Isn't this story just about a single anecdote? To me that makes it nearly meaningless.
Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average
111–120 of 278 posts
Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average
#112Real story: In Hungary students are rated from 1 to 5, where 5 is the best score and 1 is the worst. During the semester you have multiple tests (both verbal and on paper) each giving you a score between 1 and 5. Your final score is the average of these rounded to an integer. These final scores are the only important measure when you apply to study further, nothing else matters. I had a [5,5,5] and had to take a verb…
I had similar arguments with my university. They couldn't figure out how to weigh my grades. All grades are weighted by the amount of credit a course is worth, but they added it up wrongly. A Fucking university!
Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average
#113I think this is the biggest problem: > Some of their answers, like 16 and 18, were lower than any value in our sample. > Some of their answers, like 120, were higher than any value in our sample. It suggests that people not only don't know how to compute the average, they don't have a solid grasp of what the concept even means.
Not necessarily. The respondents may have just applied a mechanical procedure and did not do any kind of sanity check.
>Not necessarily
necessarily! Applying a mechanical procedure is the very definition of not understanding.
Especially if they can't even apply it right
Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
That. Growing up in Quebec, I can honestly say that my mathematical education was really, really bad. I remember spending a whole year where we had no math teacher, so instead we had one of the french language teacher teach the class. We did mostly math related crosswords. All the kids were failing the class, so they simply made us all pass. Great job, school. I still have a lot of issues because of this. Hard to lea…
What makes it so hard to find a math teacher in Quebec? I've traveled through Quebec a number of times, including a bicycle trip that went through Chibougamau - as a visitor, I love the province. I can understand that some remote areas of Quebec are hard to staff effectively. Is this more than a rural/ urban issue?
Note that the stat I pulled out is from a school board in Montreal.
Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average
#115I 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…
If folks in Quebec can speak French, it should be pretty easy.
Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average
#116I 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…
Imo, these results are not surprising (but sad regardless). There's similar studies in all fields. Economics is a prime example (with a couple of well publicized studies).
A little "closer to home"...I've listened to quite a few software developers who regularly A/B test and always implemented B if it had more whatever_unit than A. Significance be damned.
Statistics is pretty scary/best ignored on all levels I guess.
Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average
#117I 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…
I was working in a nightclub during my college years and I've met many, many people who loved learning yet hated school and dropped. There is an immense pool of potential being wasted out there.
I'm one of the lucky few who did drop out of school yet found a job as a software engineer on AAA games; the job I wanted since I was a kid with my first NES. I don't think having a degree would've made much of a difference other than wasting more years of my life and putting me even more in debt.
What made me get the job as well as keep it and rise faster in the company than those with actual degrees is finding the discipline to learn on my own every day and trying to understand how things work and why. In school I always felt slowed down by the rest of the class or by bad teachers.
Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average
#118For those of us out of the loop: What is McGill?
Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average
#119Why is this #1 on the homepage?
Because its average score was high enough.
Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average
#120In my country was a politician who was outraged by the fact that 50% of people earn below the national average.