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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

#571

Post by mrgoldenbrown »

scarmig wrote: post #240
thewebguyd wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The heritability of IQ actually changes based on wealth, so its the other way around. A child from a wealthy family will reach their potential, where one from a poorer family will not. ( https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14629696/ ) A child may have the genetic potential but never reach their potential because of outside factors. One's environment shapes one's brain development. That's why equity is just as important a…

That mistakes the point of education. Schools do not exist to fix every social problem, and demanding they treat fixing every social problem as their number one priority is how we got into this mess of "teach nothing but make sure everyone passes" in the first place.

Ideally, schools shouldn't have to fix every social problem, but in practice, in modern day America, schools are stuck being the backstop. Schools shouldn't have to provide breakfast to kids, but they do because we keep cutting SNAP and other basic assistance programs. So schools need to pick up the slack, because you can't teach a kid if they're starving.

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

#572

Post by indoordin0saur »

ceejayoz wrote: post #30
JCTheDenthog wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is the direct inverse of what's actually asserted by people talking about equity. From the wiki article you linked: >Equity is equality of outcome for all subgroups in society. Equity proponents believe that some are at a larger disadvantage than others and aims to compensate for this to ensure that everyone can attain the same lifestyle.

Note: everyone can , not everyone will . That's opportunity, not a guarantee. Yes?

But what's the rationale in removing advanced math or objective measures of talent such as SAT tests?

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

#573

Post by BobaFloutist »

Bratmon wrote: post #543
SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the evidence claimed is that there aren’t better outcomes for smart kids. Schools that claim they have better outcomes just selected for kids that would always have better outcomes. Like if I claimed my basketball team has better outcomes because I got to make sure all my players were above 6 foot. These 6 foot players don’t necessarily benefit from being in a team with other 6 foot players, but I’m saying…

But surely if having the best possible basketball team is important for national success, then it makes sense to pour more resources into the players with more talent

Yes, but in schools we're trying to get the best overall result, not optimize for one amazing school and a bunch of bad ones.

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

#574

Post by indoordin0saur »

antonyt wrote: post #485
ryukoposting wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I agree that Goodhart's law doesn't really apply to well designed tests.

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

#575

Post by zdragnar »

SoftTalker wrote: post #216
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The processes for delivering remedial classes no longer work at the scale required. UC San Diego published a detailed report of what's happening at their campus ( https://senate.ucsd.edu/media/740347/sawg-report-on-admissio... ): their remedial math placement grew from 32 students in 2020 to 921 students in 2025, 665 of whom placed into an extra-remedial course covering grade 1-8 math which had not previously been ne…

> 32 students in 2020 to 921 students in 2025 Seems easy to explain, high schoolers were not in school from 2020-2022 in most areas, so they were two or three years behind in everything when they got to college.

A senior in highschool two or three years behind should not need extra-remedial classes for grades 1-8 maths during their first year at college, and especially not 600+ of them at once.

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

#576

Post by freediddy »

Catloafdev wrote: post #519
freediddy wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't live in the Bay Area. Schools around the Bay Area are closing, especially in rich areas like Saratoga and Cupertino. That's because parents who can afford it are moving their children to private schools because of exactly what the OP was saying. Schools are incentivized to focus on struggling kids because test scores are how teachers and schools are evaluated. The kids at the high end of the class are liter…

I'm not saying it isn't in your personal best interest to consider switching your kids out of public schooling. The problem is that the public schools need to be fixed, not abandoned. There's a difference between "I choose to send my family to Charter schools because the public schools are in bad condition" and "we should close down public schools rather than fix them to make room for more profit in the child educati…

You fix public education by kicking out the fascist left agenda, that believes that high achievement is only from white supremacy, and lowering standards for Black and Brown kids so that they pass but leave high school completely uneducated.

For reference, over 50% of Black and Brown kids that graduate from high school in San Francisco Unified School District can't read properly. That is about as racist an outcome as you can imagine, creating generations of undereducated citizens, however this was completely promulgated without a single right-wing influence, it was completely an outcome from pure left-wing educators. They also believe math is white supremacy so they restrict high achievers from taking it at lower grades, which caused many of the Asian families to move to private.

And yet, they spent $2 million renaming schools because I guess they thought that was money better spent than educating Black and Brown kids. That is the zenith of hypocrisy and racism.

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

#577

Post by ux266478 »

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…

> 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.

Can you provide a link?

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

#578

Post by akramachamarei »

lokar wrote: post #551
akramachamarei wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would this be fixed buckets? I.e. would you treat 649-650 more predictive than 648-649? Presumably that wouldn't work. I'm sure there's some algorithm that could do this but it seems subtle. Obviously, if a school has a cutoff score bucketing is easy, but with excess applicants ordering becomes necessary. I guess this sort of probabilistic score would induce an order for any given student relative to sufficiently sup…

And you don’t want a 100% cutoff. You need to admit some people just under the threshold since the scores are relative. You need fresh data to keep the model tuned. Some kind of weighted lottery

Allow me to propose a model for this score-based ordering with fuzziness. (Perhaps we can call this problem probabilistic rasterization.)

The final output of an execution of the system, given a static, complete set of applicants is a particular ordering of applicants. Since lottery is involved, there are multiple acceptable orderings for a given input set. The question is to define a set of criteria to classify acceptable orderings, and a desired probability distribution of orderings, which can be satisfied by an algorithm for a maximal proportion of inputs.

For example, given a set of applicants A with score function F, we notate an ordering relation R(x,y) such that, given a limited number of seats, applicant y will be admitted before applicant x. For shorthand, x Possible acceptance criteria for an ordering R may include:

(1) Given some d in the codomain of F (presumably a group), FOR ALL x,y in A, if F(x) + d ≤ F(y), then x Possible criteria for the distribution of orderings may include:

(1) FOR ALL x,y in A, if F(x) = F(y) then P(x y)

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

#579

Post by adrr »

Catloafdev wrote: post #519
freediddy wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't live in the Bay Area. Schools around the Bay Area are closing, especially in rich areas like Saratoga and Cupertino. That's because parents who can afford it are moving their children to private schools because of exactly what the OP was saying. Schools are incentivized to focus on struggling kids because test scores are how teachers and schools are evaluated. The kids at the high end of the class are liter…

I'm not saying it isn't in your personal best interest to consider switching your kids out of public schooling. The problem is that the public schools need to be fixed, not abandoned. There's a difference between "I choose to send my family to Charter schools because the public schools are in bad condition" and "we should close down public schools rather than fix them to make room for more profit in the child educati…

Self inflicted injuries. Bunch of the public schools in large metro areas have removed their gifted and honors programs. Seattle and NY. That will force people into private schools or charter schools. Some districts talked about removing pre-calculus, thats will force kids as well. Dumbing everyone down to the lowest common dominator isn't the solution and public schools should fail if they keep that up. Its banning schools from having separate JV team and varsity team forcing all the athletes into the two teams without looking at ability. Unfair for everyone.

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

#580

Post by organsnyder »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #343
organsnyder wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just giving a shit: it's also the capacity to act on giving a shit. I'm exhausted at the end of the day after getting the kids to bed, and I'm fortunate to be in a stable marriage, live in a large home that my wife and I own, and work a well-paying WFH job. I can only imagine how tiring it must be to not have those advantages. There are the parents doing heroics that I can hardly imagine, and they should be…

How difficult is it? 1. give a shit 2. enroll 3. ??? 4. PROFIT!

There are so many pieces of that step 3 in trying to navigate a school system that isn't accustomed to working with lower-income students.
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