Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average • Hacker News Board

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#71

Post by herge » Fri, Feb 20, 2015, 5:09 PM UTC

woud420 wrote: post #52

japhyr wrote: post #3

I teach high school, and a colleague of mine went to an education conference a couple weeks ago. She was sitting at a table with three elementary school teachers. They were talking about how to gauge student progress when the students had taken a 100-question test, and a 50-question test. None of the three teachers realized that you had to scale the test scores before making a comparison between the two tests. These…

That is pretty sad. Having gone through the Quebec education system and now reflecting over it, I can relate to that student. It seems to me (of course I'm biased but...) that french and history were always seen as more way more important than math classes and that is very unfortunate. I was very lucky to be able to skim through french and math for most of high school. I didn't have an interest in french grammar and…

I don't think you went to the right school. It was made very clear to my classes from sec 3 onwards that taking "higher level math" (436, 536) would open a lot more doors in CÉGEP and university.

On the same topic, I firmly believe that CÉGEP offers the best general education in the world for 17 to 19 year olds.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#72

Post by 3pt14159 » Fri, Feb 20, 2015, 5:10 PM UTC

jordigh wrote: post #45

3pt14159 wrote: post #33

McGill is not a great university, but it isn't poor either. It doesn't have the pride that Waterloo (our MIT) or Toronto (our... Columbia? Dartmouth? We don't have a Harvard or Yale) has, but it's solidly mid-tier. And this does not surprise me one bit. I've met engineers failing out during first year at Waterloo that didn't know the second law of thermodynamics ("why don't we put wind turbines on top of electric car…

> McGill is not a great university It still ranks pretty high: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGill_University#Rankings_and... and they still sell those "Harvard: The McGill of America" sweatshirts every year. https://glasgowuniversityabroad0910.wordpress.com/2009/10/16... That B. Ed. students are coming so unprepared from McGill is quite sad. Its liberal arts programme is also much bigger than Waterloo's, but compar…

Rankings and reputation are interrelated, but not the same thing. For example, rankings punish large class sizes, but well known professors like Larry Smith command 500+ person classes; simultaneously reducing rankings while improving reputation.

I would argue that McGill hits the right numbers, and certainly has a great law program, but it is middle of the road in terms of reputation.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#73

Post by throwawaymsft » Fri, Feb 20, 2015, 5:11 PM UTC

Roboprog wrote: post #5

Before we get too smug, don't let the education majors challenge you to a writing contest :-) A few years after I finished my BS in Comp Sci, I took both the GRE and the CBEST (California teaching test). The percentile ranking skew between the two populations was interesting. A 98th percentile ranking in "verbal" in the engineering group only put me at the 50th percentile ranking in writing in the teaching group. (OT…

It's much better to be 98/99 or 80/99 percentile than 99/50. Engineers at least understand writing enough not to make facepalm-inducing mistakes like miscalculating the average.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#74

Post by outworlder » Fri, Feb 20, 2015, 5:11 PM UTC

klenwell wrote: post #6

Could they figure out how to do it in less than 5 minutes if the stakes really mattered? I agree calculating averages is a pretty basic skill that I find has many day-to-day applications. But this also smells like a lighter version of the trick interview question. Which is to say, I'm sure there are people out there who would smirk at me when they found out I didn't know how to tie a square knot off the top of my hea…

> But this also smells like a lighter version of the trick interview question.

It would be bad if we were talking about children forgetting it after one year. Since this is university students we are talking about, that's horrendous.

If they can't do averages, one wonders what else their basic education lacks. And how they even got there. And what they are worth to potential employers.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#75

Post by brunoqc » Fri, Feb 20, 2015, 5:11 PM UTC

woud420 wrote: post #52

japhyr wrote: post #3

I teach high school, and a colleague of mine went to an education conference a couple weeks ago. She was sitting at a table with three elementary school teachers. They were talking about how to gauge student progress when the students had taken a 100-question test, and a 50-question test. None of the three teachers realized that you had to scale the test scores before making a comparison between the two tests. These…

That is pretty sad. Having gone through the Quebec education system and now reflecting over it, I can relate to that student. It seems to me (of course I'm biased but...) that french and history were always seen as more way more important than math classes and that is very unfortunate. I was very lucky to be able to skim through french and math for most of high school. I didn't have an interest in french grammar and…

> french and history were always seen as more way more important than math classes

Where I went we could chose advanced math classes in the last 3 secondary years.

Most of the students would not take french classes seriously and I think the CEGEP's french standardized exam has a high failure rate.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#76

Post by danielweber » Fri, Feb 20, 2015, 5:12 PM UTC

jordigh wrote: post #36

As a McGill math grad, I must say that it was a running joke in the math department how the Education students didn't really need to know any math (some B. Ed. students shared classes with us during the first year or two). The B. Ed. students freely accepted this joke and were quite self-deprecating about their mathematical skills. Several of them even felt cheated for taking our "advanced" math classes which were, i…

Several of them even felt cheated for taking our "advanced" math classes which were, in their opinion, far beyond anything they would ever have to teach in high school or CEGEP.

Are you saying that people would go to school to be math teachers and say "teach me the math I need to teach my students"?

That's nuts.

I can't imagine a Spanish teacher who only knows the Spanish in the textbook. Or a woodshop teacher who only knows how to make napkin holders. Or an English literature teacher who's who's only read two of Shakespeare's plays. Or a computer programming teacher who only knows one language.

My dad taught civics and American history. I could ask him anything about those topics and he would answer, and love answering. My attention span would run out way before his knowledge and passion ever did.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#77

Post by balls187 » Fri, Feb 20, 2015, 5:16 PM UTC

cs702 wrote: post #4

In Finland, graduate schools of Education admit students only from the top 10% of college graduates.[1] In the US, nearly half of all new teachers come from the bottom third of college graduates.[2] Evidently, Canada is more like the US than Finland. Depressing. -- [1] http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/Why-Are-Finlands... [2] http://www.mckinseyonsociety.com/downloads/reports/Education...

There are a lot more cultural issues at play that effect the education performance of the US compared to Finland.

The US has a far more heterogeneous population than Finland, so directly comparing them doesn't mean a lot.

It would be more appropriate to compare Finland to Quebec, given the two have similar racial demographic breakdowns.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#78

Post by danielweber » Fri, Feb 20, 2015, 5:16 PM UTC

akgerber wrote: post #56

aianus wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does that work? If you're so educated and skilled, can't you make loads more money in industry than teaching snot-nosed teenagers to solve linear equations? Or does making lots of money not matter as much in Finnish culture?

A Finnish teacher at midcareer appears to make pretty much the average wage in Finland: http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/teachers-salaries_tea... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_a... That said, 'Finland's teachers have high status, professional support, and good pay'[0], teaching 4 hours a day for 190 days a year. One can also presumably make that wage pretty much anywhere in the coun…

Earnest: how hard are they to fire?

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#79

Post by pkulak » Fri, Feb 20, 2015, 5:17 PM UTC

And teachers make a lot more in Canada than they do in the United States. If you're good enough at math or science to do anything else, why would you be a teacher? It's a harsh way to look at it, but it's true.

In the US, states have their own teacher certification exams. They are pretty much just testing your understanding of 8th-grade math and science. I know a lot of teachers and I don't think any of them passed it the first time. It's like passing the bar in the world of teaching. People take it up to a dozen times. After they have gone through two years of graduate school.

Re: Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average

#80

Post by sly010 » Fri, Feb 20, 2015, 5:18 PM UTC

Real story:

In Hungary students are rated from 1 to 5, where 5 is the best score and 1 is the worst. During the semester you have multiple tests (both verbal and on paper) each giving you a score between 1 and 5. Your final score is the average of these rounded to an integer. These final scores are the only important measure when you apply to study further, nothing else matters.

I had a [5,5,5] and had to take a verbal test which I didn't prepare for. My biology teacher decided to rate it as "three fourth" and logged it as "3/4". [despite being horribly wrong it was commonly understood that it actually means "between 3 and 4"]

However...

At the end of the semester she calculated my score as:

(5+5+5+3+4)/5 = 4.4 -> 4

instead of

(5+5+5+3.5)/4 = 4.6 -> 5

Imagine a 13 year old student arguing a 50 year old biology teacher in front of the whole class about how to calculate my score properly. I even tried to convince her to downgrade my "3/4" to a "3" and recalc my score (that would yield 4.5) She didn't listen, eventually I was thrown out of the classroom and finished the year with a 4, because of a math error.

Edit: This was long time ago, so I am almost sure the exact numbers are off, but I clearly remember the broken math and the result.