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College Students Lack Literacy
Frr writes to tell us that CNN has a rather disturbing confirmation of what many of us have already seen in practice. In a recent literacy study it was found that "more than half of students at four-year colleges -- and at least 75 percent at two-year colleges -- lack the literacy to handle complex, real-life tasks such as understanding credit card offers." The literacy study took a look at three different type of literacy: analyzing news stories and other prose, understanding documents, and having basic math skills needed for checkbooks or restaurant tips.
Credit card offers are considered a complex task? What kind of world is this turning into?
My college studys lacked lottery traning, and so farr, I havent one teh lottery yet.
Formal contracts & documents should be written in Internet slang. "If you fail to pay your credit card debt we will take your car lol"
LINUX ONLINE POKER: Linux Poker
Patience... Not Literacy... It takes too much time to read the fine print on those damn offers... Kids these days are too busy getting drunk....
God Bless College Life
-nick
I should have went to a US college. I probably could have graduated there.
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
I, for one, am not surprised. I never read __less__ books in my life than when I was in college. I was much too busy trying to get the course busy-work done to do any reading, or much learning for that matter.
I've been reading stories like this for 25 years. I bet it's been happening forever, the new guys are never as good as we were!
Just pay your damnned bill on time, and you don't need to worry about the rest
My wife is a Graduate Student at one of the Ivies, and it is amazing how many of the students struggle with putting sentences together in their lab reports. We've found that they manage to construct some "sentences" that would make one of my elementary school teachers cry. It's amazing that these people have the SAT scores to attend this type of school. Apparently the SAT's verbal component doesn't measure ability to construct sentences.
Oh, wait, you mean that by including all this concern for non-academic characteristics like sports, diversity (of background, not ideas), and the ilk our schools have lost the ability to test for the right skills?
I'm sure this thread will fill essentially instantly with anecdotal stories about how dumb everyone was at our colleges. Yes, great, whatever.
Frankly, I wish everyone could have seen the great 20/20 special on our school system last Friday. We're crippling our ability to compete internationally by focusing on the wrong things: we don't want kids to feel bad, so we've got helicopter parents; teachers don't want to worry about getting fired, so we've got horrible teachers' unions; we aren't willing to let some kids occasionally lose-out because a public school failed to compete with other nearby schools, so we don't have vouchers like most of the European nations; etc.
Now, someone will come complain about how vouchers are bad for schools (despite universally benefiting the quality of schools in Europe), how unions protect teachers (despite the fantastic proof of how bad such unions were by 20/20, including a 10 page diagram from the Unions showing how difficult it is to fire someone), etc.
"Stumble before you crawl"
to those of us who actually deserve to be in college and are spending rediculous amounts for it. Back in the day, college was considered for the incredibly capable. Now, when I sit in my lecture classes of 500+ people, and listen to the conversations around me, all I can think is how utterly useless my degree will be.
Math skills to calculate tip? what is internet for?m 5 910
http://www.onlineconversion.com/tip_calculator.ht
http://www.pocketgear.com/software_detail.asp?id=
So my boss was passing this article around a few days ago to make fun of one of our new hires. The new guy pointed out that all colleges are not equal. Strangely the study doesn't mention what schools were part of this survey. Does anyone know?
"American Institutes for Research" I'm guessing that means the study was limited to American schools? I'd be interested to see how Canadian or British students fared.
15-20 years ago a guy working on his PhD told me that that getting a PhD had become like getting a MA or MS had been a generation earlier, getting a MA/MS like getting a BA/BS had been, getting a BA/BS like graduating from high school had been, and so on down the chain.
I've always been tempted to dismiss that as just a "back in my day" story about walking to school in a snowstorm, but it's hard to dismiss certain facts. For example, Robert Graves tells us in his biography that when he an ~8 year old, about 100 years ago, he was "doing ok with Latin, but having trouble with Greek".
And now people are having trouble with their own native language when they graduate from college...
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Well, first, we all know that /.ers are in the 25% that ARE literate. Remember... a BOfH is really competant, just also evil.
Let me be the first to demonstrate my logic skills and literacy with this question:
CNN, why do you hate America?
There's always the highly lucrative career field of Internet Trolling...
Surely this has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that 99.9% of the students that I've seen are busy IMing and emailing on the laptops instead of, oh I don't know, listening to the lecture.
Wonderful use of the university wireless network. Why, in my day, we simply slept through our courses!
Tech + school = h2h lol k meat u at knew bar k?
Sleep through class + school = Greetings, dear sir! Would you like to partake of the spirits in yon spiritually sensitive establishment? Jolly good show, sir!
I'm not really sure which is worse.
As a college senior, I must say that reading this article really confused me. What was it about? Damn technical schools that don't teach me to read!
I mean, like read a -book- (that's not required for a course)?
I found that a great many folks (students, and in general) simply don't read anything that's outside of e/mail. That just means that, for the most part, they're -way- less `literate' than folks who do read books (for entertainment value).
And yes, `useless' novels do increase your literacy.
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
I lack the patience to use my reading skills when reading a credit card application - eyes glaze over, hand it to my wife and ask her what it says.
In one of the classes I teach, I had to explain to a student what the word "abundant" meant. Even her Mexican lab partner was rolling her eyes.
Here's another gem:
"The geology of Mesa, Arizona is significant because my family has lived there for several generations"
For full ironic effect, the posting of this article on Slashdot should have been done by none other than Cmdr "Don't whine about our poor spelling, lack of punctuation, and Yoda-on-crack syntax, because _we're_ the _editors_, dammit." Taco. ...then followed by a slew of uncapitalised comments from (and modded up by) slack-jawed troglodytes on both sides of the Atlantic.
Other than that, have a nice day.
It does not surprise me at all that credit agreements are mentioned here. Confusing and misleading are ways that these agreements are deliberately written. The entire point is to make you believe the offer is good, whether or not it may be.
As many people as possible should be literate. I will, however, point out that creditors are notorious for being misleading and complicated. It is small wonder they do all kinds of crazy things to attract your average, semi-literate 18 year old college kid.
___Fewer___ books, dammit.
The bad news is that its not just college students. By the time that a student graduates high school, they should be able to do the things being tested here, never mind college. If all college is going to teach you is to function as well as someone with an 8th grade education 100 years ago, we have a really *REALLY* bad problem.
People, in general, are lazy, and learning to communicate is not a high priority for many. Learning to do many things is not a priority and until it is, they will not learn it. In all probability, some of those who can't make sense of credit card offers do know all the tricks for a dozen video games. I'm not saying that gamers are dumb, but that this demonstrates they are not stupid, just lazy.
The school system that my tax dollars help pay for should not cater to lazy students. They should be made to work hard, and learn as much as they can. So, with some trepidation that I've not considered every angle, I blame the school system(s) for the quality of graduates they produce. Yes, I believe that if a kid doesn't want to learn, let them languish behind the grill at a burger joint for a few years to get inspired to go back and learn something.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Try being in a resturant during a power-outage or the ordering computer is down, and there's no calculator in the building. That's when you see the resturant staff really struggling trying to figure out the bill and then making change. As my Dad keeps telling me, the fine art of making change without a computer telling what the change is disappeared a long time ago.
They always come out with some dire statistic proving that nobody reads, nobody understands math, etc. Its best to take it with a lot of salt, because these studies are probably financed by book publishers, or organizations that would benefit from higher investment in education.
I would question the benefits of education. The correlation between how much sex one and one's education is inversely proportional. Perhaps we should be celebrating how much more sex Americans are having thanks to the low-level of literacy.
but I cannot understand the article.:(
It isn't surprising to see this happen but I don't know if slashdot has considered the full impact of this study.
1) Democracies depend on the fact that the populace is educated. Without education, a democracy degrades into a society where a leader's scare tactics can hurd a flock of sheep anywhere necessary. Concieveably destroying the democracy to the leel of a monarchy.
2) A move has been ocurring in our nation that more and more people are heading to college yet the quality of graduates keeps dropping. This forces the United States to open its borders to outside talent much as it did in the latter half of the 20th century. The influx of immigrants leads to further race polarization which is manifested in calls from politicians to close borders and give prefences to "Americans."
3) Americans ask for higher wages but are less qualified. This leads to outsourcing to overseas nations where workers ask for less and are more skilled.
I could go on but those three points are starting to lead to an alarming end result. The United States superpower status is in danger. Sure we can maintain some sort of power with our military but, as history shows, this is a futile method. Strength comes from education and hard work. Both qualities that are not harrolded as necessary in today's bling bling culture.
but then, the purpose of educational theories since 1900 has not been to create a responsible independant thinking citizen. It has been to create whatever citizen was desirable at the time, be it a willing worker, or a willing consumer. The end result is that we are now reaching the end of the rope.
Teaching professionals advocate throwing Money at the problem, sort of like in the IBM commercials. When the problem is as ineffective technique. But the teachers are illiterate as well. No wonder some people throw their hands up and go for home schooling, or other solutions.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I have to wonder how private colleges would compare to public. The article mentions that the sample used (seems like a small sample size to me) included results from both schools. It seems to me that it might be worthwhile to sample each of those pools separately. Of course, it's hard to say if that would point to the caliber of students one type admits relative to the other, or if it ends up being a "quality of education" deal. I know that I never took "Table Comprehension 100," but just about _every_ class required the abilty to read a table and get information from it. Hell, though. In nuclear physics, we had to use a chart of nuclide decays, which is a little harder than looking down and across on a spreadsheet.
Why is this supposed to be a test of literacy? It sounds more like they don't have much 'common sense', which is surely a good sign in an academic ;)
Note that this research comes from the Pew Charitable Trust, the same institution which told us that the gender gap is alive and well online, claiming that women use the Internet for socialising and that men use it for hunting down information. They are certainly making a lot of bold statements and getting themselves in the news.
Phoenix, Boston, Little Rock, see a pattern?
...me and Slashdot in that wen I red it annalising news stories I sometimes see tew of them that are the same in a short periad of time.
I fought this was odd and it made me more confuesd as I cuddunt deside witch one I was supposed to reply to becuse their were tew.
Translation: Your dumb as shit but it is okay since the adults are even dumber.
Hidden subtext: It don't matter since all the tech jobs are outsourced anyway but you can't outsource the burger key at the McD.
Then again is this really new? Society has always needed far fewer bright people then it needs dumb fucks to do the low end jobs. High tech jobs can be outsourced, the guy picking up the trash has to be local. Worse if we get people who can understand credit card offers how are credit card companies going to peddle their wares? It reminds me a bit of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy where a bright young woman is cloned for an escort agency and at the same time 500 lonely ad-agency executives are cloned to keep the laws of demand and supply working.
Or to put it another way, just how many bright people can a society afford before you run out of dumbfucks to do the hard work?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
If you've gotten a credit card offer recently, there's a medium-sized standard box they include on the black-and-white legalese page which tells you the real (not introductory) interest rate, for instance.
Despite this, some people will briefly glance at the color glossy flyer, see "ZERO PERCENT (introductory) INTEREST!" and be shocked, yes, shocked, when the rates hop to twenty-seven percent or something ridiculous like that.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Often times a non-science major is required to take no more than what amounts to a single survey course in math as an undergraduate. The class sizes for this type of course are huge, and tests are often multiple choice and given on scantron sheets. It doesn't surprise me that a lot of these students would show a lack of proficiency in math.
Don't you have someone you'd die for?
But isn't this great for those of us sufficiently endowed to take advantage of the feebs?
I'm a 22 year old electrical engineering student in my first year of studies. The majority of the students in my classes are between 17 and 19 years old. The students ask questions during lectures that make me wonder how they made it to university.
Here is a small list of what these students don't have:
- skills in algebra (Why are they registered for Calculus I?)
- sentence mechanics (I walked down the street and so far I never seen any thing.)
- social skills (Friendly people sit in the back corner. They snarl at everyone.)
No wonder they don't understand those crazy credit card offers.
Out of all the teachers I had ONLY ONE was truly dedicated to teaching us how to write. He had a self-published little book that had all the common style and grammar errors in it, and it was wierd just how accurate that book was in covering all my writing mistakes. He would sit with every student one-on-one and go through every paragraph of our papers making us read them out loud, pointing out unnecessary words, and showing where the errors are. He even pulled out books by famous authors and showed us passages where even they made the same mistakes and could be improved upon. He was awesome.
The pressure to get people's money and get graduates out the door really means that any college that causes someone to drop out looses thus money.
So ofcourse they try to make everyone pass.. nevermind the things they are supposed to be teaching.
Eveybody knows that the American educational system is messed up. Instead of blaming the victims of this system, we should really analyze what the problems are and what works in terms of solutions. The educational system is designed to make children hate learning. There is too much emphasis on discipline, order, tests, and grading. Kids that can't sit still are forced onto drugs. What we need is a system that encourages *learning* and exploration. This means getting kids to enjoy reading, which is a fundamental building block when it comes to lifelong learning.
Schools need to be deconstructed and integrated into the everyday life of the community, which would mean more kids getting out of the school into workplaces, musuems, forests and so on. The hierarchies in schools need to be eliminated--all useless personnel such as principals have to go.
On a related note, it should be pointed out that the "smart" kids who go onto Ivy League colleges aren't as smart as they think. Many of these kids are good at tests and playing the system. They tend to lack social skills and think they are god's gift to the world. Given that so many highly educated people will believe nonsense such as Saddamn Hussein having WMDs, we shouldn't set up the people who are good at school as some kind of role model.
What about old people? I bet they do just as bad or worse. I hate these studies that say, "Oh, kids are stupid, they don't know whatever" when there is no comparison to the general population.
This is just a story in search of a headline. The actual study is neither surprising, nor interesting.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Come on, I mean there is this comment from the 1870ies quoting:
"There are 2 Universities in Britain, 4 in France, 10 in Prussia and 37 in Ohio".
Somewhere illiterate folks have to study...
Cheers
42
I've read every "agreement" related to money that I've ever made. Credit card agreements are long and complicated. Do I understand them? Yes. Do I remember all the details in the agreement right now? No. Does it matter? No. I use the card to purchase and I reimburse them at the end of the month or over time with interest. If I fail to pay, the card is frozen and I owe. That's the agreement. But that agreement turns into 12 pages of very fine print.
That's a big WTF moment for me.
I find myself wondering if this "study" would have had the exact same result 10 or 20 years ago and if it did, would it be more attributable to the average intelligence of those tested or rather to the increasing complexity of legalese in virtually everything.
When agreements you have to sign have 20 term definitions at the beginning of the document, you know there's a problem. WTF? Is there no commonly understood word for what the document wants to say? And then there's the other factor of, "Well if I want to use a damn credit card, I have to sign this agreement. And I could sign a different one, but they are all exactly the same. So do I even need to read it? Read one agreement for a credit card. If you do not agree, you might as well agree not to use any credit card anywhere. But if you really do need a credit card, you pretty much just have to agree. You can invest your time in reading every contract to the letter, but the returns are diminishing and it all starts to look like the same old shit.
You figure, 30 people I know have this credit card and they seem to get by all right. I guess it will be all right for me. That's just common sense, and it's pretty valid, too. If there were serious issues with a particular agreement, you would hear about it for certain, and if you did not, well the issue is probably infrequent enough and buried deep enough in the nebulous agreement terms that only a very few people (even the really smart ones) will notice it in advance.
Things are so complicated because a small percentage of the population does not operate on good faith. Therefore most of us our saddled with legal agreements that do their utmost to either screw us over, or protect the interest of the service provided in every conceivable way (which requires a devil's contract worth--more than a person can read in a lifetime--of text). Everyone knows how this works. You make a simple agreement with your customers. A couple of your customers are a really bad sort and they make your life a living Hell by ignoring good faith and exploiting ambiguities in your simple agreement. After you surive that--if you do--you modify the agreement with very detailed, very technical, hopefully unambiguous text, so no one does that to you again. Then that process repeats, and agreements grow and grow into a jungle of verbage.
Because there are some bad apples out there and the disciplinarian for them is our body of law which is even more nebulous, contorted, confusing, and technical than the broken agreement that caused the issue. Enter the lawyers.
I'm reading this and thinking about the earlier story about humans being hardwired for geometry.
Maybe the Egyptians were onto something with hieroglyphics - we should have anything that looks remotely complex traslated into a series of small pictures and icons, or maybe even comics. Imagine that; a loan agreement graphic novel.
And as I type that, I'm looking at the giant icons Slashdot uses for its stories and thinking "hmmm... stick one of those at the top of each printed newspaper story and everyone'll figure out what it's about". For chequebooks and tips, well if you can't do that you either fail sociably or get stung badly. Maths, the choice is yours... probably.
When I see something like this, or like that NSF survey of public understanding of science and technology, which contains some howlers (more than half of Americans--and Europeans!--think that lasers work by focusing sound waves, and more than half of Americans think that early humans lived alongside dinosaurs)... I can't help but be confused. I know this stuff; why don't most people? Any explanation along the lines of, "well, I'm a brilliant ubermensch, of course!" is ridiculous; what are the odds of that?
So, I'm confused. How do people never bother to learn to read, or to do math? How is it that these things are considered so unimportant? How did I end up valuing such different things?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Forgot to put this in the first time--duh duh stupid college graduates, right?
Anyhow, how difficult is it to calculate tips? 20% is divide by five, or double and move the decimal point if that's easier. For 15%, just calculate 20% and 10% (you can calculate 10% while doing 20% if you're so inclined) then guess at--I mean, estimate an average. Who cares about hitting 15% on the cent?
My problem is remembering _who_ to tip and _how much!_
On an unrelated note, if there was just one skill that I wish I would've learned back in middle school, it would be dimensional analysis. I constantly see people struggling with unit conversions trying to remember if they are supposed to divide or multiply by the factor. Dimensional analysis is simple, universal, and would banish all these conversion problems to the land of wind and ghosts... assuming people can remember the conversion factor.
For example, to calculate a 15% tip, you can take 10% (one tenth) of the bill, and add on half of that amount. Or if you're feeling generous, or if the math is easier, just take 1/6 (16.67%) of the bill.
People who aren't good at heuristics tend to catch computer viruses, fall for scams they've seen before, spread misinformation and urban legends, order informercial products and services, and get suckered in various other ways.
No one ever ends a rant on education with IANATeacher. Why is that?
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
And when robots can do all the "dumb" jobs cheaper, what will we do with all the "dumbfucks"?
I sense a faint tint of "the country is going down the shitter" going on in the comments here. Let's note that the article does not mention a trend, but instead notes a point of data: our schools pump out people with X level of skills, as of the period when the sample was taken. No conclusions about a trend can be drawn from the study, leading to the possibilty that the generation before me was as much a bunch of idiots as mine.
And laugh at the 21% interest rate. Honestly, the only literacy skill college students need when it comes to credit card offers is knowing which button turns on the paper shredder.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
A lack of literacy is a problem, but this example is pretty bad. Most credit card offers today have "features" like multiple interest rates that are applicable based upon various contingencies and multiple-month rolling interest rates. Most attorneys lack the literacy to comprehend these offers, let along the average college student.
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
Like hell I'm clicking a .RAM file.
Realplayer is a god awful peice of trash.
Although many argue that regents are unneeded because schools will form their own curriculum (that may be developed with other schools), they do ensure that people learn the basics. I've always assumed states other then CA and NY had equal education systems (if not better in some of the well-funded and educated school districts). But this appears to prove that idea wrong. At least with the old system I graduated with (they changed it recently), people could graduate w/ a Regents or non-Regents diploma, which seemed to keep someone's basic math/reading/writing/interpreting skills in check (I see why they had us analyzing documents with this problem now).
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
... are ones that "hover over" their children all the time. Think of parents who get obsessive about making sure that they have their "Baby on board" sticker prominently displayed (wtf are they *for*, anyway?) and child-proof locks on everything in site.
The good news is that despite all of this, you can still become the President of the United States! What, me worry?
To be fair, I think that quite a bit of that came from a certain physics professor that I had. He was the head of the department, and I ended up getting him for about 8 of the physics classes that I took. He expected you to understand every nuance of what you had studied, and to understand it *completely*. Often he would ask questions that were seemingly impossible to solve, but if you looked at what he gave you and gave it enough thought, you would find that in every case he had given you everything you needed to know - even if it wasn't obvious that he had.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
is our children learning?
What do you expect, American popular culture is anti-intellectual! Education is weakly meritocratic and is primarily a function of class. If you are middle class or above you get into college regardless of merit, it may not be your first choice college but you will get in somewhere if you can pay for it. If you are poor and want to go to college your friends mock you during the commercials for American Idol and you either learn how to navigate the bizzare world of student loans or, if you are lucky, you get offered grants. Is it any wonder that a significant number of American college students are illiterate? Most of them have lived sheltered suburban lives and have never had to struggle for anything.
Note: I work at a college and interact with college students regularly. I can see a direct correlation between wealth and intelligence. The majority of kids struggling finacially are busting their asses to learn and to keep paying the insanely expensive tuition costs. The majority of the stupid kids live off their parents and will muddle through college and wind up with decent jobs regardless of merit because they have a degree and their parents social network to land them their first job. I've seen it all dozens of times over.
[...]to handle complex, real-life tasks such as understanding credit card offers.
And how exactly does this relate to literacy in english? I'd say those things require fluent understanding of legalese and bullshit, not english.
Having worked as a tutor in my college days (some decade + change ago) at a four year school, some freshman were admitted lacking even understanding of fraction and basic algebra. I pretty much lost all respect for compulsive K12 education in US then.
Of course, I am the one walking around saying 'I has a college educations,' but I digress...
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Englush classis hulped me rel gud. :D
"Some fight for law. Some fight for justice. What will you fight for? One day, you will see."
There is always immigrants to carry you along.
ut isn't this great for those of us sufficiently endowed to take advantage of the feebs?
Zombies don't look too difficult to outsmart/defeat, either, but what happens when there's enough of them to surround you? You become a meal.
Here's an example: Since we're outnumbered, the feebs were able to put their king, George W. Bush, into the White House, and keep him there for a second term-- putting all of our lives in danger for that whole time.
Reading and writing are no longer considered core competencies. Math, too. And of course, science. Being smart is no longer considered important and it's never been cool. What is important to our nation's youth?
Why, being fuckable of course.
uh, dummy, i think you meant "You're dumb as shit"
I wonder if adults, tested to the same criteria as the posted article, would fare any better. Every generation has morons.
at least 75 percent at two-year colleges -- lack the literacy to handle complex, real-life tasks such as understanding credit card offers."
I have a friend, nearly 40, who just recently realized that her 10-year-old student loan has been compounding interest that she must pay. She knew the interest was compounding, but somehow was under the impression that if she paid back the principal, the loan's interest would be forgiven. She does not use any kind of personal finance software.
Her story is not atypical. Lots of my friends have deferred their student loans without bothering to calculate the massive effect this would have on their bottom lines, how in some cases it would double the amount owed over time.
According to Ask Yahoo, the credit card debt carried by the average American is $8562. Americans paid $50 billion in finance charges in 2001.
Thanks to the new bankruptcy laws, largely written by credit companies, it's much harder for an individual to file for chapter 7 now. They put you through all kinds of hoops to do it. So if you get sick or have an accident and go into massive debt, you're just plain screwed.
Student loans are now seen as a HUGE revenue source by private companies because students are very niave about what they're signing up for, because student loans have been traditionally seen as safe, low-interest, and government subsidized investments in one's future. Instead, I've seen people trying to dig their way out of these debts for 10+ years. While the education the loans paid for was useful, it was nearly impossible to get ahead because of the drag these loans had for the ensuing years post-education.
Things are getting even worse. Wanna refinance your student loan to take advantage of falling interest rates? Well....from December's 22, 2005's Washington Post, a just-passed law "Cuts $12.7 billion for education programs by fixing interest rates on student loans at 6.8 percent, even if commercial rates are lower. [MY EMPHASIS] The change comes amid rising tuition costs at colleges and universities."
Financial stuff is complicated, but is there an incentive to simplify it and make it easier to understand? Scott Cook, founder of Intuit "was famous for saying that the more complicated the tax code, the better for Intuit and its TurboTax software.")
The solution seems to be fairer laws and better education. But where is the incentive to make sure no student graduates high school without demonstrating some kind of basic competance in personal finance going to come from?
In my opinion, it must come from the people who will elect an uncorrupted new congress with its priorities straight.
15% is the usual bit. Take the total of your bill, and divide by 10. Divide that result in half and add it to the first answer. Capice?
$27.37 / 10 = $2.7 (to make it easy)
half of 2.7 is about 1.3 (the 5 of the 15% which is half of 10)
2.7 + 1.3 = 3.9 = $4.00 (round up to be nice)
15% of $137.24: 13.7 + (14/2) = 13.7 + 7: about $19.70 ($20 bucks)
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
mplayer -dumpstream -dumpfile 2020.wmv -noframedrop mms://sql2.slicker.com:1890/sanfordforgovernor/202 0.wmv
Is it working for anyone? It is not downloading to a file. I can watch online, but it is super choppy.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Intermediate skills are things like being able to read a map? What are they calling basic skills these days, the ability to hold your pee-pee until you're in the washroom?
I remember seeing a great .sig on Usenet a long time ago: People who can't factor polynomials shouldn't be allowed to vote. I guess today's equivelent is being able to find the polling station.
I mean, who cares if 5% of high school students can't understand how credit cards work? And tipping cows is discouraged, anyway, so it's not like we really want to educate them about that anyway. Checking books out from libraries is obsolete anyway, so it's not like they'll need that life skill.
-b
If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
chinese certainly doesn't look like graphic novels.
This last semester I worked on a group presentaiton for my Educational Psychology as part of my final. I was paired with three other students in the program. The presentation was on "What Makes a Good Teacher?" I wanted to cry. None of my partners knew what sound academic research was, how to use APA format, their writing was lackluster, and hated giving presentations. These are potentially future Wisconsin teachers. I was derided for pointing out that they were getting into a field that requires nonstop research and presentation. ::sigh::
.deviatefromtheabsolute.
BBC News reports teenagers value the role of science in society, but feel scientists are "brainy people not like them." This was according to The Science Learning Centre's research in London that asked 11,000 pupils for their views on science and scientists.
Around 70% of the 11-15 year olds questioned said they did not picture scientists as "normal young and attractive men and women". The research examined why numbers of science exam entries are declining. They found around 80% of pupils thought scientists did "very important work" and 70% thought they worked "creatively and imaginatively". Only 40% said they agreed that scientists did "boring and repetitive work". Over three quarters of the respondents thought scientists were "really brainy people". Among those who said they would not like to be scientists, reasons included: "Because you would constantly be depressed and tired and not have time for family", and "because they all wear big glasses and white coats and I am female".
The number taking A-level physics dropped by 34% between 1991 and 2004, with 28,698 taking the subject in that year. The decline in numbers taking chemistry over the same period was 16%, with 44,440 students sitting the subject in 1991, and 37,254 in 2004. The number of students taking maths also dropped by 22%...
Seen on Shacknews. I believe United States is also like this. Posted on AQFL.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
This is meant as a respectful comment:
What is more scary is that computer professionals lack literacy, because computer professionals are leaders, somewhat, of the rest of society. A good example of lack of literacy in the community of computer professionals is Slashdot editors. After all these years, they have not learned to spell. They lack sufficient literacy to detect public relations scams, apparently.
In general, I think that people in the U.S. culture are often not skilled at taking care of themselves. They are slow to recognize when they are being abused, for example. They often get hooked into other people's anger, and are therefore easily manipulated by corrupt politicians.
did anybody ever hear of the "baby on board sniper"?
when religion is no longer the opiate of the masses, governments will resort to real opiates.
Personally, I think a lot of this stems from grade inflation and its many causes. Instructor compassion, bureaucratic initiatives that try and get everyone to "pass," easy degree programs that idiots flock to, etc.
I swear, for many instructors the "A" is the new "C." Moreover, the "C" is the new "D-;" however, it's a D- which allows you to attain a prerequisite and move on to the next class.
Additionally, the bachelor's degree is the new high school degree, and the master's degree is the new bachelor's degree, with the exception of the MBA. The MBA is the new high school degree with sprinkles on top.
I also blame may of our educational systems problems on the ellipsis... fuck the ellipsis.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
That's rediculous! What a bunch of loosers.
And it's only now that I've learned that it's actually pretty damn difficult. I failed about 80% of my first courses (which I'm retaking now..). Damn it's like work :(
Yeah. Americans must be the only people in the world to do anything stupid...
Once you live outside of the United States, one of the things that will surprise you is just how much of an infatuation many countries have with the US. It's not uncommon to watch the nightly news and have at least a quarter of the news dedicated just to events in the United States. And it's also not uncommon to have only the very worst of events on the news, either.
Honestly, after watching news reports from other countries, I don't blame much of the world for their opinion of the United States. Honestly, after seeing their news reports, people would ask me if we really lived in houses without bars over our doors and windows, and how we could be safe like that. All they saw was the very worst that could be picked from our nation each day.
When you consider that their opinion of Americans is that we think that we *are* the entire world, and that we're not aware of what life is like outside of our nation, it's pretty funny. That's not to say that their opinion is entirely unfounded, but it's still pretty funny.
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
It's easy to blame the education system, and then forget all the other factors. It's also easy to blame this on laziness. However, you equate the inability comprehend the statement to laziness and that's the classic correlation-causation cop out. Stupidity is not lazinessand vice versa.
I think the biggest factor, I think, are the corporations, who are always going to be smarter than the common man, because they can pay a few lawyers to make up language that the common man and woman cannot speak in the hopes that they do exactly what they expect, be lazy. When someone has a real problem, the bank points to the agreement and they're screwed.
The education system can't keep up with a multi-national bank churning out legalise like cheap pasta. I don't think the common person is so lazy that they cannot read their statements. I think they have better things to do. Credit cards are given to millions of americans, and are easy to use. The terms of service should be relatively easy as well. What we need is a legal system which uses simple language that not everyone needs a lawyer for just to understand. After all, government is supposed to be by the people.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
I've often wondered if some people literally can't understand concepts that are presented in written form. I've noticed that some of my friends will laugh at a joke on TV, but they could stare at the EXACT SAME JOKE in print for an hour and never get it. It's probably kind of a cop-out to blame television for this (was there any more literacy before the rise of television?), although the thought has crossed my mind.
Slashdot pedants take note: illiteracy doesn't just manifest itself in grammar mistakes and misplaced apostrophes. It also is responsible for nonexistent words like "virii" and overly verbose language like the updates on Penny Arcade. Read George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language", it'll change your life.
"Oh, wait, you mean that by including all this concern for non-academic characteristics like sports, diversity (of background, not ideas), and the ilk our schools have lost the ability to test for the right skills?"
The article is about 2 year schools. Most voc-tech schools that are designed to get you a job, not a career. Not to be confused with Universities and traditional four year degreee programs.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
"Who needs math? There are calculators."
Ever whipped out a calculator when trying to pay a tab at a restaurant? Who brings their dictionary with them to a place they need to spell correctly?
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Note: Give it up for my excessive typos in a post about our declining educational system.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
Meh.
Maybe if kids paid for their own college educations this trend would recede. Many of these kids are going to college because their parents strapped a pile of cash and a rocket to their ass and fired them off to the local university. Combine the concept that not everyone is "college material" with the idea that children in the US are perhaps some of the most spoiled in the universe and finally multiply that by the way parents live through their children and want to *make* them successful - these research results are a no-brainer. (and before the obligatory responses come, i have a kid who will be in college in 8 years and im not sure id eat my own dog food)
I was crazy back when being crazy really meant something. (Charles Manson)
Call me a disillusioned engineer. I see very little point in completing my degree. I look around at the people I have to compete against and wonder how they can actually be graduating. Ask a college student how to spell the word "lose" or what the purpose of anti-lock brakes is and see what you get.
I have a strong background in computer engineering, with additional knowledge of advanced mathematics and aerospace systems design. My professional responsibilities allow me to interact with distinguished professors, high-ranking military officials, and aerospace industry experts. These people have no reason to think less of me because I can stand up, converse with them, take action, and give results commensurate with that of a graduate. None of these people have ever asked what my prior qualifications are because there is no need to question them. Honestly though, I don't know how many of them realize I don't have that little piece of paper that says "this guy knows stuff," nor do I know what kind of reaction there would be upon informing one of them of this fact.
As someone who has worked hard academically and professionally, let me say this to those responsible for hiring in the companies I want to work for: stop concentrating your hiring on degrees earned and start looking more at what someone can actually do.
How did you get from that story anything about the religion of the translator?
If you really are concerned about the harm done by the banking system, drop the anti-semetism.
It has not been relevant to discussions of banking since the 1600's. Even then it was the pope's fault that all the western-european bankers were jewish. It was illegal for any christian to engage in money lending for interest, and jewish people in western europe were barred from most other professions.
Since the invention of the corporation, most banks have been owned by shareholders of all religions.
"I think we are welcomed. But it was not a peaceful welcome." --George W. Bush, defending Vice President Dick Cheney's pre-war assertion that the United States would be welcomed in Iraq as liberators, NBC Nightly News interview, Dec. 12, 2005
"Those who enter the country illegally violate the law." --George W. Bush, Tucson, Ariz., Nov. 28, 2005
"The best place for the facts to be done is by somebody who's spending time investigating it." --George W. Bush, on the probe into how CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity was leaked, Washington D.C., July 18, 2005
"I was going to say he's a piece of work, but that might not translate too well. Is that all right, if I call you a 'piece of work'?" --George W. Bush to Jean-Claude Juncker, prime minister of Luxembourg, Washington, D.C., June 20, 2005
"The relations with, uhh -- Europe are important relations, and they've, uhh -- because, we do share values. And, they're universal values, they're not American values or, you know -- European values, they're universal values. And those values -- uhh -- being universal, ought to be applied everywhere." --George W. Bush, at a press conference with European Union dignitaries, Washington, D.C., June 20, 2005
"You see, not only did the attacks help accelerate a recession, the attacks reminded us that we are at war." --George W. Bush, on the Sept. 11 attacks, Washington, D.C., June 8, 2005
"It seemed like to me they based some of their decisions on the word of -- and the allegations -- by people who were held in detention, people who hate America, people that had been trained in some instances to disassemble -- that means not tell the truth." --George W. Bush, on an Amnesty International report on prisoner abuse at Guantanamo Bay, Washington, D.C., May 31, 2005
"See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda." --George W. Bush, Greece, N.Y., May 24, 2005
"We discussed the way forward in Iraq, discussed the importance of a democracy in the greater Middle East in order to leave behind a peaceful tomorrow." --George W. Bush, Tbilisi, Georgia, May 10, 2005
"I can only speak to myself." --George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., April 28, 2005
"It's in our country's interests to find those who would do harm to us and get them out of harm's way." --George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., April 28, 2005
"We expect the states to show us whether or not we're achieving simple objectives -- like literacy, literacy in math, the ability to read and write." --George W. Bush, on federal education requirements, Washington, D.C., April 28, 2005
"I want to thank you for the importance that you've shown for education and literacy." --George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., April 13, 2005
"I appreciate my love for Laura." --George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., April 20, 2005
"We look forward to analyzing and working with legislation that will make -- it would hope -- put a free press's mind at ease that you're not being denied information you shouldn't see." --George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., April 14, 2005
[I'm] occasionally reading, I want you to know, in the second term." --George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., March 16, 2005
"I understand there's a suspicion that we--we're too security-conscience." --George W. Bush, Washington D.C., April 14, 2005
"This notion that the United States is getting ready to attack Iran is simply ridiculous. And having said that, all options are on the table." --George W. Bush, Brussels, Belgium, Feb. 22, 2005
"Because he's hiding." --George W. Bush, responding to a reporter who asked why Osama bin Laden had not been caught, aboard Air Force One, Jan. 14, 2005
"Who could have possibly envisioned an erection -- an election in Iraq at this point in history?" --George W. Bush, at the white House, Washington, D.C., Jan. 10, 2005
"We need to apply 21st-century information technology to the health care field. We need to have ou
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
The key is that well educated =/= financially sucessful, so there is some truth in both statements above. I think it's well summed up in a quote by, of all people, Karl Rove:
"As people do better, they start voting like Republicans...unless they have too much education and vote Democratic, which proves there can be too much of a good thing. "
(From http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Karl_Rove)
that when he an ~8 year old, about 100 years ago, he was "doing ok with Latin, but having trouble with Greek".
;)
I would guess that he was quite above the average student at the time. His propensity for language study at that age was probably not indicative of the general populace's (particularly an average 8 year olds) abilities in the area.
There are always profound and early developing minds that will accomplish things far ahead of most people. And in the same vein, there will always be the proletariat who meander unintelligently throughout their lives, whose only real delights, far from being intellectual, are based in the primitive pleasure factories granted to them by evolution.
All of the job postings that require four-year degrees, and this is what employers are getting for it. Nobody said doing what's best is easy, and in this case, it certainly isn't.
You mean GRE, not SAT, right?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I don't understand. How can you use a ruler improperly?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I should have went to a US college.
The past participle of "to go" is "gone" rather than "went". The simple past tense and the past participle are the same in regular verbs, so mistakes with irregular verbs are inderstandable. Nevertheless, you should be using the past participle with the helper "have" for the conventional present perfect.
My other body is also not wearing any.
Or is it a vocabularly lesson? Trying to read those offers is similar to learning a foreign language. In addition, the actual important things, such as "What am I going to pay after the first month?" are always in fine print. While our school system might be easy to bash on, part of the problem is that every credit card company is trying to trick the people who get these. I shouldn't need a thesaurus to translate an offer from someone trying to sell me something. Also, if you can't understand an offer, don't take it. A little intelligence can go a long way. And if something looks too good to be true, it probably is.
"If dying were anything special, they wouldn't let everyone do it."
We need some sort of filter to filter out all those study "news" that floods Slashdot imho.
I for one had enough of those sensational study conclusions that basically either reiterate the obvious, or try to disprove the obvious with dubious link and fallacious logic.
Right now they make up around half of the articles on Slashdot (and various other similar sites) and contain zero useful information.
I saw Girls Gone Wild, and college students really do seem dumber these days :)
How is this a surprise in where, in many cases, people are ridiculed or shunned for scholarly pursuits? I am regularly given the raised eyebrow when people find out I don't watch TV or couldn't care less what Paris Hilton or other psuedo-celebs are up to.
I didn't notice the -dumpstream option in the mplayer manpage. And here I was using "mimms", which is kinda one-codec. Thanks! (And it's not working for me either; I think it's been slashdotted.)
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Ever whipped out a calculator when trying to pay a tab at a restaurant?
Calculator? Why yes I have. And I am ashamed to say that I am a lazy college graduate.
I am disappointed by the articles "brighter news" section.
The research showed that the average literacy of college students is significantly higher than the rest of the adult population. The study leaders said "that was encouraging but not surprising", attributing it to "the spectrum of adults includes those with less education".
I am disappointed that they seemed to be inferring that higher education caused the additional literacy proficiency. The article (and I highly suspect the research) doesn't show that higher education _causes_ higher literacy. It only shows that being enrolled in college _correlates_ with higher literacy.
Of course it does - there are tests to get IN! Those with lower literacy don't get admitted to college as much as those with higher literacy.
Unless the research measured literacy before college and after college, and measured literacy at the same ages for people outside of college over the same span of time, and isolated the impact of other factors, it doesn't show the anything approaching causality. And it didn't, the survey (according to the article, I haven't read the study) only measured the literacy of students nearing the end of their degree programs, compared to another study's results on a general adult population.
I'm concerned about the study leaders' ability to interpret the results of a study. I don't see any reason why the higher results of college students is "encouraging", given college entrance criteria.
Quod Erat Demonstrandum. =)
And, on the flip side, how was Graves at understanding technology?
Ah, so that's how we're spelling "playing Everquest" today.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
War.
What maths skills do you need to work out how much you're gonna leave as a tip? I stick to the good old £0 ...no maths required!
I mean it's not as if we're required by law to leave a tip.
Students lack literate for complex tasks
Yes, that was the headline. If professional writers and editors blow something like this, what's a poor college student to do? I'd love to think this was done on purpose, some editor's attempt at humor, but mistakes like this are far too common, but usually not so ironic.
Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside a dog it's too dark to read. - Groucho Marx
It would have helped if the article had included comparisons between different well known colleges. It would be very helpful information for any slashdot readers searching for colleges, because I'm guessing most of us want to go to colleges where people have some common sense.
~= scwizard =~
See, all that need be done is to lobby our beermakers such as Anheiser Busch and Shiner Bock into putting short stories on the labels to give drunk college kids something to read while they're at a party, how many times have you recalled holding a beer in college?.......See what I mean? =)
The solution is tests. Let's test them to make sure they learn these basic things. Then let's set standards so that we hold schools accountable to these tests, and if the students go to a school that can't pass these tests, they can switch to another school that teaches Credit Card, News Paper Editor, and Heart Blood pressure interpretation properly. That's the solution. If that fails let's blame teachers unions.
So, how is it brighter news that, if college students are basically illiterate, adults are significantly worse?
The questions were mostly just true/false; the ones that weren't were things like, "The amount of time it takes the earth to go around the sun is (a) a month, (b) a day, (c) a year". I'm unsure how the questions are particularly misleading or deceptive. Hell, I took the test myself when I found it (I can't for the life of me remember where it is now, but I first saw it with the questions separated), and I didn't miss any. So we're left with poor methodology. Are there particular known flaws in the design? I have little experience with survey design, so perhaps you can help me. What are the flaws, and why would they produce these particular effects?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Assuming 8% sales tax, 15% of the total bill means you left a 16.2% tip based on the amount going to the restaurant.
http://www.downsizedc.org/read_the_laws.shtml
Ever whipped out a calculator when trying to pay a tab at a restaurant?
Yes. It's called my cellphone.
"I haven't lost my mind -- it's just backed up on tape somewhere."
>>and so on down the chain.
Well, heres a partial explanation right here. People tend to develop skills as they need them. 50+ years ago in the US by the time a man was 17 going on 18 he was considered an adult who would be entering the career of his life. In a couple years, if not already so, he would also get married. These people needed to know basic finance but also worked manual labor jobs.
Now its a bit different. We don't really consider 18 year olds adult in the same sense. Adulthood starts after college graduation. Now we dont enter careers until age 22-25 and get married in mid to late twenties. College finances are not real world finances. You're living off loans, your parents help you out, the state helps you out with aid, etc. So its not surprising that people who we rarely treat as adults act like children. They have no incentive to act otherwise and have no need.
This is not common outside the US but more common in developed western nations where economies demand people with college and post-college educations for jobs that pay (checked for inflation) what old manufacturing jobs paid.
Extended childhood and a case of arrested development is part of the price of an educated society that has moved away from manufacturing and into a service based economy it seems.
I think its being very disingenious to cry "Everyone is stupid nowadays" without look at the radical cultural changes from 50-100 years ago. 200+ years ago people werent getting any education outside a few years of schooling and were getting married at around 15-17 years old and working the rest of their days on the farm. If progress means a longer childhood period then so be it unless you want to be a farmhand or working a lathe for 50 years until retirement somewhere (outside of the western world).
That 20/20 piece was put together by that Solomon of objective journalism, none other than John Stossel. For those just tuning in, John Stossel is a shill for free-market fundamentalist pet causes. What he does is PR, not investigation.
When I was younger, I was raised in a household with a library. It wasn't a very big house, but the library room was important; this is where my dad would sit and read, and I could do so as well. It never had to be said directly to me (at least, not that I remember), I just understood that the books were important, they were there to be read, and that was an important way to learn about the world. The books were knowledge, and that knowledge was respected. Whenever we visited someone else's house, I would always look at their library, because my father said you can learn a lot about a person by seeing what kind of books they read. A house without books was not a home to me.
Now, I visit people living in McMansions in various parts of the US, and I find many of them have no library, even though there is far more room for one if they so chose. Not surprisingly, their kids have little interest in reading, because their parents don't read, yet are "successful" - i.e. they have the McMansion and stuff to fill it. What conclusion do you think most kids today will come to?
"Success" and education APPEAR more uncoupled in today's world than they used to be - and that is awfully hard for even the best teachers to overcome. The people who are drawn to knowledge for its own beauty have always been a very small minority; for the rest, education is interesting to the extent it is rewarding. If the rewards appear less, the education is less interesting and devolves into seeking the form (degrees) rather than the substance.
Btw, I used to tutor kids in their homes for many years, so I have some experience/bias when it comes to how kids are educated....
Why would you ever carry a credit card balance month-to-month, though? It's a pretty damn expensive way to borrow money...
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Then 100% of non collegiate people can't do it either. We are doomed.
... what are you saying?
Colleges are becoming more about profit/loss than education. As long as Johnny undergraduate can pay the tuition or qualify for a student loan, he's in.
The undergraduates are profit centers (tuition). The staff, subcontractors (construction/maintenance/IT), and graduate students are cost centers. The graduate departments are really marketing and adversting departments that bring in more undergraduates. It's a nice little growth industry if you think about it. Mommy and Daddy OldMoney love sending Johnny off to college. It'll continue on for a while. I wish I could invest in it. Unfortunately, "boards of regents" hold the "stock" and won't let me in on it.
You'll know it's true when Universities start trading on the NYSE and NASDAQ.
It's called a cell phone. A calculator, dictionary and phone in one device.
There was a graphical calculator tha Texas Instruments made called the TI-92. It did calculus and a bunch of other types of math. You know what the problem with it was? It just gave you the answer. I had a college professor that put "show all work" as part of the requirement of the exams. And it really makes sense. If you aren't able to show work, then you truly don't understand how to get the answer. His reasoning was because people had TI-92s. It's easy to press a button and get an answer. But do you honestly understand the math involved? It's scary how computers make things like integration and differentiation just a few buttons away from getting the answer.
I hadn't heard of any studies being done to examine the literacy required to do things like "understand credit card applications". I was, however, aware of the astonishing fact that MANY current college students will go the rest of their lives without ever again reading a book. This research came out maybe 4 years ago indicating that in fact MOST college students (something on the order of 60%) go through school, even graduate with high marks and honors, without ever reading a book. Additionally, it was reported that many of these non-readers would in fact live out the rest of their lives without ever reading a book.
I've seen his sig on any number of posts/replies. This is a sub-discussion about banking, and it is a *coincidence*. Can you understand that or are you intentionally flaming him for no reason? Or, are you just stupid and actually lack reading skills, like what the article is about? You are paranoid and reactionary deluxe. Go to Free Republic for a total "amen" corner "Israel can do no wrong" forum if that is what you are looking for. You sure aren't going to see it here. And just beause someone questions the likud party or the political policy of Israel on this or that issue doesn't make them an "anti semite" either. In fact, those who *insist* on always doing that are about the biggest racists out there. Sorry, "semites" suck just as much as any other group, so just accept it. When you can't look at any culture/group/ whatever and see flaws, especially your own, you really aren't looking and are in a psychological state of denial, no different from any addict or drunk who denies they have a problem. So get off with the "you're an anti semite" BS, that criticism got old in the 60s to any thinking adult. Israel has some good points to it and some really atrocious ones, no different from most other violence-centric nations. And if you check the news, it sure does look like Israel and the US are going to attack Iran, and iran hasn't attacked them, so just you think on that some. Yep, Iran sure don't like those places, but they AREN'T attacking them either, so if Iran does get attacked, which looks likely, it will be an act of aggression and war, making the attackers the "bad guys".
Clean up your own back yard before you go complaining about your neighbors. And give it up, you need a Palestinian state, and you need to stop messing with those people. The whole world sees it, so just do it.
Yes, fuck us students, not those other ones! Seriously, can a sophomore get a little trim up in this piece?
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
My brother dropped out of school and lost his first real job because he didn't like his bosses. He ended up working at the local Dandy Donuts to make ends meet. I remember visiting him while he was filling up a big plastic bucket with water to wash the vomit off the front stoop that some friendly wino had left there for him earlier.
He sent out resumes like the devil until he got an interview for an IT job, impressed the hell out of the interviewer (he's a clever guy; he was just unmotivated) and consistently impresses his new boss with the quantity and quality of the work he does. ("If only I had six of him.")
So, hey, it worked for him.
On another note, the thing I liked most about going to college was that in high school, there had been kids who'd sullenly refuse to learn, and the school would spend untold effort cajoling them and stroking their egos. But in college, if some kid stuck out his lip and said "I don't wanna go to class!", the instructor would just shrug and say, "Fine, scram." I was ecstatic at the time that I would only be sharing classroom space with people who actually wanted to be there,
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Maybe I lack numeric literacy (numeracy?), but shouldn't 13.7 + 7 be 20.7, not 19.7? You just shorted your server a buck...
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, DON'T CLICK THE LINK! I'M BEGGING YOU! IT'S GOATSE!
(ignore this, Lorem Ipsum) Eraestrud dio blandit ullutat velisim, dignis lectus velessectem veliquisit blandipisisi molestie amconsendre consed iscidunt. (Ignore This, Lorem Ipsum)
"Hello 911? I just tried to toast some bread, and the toaster grew an arm and stabbed me in the face!"
The same problem exists in Europe too. Most people in my school are only interested in drinking & partying or arts/science. I find that literature keeps you sane and balances the so called equation, eg. you can't only study one thing and forget about the other, in this case literature. Long live the memory of the one and only Ernest Miller Hemingway.
Per Aspera Ad Astra.
So the top 25% of graduates from two year programs are more literate than "more than half" of those from four year programs. Interesting.
I would guess that he was quite above the average student at the time. His propensity for language study at that age was probably not indicative of the general populace's (particularly an average 8 year olds) abilities in the area.
Slightly. Normal was for a 12-year old to be able to
read (in Latin) a book and write a report (in Latin)
on that book. Could you do that in any language other than your native tongue?
"Thirty years ago the Europeans used to say that Americans got a very good high school education. Of course they had to go to four years of college to get it.
That was true then; it is not true now. Even four years of college doesn't always (perhaps not even frequently; I don't have hard data, but see the survey yesterday) produce as good an education as did Memphis Central High School or Memphis Technical High School in 1950."
From jerrypournelle.com
Yes, but those are the girls you look for to date. We *need* those kind of people out there.
Seeing as they must do the obligatory "Hello world!" to begin with... which is grammatically incorrect, we can't be expecting too much of the poor suckers, espectially not when their instructors are like this guy:
Instructor: "What is this?"
Student: "That's a comma, there should be a comma between hello and world"
Instructor: "So, you think you're better than me? Bad move, boy-o."
I never was able to gain his approval after that...
The better question is how many college grads are literate - if most of them are, it's the high schools that are failing (big suprise).
I work for College.
/.ers read fark.com
So I am really getting a kick out of most of these replies.
Some of you guys are very good at making it sound like you know how to read on your own.
But trust me.... You don't.
I think you just want to make yourself sound literate and technological, when in reality you dont know what you are talking about.
This is not how people learn to read.
If you dont know what symbols on paper are....Dont make yourself sound like you do.
Cuz some
teachers aren't allowed to use the ruler.
"I hope to learn skill that will be detrimental to my life and job".
I am pretty sure that this wasn't a joke. This is scarey!
For US college grads, a summary [PDF] is available.
However, while I've not read the entire paper, I don't see anything which comes out as "only 50% to 25% of these people can understand a credit card offer." If someone were to read these and post the pertinent info here, I'd be indebted to you.
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
Once you start that logic, you wind up gutting the whole idea of vouchers. Yes, some parents will choose schools that some people don't like under a voucher system. However, that happens in the current system anyway, because a great many of us dislike the current public schools.
If we restrict vouchers to schools that a majority likes and are still under the thumb of unions, you would eliminate most of the competition and potential for reform.
It is a standard but silly political tactic to latch on to your opponent's idea, while keeping sure it gets implemented in a half-assed manner, dooming it to failure or irrelevance. For example, Bush's drug plan would fit this model. We don't need it here.
Ignore the idiots and learn your material. If you are in IT, remember that you are going to be competing against foreigners who are willing to work for 1/3 of the going wage in the US. You had better be reading to produce three times the quality.
it was the same way 15 years ago when i went to college.
The study was funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts. The Pew website has a bit more detail on the report.
You can download the full report - with sample questions - here (PDF): http://www.pewtrusts.com/pdf/The_Literacy_of_Amer
Ronald said nothing. He flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse, and rode madly off in all directions.
That will get you the basics of the information you want.
If they fail, fail them.
The whole grading idea is so that people are guided into the most suitable career for their skill-set. If someone sucks at maths (or "math" for you Americans) or reading/writing, then they shouldn't really be going into a field where those skills are required - they would be better off doing something they're actually good at.
And if someone is unwilling to make the effort to be good at anything? Tough shit, go work at MacDonalds for the rest of your life then. Life is tough, deal with it.
smash.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
I don't know what anyone here is talking about.
"The literacy study took a look at three different type of literacy"
You want an S with that?
I was a math TA both for my Master's Degree and for my Ph.D., and I found students who were not merely functionally illiterate, but totally illiterate. I had one student at Cal State XXXXXXX who left every word problem blank, and never followed written directions if they were longer than a few words. He was failing the course, even though he met with a tutor three times a week, never missed a class, and did all of his homework (albeit inaccurately). I had him in my office one time, and I asked him, on a hunch, to read me one of the word problems he had left blank. He couldn't read it. At all.
There is no shame in adult illiteracy. It happens. It is shame that keeps illiterate adults illiterate. But illiterate people should not be students at a university. It is a waste of their time, the instructor's time, and the other students' time. He had inflated grades in high school because he was a star on the football field, and had earned a football scholarship. Along the way, nobody cared that he couldn't read. I gave him an F, despite his hard work. He could not do mathematics at the eighth-grade level, let alone the university level. Two years later, I saw him again. He was a greeter in a sporting goods store.
He was robbed. He actually did not understand that he was illiterate. He thought that other people faked being able to read the way that he did. He was well-meaning, hard-working, and sincere. He was the first person in the history of his family to go to college, and he had the hopes of his entire family weighing on his shoulders. He was a kitten in a piranha tank, and he had no idea about the reality of his situation. He felt that he let his family, his coach, his teammates, and me down, but he never had the necessary tools to survive college, and he never should have matriculated.
"Indeed, it is wise never to consider any form of electronic data as final." --Arnold Robbins
Actually, you cannot change SAT scores very much with coaching. There is a beautiful plot of this I have seen but I do not remember where. Basically, the gain is a quickly decaying exponential. Here is an approximation of what I remember: A few hours of good prep gets you 10 points. A week gets you twenty. A month gets you thirty. A year gets you forty.
However, a kid who puts in ten hours a week for a year studying for the test probably really deserves the extra forty points. In any case, forty points is not a whole heck of a lot. In general, the SAT, and any other test that measures something close to IQ, is not very coachable. Large efforts are required to make modest gains, and these are generally not permanent.
If all college is going to teach you is to function as well as someone with an 8th grade education 100 years ago, we have a really *REALLY* bad problem.
I don't think kids were learning how to factor quadratics in 8th grade 100 years ago, or how photosynthesis works, or what atoms and molecules and stochiometry were. Just a few things I remember learning in grade 8/9.
Ever think that maybe in the last 100 years, things have progressed a little, and we have more stuff to cram into "learning time", so some of the more basic stuff gets left out?
From my point of view, based not only on reading Slashdot but other sites also, there has been a noticeable degradation in literacy over the past five to six years. The fact that new (uid 500K up) users are younger than us "old farts" (and looking at my uid I'm not that much of an oldie here) is not an excuse.
It has been ranted about too many times to mention, but the articulation in comments on this site are, I think, a good indication of the literacy of people in general. Many younger people just don't understand basic grammar! Exempli gratia: The use of the apostrophe to omit letters from a combination and contraction of words; the you're/your error, they're/there et cetera.
I'm not saying it's the individual's fault. I personally think it's a combination of unskilled and unmotivated teachers, laziness and distraction. The USA is not the only country with this problem; Norway, where I live, is in my opinion following the exact same path of degradation. Kids here often make mistakes in applying certain grammatical rules. A certain sound, even, is fast disappearing from the language (for you Norwegians out there: og/å errors, the "kj" sound).
I've resigned and begun to accept this as a natural evolving of the languages in question, but I'm still quite opposed to it and wish everybody could just use proper grammar. Old fart syndrome, that.
Before you start your flaming, let me just say that I know my English is not impeccable, nor will it ever be, but I dare say I write more correctly than some Americans and Englishmen out there. At least I know the difference between there, they're and their.
Rant over. Let the flamewar commence!
And I quote "Also, compared with all adults with similar levels of education, college students had superior skills in searching and using information from texts and documents."
This means, at least to me, that colleges are doing a fine job of educating student. I say this because, according to this study, those who went to college years ago did even worse on these tests.
Now will you all stop the "it used to be so much better" nostalgia bullshit. A college degree has been decreasing in value since 1945. Damn GI bill.
procrastination is a way of life aka i'll think up a sig later
Over three quarters of the respondents thought scientists were "really brainy people."
Well, was that an option in the multiple choice questionnaire? I find it somewhat difficult to believe that 3/4 of all respondents would choose that particular term. If I'm right, you can fault the people who made the survey for not making the option less ridiculous, like "highly intelligent."
"because they all wear big glasses and white coats and I am female."
That sounds like someone having fun with the survey. Anonymous surveys are great because they can actually get people to answer truthfully when they otherwise wouldn't, but it also causes some to lie. I remember when they gave us all drug use surveys in high school. There was this guy in our group who, after answering 'yes' to "have you used drugs within the past 6 months" or something like that (even though he had never taken drugs in his life), made it his quest to try to come up with as many different examples of drugs as possible to explain the details of his use. If I remember correctly, he ended up naming some drugs multiple times because he didn't know they were the same thing.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
I went to public university, and I'm quite certain that people can fail out of it. You must be thinking of public primary and secondary schools, which indeed function similarly to prisons, where the top priority is the students' or inmates' presence; the rest is incidental.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Sample questions from the survey are available as a PDF download from the American Institutes for Research website.
So... naive college students are having troubles understanding something that was specifically designed to be confusing in order to prey upon the naive?
Shoot Pixels, Not People!
The only hard part is initial admittance. If you want to fail you must intentionally fail.
Everyone who turns in papers on time and scores >50% in finals is awarded a degree.
lol
Does anyone here understand a credit card offer?
I was watching a special documentary about the credit card industry on television a few weeks ago and not even Harvard based lawyers understand the terms. They are made to be as difficult as possible with years of MBA's rewriting the terms to optimize as much profit as possible where users dont know what they are getting into to suppliment the industries business model.
Using that as an example of failed literacy is not that accurate. If we were talking basic understanding of college circulumn as proof then I would be more interested in the validity.
http://saveie6.com/
about. The US Supreme Court has already ruled (correctly, imho) on the church vs state matter.
I have pretty much given up on understanding the Florida Supreme Court. Their ruling in this case was more akin to "The state constitution requires school equality. Vouchers cannot achieve this. Therefore, vouchers are unconstitutional". Of course, this ignores the obvious argument that the current system is also unconstitutional under their own reasoning, and if anything, the voucher system is less so. How does letting children go from the worst schools in the current system to one that they believe is better make things less equal?
This group of people cannot possibly represent the best and brightest of Florida. I had some doubts about them after Bush vs Gore (whatever you think of that fiasco, a court ruling to change the rules in the middle of a game in order to get the "right" answer is neither a bright idea, nor within their power), but now I am completely convinced they are the dumbest state Supreme Court I have ever heard of.
It is this, and not outsourcing, that will bring the United States to its knees.
In the course of every project, it will become necessary to shoot the scientists and begin production.
I for one, welcome our new illiterate presidential overlords.
Hang on! Haven't you American had one for the last five years.
I am one of those of the generation that grew up without computers. I seriously believe that learning to do maths by hand and read from a book and not a badly written sentence, edited for space by a semi-literate online author are the reasons I don't have these problems. Kids today are entirely helpless without computers (and judging by the quality of English on Slashdot they're helpess with them as well.)
Switch off the computer, take out a book on elementary algebra and one piece of good English fiction.
But they still get to charge you the obscene interest rates for 'unsecured' debt. Brilliant move by the banks.
But banks still have to compete for customers' business, and this means either lower interest rates or more perks. The new bankruptcy bill means banks won't have to write off as much debt, meaning they can offer lower rates to people with fair to good credit.
You could not be more correct. The goal of these offers is not for you to understand, it is for you to respond. They rely on something they call "breakage" to remain low enough to stay profitable. Breakage is when someone accepts an offer, then actually discovers what they've done and calls to cancel.
I remember this one package that really bugged me. The package looked a lot like one of the mailers you receive when you bounce a check. Inside is a form with "DID YOUR CREDIT CARDS ARRIVE SAFELY?" in big, bold print with a signature line below. Beneath the signature line is a paragraph of copy that said (paraphrased), "Ok, that's great, here's the real offer." When the recipient signed and returned the form, they were enrolled in the program.
The condition of the mail pieces that make it out the door are the result of an internal battle between what the lawyers say they can get away with and the slop that the marketing department puts together. If marketing could legally get away with enclosing fraudulent million dollar checks to get you to sign up, they would.
Is literacy a measure of how well we decipher deceptive verbage?
issue, and found (correctly) that it is not a problem. Church and state issues end as long as their is choice. You do not complain that when we build roads with government money, it allows people to get to church, now do you?
I am not particularly religious. However, I dislike the anti-religious sentiment often found on the political left, and in voucher opponents in particular. The establishment cause does not require purging religion from everything the state intrudes into, which is the interpretation far too many people seem to have taken. "It's all right for parents to choose, but not if they choose THAT" is clearly anti-religious, demoting such beliefs to an inferior second-tier. That is not "separation" of church and state, it is state VS church.
I fully understand that under a true voucher system, some people will choose some pretty ignorant things. The alternative is to force everyone except the very wealthy to learn whatever the median voter believes (ie, the current system). Which do you think is more dangerous?
One time I ate with some college friends of mine at a restaurant and I recall looking at the party next to us leaving their table (median age of group, about mid 30's). An asian guy busted out a TI 83 in trying to figure out how much everyone at their table should pay, I'll never forget that =)
Why as i read through the comments that have been posted by those who are long removed from college Do I picture an old man shaking his fist in the air shouting about how much harder it was when he was in school. Proffessors as some of the previous posters have claimed to be should hold thier student to the same standard that they were held too. If not to a higher standard
Why should you have skills you don't need? Skills evolve too, you know. If you sit around in an office all day you'll gain some extra pounds and lose muscle volume, if you work in the fields all day you'll get thinner and more muscular. Same with math, why have skills you don't need just because someone says they're "useful"? Useful where? If they were useful, you wouldn't have forgotten them. Hell, I'm having trouble writing, since I only do it twice a year, in the finals (typing is much faster, by the way).
Not that it should matter, but I happen to like math (which helps, being a university student). I just don't know why some people just HAVE to know stuff they have forgotten because they never use.
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
Required reading for internet skeptics
EULAlyzer
Program that analyzes EULAs and points out the important bits.
(Poster will not be held liable for any problems arising form the use of this program.)
The parent makes the insightful and most necessary point that WORK != LEARNING. High schools and (to my knowledge) universities often can't tell the difference between a five-page paper on an extremely boring subject and learning about something useful and interesting.
Kind of unrelated, but your post reminded me- have you ever noticed how crappy many of the BOOKS are these days? As an example, at the university library the other day I took a look in an old (like 1960s vintage) algebra book and was amazed at how much better it was. No fancy illustrations, filler, or any of that crap; just simple text (in a much more readable font on better paper) and a few illustrations here and there. You could actually read it comfortably and follow it much more easily than anything I've seen that was written in the past 10-20 years. I was hoping they would have a calculus book along the same lines but the selection there was much more limited.
It's very, very rare for me to run across a waitress in a restaurant, or in a bar, who couldn't figure the change out instantly. And, really, when was the last time you saw a waitress write an order down, if they're not brand new? Waitresses have crazy memories and crazy calculating skills, on the whole.
What if you're not running a tab, and you're paying for your drinks as you go, and you're sitting in a shadowy corner at the back, nowhere near a register? What are they going to do, run to the front to figure out what the change will be on a beer and two shots of tequila from a $20? Obviously not.
If you eat at McDonalds, well, fuck. But, that's not a "restaurant." And, they pay those poor SOBs about 4 cents an hour, so, what do you want? I'd pretend not to know how to add in that kind of environment, too.
I've always assumed the lack of literacy is highly correlated with a reduced amount of reading. Completely unscientifically and anecdotally, it seems that the average kid reads much, much less than they used to. Assuming that's correct, then all the homonyms and phonetic spelling are obvious and direct consequences of this - they've only ever heard the words, not read them, so how are they supposed to spell them?
As for the problem-solving skills, I imagine that they've developed those in the same sort of way that people used to develop spelling skills from reading: since the input that these kids have been exposed to is primarily audiovisual, they've learned to deal with and process information in that form. Besides, our thought processes don't typically involve spelling words.
I want to provide an 'outsider's' perspective in that I immigrated from India. I feel that it is unfair to blame college students in the USA for a lack of broad literacy. The culture encourages people to focus on their specific roles. All too often, people ask me "So what would you do?" when my responses seem to get lengthy. I realize that the preference is to be practical and productive, narrow one's knowledge and expertise to a specific area and work as a team for complementary skills. I came across a high school student who is passionate about mathematics so he decided to sleep through English classes! On the other hand, Indian culture encourages holism, i.e., you gain broad knowledge before you begin to specialize. The downside of a focussed approach is that a lot of time is spent on the basics. In one of my jobs, I was taken aback when my colleagues asked me explain how the Internet works. The Internet has been invented in the USA and this newbie from India was expected to explain all about it! Another common experience is that written communication bristles with errors (verbal communication is generally superb). The attitude seems to be that a copywriter will correct the errors. The reality is that I have to often struggle to understand the English! Come on, this is an English speaking country. If you have already made the choice to remain focussed, then why be surprised if general knowledge is often not adequate?
I am sick and tired of hearing the continual, "Lets all mutually complain to one another about the dreaded education problem!"
Where are you people taking these surveys? The backyard of Apalachia? In my state of Massachusetts, I have never come across anyone who couldn't read and write. Never!
I am currently pursuing a degree in the sciences. I hardly believe it would be equivalent to a high school degree 100 years ago. Stop with the generalizations!
Are you ignorant, insensitive, or did you just miss the part where Zephiria wrote "Ironically i'm also Dyslexic"?
here
Just because 75% of people at 2 year colleges lack literacy, doesn't mean that 75% of college students lack literacy. There is quite a difference between two-year colleges, which are usually much less vigorous, and normal colleges.
Literacy helps when reading those tricky credit card offers. However, no matter how literate a person is, he or she needs BankRate.com.
I find it shocking that some people commenting here believe they can evaluate credit card offers without help. Remember, the credit card companies have hired sleazy $300/hour lawyers to prepare the most sneaky language possible. It's you against an army of low-life credit card company executives.
Somehow people who would never think of stealing a candy bar from a convenience store become completely immoral when they are part of a corporation.
'It has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.'
For some reason, I found this last part to be quite funny.
Does anyone else find it amusing that CNN would report this given their own level of total ineptitude ?
Anyway, over the years I've bumped into more people than I care to count that cannot tell the time on a non digital (or digical as one idiot called it) watch. All those pointy bits and numbers confused the poor souls.
It's not just America, I have dumb friends in the UK as well.
Two spring to mind.
The first, try as he might, cannot understand that there exists a time difference between the UK and California, he can't understand why I'm not eating lunch at the same time he is.
The second is even better. When I call him on the cellphone he usually rattles on about the fantastic range on these cellphones to be able to reach between the UK and the US.
Fact is, credit card offers and other such nonsense has gotten so complicated that you often need an antire legal team to understand all the ramifications.
If some dickhead is scheming and plotting how to best rip people off, well, it's no wonder it takes a Ph. D. to cut through the bullshit.
And tips? Please... I will never believe it. How hard is it to divide by 10 and multiply by 2, or multiply tax by two? I refuse to believe that people don't know how to give tips. There must have been some communication problem or, the people in question are so greedy that giving tips is something they do rarely, and thus don't know how to do it.
I have 140 IQ myself. I'm not dumb by any means. And I make spelling and grammar errors if I don't proofread what I write. So fucking what? Big f-deal. And it took me like 10 years to figure out the best way to give tips. SO WHAT???? What does this mean? Oh, look, I used the word "like" in a sentence. Woop-de-doo.
Maybe people need to take their heads out of their asses and take a step back and reasses what is important in life?
"Me fail English?? That's unpossible!"
"Klaatu, verada, necktie!" -Ash
This is what you get when you have the educational system indoctrinating students instead of teaching them.
I teach college, the students coming in; their brains are mush. They're not stupid, they've just never been taught anything. I have to teach them that assignment deadlines are DEADLINES and not recommendations for completion date.
They've never had to work before. They're intellectually lazy.
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
you're thinking of an episode of frontgline wgere law professors were stumped. You can watch online or read the text.I'll save you the trouble and link it.
just click it. no worries mate!
Increasing grade inflation over the past thirty or forty years is a big part (and a symptom) of the problem. When I read papers that have earned grades in the B+ to A+ range these days my blood runs cold.
A lot of kids who graduate from college these days wouldn't have ever gotten off the short bus back in the day.
Insert witty sig here.
If College really wanted to prepare people for the real world. They would create an environment that mimics the real one. Curriculums would be designed around economic realities in addition to academic topics. Kids would be given virtual salaries that mirror their chosen career path. They'd be given the potential for an accelerated 4 year career growth path. They would be asked to make choices about where they live and what kind of virtual assets they buy: apartment, single family home, duplex? They'd be given the ability to make choices in virtual neighborhoods with good and bad neighbors and good and bad school systems. During their college term, the stork would bring them virtual children to deal with economically, and if they want they can play a mock stock markete or get themselves into a pile of debt. In addition to that, they would be learning the real technical crap they need for their chosen career path. Did you choose Software Engineering? Ok, you are building a real application then, so your job performance, virtual advancement, etc. will depend on it. You had better deliver a quality product at the end of each college year or you fail that segment of the curriculum.
Each year, every single student would be graded on their progress according to these metrics: net assets, job performance, interpersonal skills, and things like political currency (How well do they know what is going on in the real world?). If they did very poorly, they would fail and have to continue until they addressed the situation.
Will this ever happen? No way. Because educating our children is not the priority in this society. Prolonging their adolescence and controlling the large youth population is the priority.
You are correct in stating that the AMT was designed to hit taxpayers with incomes greater than $100,000, however, in recent years, it has been hitting more and more middle-class taxpayers--people it was not designed to target.
Sent from my iPhone
Which part of dyslexia makes it difficult to end a sentence and start a new one? I'd always heard it described as letters switching around while the text is being processed in the brain, which makes it difficult to recognize words. How does it stop you from composing an organized thought?
It should be noted that credit card offers are very often intentionally misleading and thus they are a pretty challenging test for literacy.
But I would not be surprised if all those college students really had a problem with literacy. I think what is happening is a certain kind of a cultural inflation of the idea of college -- it is becoming a social requirement for kids to go to college, which means that more and more kids do it, even if they are not very smart or do not liek studying, and colleges that want tuition dollars are responding to this by making classes extra easy, which allows more kids to finish college, which reinforces the initial social requirement, etc.
However, there ARE a lot of calculators in the world, and I don't think there is anything wrong with using one for anything remotely complicated.
Like I've always said; If you find yourself in a world without calculators, I hope you know how to kill things with pointy sticks!
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Is that ppl think lathes are stupid. I dream of getting a chance to fool around with one.
Reread the results based on the reports definitions of terms (http://www.pewtrusts.com/pdf/The_Literacy_of_Amer ican_College_Students.pdf:)
Below Basic indicates no more than the most simple and concrete literacy skills.
Basic indicates skills necessary to perform simple and everyday literacy activities.
Intermediate indicates skills necessary to perform moderately challenging literacy activities.
Proficient indicates skills necessary to perform more complex and challenging literacy activities.
It appears to me that Basic=literate. Sure basic isn't great but it seems to imply that you can function in society.
As the BBs slowly die off the good ole USA will go downhill. The new BB motto: "Apres moi, le deluge!"
Of course most post-BBs haven't the slightest notion of what that means, but they'll find out soon enough!-))
When my grandparents immigrated to the USA in the 1960s my grandfather worked as a dishwasher and my grandmother in a factory. Within a few years they bought their first house. The march of progress! Now a dishwasher and factory worker will find it hard to afford a house without paying a mortgage for 20 plus years. Well at least there are lots of colleges pumping out economy majors to tell how much our lifestyle and quality of life is improving over the years.
I am most certainly against the use of sports ability as a determinitive factor in the admission of students. While interest in sports may lead to a different viewpoint (and thus contribute to diversity of ideas) just as being poor or of an ethnic minority, it is by no means definite. As such, I think it is an extremely poor choice for inclusion in admissions decisions.
Involvement in high school sports was originally used as a tool to keep Jews from getting into American universities. Funny how the law of unintended consequences works, isn't it?
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
I used to teach 8th grade science. I believe my students would have done very well on the sample questions used to indicate that college students lack literacy. I am sure that there are huge variations in the quality of education in different schools. I have only taught it two schools; one was public, and one was private. My students were generally enthusiastic, literate, and capable of complex analysis. We used to occasionally discuss the latest "Junkyard Wars" television episode, and students would express cogent and articulate opinions about the designs and implementations on the show. They were interested and clearly thinking about science and engineering outside the class room.
I heard lots of complaints about writing assignments. Students didn't like having to submit a plan including a drawing before I would give them materials for a project. Nevertheless, they did the work even if they only did the minimum acceptable. That is not so unusual in professions, so I hardly fault the 8th graders.
Here is a really controversial observation: I almost always found the task of getting the female students involved in discussions and projects daunting, but almost invariably the best work was provided by the girls.
Many contracts are written specifically so that they obfuscate the facts. There's a reason why the quotation, "What the large print giveth, the small print taketh away," is in existence.
Our writting skill r eccelant
If I can do it, its probably not worth doing... probably
..to experience the public education system. All slashdotters are literate. An overwheming majority are/expect to be/have been college students. Therefore we feel entitled to comment college student literacy levels.
Actually, I'm pretty happy that standards are weakening and that kids are getting by with less learning: It means that MY kids will compete well against their peers.
The pressure to get people's money and get graduates out the door really means that any college that causes someone to drop out looses thus money.
Actually, if you look at how most (large) colleges are run, you'll see that there is a lot of pressure to let in marginal students, and flunk them out after a year.
Let them come in for a year, pay full tuition-hour rates for classes that are 100 students per teacher, and then kick them out before they get to the second year where classes have a more reasonable student:teacher ratio.
Freshmen are a definite profit center for most large colleges.
The further into college you get, the more you cost a university, until you get to the point that a grad student is actually being paid by the university to go to school. (Okay, it's practically slave wages, and they have to teach courses, but it is still an overall cost to the university.) Those grad students are paid using money the university gets from the freshmen that will be dropping out at the end of the year.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is... Oops. Frank, I've got your sig again! Where's mine?
http://www.snopes.com/horrors/parental/babysign.ht m
The fact that tip calculations are built-in on many modern phones gave that one away long ago.
http://www.pewtrusts.com/pdf/The_Literacy_of_Ameri can_College_Students.pdf
How many slashdotter's have the literacy to read it? hah!
I would not recommend clicking the link for any reason. PS: there is a ruler in it, so yes one could tell it is (barely) on topic.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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Still, you've made your point very well.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
And I wasn't even drinking milk at the time. This is being posted on Slashdot, where the "editors" don't know the basic rules of grammer, and often don't even read the submissions before posting them, let alone the articles they link to? That, my dear chums, is priceless.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Have you ever noticed how people deaf since birth can't talk properly? Why do you think that is?
Dyslexia doesn't stop most dyslexics from composing an organized thought, but it stops them from expressing them in an organized way in writing. Think of it as an I/O handicap. As compensation for difficulty reading and writing, dyslexics are often incredibly verbally accomplished, which is why you see dyslexic CEOs like Richard Branson of Virgin. The "letters switching" thing is just a tiny part of it. For people who have severe dyslexia, it's a serious disability, and it's sad to see how they're discriminated against by the sheer ignorance of most people.
Whereas spelling is universally bad.
Slashdot: Where nerds gather to pool their ignorance
It seems often in the news that there is something in it that gives college students shit. Actually, I don't recall the news giving college students any support. But this is America, and American news is generally FUD, so maybe I should come to expect the news to be lopsided trash.
In 3rd grade I was tested at a "College++" reading level. Which, honestly, doesn't mean a thing. I read less in COLLEGE than I did in 3rd grade. End of story.
Who brings their dictionary with them to a place they need to spell correctly?
No kidding, I bring my wifi laptop and google the word.
-Grey
Silver Clipboard: Time Management Tips
reports teenagers value the role of science in society, but feel scientists are "brainy people not like them."
Well duh. You haven't spent much time around the average teenager, have you?
-Grey
Silver Clipboard: Time Management Tips
It's "grammar." ;-)
That's unpossible! How "rediculous". "Your" an idiot. Is that "you're" pencil? ...ugh.
I've long had a beef with the term, "College Students." Every one uses it, and it seems to be an acceptable form. However, the proper terminology is, "Collegiate Students." The English language is vague and subject to mass abuse. There are many forms of words we use improperly, such as: "common," "more common" and "most common." That's just wrong. The proper usage is "common," "commoner" and "commonest." These adjective forms are in every English dictionary, yet we chose not to even recognize them. No wonder "College Students" lack English skills - it's because it's a moving target and they were never taught correctly.
My girlfriend, who's currently applying for financial aid of various sorts to attend college locally here (I believe she's been accepted at the universities she's applied at; she's just waiting for financial aid), proudly told me today how she's looking forward to the $40 in FREE CASH she's getting from Dell.
When I asked her "huh? They're sending you free money?" she replied "yeah, they called and said they'd send me a $40 rebate if I bought a three-year warranty on my new computer!"
Naturally, she financed the warranty on her Dell charge account.
I asked her questions like "how much was it?" and "what service guarantees do they offer?" She knew how much it was ($108, apparently), but couldn't answer any of the others. Do they send a tech to her house to fix the machine when it breaks? Can she get help for non-Windows, non-Dell software problems (i.e. will they support QuickBooks mysteriously not starting one day)? Will they advance-ship replacement parts to her so she can send back the broken unit in the replacement's packaging at no cost to her?
She literally jumped at the notion of having $40 of real cash in her hands whilst a $108 charge gets put on an account she's "already paying every month anyway."
Sigh. Best part was how she got mad at me for asking all those questions. Heh.
Read my stuff.
First, "belief" has nothing to do with it. A government-funded school's job is to teach factual information.
The attitude that you have the facts, and those that disagree with you are wrong, is the whole root of the problem and exactly why you shouldn't be in charge of determining who learns what.
For the fun of it, I will address some of your other points.
You don't have to believe in algebra
Actually, you do. Apparently you neither studied advanced mathematics or logic. Please "prove" algebra starting with no assumptions. I wish you luck.
it just works.
An even bigger logical mistake - you are switching from a declarative statements to imperatives (for the layman, "is" statements vs "ought" statements). If something "works", one means that it produces a good result. "Good" is clearly an opinion, not a fact. Perhaps you find algebra useful. That is nice. That clearly does not imply that everyone else will find it useful. I know some very happy people who have never studied nor performed algebra.
My tax dollars are not being used to teach people to love Jesus
Now how would this argument be any different than me saying "My tax dollars are not going to be used to teach Darwinism"? The only difference I see is the implied "Hey, I've got mine, buddy".
Second, no one is prevented from teaching whatever they want.
This argument and its variants are all have the same flaw. It should be clear if you think about it backwards - what if your kids were forced to go to a religious school or pay double to go to a private school? Couldn't the wing-nuts now use the argument you just used?
I was talking about real statistics with large sample sets. SAT have been shown to be close to impervious to coaching.
One argument I have always found odd is certain political groups will use the small coachability of the SAT against it (ie, it shouldnt be weighted heavily in admissions) when the primary alternative - grades - are FAR more coachable.
Go figure.
Is it simply that credit card offers use a language that is much different than what normal people speak? Perhaps it is time to update these offers and make them more relevant, and communicate it more clearly in a language people use.
Kids to today are LESS educated than they were before _forced_ schooling.
Take a look at the popular/best sellering literature from 100-125 years ago. Mark Twain and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle come to mind immediately.
Most kids today could barely handle the abridged versions of those now _classics_, yet the everyone from the "country mice" to the "city mice" were reading the unabridged versions as their favorite literature.
Google for "The Six Lesson School Teacher" sometime.
re subject change, see also: 'zappa +"The Blue Light"'
...Rob
The American Dream isn't an SUV and a house in the suburbs; it's Don't Tread On Me.
Anyone who's worked on a farm (like the vast majority of the population did in North America 100 years ago) would realize that farmers needed a diverse and surprisingly sophisticated knowledge of many subjects to survive: animal husbandry, veterinary skills, crop lifecycles, hunting, preserving meat/fruits/vegetables, blacksmithing, carpentry, etc. And it wasn't mere craft--you needed to know *when* to use certain skills. Since time and resources were precious, getting it wrong the first time could seriously reduce your chances of survival.
What saddens me these days is my society's increasing disinterest in and lack of respect for the practice of farming. We seem to have little concept of where our food comes from. Heck, I live in a rural community, and even here there are people who don't know that the cling-wrapped chicken at the grocery store is the same thing that goes "cluck-cluck" in a barnyard. Amazing. Worse, these same types of people are taking our precious remaining arable land and turning it into tract housing. Where's the outrage about that? Where I live in Canada, we don't have a lot of options for where we can grow food (the Canadian Shield is unfarmable for the most part) and most of what we eat is trucked in from many thousands of kilometres away. How sustainable is that in the long term?
Yes, technology will always advance and we will need to learn new things as our society evolves and grows. But at the root of it all, we're still animals that need to eat, breathe, etc. You'd think that the knowledge of how to acquire food and sustain ourselves in harmony with our environment would be important to everyone.
"Who needs math? There are calculators."
I transferred to a trade school. I decided to test out of the math class they offered. This class was the only math class required at the school as one of the pre-requisites for attendance included basic math at another college. Granted this was not the most advanced math class, it was along the lines of Algebra II in high school.
I was to take the final with the current class on their last day of the session. I walked into class and the professor ripped into me about not bringing a calculator to class and that he was not going to wait for me to finish. He stated that after the three hour time limit that I was finished regardless. I told him I did not need a calculator to take his exam. Egotistical about a basic math class like that? Yep.
He went to his car and grabbed a calculator and gave it too me. I placed the calculator on the desk next to me and started the test. I finished the test and triple checked it, all within 20 minutes. I aced the exam and had one professor very upset with me.
However, math always came easy to me.
War is peace, Freedom is slavery, Ignorance is strength.
is it changes in literacy, or changes in the complexity of the crap that corporate America deals out?
.92 postage and fill out the $10 rebate form which will take 4-6 weeks-or um months to process. 1 AAA battery not included."
100 years ago, ads would be something like this:
"Gillete disposable razor, 2 cents. Great shave, just throw away the blade."
Today:
"Gillete Mach3 Turbo Extreme Vibrating Thing!! It offers some sort of advantage over the previous model that we haven't discovered yet!! It takes batteries, which makes it better!! We'll give it to you FREE with 2 UPCs from Capn Crunch cereals, but you gotta send in a self-addressed package along with the envelope with
Just out source these complicated credit card applications to chinese and indian college students, after all, once you are done college your job is going to be outsourced as well.
bullshit.
but I'm just a college student
Remember kids, with great power comes great opportunity to abuse that power
1* Read a lot more, at least 15-20 books an year
2* Develop a taste for knowledge , distate for ignorance
3* Don't hate ignorant people, everybody is always ignorant, Einstein and you too
4* Learn about spiritual values and forget religions, they're pernicious
5* Don't judge people only by their degree. Actually, stop judging people, do better then them.
And as a last observation, it's not only teacher fault or student fault, it's society as
a whole. If one rewards remaining in ignorance, people will remain in ignorance expect very
few who naturally love to know and to do.
If people had half a notion of how creative accounting made them a lot poorer....
How many slashdotter's have the literacy to read it? hah!
I would guess very few. I've yet to see one who knows such basic things as the difference between the possessive and plural forms of a noun.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, & Firearms" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
doh!
*grin*
"Alcohol, Tobacco, & Firearms" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
I'm having trouble finding where CNN came up with their 75% of college students remark. According to the CNN article, they got their data from Pew Charitable Trusts, I found their fact sheet for this publication: http://www.pewtrusts.com/pdf/AIR_fact_sheet.pdf I didn't see anything as bad as CNN described. Anyone else able to find something?
...I feel fully qualified to respond to this article:
tl;dr
The government has no place supporting religion.
The government should be indifferent to religion and not even define whether something is "religion" or not in the first place. You want the government to be openly hostile to certain religions, treating their beliefs as inferior to your own.
Indeed. If someone wants to learn some of the ways those "ought" questions can be answered, they're free to do so on their own time and at their own expense.
That's a bit ironic, given that you have some very strong opinions about what ought to be taught in schools and about who ought to be forced to pay for it against their will.
I don't want my public schools telling anyone what they ought to do.
Start by practicing what you preach.
Partially that's because I believe on principle that everyone should make up their own minds, but mainly it's because there can be no consensus.
Yes, everyone should be allowed to make up their own minds, rather than you deciding for them.
You'll find no agreement, however, on any but the simplest of "ought" statements.
There is wide agreement on a whole lot of them. You shouldn't murder, steal, or rape, for example.
I agree. As I'm sure you know, I've never said anyone doesn't have the right to learn whatever they want, nor have I interfered with their right to do so.
Taxing is "interfering" by any stretch of the imagination. If you think otherwise, imagine a $50/sentence tax on the expression of your political beliefs. Would that "interfere" with your right to free speech? Or can I claim "Hey, you still have a choice"?
Their right to learn about whatever religion they like, however, does not obligate me, or any other taxpayer, to pay for it - just as their right to bear arms doesn't mean I have to buy them a gun.
But you want a tax that buys YOU a gun but not them, because they do not want the same gun as you.
Maybe you should get your reading comprehension checked, then, because that sure isn't what I wrote. Whether I agree with the beliefs in question is irrelevant; there are plenty of beliefs I hold that shouldn't be taught as The Truth in school either.
There is something that you consider a lie but think the schools should teach? Or are you merely claiming you are only willing to force others to learn some of your beliefs, but not all?
This is a very interesting post. Thank you.
I can best summarize your beliefs as "I can force people to spend money on teaching some of my beliefs, but not all. In the meanwhile, they cannot do the same to me, because I don't agree with their beliefs".
In my opinion, we should have either:
1: No forcing by anyone (ie, no publicly-funded education)
or
2: Complete choice in what people learn
Any other format leads to hypocrisy, with the majority forcing the minority to subsidize the majority's beliefs. This is hypocritical, unfair, and dangerous. Why are you so afraid of someone learning about Jesus or the Buddha or the Earth Goddess? I am much more afraid of people who think they know more than other people and therefore should control their right to choose. You are separating "religious" beliefs from all others and clearly treating them as lesser, inferior thoughts - as indicated by your call to ban them from public schools. The establishment clause bans their elevation. It does not require burying them.
As for my analogy, I will reverse it so perhaps you will get the point: Imagine that every time a liberal and a conservative get into an argument, the con gets paid $50 for every witty retort - to be paid for by a tax that everyone pays, of course. Is there still freedom of speech? Of course not. If one type is subsidized, and another is not, there is no longer a free choice. Likewise, we do not have a free choice between secular and religious educations.
Let me try again:
I can force people to spend money on teaching some of my beliefs, but not all. In the meanwhile, they cannot force me to spend my money on teaching a certain topic that while I may or may not agree with, I believe shouldn't be taught with my money.
You are still claiming one group of beliefs to be inferior to another. I hardly think it matters which you believe in - it should not be your right to make this decision.
I suppose you could look at it that way. But by that logic, we don't have a free choice between government cheese and our favorite meals either - we can get food stamps for free, but we have to actually get a job and spend money if we want to have a wide selection of foods to eat. We don't have a free choice between sleeping in a homeless shelter (free) and sleeping in our own apartments or houses (not free).
In principle, I oppose these freebies as well. However, they are not relevant to the discussion, and the amount of freedom lost is relatively small. The amount that we spend on this type of welfare is trivial compared to what we spend on education. You are comparing a loss of a few bucks to a few thousand. One more flaw to point out: a religious education is not mutually exclusive with a secular education.
I disagree. A religious education is holistic, or at least many people believe it to be. A proper religious education, in many peoples' eyes, includes science, math, history, and language from a religious perspective. Your "religion on Sundays, secular during the weekdays" model does not fit with these beliefs.
"Thus leading one to wonder if college students lack literacy, or are simply too lazy to read everything that comes across their face."
Or maybe more people need glasses from staring at a screen too close for too long!
No sig for you! Come back one year!
Actually..
I was confronted with a cell-phone that had a tip calculator just a couple of button-presses away. I was both envious and appalled. Envious because I wished I had one of those when I was working out how to calculate a 15% tip on the fly, and appalled because damnit, if I had to learn it, why shouldn't other people? Lazy bastards!