Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics: Teachers’ Understanding of Fundamental Mathematics in China and the United States, by Liping Ma

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#263

Post by crucini »

MichaelGG wrote: post #257
crucini wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The road of life is bumpy. I would not seek to smooth out the few remaining bumps in school. We are already in danger of creating fragile people who shatter at the first bump. All this, even if the teacher's idea were quite wrong - but it's not. By "clipping" the score, the teacher created a hybrid between curved and uncurved grades. If curved and uncurved are acceptable, why not the hybrid?

Smoothing out bumps or making it "easy" and worrying about fragile stuff is totally unrelated to acting intelligent. In early grades, I had amazing teachers. Plus they had "enrichment" where they pulled us out of less-useful classes, gave us a lab and a dedicated teacher who just said "hey, what are you interested in?" I excelled there. After moving a few times, I unofficially dropped out of school in 7th grade (12 y…

> Smoothing out bumps or making it "easy" and worrying about fragile stuff is totally unrelated to acting intelligent.

I stared at this sentence for a while and didn't quite decode it. Sounds like you've had your share of bumps. I don't know how old you are, but you may eventually decide you wouldn't change a thing.

But quite a few kids raised in good environments seem to have missed our on bullies (real, not cyber), and stupid, cruel authoritarian teachers.

This results in a naive and fragile person who is not equipped for the real world.

Have you read The Diamond Age? Neal Stephenson makes a similar point when the headmistress (really YT from Snow Crash) answers a complaint about a teacher.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#264

Post by MichaelGG »

crucini wrote: post #263
MichaelGG wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Smoothing out bumps or making it "easy" and worrying about fragile stuff is totally unrelated to acting intelligent. In early grades, I had amazing teachers. Plus they had "enrichment" where they pulled us out of less-useful classes, gave us a lab and a dedicated teacher who just said "hey, what are you interested in?" I excelled there. After moving a few times, I unofficially dropped out of school in 7th grade (12 y…

> Smoothing out bumps or making it "easy" and worrying about fragile stuff is totally unrelated to acting intelligent. I stared at this sentence for a while and didn't quite decode it. Sounds like you've had your share of bumps. I don't know how old you are, but you may eventually decide you wouldn't change a thing. But quite a few kids raised in good environments seem to have missed our on bullies (real, not cyber),…

Sorry, poorly written. I'm just making the point that there's a far cry from producing "fragile" people/overprotecting versus creating and defending a stupid system.

In the former case, it can be good to let kids have to get over some problems or deal with unfairness.

In the latter, encouraging or defending stupidity on the part of teachers or the school system only encourages cynicism or acceptance of such brokenness. School systems should try to encourage the ideals, teach people to stand up to bad things, not accept mediocrity, etc.

I'm 33 and have kids of my own, if that's relevant. I liked Snow Crash but don't remember those specifics.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#265

Post by baddox »

dragonwriter wrote: post #234
baddox wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither curved nor uncurved grades remove points that a student earned from the student's score. Uncurved grades obviously just give you what you earned, and traditional curved grades give you more than what you earned. This "hybrid" gave me *fewer( points than what I earned.

> and traditional curved grades give you more than what you earned. Traditional curves (mapping grades onto a bell-shaped curve based on the class average) do potentially give lower scores than standard 10% brackets (90% = A, etc.) There is a common thing used in some places (particularly secondary -- don't know that I've ever seen it higher ed) often called a curve which just takes the highest grade in the class or…

Yes, traditional curves do that, and that is a laughably preposterous practice.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#266

Post by StudyAnimal »

sgk284 wrote: post #240
baddox wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you clarify what you mean? How does a curve cause a 95% to get scaled down to a 43% failing grade?

If you have 10 people who score: 91%, 92%, 93%, 94%, 95%, 96%, 97%, 98% 99%, 100% and scale the grades from 0-100, those students' curved grades are: 0%, 11%, 22%, 33%, 44%, 55%, 66%, 77%, 88%, 100% In other words, they turn the students' grades into their ranked percentile within their cohort. It's an absolutely brain-dead decision.

No it means the exam was way too easy. 90% of the questions were giveaways. If its ok to fail 400 out of 1000 students doing English, then its ok to fail 4 out of 10 doing Latin. Once you adjust for the easiness of the exam, he actually did not do too well.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#267

Post by mazork »

herge wrote: post #71
woud420 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is pretty sad. Having gone through the Quebec education system and now reflecting over it, I can relate to that student. It seems to me (of course I'm biased but...) that french and history were always seen as more way more important than math classes and that is very unfortunate. I was very lucky to be able to skim through french and math for most of high school. I didn't have an interest in french grammar and…

I don't think you went to the right school. It was made very clear to my classes from sec 3 onwards that taking "higher level math" (436, 536) would open a lot more doors in CÉGEP and university. On the same topic, I firmly believe that CÉGEP offers the best general education in the world for 17 to 19 year olds.

I agree with you. I have a lot of friends in bot pre-uni (as myself) and in techniques and I find it awesome how a CÉGEP strikes a good balance between general education and specific classes.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#268

Post by xaa »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #81
mehrzad wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>bright student realizes that school has nothing to do with learning Depends on the high school and teacher. My high school (and primary schools) had really great teachers and they motivated me to learn things I otherwise would not have. Young people often need a push to learn things that they don't immediately see as useful. Schooling does interfere with learning, but when the stakes are high (getting into a top col…

> Depends on the high school and teacher. In the US, each student will have between 20 and 40 teachers by the time they graduate highschool. Thus, you can't just hope to play the public education lottery and get all good teachers for your kid. Even if things work out better than could possibly be imagined, that's what, 10 or 15 good teachers, quite a few more mediocre and 2 or 3 bad ones? Sorry. The damage that a bad…

> Sorry. The damage that a bad teacher can do outweighs much or all of the good that the good teachers can do.

> If your kid would have 40 doctors throughout his life, only 2 or 3 of which were quacks, would that make you happy?

I don't think this analogy is quite right, nor is the conclusion you are using it to illustrate. A kid, especially a smart kid, knows when a bad teacher is bad and can just coast through the class (bad teachers nearly always err towards teaching too little and therefore being easy).

The worst case scenario in most subjects is they have a hole there, which in the case of non-STEM subjects is not catastrophic because they (English, history) are more about general principles rather than specific facts that nearly all adults forget. In STEM subjects, it can be worse because they build on one another.

I guess a truly bad teacher can deny evolution or something like that, but that typically only happens in controversial subjects where a student should have prior knowledge that there's a controversy. If they aren't, they will figure it out soon enough.

But really, a bad doctor can kill you. A bad teacher leaves a hole that a self-motivated person with natural curiosity can completely fill. Take programming (I'll assume you're a developer). If one of your CS profs had just not bothered to teach a specific course, would you be able to live through it? Of course, as attested by the many successful developers who are self-taught. When you grow up, you have to take responsibility for learning for yourself. If some students have to do it sooner than usual, that has pros and cons.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#269

Post by ptaipale »

strictnein wrote: post #57
cs702 wrote: post #4

In Finland, graduate schools of Education admit students only from the top 10% of college graduates.[1] In the US, nearly half of all new teachers come from the bottom third of college graduates.[2] Evidently, Canada is more like the US than Finland. Depressing. -- [1] http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/Why-Are-Finlands... [2] http://www.mckinseyonsociety.com/downloads/reports/Education...

For [1]: [2] disputes [1]. It states in [2] that it's the top 20% of _high school_ students on page 17. A very different stat. And [1] doesn't say college graduates, it just says graduates. For [2] It's strange when I see these stats. Where I live in the US, 60-80% of high school teachers (depending on school) have advanced degrees (masters or higher). And that's also a weird stat to cite. What percentage of teachers…

Indeed: [1] does not say and does not mean college graduates. What it appears to mean is that those admitted to Department of Teacher Education in Finnish universities come from the top 10 % of high school graduates. The teachers all take a master's degree.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#270

Post by ptaipale »

StudyAnimal wrote: post #266
sgk284 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have 10 people who score: 91%, 92%, 93%, 94%, 95%, 96%, 97%, 98% 99%, 100% and scale the grades from 0-100, those students' curved grades are: 0%, 11%, 22%, 33%, 44%, 55%, 66%, 77%, 88%, 100% In other words, they turn the students' grades into their ranked percentile within their cohort. It's an absolutely brain-dead decision.

No it means the exam was way too easy. 90% of the questions were giveaways. If its ok to fail 400 out of 1000 students doing English, then its ok to fail 4 out of 10 doing Latin. Once you adjust for the easiness of the exam, he actually did not do too well.

Are you trolling? With a subject like Latin, the actual situation is that all the students are really good by the time you have only 20 students left in the whole country. The exam is probably not easy at all, and someone who didn't prepare well would get a much worse score.

You are assuming that it makes sense to make grading to a curve with a sample that is highly selective. It does not.

(I did not study Latin. Just as an item of curiosity, my country's public radio service YLE broadcasts regular radio news in Latin. You can listen and also read some of the stuff here: http://ohjelmaopas.yle.fi/1-1931339 )

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