Coryoth writes "The BBC is reporting that students in the UK are being encouraged to drop math at the senior levels. It seems that schools are seeking to boost their standing on league tables by encouraging students not to take 'hard' subjects like mathematics, in favor of easier subjects in which they are assured good grades. The result is Universities being forced to provide remedial math classes for science students who haven't done math for two years. The BBC provides a comparison between Chinese and UK university entrance tests — a comparison that makes the UK look woefully behind."
The Chinese test is actually very similar to the UK one; it's based on a similar triangle (1/rt3/2 instead of 3/4/5). The trig is virtually identical, they're asking for mostly the same angles, and you don't need that much more knowledge to answer it.
I don't think the comparison is that fair - there are plenty of easy questions in UK exams, but you can't pass by answering them all, you need to do the harder ones too. The Chinese one looks harder, but it's not, mathematically - it just needs a bit more knowledge of terminology, and a much better grasp of spatial reasoning.
The Chinese one looks harder, but it's not, mathematically - it just needs a bit more knowledge of terminology, and a much better grasp of spatial reasoning.
So... the chinese one is harder spacially and terminolically, but not mathematically? I would argue that those are a part of math. Furthermore, three dimensions *is* more difficult mathematically than two.
Furthermore, the Chinese question required a proof... the English one, just simple answers. Sure, the math is similar, but the Chinese question requires a much more complete display of understanding.
This, I believe, is due to the high cost of grading non-multiple choice exams -- which is an illustration of how the English (and US) systems choose cost-savings and absolute metrics over educational quality.
Sorry, but I abhor this article, and using these two questions to judge the quality of their respective country's education systems is just stupid.
There are no specifics there whatsoever about how hard the respective questions are seen to be. The question from a first year British University course is a low end question which would be set to check a baseline of mathematical knowledge in the undergrads, something that the examiner fully expect everyone to correctly answer. Because it's a University diagnostic question, I also doubt that cost saving when it comes to marking was ever a deciding factor.
Equally, we don't know if the pre-entry question from China was aimed at the brightest or dumbest of students, though I'd guess closer to the top end.
My point is that it would have taken only a different spin and different questions (say, from the STEP [cam.ac.uk] papers, which are also pre-entry examination papers for Cambridge/Warwick maths applicants) to make a story about how British education was much better than maths schooling in China - only it wouldn't make as good a story.
Mathematically? Not vastly - it's just a logical extension. The real challenge for English students (speaking as an English student) is that even up to A-level, one is not taught to tackle new problems - only the same problems with different numbers. OK, that's exaggerated, but in general, you know exactly what type of question each one is, and exactly which methods to apply. There's very little original thought required. If English students were taught a bit differently - required, for example, to derive methods themselves, then even if they didn't have the knowledge required for the 3D trig question, they could work it out from first principles because it really doesn't (seem to - I've not completed it) involve more complicated maths than basic trig.
On the other hand, the question from the first year university course baffles me, since it is unbelievably simple. So, although similar amounts of mathematical knowledge are required, it is definitely true that the Chinese question is of a more appropriate level. I (heading for university in September) could do it in seconds. I am now going to attempt the Chinese one.
As a teacher in China (private school, the only time I got into the public schools is when I was training the Chinese teachers) I can safely and solidly say that the Chinese education system "sucks".
No time is given to thought or creation. Everything (Really, everything!) is rote memorization. If Chinese students from the same high school are asked to write an essay on a topic then you get back multiple exact copies of an essay that almost (but not quite) fits the designated title, with varying opening and closing sentences used to shoehorn the text into compliance. Parents and students are often angry and puzzled when I grade such items lowly as the essay is one of the approved ones issued by the schools. Exceptional cases aside the students are usually unable to summarize, explain or answer questions on the essay they have just handed in.
This is not even a matter of bad teachers or bad textbooks. It is a cultural belief that knowledge comes from studying the past. That new is lesser and that all answers can be (must be) learned from the legendary sages of the deep past.
Mathematics is marginally more progressive in that textbooks are updated, but even so the students are given proofs to memorize and regurgitate on the test papers.
I am no longer asked to give training sessions for the English teachers of the local schools ever since I flatly refused to acknowledge any benefit in their efforts to teach students English by giving them phonetic books of (badly written, unattributed, incoherent) English short stories and poems to memorize, interspersed with the recitation of English grammar rules in Chinese.
The Chinese test is actually very similar to the UK one; it's based on a similar triangle (1/rt3/2 instead of 3/4/5). The trig is virtually identical, they're asking for mostly the same angles, and you don't need that much more knowledge to answer it.
The difference is that the Chinese version requires you to now simply know (and be able to mindlessly regurgitate) a few facts about mathematics, it requires you to analyse a problem, reason about it, chain together a sequence of logical deductions, and present that reasoning in a clear way. That is, the Chinese question actually asks you to do mathematics, as opposed to reciting facts about it.
Here's an analogy: Two history questions: one asks you to write a short essay discussing the rise to power of Queen Elizabeth I, and the cultural impacts those events had, both at the time, and through history; the other asks you to list dates associated with Queen Elizabeth I, and the names of some famous people alive at that time. One of those is actually testing your grasp of history, and the other is mindless regurgitation of facts that will probably soon be forgotten. The difference between those questions is very similar to the difference between the math questions. Both questions require you to know the same "facts" (names and dates), but only one actualy asks you do any history.
Mathematics is more than just facts, it is about logic, and reasoning and abstraction; just as history is not just names and dates, it a is about how those people events tie together and influence each other, and how they influence us. Don't confuse mathematics with facts about mathematics.
If you look at the base on the Chinese diagram, AD == 2 and DC = 2rt(3). Divide by 2, gives you 1 and rt(3). By Pythagoras, AC**2 == 1**2 + rt(3)**2 == 2, therefore AC == 2.
So it's a 1/rt(3)/2 triangle, which is exactly that "30, 60, 90 crap". I actually didn't find a single "unusual" angle in there (aside from the construction in the last question).
It might be less obvious, but the math is basically the same.
So, really, the complaint against the UK test boils down to: it doesn't require 3D thinking and doesn't have a large number of steps.
The complaint against the UK test is that it requires nothing more than mindless regurgitation of facts. There is no requirement for logical thought and deduction, nor for being able to present formal reasoning about a problem. The complaint against the UK test is that it doesn't actually require you to do any math.
Right. I'm an English student, 18 years old, moving onto University this year.
I've just finished the Maths A2 syllabus (advanced level). The last topic we did in pure mathematics was three dimensional vectors. I've just glanced at the question, but if I'm not mistaken, the first proof requires the following vector law:
|a||b|cosx = a_1*b_1 + a_2*b_2 + a_3*b_3...
Where |n| is the modulus of the direction vector of the vector equation and modulus being the square root of the sum of the three squared position vectors
Where a_n, b_n is the corresponding coordinates of the vectors
And x is the angle of the intersection of the two position vectors, so proof would mean x = 90, therefore cos90 = 0, so you're proving that a_1*b_1 + a_2*b_2 + a_3*b_3 = 0
Mathematics in Advanced Level can actually be very involved. Integration by substitution involve trigonometric identities. The article talks about Chemistry students and a lack of maths knowledge.
I think the problem may lie, judging from my Chemistry advanced level classes, in the fact that a lot of my class mates expect to be spoon fed right answers to questions. They don't like to think on the subject. They become deceived into thinking that Chemistry is just learning reagents and conditions and what goes where, and then subsequently move onto Uni thinking that there will be more of the same when in fact there is more inductive/deductive reasoning. More maths.
In terms of maths skills needed in the sciences, Physics > Chemistry > Biology
Because a lot of history teachers want you to regurgitate facts, rather than learn history and be able to understand it. I love history, I hated my history classes.
I heartily endorse this. If I suck at maths then so should everyone else.
You say this as a joke, but sadly it is actually very true: a lot of people who did poorly at math (often because of poor teachers early on) develop a belief that mathematics is useless as a defense mechanism -- they don't need to be good at math, so it doesn't matter that they are bad at it. The thing is that, while you don't necessarily need to be good at math for a wide variety of careers, that doesn't mean that being good at math isn't still a very useful skill for those careers. There's a good example of someone dicussing this point with regard to math for programmers [blogspot.com]. The real problem, however, is that many of these people who conclude that, because they pesonally never used it, math is useless, go on to cripple math curiccula with mistaken beliefs about what mathematics is, and what it is good for. Even worse, a surprisingly large number of elementary school teachers are these sorts of people, and they teach their hatred and ignorance of mathematics to new generations, crippling their early mathematical development, and repeating the cycle.
Even worse, a surprisingly large number of elementary school teachers are these sorts of people, and they teach their hatred and ignorance of mathematics to new generations, crippling their early mathematical development, and repeating the cycle.
This reminds me what happened to me. In sixth grade towards the end of the year the students met with guidance counselors from the junior high to decide on what classes to take and the one I saw said I should take algebra but because I didn't know how to do square roots he couldn't let me take it. From then until tenth grade I took as advanced a math class as I could without taking algebra. Then about 6 weeks after my tenth grade year started because the teacher I had for math took my homework out once he collected it and ripped it up in front of the class I got pissed off. I grabbed all of my books and stuff then went to my guidance counselor and told her I had to get out of that class. She looked at my grades in math then said I should of been taking algebra. I told her what I had been told before, that I couldn't take algebra because I didn't know how to do square roots, but she said you learn to do them in algebra. Again I got so pissed off, if I had been allowed to take algebra in 7th grade I could of taken AP Calculus in high school.
develop a belief mathematics is useless as a defense mechanism
I'm sorry, but mathematics is useless as a defense mechanism: if someone has a gun on you, you can't put a Riemannian Manifold or anything like that in the way of the bullet, can you?
develop a belief mathematics is useless as a defense mechanism
I'm sorry, but mathematics is useless as a defense mechanism: if someone has a gun on you, you can't put a Riemannian Manifold or anything like that in the way of the bullet, can you?
But you can put a book describing Riemannian manifolds in front of the bullet.
Disclaimer: I'm an American, I have not had any experience with the British education system.
But I noticed something peculiar in this article, there were no examples of students being encouraged to drop or avoid math as the title of both the Slashdot summary and the BBC's article state.
What I did see was that there were observations of Universities having to implement remedial math. Ok, and also that students were choosing not to take hard courses so their GPA remained high.
So what?
I faced the same choices in the American public education system and I chose the hardest courses I could. The result was that a student who took primarily shop courses graduated with highest honors & I graduated with a 3.0 or something. But I already had 11 credits through advanced placement courses.
If you're shocked that students are getting to college and needing to take remedial math, you fix the problem. the problem may be that your system encourages them to avoid math courses so give them an incentive to take them. A simple incentive is letting them know that any of the engineering sciences are going to be further away from their reach if they avoid the classes early on.
The 4.0 student who took shop as his electives is still in my hometown working on cars possibly missing a finger. I'm working half way across the country on computer systems for probably better pay. Ironically, in the end the only thing that matters is if you're happy.
Again, I didn't see anyone person or school official steering them away from math, just the potential problem of the system. Make the consequences known to them and if the student is your child, show them some encouragement!
But I noticed something peculiar in this article, there were no examples of students being encouraged to drop or avoid math as the title of both the Slashdot summary and the BBC's article state. What I did see was that there were observations of Universities having to implement remedial math. Ok, and also that students were choosing not to take hard courses so their GPA remained high.
Perhaps your understanding of the usage of the word "encouraged" is the issue here. It is perfectly normal to say something like, "the entrance requirements for UK universities (which take into account only GPA and not which classes are taken) are encouraging students to drop math classes so they can go to a better school.
I faced the same choices in the American public education system and I chose the hardest courses I could. The result was that a student who took primarily shop courses graduated with highest honors & I graduated with a 3.0 or something. But I already had 11 credits through advanced placement courses.
My story is very similar. I obtained a 3.8 or something while being the only student in my class to take every AP course offered. The high honors went to other students who took easier courses and they probably had a better choice of schools and scholarships as a result. The one really big difference is that in my state some schools had begun correcting for this issue by crediting AP classes higher than regular classes. Taking the same classes and getting the same scores in a nearby city I would have had a GPA of 4.7 (which I only learned after seeing another person's entrance info listing a higher than 4.0 GPA and trying to figure out what was going on).
Root problem we're really discussing is bureaucracy versus an accurate depiction of a student's abilities. One could argue that the ability to properly manipulate the bureaucracy to have the highest scores is an indication, if that is the kind of intelligence a student is supposed to be demonstrating. The sad truth is, in the world of academia being good on paper is usually a lot more important than being intelligent or competent and both students and parents realize that and make choices that reflect that reality, to the detriment or real learning.
Not sure how far back you went to school, but I graduated in 1999. Our school had some stuff in place to help with this. Basically, classes were either Tech Prep, College Prep, Honors, or AP. We were on a grading system that setup all of those such that each level higher was like a letter grade.
For instance, a C in an AP class, counted the same as a B in an Honors class, or like an A in a college prep class. There were no D's so you couldn't get a D in AP and have it work out to an A in a tech prep, but mathematically it was the same.
Now it's arguable as to whether or not that system was truly justified (because if you made made perfect scores on EVERYTHING and had a 100 average in a CP class, you still couldn't compete with B students over in the AP class. Still though, it encouraged anybody who was concerned about their rank to take the hardest version of everything you could.
I think the issue is that high-schoolers don't always have the foresight to take important, basic classes like mathematics which will help them throughout life (budgeting, building a fence in the back yard, painting the house, yes, all need math) There are outstanding examples, like yourself and many others who do choose to challenge themselves. But many high-schoolers, and their parents unfortunately, do not choose to do so. That is the 'so what'. These kids need classes and they don't all have the maturity and insight to pick them for themselves. And jobs after college aren't as cut and dry as you make them... IT people are a dime a dozen. As someone else already mentioned, plumbers and electricians are not, and don't fear outsourcing. (Myself, I was torn between CS and engineering entering college, I ensured my job security by getting a degree in aerospace engineering... there are some things that can't be outsourced, like our military's missile design and development, and designing space hardware... )
This whole situation reminds me of Bruce Schneier's observation [slashdot.org] that when deep quality metrics are unavailable, customers will base their decisions on shallow metrics instead. And then the market will adapt, driving bankrupt anyone who invests in quality that cannot be shallowly measured.
In this example, schools are the manufacturers, students are the products, and parents (i.e. localities) are the customers. The customers demand performance on a shallow metric, and boom, schools adapt to deliver.
I would personally avoid electrician unless you are sure that is what you want to do with your life. My father was an electrician, and being into electronics I made sure to learn the electrical trade as a backup, and it saved me when things got tough, but no longer. Having a very strong electronic and physics background, I can run circles around a lot of the newer electrical engineers, but they have increased the license requirements in my state to levels where I can't work construction again. It is no longer up to the employer to determine your skill level, and your skill level is based solely on the number of DOCUMENTED hours that you have worked under a licensed electrician. Tracing back all the different companies I worked under proved impossible. A lot of construction is short term projects for electricians. Talking to other people, it is getting the same in a lot of states. I have factory certificates that let me completely rebuild 480V electronic motor controls, have wired 2300V gear and motors, and have 10 years of electrical experience, but I am legally not allowed to wire anything in my own house because of the new laws. If I got a job, it would have to be as a helper. I could make better money working a low level retail job with no experience and not being in the weather.
I know that the people working on septic systems in the area have the same problem, you have to have several years of documented work under someone elses license, or you can't even touch your own system. So, I would assume that plumbing is headed the same direction. I understand that it is a good idea to make people get licenses to make sure they know what they are doing, but I think it is a bad idea to assume that someone doesn't know anything, just because they didn't go through an official apprentice program. If you leave a licensed trade for a little while, there is a good chance that you will miss an update to the license requirement and the associated grandfather clause, and never catch back up. Stick with mechanic, welder, or anything that you can get certified but don't have to be licensed and you will have a lot more options in the future.
You are insane...maybe you're fed up with your job or whatever, but I know a mechanic who is doing everything he can to get his son through engineering school (his son is currently a mechanic also), so he can get a white collar job.
Get a clue, go work on a car or in a factory for 8 hours and figure out how much spare time you have when you get home for "some fun programming".
"If I could go back in time when I was starting university I for sure would tell my 18 year old self to have fun programming in their spare time, but to train as an electrician, plumber or mechanic, so they will actually have some job security, good working conditions and some actual spare time to have fun programming in."
I have noticed that many educated, professional people tend to glamorize the "skilled trades." As someone with many family members who are electricians and plumbers, I often have to wonder if the people who dream of "job security and a 40 hour work week" have any knowledge of what a tradesman's work day is actually like.
They typically get up extremely early (5:00 am or so) and work very hard all day, often in dangerous conditions. There is virtually no chance of meaningful career advancement. Union shops are typically more concerned with "time in grade" than actual skill or talent, and you will get to watch as the best, highest-paying jobs get assigned to people with inferior skills simply because those particular workers have been around longer. Eventually you will be one of the old-timers who gets to work the slightly higher-paying jobs, and that's pretty much the extent of your prospects of advancement. The job security that you seem to imagine does not actually exist - as a plumber or electrician you can look forward to spending weeks at a time unemployed, then working 80+ hours/week for two consecutive weeks. Often you will have to travel long distances and live away from your family for days at a time in order to be close to the job site.
I suppose it's one of those "the grass is always greener on the other side" things, but the rosy image that most slashdotters seem to have of a tradesman's life is very inaccurate.
It reminds me of the old joke of the plumber and the math professor:
One professor of mathematics noticed that his kitchen sink at his home broke down. He called a plumber. The plumber came on the next day, sealed a few screws and everything was working as before.
The professor was delighted. However, when the plumber gave him the bill a minute later, he was shocked.
"This is one third of my monthly salary!" he yelled.
Well, all the same he paid it and then the plumber said to him:
"I understand your position as a professor. Why don't you come to our company and apply for a plumber position? You will earn three times as much as a professor. But remember, when you apply, tell them that you completed only seven elementary classes. They don't like educated people."
So it happened. The professor got a plumber job and his life significantly improved. He just had to seal a screw or two occasionally, and his salary went up significantly.
One day, the board of the plumbing company decided that every plumber has to go to evening classes to complete the eight grade. So, our professor had to go there too. It just happened that the first class was math. The evening teacher, to check students' knowledge, asked for a formula for the area of the circle. The person asked was the professor. He jumped to the board, and then he realized that he had forgotten the formula. He started to reason it, he filled the white board with integrals, differentials and other advanced formulas to conclude the result he forgot. As a result he got "minus pi r squared".
He didn't like the minus, so he started all over again. He got the minus again. No matter how many times he tried, he always got a minus. He was frustrated. He looked a bit scared at the class and saw all the plumbers whisper:
Everytime I tell someone I have a math degree they usually respond (proudly) "I Suck at Math!" On occasion they will go into a long conversation about how bad they were at math... I wonder whether it would be acceptable for someone to proclaim "I can't read" and then talk about how they couldn't even read a book to their 4 year old child at night.
Your earning potential in the modern world is largely dependant on your Math and Language skills; regardless on whether you think you are wasting your time because you "suck" at these subjects, you need to learn the material for your own good.
"I Suck At Math" doesn't usually mean (I hope!) innumerate. People with normal literacy skills are no more equipped to write War and Peace than people with normal numeracy skills are equipped to do differential calculus. However, the ability to compose meaningful email messages with correct grammar does not require the author to have an English degree any more than 99.99% of jobs require mathematical skill beyond basic algebra learned as a 14 year old.
This is how China will become the star of the next century. Right now US schools are churing out corporate zombies that are discouraged from taking "uncool" and "too hard" classes like math and science. The Chineese and Indians are slowly surpassing Americans in talent and ability, while US schools are focusing on turing out MBAs.
Sooner or later, they will realize that they don't need the US to manage them, and will proceed to cut us out of the loop and leave us with a bunch of middle-manager types that don't produce anything besides TPS reports.
Note: I know that the article was about the UK, but things aren't any better over here in the colonies. Our school system needs reform, and I don't mean the "No Child Gets Ahead" act.
Right now US schools are churing out corporate zombies that are discouraged from taking "uncool" and "too hard" classes like math and science. The Chineese and Indians are slowly surpassing Americans in talent and ability, while US schools are focusing on turing out MBAs.
Only if you think "school", which is only loosely correlated with "education", is the key to a successful future.
Sooner or later, they will realize that they don't need the US to manage them, and will proceed to cut us out of the loop and leave us with a bunch of middle-manager types that don't produce anything besides TPS reports.
I don't know about you, but the biggest drones I've ever known have been the types get the straight As and live to regurgitate information on school tests. Every decade we have stories like this about other countries that are going to surpass the United States because of how much better they can cough up answers on tests (the stories have been happening since AT LEAST the early 70s in my memory). And yet, it never seems to happen.
Why? I'll tell you why. And apologies in advance for this generalization. I know there are exceptions, but here is where the kernel of truth lies:
F-C students are the drones of the world. The A students are the ones good at memorizing, yet become drones when they get into the real world, because memorization only takes you so far. The B-B+ students tends to be the ones that are cruising through on their way to somewhere else. They don't care enough about school to get As, but are smart enough to get Bs without working hard.
It's in the middle where you have the smart AND creative people. They are the ones that move the world. Say what you want about the United States, but the one thing we do well is breed independence. You can't teach that, it's cultural. It has to be bred early.
Where do you get that from? Have you done some sort of long term study that correlates grades to success? Or are you just guessing from a handful of anecdotes? Are you just trying to justify your own mediocrity by putting down people who worked harder than you? I know many people who got A's through college and grad school and none are drones in the least.
I think attitudes like yours are a serious detriment to modern education. Students shouldn't be trying to get a B, they should be pushing to get the A. I've never heard of anyone in the workforce telling me to give 80% to 85% effort, why should school be different? And if the schoolwork really is too simple for your beautiful mind, then you should be getting the A's and doing extracurricular projects with ease. These half assed attitudes toward education are exactly the problem.
I can't tell you about schools in the UK, but I know for a fact that this scheme would not work here in Ontario. Universities keep an "unofficial" ranking of the academic standing of high-schools throughout the province. This doesn't mean "this school has a really high average!". This ranking takes into account subject focus and quality of education. For example, a high-school that has a large number of graduates with high averages that go on to study in Engineering, Medicine, Physics, Math etc. are given a high rating for academic subjects. Schools with a large number of graduates that go on to study Music, Literature, Art, etc. are given a high rating for the Arts.
You could almost think of this as a normalizing factor (I like to call it alpha). They multiply each student's graduating average by their school's alpha, and it is this normalized result that they use to rank students for acceptance.
Our system doesn't require you to go through technical schools to study technical subjects. Any kind of degree will do. So you have people with a "humanist" highschool degree who have their foundation in latin, maybe even greek or philosophy, or a "business" highschool that comes along with a lot of bookkeeping, commerce and international correspondence, but can't integrate their way out of a sinus.
In other words, the first year of math is pretty much wasted to get those people on par.
Funny enough, if I wanted to study medicine, I'd have to go through courses for latin first to be "allowed", but they don't have to get their math down to study technical CS.
Yes, appearantly math ain't important. Who cares if they know what a matrix is or whether they expect to be able to fly once they know.
We'd do it because poooo widdle junior got his feelings by the purple colored (god forbid we use red, that looks... stern!) F on the Math test. What's ironic is that the grade inflation and self-esteem fanaticism are creating overly confident students. They're built up on their own self-worth and esteem, and low and behold, we're having a problem with people with malignant narcissistic personalities...
...to see that a country that was the home of mathematical geniuses like Alan Turing [wikipedia.org], and inventions like the Colossus computer [wikipedia.org] would discourage students from taking math in high school just for increasing test scores. If they want to improve marks, they should be working harder to teach the students rather than discouraging it. Running away from the problem will not solve anything. England sure has changed a lot over the past few decades...
This news post reminds me of Dumbing Down Our Kids by Charles Sykes. Here's the list:
Rule 1: Life is not fair; get used to it.
Rule 2: The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something before you feel good about yourself.
Rule 3: You will not make 40 thousand dollars a year right out of high school. You won't be a vice president with a car phone until you earn both.
Rule 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss. He doesn't have tenure.
Rule 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping; they called it opportunity.
Rule 6: If you screw up, it's not your parents' fault so don't whine about your mistakes. Learn from them.
Rule 7: Before you were born your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way by paying your bills, cleaning your room, and listening to you tell how idealistic you are. So before you save the rain forest from the bloodsucking parasites of your parents' generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.
Rule 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers but life has not. In some schools they have abolished failing grades, they'll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer. This, of course, bears not the slightest resemblance to anything in real life.
Rule 9: Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off, and very few employers are interested in helping you find yourself. Do that on your own time.
Rule 10: Television is not real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.
Rule 11: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.
The solution is obvious to anyone who actually took the math courses. You weight the grade in math courses differently such that a B in a hard math course is worth more than a A in basketweaving. Make it so the maximum GPA anyone can attain without a math course is 3.5. I know this seems like witchcraft, but trust us math geeks.
Many studuents in the U.S. take higher level math. Not nearly the numbers, but many do. Some of us actually enjoy it and get it. For those that do not "get it" we don't provide an avenue.
When we all got to be 11-14 we stopped caring about school as much...not all of us of course, but many of us start to think about all the other things. From which clothes to wear to sex. School becomes and after thought for many. Then when we get to high school and need to start focusing we've already screwed ourselves.
Part of this I think is to the inadequacy of 1st thru 7th grades. We learn basic arthimetic, how to spell ( I didn't do so hot ), and some stupid life sciences. It is so general and does nothign to prepare us for the harder stuff.
Would it be so hard in the first grade when we propose _ + 7 = 11...fill in the blank to instead say X + 7 = 11. What should X be. When the kid says 4 why not then show them 4 = 11 - 7...x = 11 - 7. Basic algebra is not that much harder then the math we learn in the first and second grades, but we wait till the 7th grades when most boys are getting boners looking at their teachers.
Even the act of calling these classes harder is creating the problem. Why is algebra harder...it really isn't if presented right. Calculas is a bit tricky I'll admit, but I think if kids had a better foundation it wouldn't be that hard.
The same is true with science. I don't remember a dang thing I learned in the 7th grade about science. I think the teacher was boring me with the scientific method or something. Looking back to the thrid grade I don't even think science was on the menu. Shouldn't we have diagrams of atoms on the class and tell kids this is what everything is made of. Our minds where like sponges and we where being hand fead.
The importance of younger and younger education is becoming appartent...if you don't like to learn by the time you hit 10th grade and don't have parents pushing you to anyways you probably are not going to make it. Instead of testing kids we need to determine how much they are enjoying class.
Don't get me started on the A-F grading system:) I don't have the answers to replace it, but I think we should start talking about it.
First, I'm not sure how "representative" these two questions are of British and Chinese education. Perhaps they're comparing a "basic competency" test from a British school to the entry exam for a top Chinese technical school.
Regardless, as a mathematician, I think that the Chinese problem looks "complicated" but not especially interesting. Sure, it seems more impressive than the British one, but they both require nothing more than basic geometry and a bit of trig -- the main difference is that the Chinese problem involves a significant amount of "grinding out" calculations, but it doesn't really require any insight or understanding. It's really not much different than doing page after page of long division, or working out a nasty Sudoku puzzle. It's much more interesting to prove something surprising about a basic geometric figure than to prove something boring about a complicated geometric figure -- that is, unless your sole interest is in cranking out engineers to do "worker bee" calculations like this, rather than trying to learn more about reality and how to calculate unknown things.
The difference is that the Chinese question actually requires you to chain together a sequence of logical reasoning -- and to present that reasoning clearly. I'm not suggesting its an ideal question (I didn't write it), but it is asking for something more than the UK question, which requires little more than mindless regurgitation of fact. The Chinese questions expects you to think and reason and to communicate that reasoning. Ultimately that's what mathematics is. Thus the Chinese question is actually asking you to do some math, while blind recollection of fact that will be forgotten soon after is enough to get you through the UK question.
"Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house."
But very few comments from anyone in the UK. Let me explain, and hopefully redress the balance slightly.
The way the UK education system works is:
At around age 16, you take exams we call GCSE's. These are, in the big scheme of things, fairly straightforward. Most people will take around 10 subjects at GCSE level.
The next year (around age 17), you take AS-levels. Each AS-level is worth half an A-level. Most people will take about 6 subjects.
The year after, you take A-levels. Most people will take 3, though some will take 2 or 4. You don't choose new subjects - you generally carry on doing the things you did well in at AS-level.
Each A-level pass grade (A-E) gets you a certain number of points - obviously, higher grades=more points. AS-levels are worth half the number of points of their equivalent A-levels.
Universities set entrance requirements based primarily on points achieved at A/AS level. They can also demand you do a particular subject for some courses, but that's by no means certain and varies from university to university. Some of the top universities also demand you take another entrance exam.
All of which is well and good. But what I haven't explained yet is the real fuck-up.
There is absolutely no comparison whatsoever between "amount of work required to get a good grade at GCSE" and "amount of work required to get a good grade at A-level". The gap between the two is absolutely huge.
Seriously. Provided you're of reasonable intelligence, you could mess around for 2 years (as I did) at GCSE level and still get reasonably good grades.
Try doing that at A-level and you will almost certainly screw up with a vengeance. This is particularly true in science-y subjects like Maths and Chemistry.
Thing is, a lot of 16 year olds don't take these things seriously. Your teachers can say "You're going to have to pay more attention at A-level" until they're blue in the face, but a lot of people won't really take that on board until it's far too late. So you either drop that A-level in Maths or you fail it.
Now politics comes into play. No government wants to admit that the schoolchildren of the day are failing. But it's a government body which sets the exams. So every year, the exams are a little bit easier than they were the previous year. Not substantially - as a pupil, you probably wouldn't notice unless you were given an exam from 15 years earlier. The unversities notice, though, and they've taken a number of approaches. Some demand an extra entrance exam, others do remedial courses. Such remedial courses have existed for ages - they're called "foundation" courses and are generally a year long. But they are generally only offered for some degree courses, and they seldom get this level of publicity
This is happening in the US too; it's just parents and teachers trying to get students into "good" colleges instead of schools trying to boost rankings. Students here in the US are being encouraged to take fewer, lower-level courses than are offered at their schools because "an A in standard math looks better to colleges than a C in higher-level math." Sadly, this is mostly true.
This is mostly due to the grade-point-average system and due to grade inflation. Colleges often summary-reject students with a GPA lower than e.g. 3.0, without looking at what classes they took. This leads to the common scenario in U.S. education: In many US high schools, A no longer means a student is extremely bright and talented. As are average. A C is nearly failing. Students who aren't getting As complain to their teachers (and engage their parents to complain) as though they're failing the class.
This problem is compounded by the difference in a class's difficulty depending on teacher, school, and date taken. At my school, "IB Calculus I" is taught by three teachers. One doesn't teach well and gives amazingly hard tests. His students tend to have Cs and not know what they're doing (through no fault of their own). One teaches well and is a total hard-ass. His students are probably the most well-versed, but they also have Cs. One teacher gives open-note, multiple-choice tests. His students are generally clueless and have As.
A college has *no way* to tell which students are which, since the class is the same on transcripts. This Is Broken.
Colleges need to take a closer look at what classes a student took and other methods of aptitude testing before they accept or reject students.
China is testing 75 million students for 2 million university slots. The UK is testing 5 million students for a million university slots. The difference between the 80th percentile and the 97th percentile is pretty significant, and has very little to do with the quality of the primary and secondary education systems in either country.
But please ignore this, and proceed being alarmed. It's certainly easier than thinking.
In the UK, the standards-based approach has been bad for education. This is the view of people I know involved in staff recruitment (I work in software dev). It is also the view of people I know involved in the university scene (I live in Cambridge, UK, and many of my friends are staff or postgrad researchers at the university). And it is most certainly the view of people I know involved in teaching at school age (those that haven't simply left the profession in disgust, that is).
The argument about standards-based testing would have merit if the approach worked in practice, but unfortunately, we can clearly see now that school league tables have not had the desired effect. Instead of motivating schools to teach to higher standards, what they have actually done is motivate schools to play the system.
Today, schools will encourage weaker students to take subjects where they are likely to get better grades rather than more difficult subjects, as with mathematics in the case of TFA. Similar things hold for sciences, modern languages, etc. This is caused, in no small part, by giving all subjects equal weight in the statistics (give or take special statistics for things like English and maths, which they play around with every couple of years).
Today, schools will focus on teaching pupils to pass their exams with as high a grade as possible, not on teaching pupils their subject and letting exams simply be a measure of how well the pupils have learned. Revision is all about exam strategy now.
Today, schools will actively discourage pupils from taking courses where they may pass but without gaining a high grade. No grade at all damages the averages less than a D or E grade, and so doesn't corrupt the school's precious "percentage of examinations taken that were passed at grades A*-C" type statistics.
The bottom line is that instead of teaching pupils real understanding in key subjects, and playing a role in their personal and social development along the way, today's schools are simply machines geared to generating exam passes, and today's pupils are simply fuel for the machine. Consequently, you can get straight-A students who don't know their subjects. You get universities inventing their own entrance examinations and/or stating bluntly that they will ignore certain A-level subjects entirely when considering applications, simply because otherwise everyone applying is a straight-A student and the admissions tutors can't distinguish between them. And you get people applying for jobs with great qualifications on paper, who can't do now with an A-level in a subject what someone twenty years older could do after gaining an O-level.
This isn't education, it's product marketing for the New Labour administration. And like much of marketing, most of it is simply lying with statistics, and finding excuses to deny a reality that is self-evident to any qualified observer who takes the time to look.
And as for firing teachers, consider this: so many old-school, teach-the-subject veterans are now leaving the profession (often through early retirement deals because they are much more expensive to employ as teachers than green youngsters fresh from university) that all the accumulated wisdom of generations of teachers is rapidly disappearing. We are being left only with youngsters who have found trendy new methods like synthetic phonics to increase results (no, wait, that one's decades old!) and think they're very clever. Unfortunately, the ones who are very clever rapidly get disillusioned and leave the profession, as several highly qualified and very smart friends who graduated in my university generation all did within two years of starting work as teachers. You don't have to fire anyone in this scheme, because the good people — young and old alike — have already left in disgust.
Glad to see (Score:5, Funny)
Re:It's than the Summary makes out (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think the comparison is that fair - there are plenty of easy questions in UK exams, but you can't pass by answering them all, you need to do the harder ones too. The Chinese one looks harder, but it's not, mathematically - it just needs a bit more knowledge of terminology, and a much better grasp of spatial reasoning.
Parent
Re:It's than the Summary makes out (Score:5, Insightful)
So
Parent
Re:It's than the Summary makes out (Score:4, Insightful)
This, I believe, is due to the high cost of grading non-multiple choice exams -- which is an illustration of how the English (and US) systems choose cost-savings and absolute metrics over educational quality.
Parent
Re:It's than the Summary makes out (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:It's than the Summary makes out (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, the question from the first year university course baffles me, since it is unbelievably simple. So, although similar amounts of mathematical knowledge are required, it is definitely true that the Chinese question is of a more appropriate level. I (heading for university in September) could do it in seconds. I am now going to attempt the Chinese one.
Parent
Re:It's than the Summary makes out (Score:5, Interesting)
No time is given to thought or creation. Everything (Really, everything!) is rote memorization. If Chinese students from the same high school are asked to write an essay on a topic then you get back multiple exact copies of an essay that almost (but not quite) fits the designated title, with varying opening and closing sentences used to shoehorn the text into compliance. Parents and students are often angry and puzzled when I grade such items lowly as the essay is one of the approved ones issued by the schools. Exceptional cases aside the students are usually unable to summarize, explain or answer questions on the essay they have just handed in.
This is not even a matter of bad teachers or bad textbooks. It is a cultural belief that knowledge comes from studying the past. That new is lesser and that all answers can be (must be) learned from the legendary sages of the deep past.
Mathematics is marginally more progressive in that textbooks are updated, but even so the students are given proofs to memorize and regurgitate on the test papers.
I am no longer asked to give training sessions for the English teachers of the local schools ever since I flatly refused to acknowledge any benefit in their efforts to teach students English by giving them phonetic books of (badly written, unattributed, incoherent) English short stories and poems to memorize, interspersed with the recitation of English grammar rules in Chinese.
Parent
Re:It's than the Summary makes out (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's an analogy: Two history questions: one asks you to write a short essay discussing the rise to power of Queen Elizabeth I, and the cultural impacts those events had, both at the time, and through history; the other asks you to list dates associated with Queen Elizabeth I, and the names of some famous people alive at that time. One of those is actually testing your grasp of history, and the other is mindless regurgitation of facts that will probably soon be forgotten. The difference between those questions is very similar to the difference between the math questions. Both questions require you to know the same "facts" (names and dates), but only one actualy asks you do any history.
Mathematics is more than just facts, it is about logic, and reasoning and abstraction; just as history is not just names and dates, it a is about how those people events tie together and influence each other, and how they influence us. Don't confuse mathematics with facts about mathematics.
Parent
Re:It's than the Summary makes out (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:It's than the Summary makes out (Score:5, Informative)
*Shrug* I learned the stuff for the Chinese test at 14 in 9th grade geometry class in a US public high school. Your mileage may vary.
Parent
Re:It's than the Summary makes out (Score:4, Interesting)
So it's a 1/rt(3)/2 triangle, which is exactly that "30, 60, 90 crap". I actually didn't find a single "unusual" angle in there (aside from the construction in the last question).
It might be less obvious, but the math is basically the same.
Parent
Re:It's than the Summary makes out (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:It's than the Summary makes out (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:It's than the Summary makes out (Score:5, Insightful)
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finally (Score:5, Funny)
Re:finally (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:finally (Score:4, Interesting)
Even worse, a surprisingly large number of elementary school teachers are these sorts of people, and they teach their hatred and ignorance of mathematics to new generations, crippling their early mathematical development, and repeating the cycle.
This reminds me what happened to me. In sixth grade towards the end of the year the students met with guidance counselors from the junior high to decide on what classes to take and the one I saw said I should take algebra but because I didn't know how to do square roots he couldn't let me take it. From then until tenth grade I took as advanced a math class as I could without taking algebra. Then about 6 weeks after my tenth grade year started because the teacher I had for math took my homework out once he collected it and ripped it up in front of the class I got pissed off. I grabbed all of my books and stuff then went to my guidance counselor and told her I had to get out of that class. She looked at my grades in math then said I should of been taking algebra. I told her what I had been told before, that I couldn't take algebra because I didn't know how to do square roots, but she said you learn to do them in algebra. Again I got so pissed off, if I had been allowed to take algebra in 7th grade I could of taken AP Calculus in high school.
FalconParent
Re:finally (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:finally (Score:5, Funny)
But you can put a book describing Riemannian manifolds in front of the bullet.
Parent
Interestingly Enough, No Examples Provided (Score:5, Interesting)
But I noticed something peculiar in this article, there were no examples of students being encouraged to drop or avoid math as the title of both the Slashdot summary and the BBC's article state.
What I did see was that there were observations of Universities having to implement remedial math. Ok, and also that students were choosing not to take hard courses so their GPA remained high.
So what?
I faced the same choices in the American public education system and I chose the hardest courses I could. The result was that a student who took primarily shop courses graduated with highest honors & I graduated with a 3.0 or something. But I already had 11 credits through advanced placement courses.
If you're shocked that students are getting to college and needing to take remedial math, you fix the problem. the problem may be that your system encourages them to avoid math courses so give them an incentive to take them. A simple incentive is letting them know that any of the engineering sciences are going to be further away from their reach if they avoid the classes early on.
The 4.0 student who took shop as his electives is still in my hometown working on cars possibly missing a finger. I'm working half way across the country on computer systems for probably better pay. Ironically, in the end the only thing that matters is if you're happy.
Again, I didn't see anyone person or school official steering them away from math, just the potential problem of the system. Make the consequences known to them and if the student is your child, show them some encouragement!
Re:Interestingly Enough, No Examples Provided (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps your understanding of the usage of the word "encouraged" is the issue here. It is perfectly normal to say something like, "the entrance requirements for UK universities (which take into account only GPA and not which classes are taken) are encouraging students to drop math classes so they can go to a better school.
My story is very similar. I obtained a 3.8 or something while being the only student in my class to take every AP course offered. The high honors went to other students who took easier courses and they probably had a better choice of schools and scholarships as a result. The one really big difference is that in my state some schools had begun correcting for this issue by crediting AP classes higher than regular classes. Taking the same classes and getting the same scores in a nearby city I would have had a GPA of 4.7 (which I only learned after seeing another person's entrance info listing a higher than 4.0 GPA and trying to figure out what was going on).
Root problem we're really discussing is bureaucracy versus an accurate depiction of a student's abilities. One could argue that the ability to properly manipulate the bureaucracy to have the highest scores is an indication, if that is the kind of intelligence a student is supposed to be demonstrating. The sad truth is, in the world of academia being good on paper is usually a lot more important than being intelligent or competent and both students and parents realize that and make choices that reflect that reality, to the detriment or real learning.
Parent
Re:Interestingly Enough, No Examples Provided (Score:5, Interesting)
For instance, a C in an AP class, counted the same as a B in an Honors class, or like an A in a college prep class. There were no D's so you couldn't get a D in AP and have it work out to an A in a tech prep, but mathematically it was the same.
Now it's arguable as to whether or not that system was truly justified (because if you made made perfect scores on EVERYTHING and had a 100 average in a CP class, you still couldn't compete with B students over in the AP class. Still though, it encouraged anybody who was concerned about their rank to take the hardest version of everything you could.
Parent
Re:Interestingly Enough, No Examples Provided (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Interestingly Enough, No Examples Provided (Score:5, Informative)
This whole situation reminds me of Bruce Schneier's observation [slashdot.org] that when deep quality metrics are unavailable, customers will base their decisions on shallow metrics instead. And then the market will adapt, driving bankrupt anyone who invests in quality that cannot be shallowly measured.
In this example, schools are the manufacturers, students are the products, and parents (i.e. localities) are the customers. The customers demand performance on a shallow metric, and boom, schools adapt to deliver.
Parent
Re:Interestingly Enough, No Examples Provided (Score:5, Informative)
I know that the people working on septic systems in the area have the same problem, you have to have several years of documented work under someone elses license, or you can't even touch your own system. So, I would assume that plumbing is headed the same direction. I understand that it is a good idea to make people get licenses to make sure they know what they are doing, but I think it is a bad idea to assume that someone doesn't know anything, just because they didn't go through an official apprentice program. If you leave a licensed trade for a little while, there is a good chance that you will miss an update to the license requirement and the associated grandfather clause, and never catch back up. Stick with mechanic, welder, or anything that you can get certified but don't have to be licensed and you will have a lot more options in the future.
Parent
Re:Interestingly Enough, No Examples Provided (Score:5, Insightful)
Get a clue, go work on a car or in a factory for 8 hours and figure out how much spare time you have when you get home for "some fun programming".
Parent
Re:Interestingly Enough, No Examples Provided (Score:5, Informative)
I have noticed that many educated, professional people tend to glamorize the "skilled trades." As someone with many family members who are electricians and plumbers, I often have to wonder if the people who dream of "job security and a 40 hour work week" have any knowledge of what a tradesman's work day is actually like.
They typically get up extremely early (5:00 am or so) and work very hard all day, often in dangerous conditions. There is virtually no chance of meaningful career advancement. Union shops are typically more concerned with "time in grade" than actual skill or talent, and you will get to watch as the best, highest-paying jobs get assigned to people with inferior skills simply because those particular workers have been around longer. Eventually you will be one of the old-timers who gets to work the slightly higher-paying jobs, and that's pretty much the extent of your prospects of advancement. The job security that you seem to imagine does not actually exist - as a plumber or electrician you can look forward to spending weeks at a time unemployed, then working 80+ hours/week for two consecutive weeks. Often you will have to travel long distances and live away from your family for days at a time in order to be close to the job site.
I suppose it's one of those "the grass is always greener on the other side" things, but the rosy image that most slashdotters seem to have of a tradesman's life is very inaccurate.
Parent
Re:Interestingly Enough, No Examples Provided (Score:5, Funny)
One professor of mathematics noticed that his kitchen sink at his home broke down. He called a plumber. The plumber came on the next day, sealed a few screws and everything was working as before.
The professor was delighted. However, when the plumber gave him the bill a minute later, he was shocked.
"This is one third of my monthly salary!" he yelled.
Well, all the same he paid it and then the plumber said to him:
"I understand your position as a professor. Why don't you come to our company and apply for a plumber position? You will earn three times as much as a professor. But remember, when you apply, tell them that you completed only seven elementary classes. They don't like educated people."
So it happened. The professor got a plumber job and his life significantly improved. He just had to seal a screw or two occasionally, and his salary went up significantly.
One day, the board of the plumbing company decided that every plumber has to go to evening classes to complete the eight grade. So, our professor had to go there too. It just happened that the first class was math. The evening teacher, to check students' knowledge, asked for a formula for the area of the circle. The person asked was the professor. He jumped to the board, and then he realized that he had forgotten the formula. He started to reason it, he filled the white board with integrals, differentials and other advanced formulas to conclude the result he forgot. As a result he got "minus pi r squared".
He didn't like the minus, so he started all over again. He got the minus again. No matter how many times he tried, he always got a minus. He was frustrated. He looked a bit scared at the class and saw all the plumbers whisper:
"Switch the limits of the integral!!"
Parent
That's only because... (Score:5, Funny)
Anyway, I didn't take any math in school, and it hasn't impaired my reasoning at all!
Crow T. Trollbot
Insensitive comment alert (Score:4, Interesting)
What's the catch?
Re:Insensitive comment alert (Score:5, Insightful)
Your earning potential in the modern world is largely dependant on your Math and Language skills; regardless on whether you think you are wasting your time because you "suck" at these subjects, you need to learn the material for your own good.
Parent
Re:Insensitive comment alert (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Insensitive comment alert (Score:4, Insightful)
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And this is how... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sooner or later, they will realize that they don't need the US to manage them, and will proceed to cut us out of the loop and leave us with a bunch of middle-manager types that don't produce anything besides TPS reports.
Note: I know that the article was about the UK, but things aren't any better over here in the colonies. Our school system needs reform, and I don't mean the "No Child Gets Ahead" act.
Re:And this is how... (Score:5, Interesting)
Right now US schools are churing out corporate zombies that are discouraged from taking "uncool" and "too hard" classes like math and science. The Chineese and Indians are slowly surpassing Americans in talent and ability, while US schools are focusing on turing out MBAs.
Only if you think "school", which is only loosely correlated with "education", is the key to a successful future.
Sooner or later, they will realize that they don't need the US to manage them, and will proceed to cut us out of the loop and leave us with a bunch of middle-manager types that don't produce anything besides TPS reports.
I don't know about you, but the biggest drones I've ever known have been the types get the straight As and live to regurgitate information on school tests. Every decade we have stories like this about other countries that are going to surpass the United States because of how much better they can cough up answers on tests (the stories have been happening since AT LEAST the early 70s in my memory). And yet, it never seems to happen.
Why? I'll tell you why. And apologies in advance for this generalization. I know there are exceptions, but here is where the kernel of truth lies:
F-C students are the drones of the world. The A students are the ones good at memorizing, yet become drones when they get into the real world, because memorization only takes you so far. The B-B+ students tends to be the ones that are cruising through on their way to somewhere else. They don't care enough about school to get As, but are smart enough to get Bs without working hard.
It's in the middle where you have the smart AND creative people. They are the ones that move the world. Say what you want about the United States, but the one thing we do well is breed independence. You can't teach that, it's cultural. It has to be bred early.
Parent
Re:And this is how... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think attitudes like yours are a serious detriment to modern education. Students shouldn't be trying to get a B, they should be pushing to get the A. I've never heard of anyone in the workforce telling me to give 80% to 85% effort, why should school be different? And if the schoolwork really is too simple for your beautiful mind, then you should be getting the A's and doing extracurricular projects with ease. These half assed attitudes toward education are exactly the problem.
Parent
School Ranking (Score:4, Informative)
I can't tell you about schools in the UK, but I know for a fact that this scheme would not work here in Ontario. Universities keep an "unofficial" ranking of the academic standing of high-schools throughout the province. This doesn't mean "this school has a really high average!". This ranking takes into account subject focus and quality of education. For example, a high-school that has a large number of graduates with high averages that go on to study in Engineering, Medicine, Physics, Math etc. are given a high rating for academic subjects. Schools with a large number of graduates that go on to study Music, Literature, Art, etc. are given a high rating for the Arts.
You could almost think of this as a normalizing factor (I like to call it alpha). They multiply each student's graduating average by their school's alpha, and it is this normalized result that they use to rank students for acceptance.
Aikon-
I know what this leads to (Score:4, Informative)
In other words, the first year of math is pretty much wasted to get those people on par.
Funny enough, if I wanted to study medicine, I'd have to go through courses for latin first to be "allowed", but they don't have to get their math down to study technical CS.
Yes, appearantly math ain't important. Who cares if they know what a matrix is or whether they expect to be able to fly once they know.
In the US (Score:5, Funny)
It's surprising (Score:4, Insightful)
Dumbing Down Our Kids (OT) (Score:4, Insightful)
Rule 1: Life is not fair; get used to it.
Rule 2: The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something before you feel good about yourself.
Rule 3: You will not make 40 thousand dollars a year right out of high school. You won't be a vice president with a car phone until you earn both.
Rule 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss. He doesn't have tenure.
Rule 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping; they called it opportunity.
Rule 6: If you screw up, it's not your parents' fault so don't whine about your mistakes. Learn from them.
Rule 7: Before you were born your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way by paying your bills, cleaning your room, and listening to you tell how idealistic you are. So before you save the rain forest from the bloodsucking parasites of your parents' generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.
Rule 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers but life has not. In some schools they have abolished failing grades, they'll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer. This, of course, bears not the slightest resemblance to anything in real life.
Rule 9: Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off, and very few employers are interested in helping you find yourself. Do that on your own time.
Rule 10: Television is not real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.
Rule 11: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.
Obvious solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is it harder? That is the question. (Score:5, Interesting)
When we all got to be 11-14 we stopped caring about school as much...not all of us of course, but many of us start to think about all the other things. From which clothes to wear to sex. School becomes and after thought for many. Then when we get to high school and need to start focusing we've already screwed ourselves.
Part of this I think is to the inadequacy of 1st thru 7th grades. We learn basic arthimetic, how to spell ( I didn't do so hot ), and some stupid life sciences. It is so general and does nothign to prepare us for the harder stuff.
Would it be so hard in the first grade when we propose _ + 7 = 11...fill in the blank to instead say X + 7 = 11. What should X be. When the kid says 4 why not then show them 4 = 11 - 7...x = 11 - 7. Basic algebra is not that much harder then the math we learn in the first and second grades, but we wait till the 7th grades when most boys are getting boners looking at their teachers.
Even the act of calling these classes harder is creating the problem. Why is algebra harder...it really isn't if presented right. Calculas is a bit tricky I'll admit, but I think if kids had a better foundation it wouldn't be that hard.
The same is true with science. I don't remember a dang thing I learned in the 7th grade about science. I think the teacher was boring me with the scientific method or something. Looking back to the thrid grade I don't even think science was on the menu. Shouldn't we have diagrams of atoms on the class and tell kids this is what everything is made of. Our minds where like sponges and we where being hand fead.
The importance of younger and younger education is becoming appartent...if you don't like to learn by the time you hit 10th grade and don't have parents pushing you to anyways you probably are not going to make it. Instead of testing kids we need to determine how much they are enjoying class.
Don't get me started on the A-F grading system
I'm a mathematician, and I call BS (Score:5, Insightful)
Regardless, as a mathematician, I think that the Chinese problem looks "complicated" but not especially interesting. Sure, it seems more impressive than the British one, but they both require nothing more than basic geometry and a bit of trig -- the main difference is that the Chinese problem involves a significant amount of "grinding out" calculations, but it doesn't really require any insight or understanding. It's really not much different than doing page after page of long division, or working out a nasty Sudoku puzzle. It's much more interesting to prove something surprising about a basic geometric figure than to prove something boring about a complicated geometric figure -- that is, unless your sole interest is in cranking out engineers to do "worker bee" calculations like this, rather than trying to learn more about reality and how to calculate unknown things.
Cheers,
IT
Re:I'm a mathematician, and I call BS (Score:5, Insightful)
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Heinlein on Math (Score:5, Insightful)
R. A. Heinlein
Lots of comments here from US slashdotters (Score:4, Informative)
The way the UK education system works is:
At around age 16, you take exams we call GCSE's. These are, in the big scheme of things, fairly straightforward. Most people will take around 10 subjects at GCSE level.
The next year (around age 17), you take AS-levels. Each AS-level is worth half an A-level. Most people will take about 6 subjects.
The year after, you take A-levels. Most people will take 3, though some will take 2 or 4. You don't choose new subjects - you generally carry on doing the things you did well in at AS-level.
Each A-level pass grade (A-E) gets you a certain number of points - obviously, higher grades=more points. AS-levels are worth half the number of points of their equivalent A-levels.
Universities set entrance requirements based primarily on points achieved at A/AS level. They can also demand you do a particular subject for some courses, but that's by no means certain and varies from university to university. Some of the top universities also demand you take another entrance exam.
All of which is well and good. But what I haven't explained yet is the real fuck-up.
There is absolutely no comparison whatsoever between "amount of work required to get a good grade at GCSE" and "amount of work required to get a good grade at A-level". The gap between the two is absolutely huge.
Seriously. Provided you're of reasonable intelligence, you could mess around for 2 years (as I did) at GCSE level and still get reasonably good grades.
Try doing that at A-level and you will almost certainly screw up with a vengeance. This is particularly true in science-y subjects like Maths and Chemistry.
Thing is, a lot of 16 year olds don't take these things seriously. Your teachers can say "You're going to have to pay more attention at A-level" until they're blue in the face, but a lot of people won't really take that on board until it's far too late. So you either drop that A-level in Maths or you fail it.
Now politics comes into play. No government wants to admit that the schoolchildren of the day are failing. But it's a government body which sets the exams. So every year, the exams are a little bit easier than they were the previous year. Not substantially - as a pupil, you probably wouldn't notice unless you were given an exam from 15 years earlier. The unversities notice, though, and they've taken a number of approaches. Some demand an extra entrance exam, others do remedial courses. Such remedial courses have existed for ages - they're called "foundation" courses and are generally a year long. But they are generally only offered for some degree courses, and they seldom get this level of publicity
Grade inflation. (Score:5, Insightful)
Students here in the US are being encouraged to take fewer, lower-level courses than are offered at their schools because "an A in standard math looks better to colleges than a C in higher-level math." Sadly, this is mostly true.
This is mostly due to the grade-point-average system and due to grade inflation. Colleges often summary-reject students with a GPA lower than e.g. 3.0, without looking at what classes they took. This leads to the common scenario in U.S. education:
In many US high schools, A no longer means a student is extremely bright and talented. As are average. A C is nearly failing. Students who aren't getting As complain to their teachers (and engage their parents to complain) as though they're failing the class.
This problem is compounded by the difference in a class's difficulty depending on teacher, school, and date taken. At my school, "IB Calculus I" is taught by three teachers. One doesn't teach well and gives amazingly hard tests. His students tend to have Cs and not know what they're doing (through no fault of their own). One teaches well and is a total hard-ass. His students are probably the most well-versed, but they also have Cs. One teacher gives open-note, multiple-choice tests. His students are generally clueless and have As.
A college has *no way* to tell which students are which, since the class is the same on transcripts. This Is Broken.
Colleges need to take a closer look at what classes a student took and other methods of aptitude testing before they accept or reject students.
The big difference that everyone will ignore... (Score:5, Insightful)
But please ignore this, and proceed being alarmed. It's certainly easier than thinking.
It *is* that depressing here, unfortunately (Score:5, Insightful)
In the UK, the standards-based approach has been bad for education. This is the view of people I know involved in staff recruitment (I work in software dev). It is also the view of people I know involved in the university scene (I live in Cambridge, UK, and many of my friends are staff or postgrad researchers at the university). And it is most certainly the view of people I know involved in teaching at school age (those that haven't simply left the profession in disgust, that is).
The argument about standards-based testing would have merit if the approach worked in practice, but unfortunately, we can clearly see now that school league tables have not had the desired effect. Instead of motivating schools to teach to higher standards, what they have actually done is motivate schools to play the system.
Today, schools will encourage weaker students to take subjects where they are likely to get better grades rather than more difficult subjects, as with mathematics in the case of TFA. Similar things hold for sciences, modern languages, etc. This is caused, in no small part, by giving all subjects equal weight in the statistics (give or take special statistics for things like English and maths, which they play around with every couple of years).
Today, schools will focus on teaching pupils to pass their exams with as high a grade as possible, not on teaching pupils their subject and letting exams simply be a measure of how well the pupils have learned. Revision is all about exam strategy now.
Today, schools will actively discourage pupils from taking courses where they may pass but without gaining a high grade. No grade at all damages the averages less than a D or E grade, and so doesn't corrupt the school's precious "percentage of examinations taken that were passed at grades A*-C" type statistics.
The bottom line is that instead of teaching pupils real understanding in key subjects, and playing a role in their personal and social development along the way, today's schools are simply machines geared to generating exam passes, and today's pupils are simply fuel for the machine. Consequently, you can get straight-A students who don't know their subjects. You get universities inventing their own entrance examinations and/or stating bluntly that they will ignore certain A-level subjects entirely when considering applications, simply because otherwise everyone applying is a straight-A student and the admissions tutors can't distinguish between them. And you get people applying for jobs with great qualifications on paper, who can't do now with an A-level in a subject what someone twenty years older could do after gaining an O-level.
This isn't education, it's product marketing for the New Labour administration. And like much of marketing, most of it is simply lying with statistics, and finding excuses to deny a reality that is self-evident to any qualified observer who takes the time to look.
And as for firing teachers, consider this: so many old-school, teach-the-subject veterans are now leaving the profession (often through early retirement deals because they are much more expensive to employ as teachers than green youngsters fresh from university) that all the accumulated wisdom of generations of teachers is rapidly disappearing. We are being left only with youngsters who have found trendy new methods like synthetic phonics to increase results (no, wait, that one's decades old!) and think they're very clever. Unfortunately, the ones who are very clever rapidly get disillusioned and leave the profession, as several highly qualified and very smart friends who graduated in my university generation all did within two years of starting work as teachers. You don't have to fire anyone in this scheme, because the good people — young and old alike — have already left in disgust.
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