211–220 of 220 posts
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> find Analysis 1 https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-100b-analysis-i-f...
Now everyone can look and make their own judgment call.
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If you mean there is more to the credential than the coursework, of course that's true. But the only possible value in the credential is scarcity; if everyone gets it, it ceases to have any value as a credential. Or if you mean there's more to the experience of going to college than just the coursework, of course that's true as well. But if everyone went to MIT (or any other selective school), that experience would c…
> There is one other thing you could be referring to that the online materials can't give you, namely in person instruction and feedback It's the labs and the projects. Especially for engineering degrees, a good part of learning comes from shipping projects. I think it's where "everyone doing MOOC" falls short.
True, this is one thing that online course materials can't give you. But I also don't think a school like MIT has any real advantage in this respect over other schools. At least, not if the labs I had there are any indication; the materials we were given to work with were just as half-baked as anywhere else.
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One of the more obnoxious things is how biases are buried into things like personal essays and extracurriculars. They're so subjective that it lets evaluators sneak bias into their decisions. The Harvard undergraduate admissions lawsuit a year ago or two provides an example. Asian applicants were consistently ranked to have inferior personalities to white people, even with otherwise identical applications. There's no…
The so called "holistic reviews" were introduced to limit the number of Jewish people admitted to top colleges. See story here: https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/histor...
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How about kids test in? They can take classes online, if they perform well enough, they get to attend in person, everyone else can bang on the gates via a MOOC. Why not take 1 or 2 university classes your junior and senior year of HS?
> Why not take 1 or 2 university classes your junior and senior year of HS? Wasn't this the point of AP classes?
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Now everyone can look and make their own judgment call.
Or you could just say explicitly what you think is missing from the course called "Analysis I" that I linked to, instead of making vague insinuations. Your call.
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> Why not take 1 or 2 university classes your junior and senior year of HS? Wasn't this the point of AP classes?
I think so, but in the method I am outlining, the student would be doing an audition with a university they would like to attend, it isn't just for college credit.
I think there are some Community Colleges/Universities that will allow it, or used to.
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> […]it is ridiculous that one of the main metrics used in admissions is a glorified IQ test. SATs are a good measure of General Intelligence (and IQ). “ This research established the relationship between SAT and g, as well as the appropriateness of the SAT as a measure of g, and examined the SAT as a premorbid measure of intelligence. In Study 1, we used the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979. Measures of g…
Maybe not in the top decile we are discussing here. Things like age and prep time matter a lot. I skipped two grades so I took the SAT at age 15 without studying, did well enough, and went to one of the top state schools for CS at the age of 16. I took the intro to CS weed out class first year and got the highest score by a mile.
Not really. Of course studying for any test and preparing strategically/emotionally/psychologically makes one able to perform at their potential. If you didn't study, didn't prepare, don't know how to sit for a test or what the test will look like, no one expects good performance. Even though I run several miles every day, I'm never going to have the innate ability of an East African long distance runner.
Your extraordinarily excellent performance was not about your preparation but about your brilliance.
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Yet research has consistently demonstrated that it is remarkably difficult to increase an individual’s SAT score, and the commercial test prep industry capitalizes on, at best, modest changes [13,17].
Short of outright cheating on the test, an expensive and complex undertaking that may carry unpleasant legal consequences, high SAT scores are generally difficult to acquire by any means other than high ability.
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Or you could just say explicitly what you think is missing from the course called "Analysis I" that I linked to, instead of making vague insinuations. Your call.
Not the OP, but it seems that videos of lectures are missing, which is the case for most OCW courses - they are mostly incomplete and often outdated. Don't get me wrong, I'm very grateful for some of the marvelous OCW courses I took, but suggesting it can substitute actually studying at MIT is a bit too... optimistic.
Yes, fair point.
> suggesting it can substitute actually studying at MIT is a bit too... optimistic
My personal experience at MIT was that I didn't learn much from lectures; too long, too boring, and too much tailored to the professor's style instead of the student's. In this respect lectures at other schools where teaching is valued more relative to research might actually be better. (One of the professors I had at MIT who was the exception--an excellent lecturer, who actually responded usefully to questions from students in a freshman-level class of 200 or more--was criticized by the MIT administration for not publishing enough research papers.)
On the one hand, it is ridiculous that one of the main metrics used in admissions is a glorified IQ test. On the other hand, it is ridiculous that we don't have a single commonly used standardized-exam that evaluates proficiency and expertise in the core curriculum. I know America has a serious NIH syndrome, but the situation could be improved overnight if every single public school adopted the GCSE/A levels or IB cu…
Please omit nationalistic flamebait from your posts to HN, regardless of which country it's about. It may not have led to a nationalistic flamewar in this case, but statistically it very much does, and such threads are the opposite of what we want here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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> On the one hand, it is ridiculous that one of the main metrics used in admissions is a glorified IQ test. On the other hand, it is ridiculous that we don't have a single commonly used standardized-exam that evaluates proficiency and expertise in the core curriculum. You don't like the use of an IQ test in school admissions, and you want to establish an IQ test instead?
Standardized national exams on proficiency in math, languages, science, etc... are very different from IQ tests and only somewhat correlated with IQ, being instead much more strongly correlated with consciensciousness, and generally how good of a student you are and will be.