Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average • Hacker News Board

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#271

Post by mhartl » Sat, Feb 21, 2015, 7:20 PM UTC

StudyAnimal wrote: post #266

sgk284 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No it means the exam was way too easy. 90% of the questions were giveaways. If its ok to fail 400 out of 1000 students doing English, then its ok to fail 4 out of 10 doing Latin. Once you adjust for the easiness of the exam, he actually did not do too well.

In related news, the fifth-best player on an NBA team is a failing basketball player, because 80% of the starting players are better than he is.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#272

Post by nkassis » Sat, Feb 21, 2015, 8:59 PM UTC

spunwasi wrote: post #43

fidotron wrote: post #2

Underneath this is the simple fact that educational standards in Quebec are disgracefully bad. A frightening proportion of kids never graduate high school either, and making it into McGill is near the upper reaches of achievement for those that do. This is going to provoke a lot of kneejerk "but it's worse in [x]". No, in the developed world it's probably not. There are lots of dynamics unique to the Quebec situation…

Well to be fair, we don't know that the 6 students called were from Quebec. McGill is a fairly popular school for kids from Ontario and the Maritimes provinces too.

And Americans. It's a cheaper (or was given recent international tuition increase) option for those who can't afford even in state tuition in some states.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#273

Post by acjohnson55 » Mon, Feb 23, 2015, 6:10 AM UTC

omegaham wrote: post #217

acjohnson55 wrote: post #35

This is alarming but not particularly surprising to me, if the culture of education is similar between the US and Canada. Judging by this piece and one I read hear a few days back [1], there may be more similarities than I'd thought. Ed school for far too many is a compelling choice for people who want a relatively easy college degree. I don't want to diss the countless teachers who choose that route out of genuine p…

One thing that I've become a firm believer in is that teaching isn't the problem; administration is. A good administrator or group of administrators will make the entire school into a team that can excel. They set a clear vision for what teachers need to know and do. They set clear standards for discipline, which are practiced in a fair, evenhanded, rational fashion. They uphold high standards and remove the non-hack…

One of the few jobs I want even less than my old teaching job is my old principal's job. The role has insane expectations. The collective administration has to be capable of management, budgeting, academic master planning, public relations, recruitment (of staff and teachers), HR, scheduling, event planning, behavior management, and the list goes on practically forever. The principal has to build a team that can cover all of these bases with no gaps, and in a school district like the one I taught in, they have to do it with a very limited number of people and typically on a very difficult time scale.

In a rough school district, turnover is rampant. Few sane people want to take this role or honestly feel qualified to do it, so it tends to attract manic people, with the assortment of negative personality traits that tends to correlate with. You name it: manipulativeness, sleaziness, narcissism, capriciousness, etc.

I have yet to see a private school that effectively serves the neediest communities with a model that is actually replicable. Even the best charters tend to weed out the neediest students, in their messaging, their admissions or through high daily expectations with lack of support. The lack of support undercuts high expectations at all levels of the educational system.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#274

Post by ramblerman » Mon, Feb 23, 2015, 9:50 AM UTC

plehoux wrote: post #131

japhyr wrote: post #3

I 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…

Many comments here are anecdotal. Quebec outperforms other Canadian provinces in most math rankings (Programme for International Student Assessment). Globe and Mail on the subject: > But there’s also good news. Canada’s declining performance in math isn’t equally distributed across the country. When results are broken down by province, there are shocking differences. And at the top of the class is Quebec. > While the…

> Quebec outperforms other Canadian provinces in most math rankings

Given what we have learned here today, I'm wondering if Quebec just has more questions on their exam :P

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#275

Post by balls187 » Mon, Feb 23, 2015, 10:46 PM UTC

drpgq wrote: post #239

balls187 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Racial mixture has Quebec being nearly 90% Caucasian.

That's definitely not the same thing as being 90% plus ethnic Finnish.

It's not.

But I said "racial background" not "ethnic background."

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#276

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft » Tue, Feb 24, 2015, 5:39 PM UTC

xaa wrote: post #268

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Depends on the high school and teacher. In the US, each student will have between 20 and 40 teachers by the time they graduate highschool. Thus, you can't just hope to play the public education lottery and get all good teachers for your kid. Even if things work out better than could possibly be imagined, that's what, 10 or 15 good teachers, quite a few more mediocre and 2 or 3 bad ones? Sorry. The damage that a bad…

> Sorry. The damage that a bad teacher can do outweighs much or all of the good that the good teachers can do. > If your kid would have 40 doctors throughout his life, only 2 or 3 of which were quacks, would that make you happy? I don't think this analogy is quite right, nor is the conclusion you are using it to illustrate. A kid, especially a smart kid, knows when a bad teacher is bad and can just coast through the…

> A kid, especially a smart kid, knows when a bad teacher is bad and can just coast through the class (

There are many sorts of "bad". Sometimes they're simply ineffective or uninterested teachers. Other times they're borderline mentally ill and abusive.

How many times does the child need to be mocked or called names for lasting damage to happen? Can you judge this before the fact? "Oh my boy Timmy, he can be called names at least a dozen times with no ill effects, and you look like you'll only do that 8 times, Mrs. Kuntzenheimmer."

> guess a truly bad teacher can deny evolution

Or lock them in a closet. Or tell them "girls can't do math" so many times they believe it, and roll their eyes derisively if any of the 9 yr olds object. Or fail them out of spite... or have them expelled without true cause.

Oh man, there must be a 100 different kinds of bad. And few children have the life skills to mitigate that (few adults, if we're honest).

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#277

Post by lotharbot » Wed, Feb 25, 2015, 3:03 AM UTC

Dove wrote: post #261

worklogin wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it unfair? The AP courses are more challenging, and therefore get more weight. Isn't the valedictorian (theoretically) the smartest kid in the school?

If you have all your graduation requirements fulfilled, the system penalizes you for taking any further classes. You improve your GPA by taking a quarter of Nothing/Study Hall if you can't get another AP class. And indeed, I believe the valedictorian did exactly that, for exactly that reason.

(Sorry I'm late to the party)

That is indeed exactly what happened -- the valedictorian was in all of the same advanced/AP classes as the rest of the top 10 students. But while each of us had additional classes like band, choir, or drama, she simply took the minimum number of credits, and as a result ended up with a slightly higher GPA. I actually ended up dropping all the way to fifth because I was taking math at a local college (multivariable calculus, linear algebra) which was treated as an ordinary course for GPA.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#278

Post by Yhippa » Fri, Feb 27, 2015, 6:29 PM UTC

recursive wrote: post #227

Yhippa wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and as few regular classes as possible I enjoyed band so I took it and they didn't have an honors or AP version. So for me to maximize my GPA would mean that I would have to forgo band all four years of my high school existence in order to min-max for GPA.

How is this min-max? Isn't this just straight maximization?

You are minimizing anything that hurts your GPA. If the highest grade you could get in a course is a 4.0 for a regular course and say a 5.0 for AP or Honors and band is a regular course you wouldn't want to take the hit from band.