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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

#231

Post by rogerbinns »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #216
rogerbinns wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my first year of university we had to do a maths module. My final score was 120%. Imagine just many different broken and non-mathematical things have to go into that!

Can you be more specific? Curving and extra credit can go over 100, and extra credit can be common in a mandatory intro module.

I don't remember the exact details now, and this was at a British university that did neither extra credit nor curving. I think they weren't a particularly good teacher and just wanted everyone to get higher marks so things kept getting biased up for gratuitous reasons. And the result still called a percent.

Students are far less likely to complain about teachers, course work, etc the higher the grades they get, making this an easy cop out for the teacher.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#232

Post by danielweber »

jerf wrote: post #180
jessaustin wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't imagine a Spanish teacher who only knows the Spanish in the textbook. I don't need to imagine her; she taught me for three years in high school.

danielweber ought to damn well be able to imagine it too because I guarantee beyond a shadow of a doubt that he had teachers that worked like that too. It's easy to miss when we're kids and we still have that presumption that the teachers must know so much more, but what little left of that illusion I had was shattered when I got to college and on a whim started examining the curricula of the teaching degrees. No, th…

True, I had some teachers who were just reading from the book, like my health teacher.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#233

Post by sago »

I sit on the board of governors of a public school in Wales, which has decided it needs to focus on math after bad PISA results.

We had an official from the local government come in to tell us that she'd gone through our testing scores and divided schools into quartiles, so she could focus her efforts. Good, I thought.

Then she said, because of how she'd done the calculation, she had ended up with three quartiles. And she hoped most of the schools in the middle quartile (like us) would be able to reach the upper quartile for math next year.

I tried gamely to point out she was an imbecile, along with a reference to Lake Wobegon, but most of the rest of the governing body seemed to think this was entirely reasonable.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#234

Post by dragonwriter »

baddox wrote: post #230
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?

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 the grade at a certain percentile point and calls it 100% and renorms scores based on that, and that system never gives people lower than the pre-adjusted score. That may be what you are thinking of.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#235

Post by j2kun »

hawleyal wrote: post #162
ravitation wrote: post #38

Look, I understand that this should be a topic of conversation. I have no problem with that. If Québécois feel like the education they are receiving is sub-par then there definitely should be a discussion about it. But! What I also think is distressing is that, based on this article (and its author) alone, there is also an extreme lack of understanding of statistics. The evidence presented is purely anecdotal. I read…

It's just a student expressing outrage at his classmates ignorance of basic math. Especially future teachers.

Also something that competent mathematicians interested in education have been discussing for many years. It's interesting how we choose to call anecdotes "writing on the wall" when it turns out to be correct and "unsubstantiated by data" in other scenarios.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#236

Post by j2kun »

Retric wrote: post #97
cbgb wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO, calculating an average is something every teacher should have to do many times throughout their career (at the very least for calculating how well individual students performed on a test relative to their peers). Calculating an average is the statistical equivalent of 2 + 2. Who could respect a teacher who had to look up the algorithm for 2 + 2 every time they were asked to compute it?

I would hope most teachers stopped calculating averages by hand a long time ago.

But understanding what an average represents is obviously important.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#237

Post by balls187 »

drpgq wrote: post #187
balls187 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot more cultural issues at play that effect the education performance of the US compared to Finland. The US has a far more heterogeneous population than Finland, so directly comparing them doesn't mean a lot. It would be more appropriate to compare Finland to Quebec, given the two have similar racial demographic breakdowns.

There's a lot of immigrants in Quebec.

Racial mixture has Quebec being nearly 90% Caucasian.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#238

Post by j2kun »

grownseed wrote: post #145

This is abysmal and unfortunately, it is far more widespread than people like to believe, particularly in supposedly advanced countries. I've worked with programmers who could not do proportions, compounded with designers, managers etc. who were in the same boat, I'd hear conversations along the lines of: "This is terrible, X is 3/4 of Y!" "I don't think you got it right, I got 75%, which isn't that bad" The conversa…

While I agree with you in general, HN comments should (and do) have lower standards for grammar, spelling, and logical reasoning. If I spent as much time on my HN comments as I do on research papers I probably wouldn't get more than one comment per month.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#240

Post by sgk284 »

baddox wrote: post #229
Negitivefrags wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is a story of something that happened to a friend of mine. This is from New Zealand. He was taking 7th form Latin. Latin has enough students in the 3rd form but by the time you get to 7th form (The final year before university) there were only 20 or so students in the entire country taking the course. He was taking the course by correspondence because the school obviously wouldn't provide a teacher for a single…

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.
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