Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

latimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

801–810 of 925 posts

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

#801

Post by rahimnathwani »

isityettime wrote: post #735
trunnell wrote: post #435

I'm in the SF bay area w/ middle school and high school age kids. Between San Jose and San Francisco, 15%-30% of kids are in private school (it's 30% in SF where the public schools are extra dysfunctional). That's far above the California statewide average of 8% in private school. Among our peers, somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 of kids are doing advanced math outside of school, typically either Russian School of Math…

> So by decelerating math in the public school, incentives were created for privileged parents to take matters in their own hands and put their kids into programs that accelerate math education far beyond what public schools used to do. We now have a system that is creating even wider disparities in outcomes. Afaik China has widely carried out this same experiment to basically the same effect, across multiple discipl…

Then they outlawed after school tutoring.

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

#802

Post by badosu »

remarkEon wrote: post #796
genxy wrote: post #741

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one has to suck at math. Any human can learn the majority of skills.

This is not true. Math aptitude is not evenly distributed.

Good education, where one is imbued with motivation to learn and develop knowledge. That's not evenly distributed.

Anybody can learn math.

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

#803

Post by slowking2 »

tptacek wrote: post #736
fsckboy wrote: post #732

Earlier quoted context omitted.

saying things doesn't make them true, but studying them informs what you should think and say. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5985927/ Intelligence — the ability to learn, reason and solve problems — is at the forefront of behavioural genetic research. Intelligence is highly heritable and predicts important educational, occupational and health outcomes better than any other trait. Recent genome-wide associa…

I don't even have to argue with your cite (and I'm not a Plomin fan), since the numbers he's giving drastically slash heritability estimates from just a few years prior. If we were having this discussion 5 years ago, the claim would be that intelligence is 80% heritable. Now the foremost academic proponent of hereditarianism arguably concedes it could be as low as 20%. Molecular genetics numbers put it lower, in the…

Where are you getting 20% from? That's not what Plomin is saying in what you are replying to. Are you confusing the fraction of GWAS estimate heritability out of total heritability (10/50 = 20%) with a top or bottom bound?

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

#804

Post by BrenBarn »

There is a real doozy of an issue bured in there, which was reported when it originally happened but I felt it never got the public censure it deserved:

> But the vote went against the UC Academic Senate’s own Standardized Testing Task Force, which said use of test scores could actually boost admission rates for students from disadvantaged backgrounds and school districts.

The UC actually commissioned a faculty panel to investigate whether requiring test scores undercut the changes of disadvantaged students, and the panel found the opposite effect, and yet the administration got rid of the tests anyway. This is the clearest indication to me that the policymakers are entirely concerned with image and symbolism and not with any actual attempt to help anyone. They did the exact thing that their own people told them would hurt the very people they were ostensibly trying to help.

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

#805

Post by stellalo »

ziofill wrote: post #708

I can’t help comparing this to the system I grew up in (Italy), which is vastly different and it seemingly produces very good graduates. University was free and there was no test for enrolling in STEM degrees, and you could retry exams every semester as much as you wanted to. But goddamit exams were HARD and if you weren’t prepared enough you would keep failing until you gave up. We weren’t entitled because we weren’…

Oral exams, what an experience

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

#806

Post by slowking2 »

userbinator wrote: post #704
tptacek wrote: post #700

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And, depressingly from an egalitarian perspective, there is a strong genetic correlation. No, there isn't. Hope that helps your mood!

Yes there is. Stop drinking the woke-aid. Look at where advanced civilisations started, and it's clear as night and day.

This doesn't have that much to do with the genetic heritability of intelligence, which is a measurement in proportion to environmental variability. Civilizations with farming, metallurgy, etc. showed up independently in many places although at highly varying times due to human dispersal. You can also see that intelligence isn't all its cracked up to be from an evolutionary point of view since it sometimes goes down. Has it gone up in most places over the last few thousand or ten thousand years overall. I think so, read the recent Reich paper (EDIT: this Reich https://reich.hms.harvard.edu/publications). But it doesn't only go up all the time.

Disease factors were probably the biggest factor in selection until very recently (and maybe now is just a temporary blip before a return to the historical pattern). Disease almost wiped out the Native Americans and strongly held sub-Saharan Africa back.

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

#807

Post by tomhow »

throwawaypath wrote: post #668
weakfish wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

Please don't comment like this on HN. These guidelines make it clear that this kind of participation is unacceptable:

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#808

Post by tomhow »

weakfish wrote: post #542
throwawaypath wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

Please don't post inflammatory comments on HN, even if the comment you're replying to is offensive. The guidelines make it clear we're here for curious conversation, not battle. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#809

Post by vasco »

try-working wrote: post #787
ziofill wrote: post #708

I can’t help comparing this to the system I grew up in (Italy), which is vastly different and it seemingly produces very good graduates. University was free and there was no test for enrolling in STEM degrees, and you could retry exams every semester as much as you wanted to. But goddamit exams were HARD and if you weren’t prepared enough you would keep failing until you gave up. We weren’t entitled because we weren’…

I studied engineering in Sweden. One of our courses had an 80% failure rate. A world of difference from Harvard where the average grade is A.

Similar experience on differential calculus courses in an engineering university in portugal. Some people would try a couple of times and then some even switch university to an easier one so they could actually get a degree, or outright give up. I remember 210 guys and 10 girls started my course. Only about 25 guys and 5 girls finished the 5 year degree "on time" - most people don't give up but they will get delayed by a semester up to a year or two due to failing some classes on the first try.

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

#810

Post by vasco »

genxy wrote: post #754
vnce wrote: post #752

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and I standby genxy’s comment. It was always a question of motivation, not ability.

And motivation was often impeded by either trauma or not finding a way to make it relevant to the student. Those are prereqs for learning anything. The common denominator for people that are good at something is that they liked it, so they did it more.

I know plenty of people that went through an engineering degree with me that do not like math, but they are competent at all the way up to what an electrical engineer needs to know, which is not research level math, but what most people would call advanced. I would never say I "like" math for example but I've always thought about it as something important to learn and get decent at to succeed in life.

I have way more interest in history and philosophy but the way I figured is I can learn all of that on my own because all you need is to read. Math is actually hard so I better get "trained by someone" at it.

Post reply on HN