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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

#481

Post by convolvatron »

hedora wrote: post #340
gausswho wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pains I was thinking of largely occupy the transitionary period of a school closing before alternatives are open. When does the deficient school close? After this new school is opened? If not, what happens to students and families that depend on an education in the interim? Who pays for this new school? Must they immediately show improvement or do they get some years to show that their approach is working better?…

I don't think these details are particularly hard to work out: - You can shrink the deficient school to zero by reducing teacher count starting in the lower grades and moving up, and by allowing parents to opt for transfers in higher grades. - The building still exists, so you could reuse it. Or, investors could build a new school. Obviously, there's some lag in the measurement, since it requires a few years of stude…

investors? you're going to raise the cost of primary education to accommodate enough of a margin to attract investors? I thought we were talking about public education so that people in our society can at least read - a task that we're doing pretty bad at. The private school system for the 1% is doing just fine already.

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

#482

Post by [deleted] »

CalRobert wrote: post #61
StateflowsLabs wrote: post #2

"The surge in math deficiencies after dropping the SAT highlights a systemic issue: grade inflation. Without a standardized baseline like the SAT/ACT, a 4.0 GPA from a high school with relaxed standards looks identical to a 4.0 from a highly rigorous one. Paradoxically, removing test requirements harms underprivileged students the most. Preparing for the SAT requires a book and an internet connection. In contrast, bu…

I wasn't underprivileged but I did go to a terrible evangelical high school that had no honors or AP classes (AP bio at a place teaching creationism would've been something else...) and I think I only got in to a decent college on the strength of my SAT and ACT scores. My grades were OK (except in bio, where I refused to acknowledge young Earth creationism) but not amazing.

[deleted]

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

#483

Post by nyeah »

smcg wrote: post #282
RealityVoid wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My grades were OK (except in bio, where I refused to acknowledge young Earth creationism) but not amazing. This is... Wild.

It's very common in US private schools.

I think this depends a lot on how you select the set of private schools you're looking at.

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

#484

Post by make3 »

650 wrote: post #338
make3 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one is saying there isn't, but it's objectively a stupid massive oversimplification of how complex things like a human brain and human learning really are. For one, people used to be a lot better, do unless you think people are actively dumber, you argument doesn't hold. School capabilities also correlates massively with things like access to resources and wealth of parents, and inversely with mental health. We al…

What do you mean people used to do a lot better? As far as I know https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect was a thing until recently. The human body is quite complex as well. Graduating a for profit private college that is aiming to maximize profit, by churning out specific degrees does not mean you are educated. Having a college degree is not synonymous anymore with well educated. The measure (college degree) bec…

Before devices and AI came. we're seeing a reversal of the Flynn effect trend

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

#485

Post by antonyt »

ryukoposting wrote: post #127
collabs wrote: post #49

something that came to my mind as I was reading the comments here -- the thing is that in the quest for professionalism, we have sidelined a lot of people who would be good at teaching in favor of people who are good at jumping hoops. there is a famous quote saying "when the measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure"

Goodhart's Law (that quote) is actually one of the motivations for moving away from ACT and SAT as college entry benchmarks. "Teaching to the test" is a rampant problem in the US. UC is seeing flaws in departing from those benchmarks, though. The thing is, % of students getting admitted to college is itself a measure for schools and school districts. If GPA is how you get kids into college, well... It's not a teacher…

I've never understood the "teaching to the test" argument against these tests. Take a look at some of the math SAT sample questions: https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/digital-sat-samp...

How would you "teach to the test" for these in a way that looks different from just teaching arithmetic, algebra, trigonometry, etc?

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

#486

Post by moi2388 »

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…

Sorry, but I’m calling absolute bullshit. Blackboards are fine for teaching maths according to mathematicians. For students, just look at stuff like 3blue1brown and summer of math and how many people finally get it because of animations and playing with the maths instead of some old dude drawing a formula on a blackboard.

This is like the pi vs tau debate.

I seriously do not understand why maths teachers are so unable to relate to their non-mathematically inclined students

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

#487

Post by tracker1 »

ofjcihen wrote: post #444
throwaway27448 wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be fine with that. It would provide an incentive to care about the bottom 75th percentile along with the spoiled rich kids

Just FYI I was dirt poor and from a crap neighborhood and qualified for and benefited from these AP classes. Not all kids who succeed only succeed because of their background.

Similar.. not dirt poor, but bottom 1/3.

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

#488

Post by xdennis »

julianeon wrote: post #143
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 th…

> This has the unintended consequence of encouraging schools to eject students who are struggling.

You're saying that like it's a bad thing.

I'm continuously surprised by how America, a supposed capitalist country is more communist than some communist countries.

I grew up in Romania, after the revolution, but we still had basically the same education system. Even in communist Romania, if you wanted to get into a good high-school, you had to pass exams, and if you didn't perform well in school, you got left behind.

Everyone understood that if you wanted kids to succeed, you couldn't let the slow kids pull down the smart kids.

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

#489

Post by tracker1 »

throwaway27448 wrote: post #411
tracker1 wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bottom 75th percentile don't advance humanity to nearly the same level. Do you think you'd have the internet or iPads if everyone was capped to the 75th percentile? No. Beyond this, the entire point of higher education is to push those who are able to higher levels, not to drag the 75% along for the ride.

> The bottom 75th percentile don't advance humanity to nearly the same level. Who do you think produces all the value in the world? It's not the people organizing the labor, it's the goddamn laborers. > Do you think you'd have the internet or iPads if everyone was capped to the 75th percentile? No. What do you think we would be eating if we left the world up to the rich nerds? We would have starved many millennia ago…

I said specifically "advance humanity" ... simple labor doesn't advance humanity. It's absolutely necessary, but it also doesn't require a college education.

Advancing humanity is coming up with cures for disease, or inventing useful things. We manage to feed the world with a fraction of the labor it once took to do so. It wasn't the common laborer that came up with solutions that effectively eliminated food scarcity.

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

#490

Post by mos_basik »

SoftTalker wrote: post #199
make3 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

blackboards in uni where you can't do anything but just rewrite everything the prof is writing is a nightmarish waste of time, especially for anyone with any kind of attention difficulties please remove the devices from the students but provide slides

If you have attention difficulties perhaps uni isn't the place for you.

As someone with attention difficulties who eventually decided to leave uni and pursue another path:

I'm saddened that my culture has formed me into a person whose first reaction to your comment was "wow, that's harsh" - because I mentally (and unwarrantedly) translated your comment into something like "if you have attention difficulties perhaps you should just accept that you are a low-value human who is hard class-locked out of many of life's joys and you should (quickly) figure out how to live in the way that least inconveniences your betters."

And my brain does this even though I'm gainfully employed and comfortable and happy (happy modulo general anxiety re climate, politics, war, and future generations)

My second reaction to your comment was more like "bingo, but it sure would be nice to have more clear directions about where one's actual place is." And it sure seems like there might be more such places and they'd be easier to find in a culture whose incentives were slightly (or significantly) different than those of mine (USA).

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