If you live on the West Coast and want your children to be able to read Hacker News, then you better send them to a private school.
Cal State will no longer require math and English placement exams
51–60 of 278 posts
Re: Cal State will no longer require math and English placement exams
#52"At Cal State, about 40% of freshmen each year are considered not ready for college-level work and required to take remedial classes that do not count toward their degrees." This is crazy to me. I'm not familiar with Cal State but do they just let anyone in who applies?
I can't comment on Cal State, but SUNY schools in New York will pretty much take anybody. That doesn't necessarily make them bad institutions, it's just widely varied. I was fortunate enough (or unfortunate depending on how you look at it) to attend a SUNY CC and two private schools. My education at the SUNY CC was far superior to one of the private colleges, while the college I actually graduated from blew them both out of the water. It still surprises me how drastic the differences can be.
Re: Cal State will no longer require math and English placement exams
#53The hope is that these efforts will also help students obtain their degrees sooner — one of the public university system's priorities. Cal State has committed to doubling its four-year graduation rate, from 19% to 40%, by 2025. The implicit message here seems to be, "let everyone pass through the system regardless of how qualified they actually are, but we'll have to lower the bar to keep grades and graduation rates…
When you realize that it's all about equality of outcome instead of equality of opportunity, it makes much more sense.
> It's debatable whether there was ever a time when having a university degree actually meant you had a very high likelihood of being "ready to move into the workforce, ready to move into graduate or professional school."
You're kidding right? That most certainly was the case... many years ago.
Re: Cal State will no longer require math and English placement exams
#54The hope is that these efforts will also help students obtain their degrees sooner — one of the public university system's priorities. Cal State has committed to doubling its four-year graduation rate, from 19% to 40%, by 2025. The implicit message here seems to be, "let everyone pass through the system regardless of how qualified they actually are, but we'll have to lower the bar to keep grades and graduation rates…
As far as I can tell from the article the goal is to reduce the number of classes the students need to graduate. They are not say that that graduates will not meet the graduation requirements for math and english but that they have better ways to get them to learn what they need to learn to graduate. I have no doubt that every extra class that a student needs to take makes it less likely that he/she will graduate. It seems like the change is positive.
The real problem is that high schools aren't preparing some students for college. That's really where things need to change.
Re: Cal State will no longer require math and English placement exams
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course all kinds of people can land in these remedial classes if they are not prepared. Now, I ask you, which schools do a better job of preparing students for college level work, the schools white kids get to go to or the schools black kids have to go to? If you are wondering, look at the AP classes offered at say Palo Alto high school vs Crenshaw high school: http://schools.latimes.com/school/los-angeles/crensha…
>Now, are you saying we shouldn't let bright kids from bad schools get into college? Show me where I implied that.
I was just using your technique of putting words in someone else's mouth, with a question mark at the end. See GP post.
Re: Cal State will no longer require math and English placement exams
#56The hope is that these efforts will also help students obtain their degrees sooner — one of the public university system's priorities. Cal State has committed to doubling its four-year graduation rate, from 19% to 40%, by 2025. The implicit message here seems to be, "let everyone pass through the system regardless of how qualified they actually are, but we'll have to lower the bar to keep grades and graduation rates…
No, it's that empirically, the delays imposed by the existing requirement to complete remedial classes before taking any other classes has been counterproductive. They aren't lowering standards to pass substantive classes, the are requiring different mechanisms for closing the gaps that have worked better than the current CSU remediation model in other institutions.
Re: Cal State will no longer require math and English placement exams
#57"At Cal State, about 40% of freshmen each year are considered not ready for college-level work and required to take remedial classes that do not count toward their degrees." This is crazy to me. I'm not familiar with Cal State but do they just let anyone in who applies?
I went to a Cal State university - it was a joke.
Would be happy to hear more about your experience. In what respect?
Re: Cal State will no longer require math and English placement exams
#58There's just no reason to get a degree from any but a few schools anymore. Employers have already caught on, and this is a move in the wrong direction. If they'll give you a degree for free, fine, but no one should be taking out loans or paying a dime for a school without making sure diplomas from that schools are still worth anything to employers. There are schools where a CS degree from them makes you look worse th…
This isn't about degrees for free, it's about replacing a broken model of remediation with newer models that have been shown to work better at getting people ready to pass the same substantive classes better and with less delay.
Re: Cal State will no longer require math and English placement exams
#59Let's just drop meritocracy all together. Everything is subjective, right?
Seriously though, I'm worried about our future as a spieces. The knowledge and technologies we have developed, which require nurturing. We nurture modern civilization by making sure the smartest get into positions where they can express their intellect. Part of that process needs to be keeping rigours standards in place when it comes to education.
Re: Cal State will no longer require math and English placement exams
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
If someone is studying computability or formal languages or algorithms or ML in a CS department, they don't really need to be programmers.
My sister is a graduate student in Neuropsychology. As part of her graduate program, she was required to take a programming class; because programming is an important tool that she needs to be able to use to do her research. Simmilarly, most research in CS will involve using programming as a tool, even if it is not the final product. The problem is that in CS, no one thinks to require the graduate students to take ba…
> As part of her graduate program, she was required to take a programming class; because programming is an important tool that she needs to be able to use to do her research.
But for students focusing in complexity, they may not need to program at all, so naturally it makes sense there would not be much emphasis on programming.