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Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM

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Re: Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM

#141

Post by adrr »

john_strinlai wrote: post #3

> “We now observe preparation gaps so severe that instructors must reteach middle-school mathematics while simultaneously teaching the material students need for sciences, engineering, economics, and other quantitatively demanding fields,” they warned. i dont understand why the teachers would go out of their way to reteach middle-school math. i teach. my courses have prerequisites. if a student somehow makes it into…

They could just accept the kids who are at or above grade level. There are way more kids at or above grade level who graduate from California high school like my nephew who took AP calc and missed only question on the math of his SAT. He couldn't get into any UC schools and instead had to leave the state for college.

We could set up a standardized test for the UC schools ensure that the students being accepted have minimum baseline normalized across all applicants. We could call it scholastic aptitude test or the American College Test.

Re: Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM

#142

Post by t0mpr1c3 »

Aarostotle wrote: post #50
ceejayoz wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Professional athletes are like people who get 1600s on the SAT; a bit of an outlier.

That's exactly the point. Top schools are looking for outlier intellectual talent, but the egalitarian approach (high school grade inflation plus weakening of standardized testing) smooths the differences and makes it harder for them to admit the right people. The visible result has been the weakening of these institutions. Do also observe that this is recursive — as these institutions have lowered their standards ov…

We're talking about the California state education system here. They do not have the option to restrict the provision of their services to a tiny elite. The concerns of "top schools" absorbs altogether too much oxygen.

Re: Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM

#143

Post by julianeon »

hedora wrote: post #53

This doesn't surprise me at all. From what I can tell, California's education system has moved from "equality" (which I would define as providing similar opportunities to all the kids) to focusing on "equity" (which I think they define as dictating the same outcome for all kids). To get an idea of how off the rails this has gotten, go read up on their statements trying to justify banning high school calculus. They ex…

> Personally, I think all funding in California education (other than terminal levels like 4 year bachelors and up) should be a function of the percentage of students that succeed at the next step.

This has the unintended consequence of encouraging schools to eject students who are struggling. For example, if the student has a learning disability, declare that it's too serious for them to handle, and then transfer them to a school that theoretically can.

The system gets gamified and the "top" schools are just ones that reject, socioeconomically, every student who can't pay for tutoring or full-time care, which is a very technical form of "excellence".

Re: Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM

#144

Post by JCTheDenthog »

9dev wrote: post #120
JCTheDenthog wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but if some people are faster than others because they have longer legs or because they've trained more etc. then people without such advantages aren't given special accomodation. It actually runs in my family that we have very short legs in comparison to our torsos. For example I'm 6' tall but look like I'm 6' 4" or thereabouts when sitting down next to someone with more normal proportions. In spite of this di…

And that's commendable, but what if your brother would not have had time for doing cross country in high school because he had to care for his siblings as your parents were poor and working double shifts? Or so heavily indebted due to a cancer therapy that he couldn't afford running shoes? > people without such advantages aren't given special accomodation They are not - but I'm specifically talking about the reverse…

>And that's commendable, but what if your brother would not have had time for doing cross country in high school because he had to care for his siblings as your parents were poor and working double shifts? Or so heavily indebted due to a cancer therapy that he couldn't afford running shoes?

That's awful and unfortunate, but he still shouldn't have an extra hour shaved from his half-marathon times over his competitors, because the half-marathon isn't measuring "How fast could you have run this in an alternate universe where you had no disadvantages". It's measuring "How fast can you run this, full stop."

Poor Black kids who had uninvolved parents that didn't help them to learn math better aren't helped by affirmative action because you're just setting them up for failure in the actual college level math classes they end up in (and are woefully unprepared for). The SAT measures how capable you are at math because that's what matters for college, not how capable you might have been in a different reality.

>Curiously, everyone seems to understand the purpose of handicaps in Golf, but it's an outrageously leftist concept in social contexts.

If I try to join the PGA tour, they aren't going to consider my handicap.

Re: Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM

#145

Post by john_strinlai »

rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote: post #119
john_strinlai wrote: post #3

> “We now observe preparation gaps so severe that instructors must reteach middle-school mathematics while simultaneously teaching the material students need for sciences, engineering, economics, and other quantitatively demanding fields,” they warned. i dont understand why the teachers would go out of their way to reteach middle-school math. i teach. my courses have prerequisites. if a student somehow makes it into…

What isn’t fair is for schools to take students’ matriculation and set them up for years of debt, apparently without any intention of educating them properly as per your comment. Better for schools to just screen based on standardized test scores

>without any intention of educating them properly as per your comment.

my comment in no way implies that we have don't have an intention of educating our students properly

Re: Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM

#146

Post by 9dev »

elteto wrote: post #134
9dev wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you hold a race, but some people start further behind others, they have a longer track to run. I think we can agree that to call it a fair race, we'd want to accommodate for the track length.

Following your analogy, what equity efforts turn in practice is to not only accommodate for track length for those that start behind, but also to cut one leg off of those perceived to be ahead.

My point wasn't that every existing equity effort is justified and flawless, but that there is a clear reason why some kind of levelling is required if you want to live in a fair society - and I do believe most of us want that.

Re: Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM

#147

Post by xg15 »

DonutATX wrote: post #128
kleiba2 wrote: post #28

I used to teach high school math. There was a big push for doing everything digitally. And admittedly, for some topics the use of technology in the classroom or at home can really be a benefit, for instance visualizations or interactive exercises. But having a digital device in class was the number one cause of distraction every time. For a lot of things, good old blackboards are just fine as are pen + paper exercise…

I suggest you glance at the novel Ananthem by Neal Stephenson. The core plot device is about "universities" stripping all worldly items away from the students, so they are left with simple clothes and chalkboards. Fascinating topic, well executed by Neal. One of my favorite books.

That sounds like the other extreme.

Re: Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM

#148

Post by scarmig »

throw9494krrj wrote: post #78
scarmig wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself. Treating universities as a system, it is deeply problematic and even immoral to saddle students with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt to enter programs that it is entirely predictable that the student will fail at. The solution is to use all the methods available to predict how successful the student is likely to be after matriculating, not to w…

No, moral is to make student loans subject to regular bankrupcy. Student should be also able to get refound, if university misrepresents or lies about their job prospects! Universities are business as any other!

That would be a reform I'd get behind.

At the same time, it's still a bad use of funds, and lenders likely wouldn't have the ability to discriminate based on likelihood of bankruptcy or success in an academic program. So it just shifts costs from the student unlikely to succeed to the lender and students likely to succeed.

Re: Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM

#149

Post by bearjaws »

kleiba2 wrote: post #28

I used to teach high school math. There was a big push for doing everything digitally. And admittedly, for some topics the use of technology in the classroom or at home can really be a benefit, for instance visualizations or interactive exercises. But having a digital device in class was the number one cause of distraction every time. For a lot of things, good old blackboards are just fine as are pen + paper exercise…

I'm always torn on this, I learned a lot of algebra, stats and calc from actually writing TI-Basic programs in my calculator. I was deeply interested in programming since the age of 11, so it felt very natural to translate the formulas and concepts to code.

Ultimately I am sure the majority of students learn better writing it out by hand.

Re: Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM

#150

Post by john_strinlai »

jancsika wrote: post #111
john_strinlai wrote: post #3

> “We now observe preparation gaps so severe that instructors must reteach middle-school mathematics while simultaneously teaching the material students need for sciences, engineering, economics, and other quantitatively demanding fields,” they warned. i dont understand why the teachers would go out of their way to reteach middle-school math. i teach. my courses have prerequisites. if a student somehow makes it into…

> i dont understand why the teachers would go out of their way to reteach middle-school math. "gaps" implies a critical mass of students who require middle-school math reteaching. > i teach. If you've taught for a non-trivial amount of time, you did one of the following with that class: * graded on a curve so you don't fail half the class * failed half the class, and got suspended (pours one out for my compsci profes…

>If you've taught for a non-trivial amount of time,

i have

>you did one of the following with that class: [...] Which was it?

these are not the only two options.

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