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

latimes.com

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

#621

Post by jltsiren »

dyauspitr wrote: post #615
jltsiren wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 compr…

You are confusing education with test scores.

The ability to solve hard problems in artificial test conditions is a useful proxy for having learned what is being tested. But only if the test itself is irrelevant. If your future depends on test scores, most people start focusing on what is being tested over what they are actually supposed to learn.

All measurements are proxies. They never measure the thing they are supposed to. That's the essence of Goodhart's law. When people focus on what is being measured, they usually perform worse on whatever it was supposed to measure.

The actual quality of education is your overall contribution to the society over the expected baseline. It can never be measured for individuals but only in aggregate. And only decades after the fact.

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

#622

Post by [deleted] »

Levitz wrote: post #451
throwaway5752 wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funnier because it's old, failed policy that they are recycling without being aware of it because they are ignorant. All old things really do become new again.

Did that "old, failed policy" yield better results than the current one?

[deleted]

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

#623

Post by borski »

rayiner wrote: post #552
jnovek wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is so much context here that you’re missing — have you ever been poor before?

Everyone in my wife’s family grew up poor and many still are. My wife lived in a converted barn for part of her childhood. Regardless, the data is the data! Only 10% of parents on SNAP work full time.

Data without context is not useful.

  Data (alone) = Noise
  Data + Context = Information
  Experimentation + Error = Experience
  Information + Experience = Knowledge
  Knowledge + Humility = Wisdom

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

#624

Post by throwaway5752 »

wagwang wrote: post #356
throwaway5752 wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funnier because it's old, failed policy that they are recycling without being aware of it because they are ignorant. All old things really do become new again.

It's the current set of policy that is failing. All literacy and math score are down across the entire country and theyve been going down for the past 10 years.

It is smartphones and social media.

The decline is across demographics, across geographies, and correlated with an increase young mental health issues.

The answer is staring us in the face, quite literally, as we type this. We put a cheating and dopamine producing machine in the hands of children without any regulations. Of course it is harming their academic performance.

Ask a football coach if there kids are going to play tackle football and you'll be surprised how often you they won't let them. Ask an educator or psychologist at what age they give smart devices to their kids, and I'd guess it is 3-4 years above the median.

The policy doesn't matter when we're actively damaging the brains of children, which are not fully developed.

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

#625

Post by wagwang »

habinero wrote: post #461
wagwang wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people who benefit are not the wealthy, who can afford to simply buy a house in the school district of their desire, but simply middle class parents who care about their kids.

Poor people care about their kids, too. They're just struggling to keep a roof over their heads and food on their plates instead of worrying about what college their kids are going to get into.

Assuming we're talking about the US, this is just not true. If you are actually poor, then the government has incredibly generous programs to put food and shelter over your head. Where I live, the city government will literally paid for your daycare and you can enroll in lotteries to buy homes at 1/10th the regular price.

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

#626

Post by dyauspitr »

jltsiren wrote: post #621
dyauspitr wrote: post #615

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 compr…

You are confusing education with test scores. The ability to solve hard problems in artificial test conditions is a useful proxy for having learned what is being tested. But only if the test itself is irrelevant. If your future depends on test scores, most people start focusing on what is being tested over what they are actually supposed to learn. All measurements are proxies. They never measure the thing they are su…

I think you’re drawing too much of a distinction here. Education can be just learning for the test. What you’re being tested on can be the entirety of what you need to know. It’s working extremely well for all of Asia. There’s no reason we can’t take away something from that.

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

#627

Post by joveian »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #124
zdragnar wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they not have remedial classes for these students? It's been more than 20 years, but back in my day, if you weren't ready for entry level classes (but still got in to university) you took remedial classes first.

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…

It seems like the current situation means that processes need to change in a major way somewhere (maybe everywhere) but this report (and the letter) seem to be focused on doing as little as possible to get their part of the system back to the way it was. With this many students it seems like larger structural changes like a remedial year should be considered or else quickly redesign the system in other ways like reducing the focus on directly attending university after high school.

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

#628

Post by DerekL »

zdragnar wrote: post #575
SoftTalker wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

“High school” is two words.

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

#629

Post by no-name-here »

throw9494krrj wrote: post #78
scarmig wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself. Treating universities as a system, it is deeply problematic and even immoral to saddle students with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt to enter programs that it is entirely predictable that the student will fail at. The solution is to use all the methods available to predict how successful the student is likely to be after matriculating, not to w…

No, moral is to make student loans subject to regular bankrupcy. Student should be also able to get refound, if university misrepresents or lies about their job prospects! Universities are business as any other!

> No, moral is to make student loans subject to regular bankrupcy.

Aren't the issues that there is no collateral/nothing to repossess? What kind of issuer would give a 5 or 6 figure loan with no collateral and nothing to repossess?

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

#630

Post by vkou »

rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote: post #305
vkou wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The universities can just fail them out and admit people who barely missed the admission bar in their place. Many of them will make it. What's wrong with making universities easier to get into, but harder to stay in?

Costs the failing students money and mental health issues, which are bad, if you care about those things

I care about those things but not enough to keep people who can't do the curriculum taking up a university slot.
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