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My Students Can't Read

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Re: My Students Can't Read

#131

Post by pclowes »

GuB-42 wrote: post #124
pclowes wrote: post #28

We really need to make high school diplomas mean something again. However, this means something like a 35% fail rate. Unfortunately, the populace would not accept that and so every credential gets inflated to worthlessness. 90%+ of all people in undergrad and 50% of grad school probably shouldn’t be there. They just want the credential, to get the job, to get the money. This is understandable but there is no interest…

The problem is: what are you going to do with these 35%? where should the people who shouldn't be there be? You need to give these people something to do. You say they just want to get the job, another way to say it is that if they don't graduate, they won't get the job, so what are they going to do instead? Some low skill jobs don't require much study, but there are only so many in modern society, and we don't reall…

They are already doing it. They just have a useless degree and if they went onto college, another worthless degree and likely a bunch of debt in order to do it.

Whether or not our programs are rigorous, does not change the reality on the ground or make the actual capabilities of the population different. It’s not like a person with a worthless degree is more capable than a person who dropped out of a worthwhile rigorous program. We just perceive them to be. A rigorous high school program corrects that perception, saving time and money.

Re: My Students Can't Read

#132

Post by godelski »

abaymado wrote: post #110
pclowes wrote: post #28

We really need to make high school diplomas mean something again. However, this means something like a 35% fail rate. Unfortunately, the populace would not accept that and so every credential gets inflated to worthlessness. 90%+ of all people in undergrad and 50% of grad school probably shouldn’t be there. They just want the credential, to get the job, to get the money. This is understandable but there is no interest…

I can attest to this. I grew up outside of the US, where starting in middle school, there are national exams that determine what field of study you are going to end up in. A higher score is needed for STEM majors; the rest who pass end up in Arts and Business. If you fail, your only option is manual labor. For students who don't come from "privilege" it was sink or swim, and those who survived the waves actually dese…

I think this is a more important comment than people might take it for.

We all want meritocracy. Really. But the problem is that meritocracies are never really meritocratic. The problem is that it's actually really hard to measure these things. It looks simple at first glance, but once you dive into things it starts to change.

Let's change your example above and ignore cheating. Let's say there's no cheating. The rich and well off still tend to have the advantage. Let's even pretend that a rich person and poor person goes to the same school, in the same class. It's more likely that rich person will get extra tutoring for those exams. The more important those exams are, the more valuable those tutors become (allowing them to charge more and more).

Are there not test taking strategies? The mere existence of this should tell you that the test is measuring something more than knowledge.

I'm just using this as a simple example but I'd encourage others to think more deeply about it because these things do matter if we're going to try to make a meritocracy. I'm not saying we shouldn't try, but I'm saying one of the most critical parts to creating a meritocracy is recognizing the limitations in the metrics. It's an alignment problem and Goodhart always comes back to bite you. As soon as you become complacent you drift further from meritocracy.

Meritocracy will always be a dream. We should chase our dreams, but we need to recognize the difference between dreams and reality. You'll never make those dreams come true if you can't

Re: My Students Can't Read

#133

Post by jkubicek »

GuB-42 wrote: post #124
pclowes wrote: post #28

We really need to make high school diplomas mean something again. However, this means something like a 35% fail rate. Unfortunately, the populace would not accept that and so every credential gets inflated to worthlessness. 90%+ of all people in undergrad and 50% of grad school probably shouldn’t be there. They just want the credential, to get the job, to get the money. This is understandable but there is no interest…

The problem is: what are you going to do with these 35%? where should the people who shouldn't be there be? You need to give these people something to do. You say they just want to get the job, another way to say it is that if they don't graduate, they won't get the job, so what are they going to do instead? Some low skill jobs don't require much study, but there are only so many in modern society, and we don't reall…

> The problem is: what are you going to do with these 35%? where should the people who shouldn't be there be?

Doing the exact same thing they’re doing now, just without wasting 4 years in college and being $100k in debt

Re: My Students Can't Read

#134

Post by JumpCrisscross »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #123
ngriffiths wrote: post #20

> The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow. Obviously literacy is super important but these are examples of things where literacy plays very little role, because ~nobody can read a bill, or follow a written legal argument. I mean a very literate person can get something out of reading it, which…

> I feel like it matters more for the economy and the future of knowledge work which, uh, is a little uncertain these days. I'm not sure it matters anyway. I was talking to a VC the other day and they get an LLM to summarise all the pitches they see and spit out bullet points. I have a cousin who's a highly-paid lawyer and they get an LLM to parse long documents and spit out bullet points. I know many people who don'…

> it's moving away from long-form reading and writing. The kids (as usual) are adapting faster than us oldies

The article specifically references this. The problem isn’t they can’t read and write. It’s that their brains are measurably less powerful. If what we’re getting is everyone over 30 today having a permanent economic and living-standards advantage over everyone younger, so be it. What we’ll actually get is the kids of the wealthy able to read and think while the average American can’t think beyond a YouTube short.

Re: My Students Can't Read

#135

Post by rahimnathwani »

jagged-chisel wrote: post #98
joegibbs wrote: post #92

There was a study "They don’t read very well: A study of the reading comprehension skills of English majors at two midwestern universities" last year where they had university students try to read the opening of Bleak House by Dickens, they couldn't do it at all. Text: "it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill." Respondent: "It’s prob…

Response looks cherry picked. I’d be curious to know the methodology here. I’ve seen intelligent students twisting in an attempt to satisfy the instructor that they (have been trained to) assume is trying to trick them with puzzles; the kind where “gotcha!” is the typical teaching method; where common sense is frowned upon.

IIRC the paper is behind a paywall. But this article has some good snippets from it:

https://open.substack.com/pub/nataliewexler/p/struggles-with...

Re: My Students Can't Read

#136

Post by raddan »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #123
ngriffiths wrote: post #20

> The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow. Obviously literacy is super important but these are examples of things where literacy plays very little role, because ~nobody can read a bill, or follow a written legal argument. I mean a very literate person can get something out of reading it, which…

> I feel like it matters more for the economy and the future of knowledge work which, uh, is a little uncertain these days. I'm not sure it matters anyway. I was talking to a VC the other day and they get an LLM to summarise all the pitches they see and spit out bullet points. I have a cousin who's a highly-paid lawyer and they get an LLM to parse long documents and spit out bullet points. I know many people who don'…

> The world is changing, and it's moving away from long-form reading and writing. The kids (as usual) are adapting faster than us oldies.

Perhaps this is the case, but it is a great loss to civilization if true. The fact is that there are many ideas that take time and length to explain. Read any good scientific paper. These things are not fluff. As the author of a number of scientific papers (at least a couple of which I would humbly claim are good), it is difficult—sometimes even brutal—to fit in all the essential information while also making the paper accessible to _people in my own field_. Moreover, the experience of writing a paper has lead me to conclude over the years that _writing is thinking_. So what you’re advocating for is the outsourcing of thinking.

Sorry, no. Fuck that. I didn’t work hard all those years just so I could have a good salary and standard of living. Those are ancillary benefits. I did it because I love learning, because it excites me when I do something difficult, and most importantly, because I deeply identify as a person who is interested in the world.

The thought I keep having as I read these recurring conversations on HN is “what the fuck happened to proud nerds?” A big group here seems obsessed with doing as little as possible for as much money as possible. It’s just not my style, man!

Re: My Students Can't Read

#137

Post by JumpCrisscross »

pclowes wrote: post #119
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the populace would not accept that What is your evidence for this? It seems like there is growing frustration with the realization that we may have an economically useless cohort about to hit the real world.

High Schools don’t support teachers who are confronted by angry parents who are mad that you are ruining their kids chance at an Ivy by giving them a B- in HS algebra (meanwhile the ivies remedial math classes are packed more than ever)

> High Schools don’t support teachers who are confronted by angry parents

When I took the California high school exit exam, it was already a joke. Still, the news was filled with people treating every failure as a failure of the test.

Re: My Students Can't Read

#138

Post by ngriffiths »

ipsento606 wrote: post #128
jhbadger wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Legal language is basically a programming language for lawyers. It isn't reasonable to expect a non lawyer to understand it any more than to expect a non-coder to understand source code. Even most politicians keep staff to do the actual reading of bills.

> It isn't reasonable to expect a non lawyer to understand it A closing argument - the specific example the parent comment used - is made to the jury. It is intended to persuade the jury. If the jury can't understand it, something has gone very wrong.

It is not written though

Re: My Students Can't Read

#139

Post by pclowes »

godelski wrote: post #132
abaymado wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can attest to this. I grew up outside of the US, where starting in middle school, there are national exams that determine what field of study you are going to end up in. A higher score is needed for STEM majors; the rest who pass end up in Arts and Business. If you fail, your only option is manual labor. For students who don't come from "privilege" it was sink or swim, and those who survived the waves actually dese…

I think this is a more important comment than people might take it for. We all want meritocracy. Really. But the problem is that meritocracies are never really meritocratic. The problem is that it's actually really hard to measure these things. It looks simple at first glance, but once you dive into things it starts to change. Let's change your example above and ignore cheating. Let's say there's no cheating. The ric…

Standardized testing so far is the worst solution, except for all the others.

Sure, wealthy people can pay for standardized testing prep. However, test prep is a much lower barrier than having to pay for exotic experiences abroad to pad admissions essays or connections to gain political exposure so you know the appropriate shibboleths to utter or racial features to highlight.

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