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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

#611

Post by JuniperMesos »

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…

> 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 education industry"

The case for closing down public schools and replacing them with a for-profit child education industry is that it's systematically easier for all parents to get a better education for their children by abandoning bad schools and only paying good schools in a free market, than it is for parents to participate in the mass political process of fixing public schools, which are government institutions intended to serve a broad mass of people.

Also because different parents have different ideas about what constitutes a good education for their kids, different private schools can differentiate themselves in the marketplace by specializing in different styles of education and attracting different student bases; rather than parents having to democratically coordinate to enact the changes they want in the same mass-scope public school system (and fight against rival groups of parents who want incompatible things).

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

#612

Post by constantius »

jdw64 wrote: post #458
MyHonestOpinon wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. The rich kids will always have an advantage. But let me ask why are we playing this like a zero sum game? Do we not have enough education for anyone who is willing to put up the work?

The ideal of education is holistic growth, but functionally, it's a positional good. An Ivy League, MIT, or UC Berkeley degree is valuable precisely because others do not have it, not simply because you do. Add to this the fact that global productivity is maxed out, yet access to the tools of production remains highly restricted. This is the core issue. If the number of good jobs is fixed, hiring is a zero-sum game.…

So your post got flagged, and I wonder what was controversial about it.

Wouldn't you agree that this zero-sum quality ultimately stems from increasing wealth inequality?

While scarcity is a reality indeed, more egalitarian societies, where life can be satisfactory whether you've studied with billionaire kids or in your town's vocational college, the issue is much lesser.

I'd argue measures that reduce wealth inequality would be the solution.

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

#613

Post by ryukoposting »

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?

With standardized testing, you lose a lot of detail about how the student got to their answer. Nuance is lost. But yeah I agree, with math it seems like that isn't such a big problem compared to, say, reading or science.

It does create some perverse incentives, to be sure. "Test mills" are an ongoing issue, especially in urban areas, in both public and charter schools. Basically admin guts all liberal arts programs, theater, music, history, etc, institutes some draconian discipline system, and kids just do practice tests over and over until they graduate from high school. Great standardized test scores, and virtually zero practical value to be had from the education the kids received. I know someone who got a 30 on the ACT and didn't learn that Africa was a continent and not a country until 9th grade.

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

#614

Post by kyboren »

ryandamm wrote: post #591
kyboren wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with everything you wrote about maladministration of California's math curricula, but: > since Prop 13 in the 1970s, California has been 49th or 50th in per-pupil funding for public education (excluding college, I think). This is totally incorrect. California ranked 6th in total per-pupil spending in 2023[0]. California has a formulaic mandate on K-12 funding amounts (Prop 98) and schools are funded through b…

This is interesting news to me, thank you. I'm curious if the per-pupil spending includes locally raised funds; the reality in California is that the state level funding is poor, and districts that are above some threshold don't get enough funding to operate. So public schools function as local charities and inevitably have fundraising arms to make up the shortfall. This has been true since at least the 1980s when I…

> the reality in California is that the state level funding is poor

No, it really isn't. Again, just mandated Prop 98 state spending on K-12 is $127.1B for next year, with this year's enrollment at just about 5.8 million students. That works out to $21k per pupil not including all discretionary state spending, federal spending, and other local funding (like the fundraising you're talking about).

> districts that are above some threshold don't get enough funding to operate

Since 2013, under the LCFF, districts with a very high amount of property tax revenue only get "basic aid" from the state, but this is only a small fraction of school districts. Anyway the funding disparity is the entire point of the LCFF: The idea is to give rich districts less and poor districts more.

It's frustratingly difficult to get my fellow Californians to understand that our schools are, if anything, over-funded, and that throwing ever more money into the black hole is unlikely to improve our abysmal outcomes.

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

#615

Post by dyauspitr »

jltsiren wrote: post #604
dyauspitr wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Standardized testing is usually foiled by Goodhart's law. If the outcomes of the tests matter, schools start focusing on test prep, at the expense of actual education. It's probably necessary to have one set of standardized tests for college admission, but otherwise they should be abolished, because they are a terrible idea. Separation of responsibilities is the actual key to good public schools. At least to the exte…

Test prep and actual education don’t have to be all that different. If the test is hard and comprehensive (ie random enough) preparing for the test will teach you a lot. You see this with the SATs where people preparing for it digest 3000+ vocabulary words, write tons of sample essays and really dig into grammar. Same with the MCATs, foreign doctors spend 1-2 preparing for the MCATs and because the tests are so comprehensive you end up learning everything you need to.

Also, I think another very important thing is Asian students rely very little on the quality of the teacher. A lot of the work is self work and extra curricular tuitions. The average Asian is done with school and then goes to two or three hours of additional tuition. This isn’t like the bottom 5%. This is 95% of the student body.

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

#616

Post by jdw64 »

constantius wrote: post #612
jdw64 wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ideal of education is holistic growth, but functionally, it's a positional good. An Ivy League, MIT, or UC Berkeley degree is valuable precisely because others do not have it, not simply because you do. Add to this the fact that global productivity is maxed out, yet access to the tools of production remains highly restricted. This is the core issue. If the number of good jobs is fixed, hiring is a zero-sum game.…

So your post got flagged, and I wonder what was controversial about it. Wouldn't you agree that this zero-sum quality ultimately stems from increasing wealth inequality? While scarcity is a reality indeed, more egalitarian societies, where life can be satisfactory whether you've studied with billionaire kids or in your town's vocational college, the issue is much lesser. I'd argue measures that reduce wealth inequali…

I'm from Korea, and people often flag my comments as 'GEN AI' I really don't care about the reports. It just happens because non-native speakers tend to rely on the same formal dictionary words that LLMs use. Regardless of that, here is my take: the extreme widening of wealth inequality is a serious systemic issue

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

#617

Post by lokar »

streptomycin wrote: post #608
lokar wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, but they should be admitted into some special program. Like, turn up in July for 3 months of catch-up instruction 4 hrs a day.

That's exactly what they did at my college (non-California state school) 20 years ago. Special program for students from poor high schools who otherwise wouldn't be admitted, where they came in the summer before freshman year and had to pass some prep classes first. IDK what the actual long term results were, but seems like a better idea than nothing.

If nothing else they could flame out of the pre-freshman classes before wasting too much time and $

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

#618

Post by joveian »

buellerbueller wrote: post #203
nradov wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've got to be kidding. Writing longhand was always a miserable experience for me no matter what technique or pen I used. Typing on a keyboard is so much faster and more fluent.

>Typing on a keyboard is so much faster and more fluent. ...and studies show, inferior for recall: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-writing-by-ha...

Interesting article, although it does raise a few questions for me. I can see handwriting being uniquely important when learning to read but beyond that it would seem to just be suggesting that directly translating the same note taking to using a direct-mapped keyboard is a bad idea. But what about more complex input methods like for Chinese or a chording stenograph? Is there a distinct point where brain activity pops to wider activity? Do other computer based activities like correcting typos or non-computer activities like wiggling your finger to draw the shape of the first letter of each word engage more activity similar to handwriting? If needing a summary is the main difference, that seems like an easy thing to incorporate into digital note taking.

Learning to read I can see that handwriting directly relates but beyond that it seems like there must be more effective ways to engage with the material than just making the writing method more complex. I'd say the same about lectures; interacting with someone who understands the material can be quite valuable but spending a lot of time listening to the same thing that could be read can't be the most effective way to learn even if the complexity of the transmission does help some with memory. I hope this type of research goes beyond basic handwriting vs typing and looks into the effectiveness of additional ways of engaging with information.

For example, I like "don't guess" as a major principle of learning (per B.F. Skinner) to cultivate awareness of how reliable your memory is and avoid remembering incorrect answers as much as possible. The process of determining and looking up things that you aren't fairly certain about seems like something that could also engage wider brain activity and do so in a way that is more directly relevant to what you are learning.

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

#619

Post by vkou »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #225
vkou wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a shortage of students who have a grasp of elementary school math, who apply to UC? Instead of admitting the captain of the ping-pong team (who can't count past 21 - or past ten without pulling off his boots), maybe admit any one of the students who... Did not have the extracurricular pedigree, but actually applied themselves and passed Math 12? Surely, there's more than a few hundred of the latter in Califo…

You're misunderstanding the problem. It's not that the UCs are admitting a bunch of special exceptions who failed out of high school math; these are people who got decent grades and are supposed to know the material.

Well, then. In that case, the simple solution is to admit more students in the first year, and aggressively flunk out the ones whose performance does not match their high school grades.

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

#620

Post by sometimelurker »

trunnell wrote: post #566
niwtsol wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you elaborate on the reasoning they "strongly discourage math outside of school"? I'm genuinely curious how that would be a stance they take.

We've heard: - It can make kids "overconfident when they see material they think they already know, so they end up not engaging." - Some programs, particularly RSM, are criticized for valuing speed over depth. Current culture for K-8 math teachers is the opposite, they value depth over speed. Left unsaid: - It can make the teacher's job harder when the class has a wide span of abilities. - Current teaching culture is…

> valuing speed over depth

have you shown them the lengths of the homeworks RSM gives? vastly more depth than any hw a public school would give imo.

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