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What happens when even college students can't do math anymore?

theatlantic.com

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Re: What happens when even college students can't do math anymore?

#41

Post by corpMaverick »

jackallis wrote: post #4

".....In 2020, system leaders voted to phase standardized-test scores out of admissions decisions. They argued that the tests worsened racial divides and unfairly privileged wealthy students. But SAT and ACT scores are the most reliable predictors of a student’s math ability, the report found...."

IMHO. It is futile to level the field with the wealthy. They will always have the better opportunities, education, connections, etc. They will find a way.

But we should keep trying to give more opportunities to the less fortunate. Better education, remedial classes, free school lunches, child credits, etc. We do that by asking the wealthy to contribute more. Not by taking away their advantages.(e.g. Admission tests)

Re: What happens when even college students can't do math anymore?

#42

Post by gizajob »

adzm wrote: post #20
skeezyjefferson wrote: post #5

cant do mathematic? shouldnt it be mathematics? ie "...students cant do maths anymore?"

Both are fine. The singular form "math" is predominant in the States. But, notably, not "mathematic"

Maths is the singular form in English speaking countries.

Re: What happens when even college students can't do math anymore?

#43

Post by ajross »

WoodenChair wrote: post #39
ajross wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did! Here's the quote: > But the national trend is very clear: America’s students are getting much worse at math. The decline started about a decade ago and sharply accelerated during the coronavirus pandemic. So I, a "fool", read that and think: Hm... well if the article isn't giving numbers I'm going to take the "sharp acceleration" as a statement about magnitude and clearly infer that the pandemic is at fault. A…

You're hand wavy "it's the pandemic" neglects the other evidence provided in the article that happens to coincide with the pandemic such as the elimination of test scores as admissions criteria to many universities. And the article certainly doesn't blame it wholly on the pandemic, for example here are two theories it presents: > How did this happen? One theory is that the attention-shredding influence of phones and…

> You're hand wavy "it's the pandemic" neglects the other evidence provided

There was no significant other evidence. And "hand wavy" is missing the point. There is a bleedingly obvious hypothesis for this effect with huge signal in all sorts of other areas of social policy. I mean, really? The pandemic is visible in every measurable segment of society but somehow not a major factor in education results?

In some sense, yes, Occam's Razor is a principle that embraces "hand wavy" understanding by demanding extraordinary evidence for extraordinary claims. And I think it's going to work very well here. Again, for the third time: write it down. In four years this will all bounce back.

What's happening here is actually a different logical fallacy entirely. HN commenters have a distinct ideological bent against new ("woke") ideas in education. And they're willing to ignore things like giant global pandemics to chase their preferred explanations.

Re: What happens when even college students can't do math anymore?

#44

Post by screye »

Aurornis wrote: post #8
jackallis wrote: post #4

".....In 2020, system leaders voted to phase standardized-test scores out of admissions decisions. They argued that the tests worsened racial divides and unfairly privileged wealthy students. But SAT and ACT scores are the most reliable predictors of a student’s math ability, the report found...."

The war on admissions testing is one of the worst education trends. I couldn’t believe it when it was first proposed, but I was even more shocked when the trend started to spread. It does appear to be reversing a little bit in some places as schools realize they were fooled by people pushing ideology over data and results, but it’s going to take a while. For those who aren’t in the loop: There’s an ideological push t…

It goes deeper. The problem lies at the source.

> people pushing ideology

University Education programs and as a result teaching bodies have been taken over by ideology.

I believe it is in part because all the teaching low hanging fruit has been established for centuries. So the only 'novel' things the programs can do is talk about discrimination, disparate outcomes and hand-wavey ideas about improving education. The departments have some of the lowest bars for academic professorship and as a result, the quality of research is similarly bad -> terrible.

The war on phonics is the canonical example.

The fault doesn't lie with 'people'. The above mentioned institutions are squarely at fault for making education ideological, and they should explicitly be blamed for the deterioration in student performance.

Re: What happens when even college students can't do math anymore?

#45

Post by mlboss »

TechRemarker wrote: post #18
Aurornis wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The war on admissions testing is one of the worst education trends. I couldn’t believe it when it was first proposed, but I was even more shocked when the trend started to spread. It does appear to be reversing a little bit in some places as schools realize they were fooled by people pushing ideology over data and results, but it’s going to take a while. For those who aren’t in the loop: There’s an ideological push t…

Imagine still will be all the advanced tracks but will be only reserved for those with the resources to afford it and seemingly further the divide.

I don’t think it is about resources. Growing up in 3rd world country I have zero resources. It is the drive of student and higher standards from parents and teachers that matters. Everybody is just getting soft.

Re: What happens when even college students can't do math anymore?

#46

Post by riskable »

triceratops wrote: post #19
Aurornis wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don’t. The movements pushing these ideas are against the idea of aptitude testing. Many of them are even against the idea of having advanced classes for those who are ahead. It’s not a niche ideology, sadly. It’s going mainstream. A core part of Zohran Mamdani’s platform was his goal to phase out gifted education programs, for example.

> his goal to phase out gifted education programs Gifted education programs for kindergarten. I don't necessarily agree with that either but it's important to be accurate when talking about proposed policies. The man isn't talking about taking away AP algebra. Most kindergarteners still need to be told not to eat their boogers.

There is a well-known effect where segregating kids into gifted VS non-gifted harms the education of the non-gifted while only having a marginal impact on the gifted:

https://ncrge.uconn.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/982/2019/04...

Basically, non-gifted kids learn from the gifted ones. It's that whole, "positive influence from peers" thing.

In the long term, having gifted programs results in a handful of accelerated students and a lot more struggling ones (at the end of mandatory education).

Re: What happens when even college students can't do math anymore?

#47

Post by qsort »

Theodores wrote: post #27

How much mathematics is needed anyway? In the day job, how many people have to use maths skills beyond arithmetic? What about trigonometry? Differential equations? Integration and calculus? To be honest, if I am using Boolean Logic then that might as well be 'advanced mathematics', far beyond the comprehension of non-coders. Even simple trigonometry isn't so simple to most people. Clearly we need some people on the p…

> How much mathematics is needed anyway? In the day job, how many people have to use maths skills beyond arithmetic?

A lot. It's also pretty funny that your examples of useless math are 3 of the most concrete and directly applicable concepts in the entire set of human knowledge. Try, idk, ergodic Ramsey Theory next time.

> What about trigonometry?

Ever heard about FM radio? Or anything that takes a Fourier series? Anything using complex numbers? Game programming? Graphics? Positional encodings in large language models?

> Differential equations?

My brother in christ, literally Newton's second law.

> Integration and calculus?

Ever needed to numerically find the minimum of a function or solve an equation? Newton-Raphson? Literally all of machine learning?

The thing with math is that if you aren't familiar with the concepts then you don't know what you don't know.

Re: What happens when even college students can't do math anymore?

#48

Post by NiloCK »

> “Who is going to trust somebody who got a degree in airline engineering who doesn’t know how to think through a problem without a computer telling them the answer?”

Years ago when I was working in education (Canadian public schools) our school board had a conference ahead of the school year. The keynote was an inclusive-ed researcher / consultant / speaker who told an anecdote of how they had successfully lobbied for a student with a substantive intellectual disability to be registered for the high school physics courses.

Part of the anecdote was pushback from the physics head: "I've known Jake for years. Great kid. But what is he supposed to get out of physics class?"

The consultant's in-anecdote response: "what is anybody supposed to get out of physics class?"

Wild laughter and applause.

---

A surprising number of people in education seem to simply not know that there is substantive and consequential content in the curriculum.

Having never really learned math, they've never really used it. Having never used it, they don't recognize its utility.

They seem to earnestly believe that it isn't an actual tool but a gatekeeping mechanism devised by autistic persons to humiliate normies.

Re: What happens when even college students can't do math anymore?

#50

Post by Aurornis »

triceratops wrote: post #26
Aurornis wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Phase out” means gradually remove. Kindergarten is where the phase out starts. That’s how you phase something out. You don’t take it away from everyone all at once because that triggers outrage. You disallow it for new kindergarten students one season, then next year remove it from 1st grade so they can’t go into accelerated programs and so on. He explicitly uses the phrase “phase out” for this reason. Read more of…

> Read more of his platform documents, including the ones before everything got watered down for his website Do you have links?

It’s been his statement all over: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/nyregion/mamdani-schools-...

The phase out starts with kindergarten and “early grades”. In some places he’s said up through second grade which some assume is an upper limit, but really it’s just the natural length of phasing out gifted programs one year at a time over the 4-year course of a mayoral term due to the necessary delays to eliminate the program after his election date (kindergarten next school year, then 1st grade the next, then 2nd grade)

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