Slashdot Mirror
Encouraging Students to Drop Mathematics
Coryoth writes "The BBC is reporting that students in the UK are being encouraged to drop math at the senior levels. It seems that schools are seeking to boost their standing on league tables by encouraging students not to take 'hard' subjects like mathematics, in favor of easier subjects in which they are assured good grades. The result is Universities being forced to provide remedial math classes for science students who haven't done math for two years. The BBC provides a comparison between Chinese and UK university entrance tests — a comparison that makes the UK look woefully behind."
someone else has as messed up an education system as the US.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I heartily endorse this. If I suck at maths then so should everyone else.
Isn't enough that I ruined a pony, making a gift for you?
Disclaimer: I'm an American, I have not had any experience with the British education system.
But I noticed something peculiar in this article, there were no examples of students being encouraged to drop or avoid math as the title of both the Slashdot summary and the BBC's article state.
What I did see was that there were observations of Universities having to implement remedial math. Ok, and also that students were choosing not to take hard courses so their GPA remained high.
So what?
I faced the same choices in the American public education system and I chose the hardest courses I could. The result was that a student who took primarily shop courses graduated with highest honors & I graduated with a 3.0 or something. But I already had 11 credits through advanced placement courses.
If you're shocked that students are getting to college and needing to take remedial math, you fix the problem. the problem may be that your system encourages them to avoid math courses so give them an incentive to take them. A simple incentive is letting them know that any of the engineering sciences are going to be further away from their reach if they avoid the classes early on.
The 4.0 student who took shop as his electives is still in my hometown working on cars possibly missing a finger. I'm working half way across the country on computer systems for probably better pay. Ironically, in the end the only thing that matters is if you're happy.
Again, I didn't see anyone person or school official steering them away from math, just the potential problem of the system. Make the consequences known to them and if the student is your child, show them some encouragement!
My work here is dung.
The maths knowledge required for both tests is the same, the chinese one just merely requires more application know-how :)
There will be a clamor to drop standards based testing because it is "bad for education" instead of summarily firing the administrators and teachers involved.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Anyway, I didn't take any math in school, and it hasn't impaired my reasoning at all!
Crow T. Trollbot
can they create some more (better?) dentists? seems the UK could really use some help there.
If you read TFA, it actually states the Chinese test is a entrance exam but the UK test is while studying in the first year at uni. I learnt the knowledge to answer the UK test school at 14. I have not idea how to start the Chinese test.
So, basically, people who suck at math are advised not to waste their time and everyone else's money, pursuing something they suck at anyway.
What's the catch?
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
Sooner or later, they will realize that they don't need the US to manage them, and will proceed to cut us out of the loop and leave us with a bunch of middle-manager types that don't produce anything besides TPS reports.
Note: I know that the article was about the UK, but things aren't any better over here in the colonies. Our school system needs reform, and I don't mean the "No Child Gets Ahead" act.
If you're so mentally destitute that you need remedial math classes going into college, you're likely not majoring in the subject anyway, or in any need of what would be considered "hard" math classes anyway.
How many people outside of fields like engineering and other math-specialty careers even need to be able to do much beyond the basic four functions anyway? Sure, it'd be nice to have a general populace well-versed in all subjects, but at this point in time I think that's little more than wishful thinking.
I can't tell you about schools in the UK, but I know for a fact that this scheme would not work here in Ontario. Universities keep an "unofficial" ranking of the academic standing of high-schools throughout the province. This doesn't mean "this school has a really high average!". This ranking takes into account subject focus and quality of education. For example, a high-school that has a large number of graduates with high averages that go on to study in Engineering, Medicine, Physics, Math etc. are given a high rating for academic subjects. Schools with a large number of graduates that go on to study Music, Literature, Art, etc. are given a high rating for the Arts.
You could almost think of this as a normalizing factor (I like to call it alpha). They multiply each student's graduating average by their school's alpha, and it is this normalized result that they use to rank students for acceptance.
Aikon-
Our system doesn't require you to go through technical schools to study technical subjects. Any kind of degree will do. So you have people with a "humanist" highschool degree who have their foundation in latin, maybe even greek or philosophy, or a "business" highschool that comes along with a lot of bookkeeping, commerce and international correspondence, but can't integrate their way out of a sinus.
In other words, the first year of math is pretty much wasted to get those people on par.
Funny enough, if I wanted to study medicine, I'd have to go through courses for latin first to be "allowed", but they don't have to get their math down to study technical CS.
Yes, appearantly math ain't important. Who cares if they know what a matrix is or whether they expect to be able to fly once they know.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
We'd do it because poooo widdle junior got his feelings by the purple colored (god forbid we use red, that looks... stern!) F on the Math test. What's ironic is that the grade inflation and self-esteem fanaticism are creating overly confident students. They're built up on their own self-worth and esteem, and low and behold, we're having a problem with people with malignant narcissistic personalities...
...to see that a country that was the home of mathematical geniuses like Alan Turing, and inventions like the Colossus computer would discourage students from taking math in high school just for increasing test scores. If they want to improve marks, they should be working harder to teach the students rather than discouraging it. Running away from the problem will not solve anything. England sure has changed a lot over the past few decades...
Look at the BBC entrance exam comparison. They show us one question given on a Chinese university entrance exam, and another from a British first year university exam. We don't know anything about the percentage of students who correctly answer either question, so the comparison is meaningless.
Both the Chinese test and the British test were only testing for elementary trigonometry stuff. The only difference being that the Chinese test requires you to be more careful and give more effort. It is just more tedious, but not difficult.
This news post reminds me of Dumbing Down Our Kids by Charles Sykes. Here's the list:
Rule 1: Life is not fair; get used to it.
Rule 2: The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something before you feel good about yourself.
Rule 3: You will not make 40 thousand dollars a year right out of high school. You won't be a vice president with a car phone until you earn both.
Rule 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss. He doesn't have tenure.
Rule 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping; they called it opportunity.
Rule 6: If you screw up, it's not your parents' fault so don't whine about your mistakes. Learn from them.
Rule 7: Before you were born your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way by paying your bills, cleaning your room, and listening to you tell how idealistic you are. So before you save the rain forest from the bloodsucking parasites of your parents' generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.
Rule 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers but life has not. In some schools they have abolished failing grades, they'll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer. This, of course, bears not the slightest resemblance to anything in real life.
Rule 9: Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off, and very few employers are interested in helping you find yourself. Do that on your own time.
Rule 10: Television is not real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.
Rule 11: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.
I am taking AS Maths and AS Further Maths at my school (a state school in the UK, and according to the league tables one of the best). For those who do not know this is the first year of A-Level, and so I chose to do Maths not long ago, and know lots of people who have just chosen their subjects.
In general at my school we were not discouraged from taking Maths at all - in fact the maths department is only a few students away from 50% of the year do maths. 25% of the year does Further Maths. The maths department gets consistently very good results, even though they accept people who got C's (and even sometimes D's) at GCSE to do maths for A-level. If we do a science (I do two) then we are strongly encouraged to take maths, and for those people who do physics without doing maths there are extra lessons for them to learn the maths they need to know. I know for biology people are not really encouraged though.
If we want to do a science at university then we were told that if we do not do maths we will not get in to most of the top universities, and if we do not want to do maths then maybe we should reconsider wanting to do science. For those who do not want to do AS Maths then you can do Use of Maths, which is an extra subject which doesn't get you A-level maths but you do very similar stuff as AS Maths students, just with a focus on Mechanics and Statistics rather than Pure.
The solution is obvious to anyone who actually took the math courses. You weight the grade in math courses differently such that a B in a hard math course is worth more than a A in basketweaving. Make it so the maximum GPA anyone can attain without a math course is 3.5. I know this seems like witchcraft, but trust us math geeks.
The hysterical claim being made (in this case that comparing a single question from one exam to a single question from another exam, with no context as to who takes the test or how students do on those questions) always demonstrates utter innumeracy far more clearly than it denounces it.
And I'm missing where the submitter got the whole "Encouraging Students to Drop Mathematics" thing from.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
I am just about to leave university in the UK (Computing for real time systems not maths) The question they show on there I can answer in my head hardly thinking about it. Its stuff we covered year 8 (I was 11 years old for you guys in the US no idea what that equates to in your system) It makes me worried what has happened to the school system in the last few years. Even the first years at uni are struggling badly at the moment, our lectures keep going on about a failure in the education system. There was comments about failing them all, but I think funding considerations were taken into account and they all got extensions. If a student drops out in the first year the university has to give back the extra money they got from the government so they like people to get past the first year before dropping out. It really is quite worrying hearing some of the questions they ask some times. So yeah the education system over here has gone down the pan pretty rapidly as far as I can tell.
Anti gravity, but don't positives and negatives attract, humm a flaw me thinks.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Man, that law is a bitch.
I see people often chastise others about thinking about this law before altering incentive systems. But are effects like this really that reasonable to anticipate?
Man. Did it just get cold down there? Am I even at the right site?
(:
Quack, quack.
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
This is obviously a strange usage of the word 'glad' that I wasn't previously aware of.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C1 bottles of beer on the wall. Take one down, pass it round... Oh, umm...
Gee, I work in the tech industry, make 6 figures and never need more than simple algebra in my job or personal life. If you want to be an engineer (or other technical position that actually uses high level math), then sure - make math a pre-req, otherwise, teaching kids how to manage a budget and balance a checkbook if FAR more important to being successful in life.
All that anti-math stuff aside, I have gained an interest in how cool math is "just because" and am learning as a self-enrichment activity.
It was "If y=3x and 3x=12 what is y?". They both kept insisting y=4 no matter how many times I said no, would you like to try again. Finally I explained why y=12 and they both said "yeah, but that's math".
For background info: they were both female, one was in her early 50s and educated in Saskatchewan (finished High School), the other was in high school (age 14-17?) and had spent time in both the Nepal and Sask. education systems (I'm not sure where she spent more time, she was from Nepal originally).
Anyways, I guess my point is that people everywhere have a disdain for math and science. I think the problem lies in the fact that in too many schools (around here at least), they do things like having the phys-ed teacher teach math. My sister's class in grade 5 had a race instead of a test (this was in math not phys-ed).
OK, from the article:
Pupils are being discouraged from taking A-level maths as schools in England chase higher places in the league tables, scientists have claimed.
[...]
The Department for Education and Skills said more pupils were studying maths.
Now, tell me if I need remedial classes in English, but it sounds to me like more pupils are studying maths, i.e. the opposite of fewer.
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
The people who provide the education should not also provide the certification.
Degrees and certifications of all types should be provided by a taxpayer-funded institution who's standards are under public control. The role of the university, then, is simply to prepare you for those tests.
That would destroy the incentives for grade-inflation and also give more meaning to the certifications themselves (no more of this "does a degree from this university cover the same material as one from that university" business...)
My wife has first hand experience of china's education system, and her recollections were that she was studying material at 14-15 that UK students met at 17-18.
My recent visits to UK schools support the idea that british maths education is a good way short of what it was. To see a 14 yr old science student, at a well-respected school, struggle with a linear equation with 3 terms in it is a sad thing.
As to whether students are being encouraged to drop tougher subjects, as the article claims, *that* I have not seen or heard of from my teacher-friends.
Students not taking A-Level mathematics (or "maths", over here in the UK) is nothing new, typically it was the preserve of those who had a natural aptitude for it, rather than based on the requirements of a degree they might want to study.
This isn't ideal, obviously, but it's been this way (in England & Wales: the Scottish and Northern Irish education systems are quite different, and I don't know how popular Higher Maths is in Scotland) for at least 15 years, probably longer.
The undergraduate entrance exams for IIT is one of the toughest I've seen. Here is a sample. A typical question would be like.. Find all solutions for the equation 1! + 2! + 3! + 4!... + n! = n^2. The british paper wouldnt probably appear even in a high school exam in India because the problem is so typical, it would have been surely used in the textbook prose, and hence immediately disqualified from being used as a question in an exam.
I have worked through to a solution of the BBC problem from China and my first reaction is Yuck, this is not mathematics but artifical nonsense posing as mathematics. The problem does little to inspire what I call "abstract" reasoning (though it does have a little bit of cleverness in finding triangles with two equal sides and where all the perpendiculars occur). I suspect that the students who do well on this problem have drilled themselves on 100s of variants of this problem until they were deathly sick of it. This is why some characterize the Japanese and Chinese education system as a system designed to suppress creative thought.
I think we have little to fear from the Chinese produced from this education system.
Having said that, Britain does do a fairly poor job in educating their students in mathematics compared to their peers in other European countries.
I just want the correct change at Subway when the cash register doesn't tell the sandwich-master what to do. Is adding and subtracting that much of a lost art these days?!
It's almost a sick hobby of mine to wait until they hit the $20 as cash tendered key to whip out a little change to prevent getting more change. The panicked, vapor locked, look in their eyes is really a thing of beauty.
c'mon people, your job is to make change when you work the register. It's not to say hi, it's not to look hip and disinterested, it's to take my money, and give me my friggin sandwich and change. When subtraction eludes you, maybe you should be swabbing the dining room instead.
Sheldon
Why are they giving extra lessons instead of making maths A-level a requirement for placement on a science course? Cambridge gave me a conditional offer to study Computer Science on the condition I had an A in Maths, and an A in Further Maths (as well as an A in Physics [more maths]). Other universities expected grade A-C at Maths A-Level. What's the problem here? Not enough science candidates if they require this A-level?
Who needs math when all the computers are gonna be doing it for us - they already are. Great!
Many studuents in the U.S. take higher level math. Not nearly the numbers, but many do. Some of us actually enjoy it and get it. For those that do not "get it" we don't provide an avenue.
:) I don't have the answers to replace it, but I think we should start talking about it.
When we all got to be 11-14 we stopped caring about school as much...not all of us of course, but many of us start to think about all the other things. From which clothes to wear to sex. School becomes and after thought for many. Then when we get to high school and need to start focusing we've already screwed ourselves.
Part of this I think is to the inadequacy of 1st thru 7th grades. We learn basic arthimetic, how to spell ( I didn't do so hot ), and some stupid life sciences. It is so general and does nothign to prepare us for the harder stuff.
Would it be so hard in the first grade when we propose _ + 7 = 11...fill in the blank to instead say X + 7 = 11. What should X be. When the kid says 4 why not then show them 4 = 11 - 7...x = 11 - 7. Basic algebra is not that much harder then the math we learn in the first and second grades, but we wait till the 7th grades when most boys are getting boners looking at their teachers.
Even the act of calling these classes harder is creating the problem. Why is algebra harder...it really isn't if presented right. Calculas is a bit tricky I'll admit, but I think if kids had a better foundation it wouldn't be that hard.
The same is true with science. I don't remember a dang thing I learned in the 7th grade about science. I think the teacher was boring me with the scientific method or something. Looking back to the thrid grade I don't even think science was on the menu. Shouldn't we have diagrams of atoms on the class and tell kids this is what everything is made of. Our minds where like sponges and we where being hand fead.
The importance of younger and younger education is becoming appartent...if you don't like to learn by the time you hit 10th grade and don't have parents pushing you to anyways you probably are not going to make it. Instead of testing kids we need to determine how much they are enjoying class.
Don't get me started on the A-F grading system
You get smart people with low self-esteem and arrogant dumb people.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C1 bottles of beer on the wall. Take one down, pass it round... Oh, umm...
Take the top twenty wealthiest people in the world, and see how many of them used math skills beyond arithmetic to get to where they are...
If I could integrate my way out of a sinus, maybe I could breathe easier.
This is a symptom of a greater problem. It seems, nobody is willing to do the hard work needed to accomplish great goals, because it makes them look .... bad when they fail. There is this whole mentality of "gotcha" in the world, where everyone blames everyone and everything else for "failure". Everyone is out to "get" the person who screwed up, so every effort is made to lower standards so that more people "succeed" even though, the real measure of success hasn't changed.
The craziness of this all is not based upon reality but rather on "feelings". Can't "hurt" the "feelings" of the poor souls who can't do something by actually being truthful and saying "You suck at that, let's try something else".
So, we've raised a generation (or two) of wimpy girly people, who wear their emotions on their sleave, and base everything on said emotions. "He offended me" waaaaaa. Grow some backbone people, and quite being a two year old.
A university of athletes gets shot up and murdered, while an 81 year old man was the only man, "Man enough" to do something. The stud athletes were jumping from windows. How pathetic is that?
Four airplanes are crashed into buildings while passengers sat like lambs doing nothing. One airplane had some REAL MEN and took out the hijackers.
We've lost our gung ho, wild west attitude, it as been pussified from our society. This is what happens when you let women and girly men run things. "Don't take the hard math, because it makes us look bad". "Don't fight back", "don't try and fail, better to not try at all".
I'm sick of it.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I didn't follow Chinese version question (iii). Been a while since I've done much trig outside of programming. How do you compute an angle between two lines that don't intersect?
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
I live in England, and went to an English school. I could do both questions by the time I hit 16. My university required me to achieve an A (80%+) at A-Level Mathematics in order to gain acceptance to my course - Computing - and does the same for all science subjects. For those of you who don't know, this consists of six modules containing fairly advanced calculus, geometry, vectors, mechanics, statistics and more. Many of those on my course took Further Mathematics too - essentially another six, harder modules (or three if you only take it for one year). We have no idea what courses the given questions came from, let alone what universities... without more information, I'd be hard-pressed to give this any sort of credibility.
I work with MANY people who make six figures but never learned math. Even though their jobs do not require a direct application of higher mathematics they make decisions that are stupid and cost the project millions of wasted dollars. They lack intelligence, discipline and logic - something they would have had more of if they studied math - to realize they are making mistakes before it's too late.
I'm shocked it took this long to run into the usual GW Bush slam...
It wasn't until college when I took physics that I realized that math can be fun and interesting. I think the biggest mistake that math teachers make up until sophomore in college is to teach math as a separate subject with very little reference to its roots. In my case, when I learned math in the context that it was developed for (physics and other sciences), I understood it.
Devoid of the reason it was developed for, calculating a derivative is just a mechanical and rote learning exercise. Learning in the context of velocity, acceleration, and distance made it meaningful. The same goes for most mathematics. I didn't get my undergrad in math, so I don't expect my reasons to hold up with the higher levels of math and other subjects.
"The result is Universities being forced to provide remedial math classes for science students who haven't done math for two years."
And why would the students bother with it if they know that the University will allow them to take a remedial course? I don't mean to seem harsh, but if the Universities simply told the students "Oh, you don't know math? Then I don't think this is the place for you," the students would suddenly have a much greater interest in taking senior-level math.
Higher level math education is not dead in America. See the www.artofproblemsolving.com website, and browse some of the problems in the forums. It's amazing what one can do with even pre-calculus mathematics, and even more amazing that high schoolers can solve the kinds of problems posted there. Let me just take the first thread in the "Intermediate" forum:
Find m and n if m and n are both natural numbers such that (m+n)^m = n^m+1413.
Pretty hardcore stuff. Nice books, too.
Myself, I was torn between CS and engineering entering college
Me, I was torn between taking Computer Engineering or Marine Biology as a major in college. If I knew then what I know now I would of done a double major, both CE and Marine Bio.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I must be missing something... but the third part of the chinese question asks you to find the angle between two lines in different planes (AD - BC1). Since they never meet, how are you supposed to determine what the 'angle' between them is?
Assume the 'angle' is formed by looking 'straight down/up' according to the reference normal for the top and bottom planes of the object???
I hated questions like that...
One thing overlooked is the fact that China has a vastly higher number of people. The United States has a higher percentage of people who achieve "higher" education as tested, at least in comparison to China. If the percentage of people that went to Chinese universities was compared to the same percentage of people going to American or UK universities you might just find schools like MIT or Oxford in the comparison. Point being, statistically the study isn't taking into account overall effects of the system on the country in question.
First, I'm not sure how "representative" these two questions are of British and Chinese education. Perhaps they're comparing a "basic competency" test from a British school to the entry exam for a top Chinese technical school.
Regardless, as a mathematician, I think that the Chinese problem looks "complicated" but not especially interesting. Sure, it seems more impressive than the British one, but they both require nothing more than basic geometry and a bit of trig -- the main difference is that the Chinese problem involves a significant amount of "grinding out" calculations, but it doesn't really require any insight or understanding. It's really not much different than doing page after page of long division, or working out a nasty Sudoku puzzle. It's much more interesting to prove something surprising about a basic geometric figure than to prove something boring about a complicated geometric figure -- that is, unless your sole interest is in cranking out engineers to do "worker bee" calculations like this, rather than trying to learn more about reality and how to calculate unknown things.
Cheers,
IT
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
In my High School, the A students were those who put the most time into everything they did. The best athletes were usually the A students. The best musicians were the A students. The student council were A students. The B students weren't too bad either. Maybe they watched a little bit more TV at home.
The C students were the linemen on the football team, the bench-warmers on the baseball, softball, and soccer teams. The fill-in trumpet players.
The D students were always smoking near the back doot, smoking by the tennis courts, smoking in the parking lot.
The F students were smoking near the back door on Monday's when they would show up at school. By Wednesday, they were in "special" study hall, sleeping at their desks. Or, maybe they never made it to school.
I know of several A & B & C students making a fine living, nice families. D students, one is a murderer, in prison somewhere. I didn't know many F students...
we need to be increasing our manned space program, and start some colonies of our own.
It was four modules back in my day. Ahh, yes, P1-4 and M1-4 (applied mathematics: classical mechanics) and trying hard not to be pressured into doing Stats... Then they switched to the six module structure.
OK, cue the old codger who did it all in one ruddy great exam at the end.
Well, from the universities' persepective, this should be a no-brainer. Nobody's holding a gun to their heads dictating what their admission standards should be, nor what courses they should teach most of.
So there's nothing to stop them from saying that anyone who hasn't taken advanced-level maths shouldn't be admitted to any science, maths or social-science subject. They could still do arts, within certain restrictions.
Maybe this would mean even fewer science and engineering students. Maybe it'd mean whole departments closing. So be it. That's the market speaking. If companies won't pay their employees enough to make it worth their while to learn this s**t, then they deserve what's coming to them.
If you don't know how to do math, use a calculator! Or, better yet, use a computer!
Math is too hard for most people. Besides, how much math do you really need? If you aren't a math teacher, that is.
If you can count the number of cigs left in a pack, that should be good enough, right? Leave the harder stuff to the computers.
Back when I did a maths degree in the UK, and probably now, A-level syllabuses varied wildly in what they covered. And students may (as I did) have taken two maths A-levels rather than just the one. So some students might well simply not have encountered any basic statistics, or might have inadequate knowledge of geometry, etc.
Hence the remedial tests and classes. It's not an examination, as such; it's just to see which students might benefit from having bits of the basic knowledge filled in, so only they need to sit through what would be exceedingly boring classes for people who've already covered the basic stuff.
"Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house."
R. A. Heinlein
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
"Our students can't make change, but their scores on insipid post-modern nonsense is amazing." Unfortunately, they'll all be self-alienated crazies working at fast-food establishments for life.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
Then some parents complained that it was discriminatory towards non-college-track students, and the district got rid of it. The next year, the big town nearby had some ridiculous number of co-valedictorians, all but one of which were people that hadn't taken a single honors class. Damn PC cry-babies.
In the UK, the standards-based approach has been bad for education. This is the view of people I know involved in staff recruitment (I work in software dev). It is also the view of people I know involved in the university scene (I live in Cambridge, UK, and many of my friends are staff or postgrad researchers at the university). And it is most certainly the view of people I know involved in teaching at school age (those that haven't simply left the profession in disgust, that is).
The argument about standards-based testing would have merit if the approach worked in practice, but unfortunately, we can clearly see now that school league tables have not had the desired effect. Instead of motivating schools to teach to higher standards, what they have actually done is motivate schools to play the system.
Today, schools will encourage weaker students to take subjects where they are likely to get better grades rather than more difficult subjects, as with mathematics in the case of TFA. Similar things hold for sciences, modern languages, etc. This is caused, in no small part, by giving all subjects equal weight in the statistics (give or take special statistics for things like English and maths, which they play around with every couple of years).
Today, schools will focus on teaching pupils to pass their exams with as high a grade as possible, not on teaching pupils their subject and letting exams simply be a measure of how well the pupils have learned. Revision is all about exam strategy now.
Today, schools will actively discourage pupils from taking courses where they may pass but without gaining a high grade. No grade at all damages the averages less than a D or E grade, and so doesn't corrupt the school's precious "percentage of examinations taken that were passed at grades A*-C" type statistics.
The bottom line is that instead of teaching pupils real understanding in key subjects, and playing a role in their personal and social development along the way, today's schools are simply machines geared to generating exam passes, and today's pupils are simply fuel for the machine. Consequently, you can get straight-A students who don't know their subjects. You get universities inventing their own entrance examinations and/or stating bluntly that they will ignore certain A-level subjects entirely when considering applications, simply because otherwise everyone applying is a straight-A student and the admissions tutors can't distinguish between them. And you get people applying for jobs with great qualifications on paper, who can't do now with an A-level in a subject what someone twenty years older could do after gaining an O-level.
This isn't education, it's product marketing for the New Labour administration. And like much of marketing, most of it is simply lying with statistics, and finding excuses to deny a reality that is self-evident to any qualified observer who takes the time to look.
And as for firing teachers, consider this: so many old-school, teach-the-subject veterans are now leaving the profession (often through early retirement deals because they are much more expensive to employ as teachers than green youngsters fresh from university) that all the accumulated wisdom of generations of teachers is rapidly disappearing. We are being left only with youngsters who have found trendy new methods like synthetic phonics to increase results (no, wait, that one's decades old!) and think they're very clever. Unfortunately, the ones who are very clever rapidly get disillusioned and leave the profession, as several highly qualified and very smart friends who graduated in my university generation all did within two years of starting work as teachers. You don't have to fire anyone in this scheme, because the good people — young and old alike — have already left in disgust.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Your earning potential in the modern world is largely dependant on your Math and Language skills
In college I tutored in math, and chemistry, and one of the first questions I asked a new student was if they were good with languages or art. I'd say math was just another language, just translate the different symbols and math should be easy. Or I'd say you had to be creative in how you analysed a problem so you can come up with a solution. This pretty much worked with most of the students I tutored. The only one it didn't work with was this girl who's parents were paying her expenses and she was frequently drunk, she kept an ice filled cooler in her car stocked with beer. After a couple of weeks I couldn't take it anymore and had to stop tutoring her.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Now, it's been years since I've done this level of math. BUT, the first question on the Chinese test seems impossible -- it asks you to prove that two lines are perpendicular even though they don't intersect. The third question has a similar problem -- it asks you to find the angle between two lines when the lines aren't on the same plane.
I think I now know why none of my kid's made-in-China toys fit together correctly.
I took Algebra 2 in summer school my junior year and then filled up my senior year with Intro to Art and Creative Writing...so while I got all A's my senior year, the college I wanted to get into looked at the 'easy' courses I'd taken and said no thanks.
I ended up in remedial math at university. *sigh* This is a disturbing trend, and you're right, it's "to the detriment of real learning." If I'd known I would have gone ahead and struggled through a math class instead of art.
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
How many people outside of fields like engineering and other math-specialty careers even need to be able to do much beyond the basic four functions anyway? Sure, it'd be nice to have a general populace well-versed in all subjects, but at this point in time I think that's little more than wishful thinking.
A number of fields outside of math or science need math. My sister who majored in accounting for her BA had to take calculus for business and statistics classes. Other fields in the business arena require calculus as well, even more so in finance and economics.
FalconShould there be a Law?
And I can tell you that this article is slanted very heavily to create a sensationalist story.
The maths question that appears in the article is very similar to something I would expect to see at GCSE level. NOT university level.
I'm doing a degree at university in Computer Networking, we had to do Diploma Maths (which is slightly above A-level standard) in our first year and it was very difficult stuff, if questions like that appeared in the exam I would have thanked god, and walked out with 100% (and so would everyone else on the course). I'm not sure where they found that question and exactly what the test was actually trying to achieve but it certainly doesn't match my experience of GCSE, A-level and Degree level maths in the UK.
Maths is easy. You add up, subtract, multiply and divide. Could it get any simpler?
Those using pirated Tinysoft signatures(TM) are a real threat to society and should all be thrown in jail.
Two lines are perpendicular if they meet at a right angle. If they don't meet, they aren't perpendicular. So question (i) on the Chinese national test is ill-formed. I prefer the British test. It looks like the people who wrote the Chinese test were trying to make too complicated a question, and got confused themselves. Maybe something got lost in translation. You could guess that they meant that any non-zero vector along BD is perpendicular to any non-zero vector along A1C, but if that's what they meant, they could have said so.
What I've noticed is that math and sciences are a little bit immune to grade inflation. I think this is because the teachers know the meaning of the ditribution function and set their exams to get an actual spread. So, only a few people should actually do very well on an exam and most should end up missing a third or so of the questions. This means that grades can be meaningfully assigned from quantitative information. Perhaps the problem is not that these subjects are too difficult but rather that assessments in other subjects have become less meaningful.s -selling-solar.html
--
Solar power with no exam: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
without more context.
First off, who is to say that these questions were intended to be completed in the same amount of time? (Perhaps the UK test has 60 questions in 1 hour and the Chinease test has 20). In truth, they really test the same thing just the chinease example takes more steps.
Secondly, what percent of UK students get the UK question right, and what percent of Chinease students get the Chinease question right? Tests usually have questions of different degrees of difficulty -- we could be comparing an easy UK question to a hard Chinease question. Or maybe the difference represents a difference in test crafting philosophy -- the UK test could have been created with the intention that most people get most of the questions right, the Chinease such that most people get most of the questions wrong. Both systems can compare applicants' knowledge.
On a different subject, it is my understanding that no HS students in China learn calculus. My source is my Dad, who is a Math prof at a good US college and former math adviser to incoming freshman. Some Chinease students who are very good at math would show up every year, and to his surprise, none of them every had taken calculus. The explanation was simple: there is no calculus on the Chinease college entrance exam, so no school teaches it because they are all preoccupied with teaching to the test. As a result, maybe Chinease HS students are very good at trig and geometry, but those aren't the subjects really needed for engineering and science. But writing an article about that would be poor fearmongering.
You can see the remnants of it this sort of thing in ancient myth. Hephaestus was the god of the forge. One may think that at one point he was highly respected, for he got to marry Aphrodite who we know as a goddess of beauty. Earlier, she was likely a goddess of fertility - high rank indeed among early figures. But his high value did not hold - he was cuckolded, and in myth was rendered as ugly and lame.
Those who create are held in esteem, but when the creation is done their value dissipates.
Perhaps one may see parallels among math and sciences.
I got this from a paper I read on the 'net about prehistory based on ancient greek myth. It was pretty cool, but I forget exactly where it was.
-- "Oh. This guy again."
Long story short, I ended up having to take remedial math, which ended up earning me a world of hatred and loathing from my classmates, and made me a source of endless amusement to my advisor (who had told me to my face that my "sleep deprivation" story was hilariously implausible), due to my "impossible" 116 point class average...I was so far off the curve, that they had to adjust it anyway, and count my score as a data anomaly.
When I took an entrance exam when I started college I was told I had to take an intro to algebra class, which I got a "D" in. The following semester I took the intermediate algebra class selfpaced. I finished it in half the semester with an "A". I then used the rest of the semester to work on geometry and trig. By the end of the semester I had a "B" average with one test left to finish it. When we had registration for the following semester my guidance counselor said I shouldn't of been allowed to take the intermediate class because of the "D" however my scores in intermediate and trig made up for it. I asked her about getting the credit for trig and she said in order to get it I'd have to register and pay for it. Then I asked if I needed the credit to take calculus and she said no so I skipped it and registered for calc.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Although the excuse is safety, the real reason for these license requirements is to reduce competition for the current professionals, and provide a cheap labor pool to exploit. These license requirements get passed for the same reason "forever copyright" laws get passed: the people who give contributions to legislators to pass them have a great deal of interest in them, but the voters in general are rarely even aware of the issue.
There's no excuse for basing the decision regarding a person's competency on an excessively long term of servitude to a self-interested party. If the license candidates aren't qualified after their training is complete, then their training is deficient. Whatever safety issues they're learning on the job should be taught during training. Whatever they must know, should be on a test. It's dangerous to rely on employers to fill the educational gaps that professional educators failed to address.
A better way might be to track the ability of incoming students during their first semester. For example, if students from high school X had an average of C- in IT courses during their first college semester, but students from school Y had an average of a B+/A, then school Y gets a rank of 9/10, while school X gets a rank of 6/10.
Then, you take the students' grades, say a B- in IT-related courses, and give that a score, say 7.5/10.
Combine the two, so that you get 16.5/20 for a student of Y, but only 13.5 for a student of X.
Then, you might set the admittance standard so that entries with a higher score take precedence. Entries can be re-evaluated each intake, and then "school scores" recalculated.
Good students in schools with a lower-standard of education will still get in, while medium-students of a better school might also get in. That puts both school's students on hopefully about the same level, while knocking out the midline students of schools that have a "just pass 'em through" policy.
But very few comments from anyone in the UK. Let me explain, and hopefully redress the balance slightly.
The way the UK education system works is:
At around age 16, you take exams we call GCSE's. These are, in the big scheme of things, fairly straightforward. Most people will take around 10 subjects at GCSE level.
The next year (around age 17), you take AS-levels. Each AS-level is worth half an A-level. Most people will take about 6 subjects.
The year after, you take A-levels. Most people will take 3, though some will take 2 or 4. You don't choose new subjects - you generally carry on doing the things you did well in at AS-level.
Each A-level pass grade (A-E) gets you a certain number of points - obviously, higher grades=more points. AS-levels are worth half the number of points of their equivalent A-levels.
Universities set entrance requirements based primarily on points achieved at A/AS level. They can also demand you do a particular subject for some courses, but that's by no means certain and varies from university to university. Some of the top universities also demand you take another entrance exam.
All of which is well and good. But what I haven't explained yet is the real fuck-up.
There is absolutely no comparison whatsoever between "amount of work required to get a good grade at GCSE" and "amount of work required to get a good grade at A-level". The gap between the two is absolutely huge.
Seriously. Provided you're of reasonable intelligence, you could mess around for 2 years (as I did) at GCSE level and still get reasonably good grades.
Try doing that at A-level and you will almost certainly screw up with a vengeance. This is particularly true in science-y subjects like Maths and Chemistry.
Thing is, a lot of 16 year olds don't take these things seriously. Your teachers can say "You're going to have to pay more attention at A-level" until they're blue in the face, but a lot of people won't really take that on board until it's far too late. So you either drop that A-level in Maths or you fail it.
Now politics comes into play. No government wants to admit that the schoolchildren of the day are failing. But it's a government body which sets the exams. So every year, the exams are a little bit easier than they were the previous year. Not substantially - as a pupil, you probably wouldn't notice unless you were given an exam from 15 years earlier. The unversities notice, though, and they've taken a number of approaches. Some demand an extra entrance exam, others do remedial courses. Such remedial courses have existed for ages - they're called "foundation" courses and are generally a year long. But they are generally only offered for some degree courses, and they seldom get this level of publicity
What University is "forced" to accept these students AT ALL? Give the spot to someone who took math and science. Or, if someone wants to spend a couple of terms at a junior college taking "remedial" math and can get to the point where he or she qualifies for entry into a science degree program, then accept him or her at that time.
The University science curriculum is difficult enough, at least at the more challenging schools, that even the people who did well in High School Calculus and Physics have to really work hard. It's really not a place for someone who opted out of High School math.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
But I noticed something peculiar in this article, there were no examples of students being encouraged to drop or avoid math as the title of both the Slashdot summary and the BBC's article state.
Here it is.
My page.
Get rid of grades. Grades create massive amounts of external pressure, and that extrincsic motivation causes kids to lose any intrinsic interest they had in the subjects. Why doesn't hardly anyone read or do math on their own anymore? They're forced to do it. Basic psychological principles of motivation..
Of course the Chinese tests are harder - they're in Chinese!
Reading the entire article it seems to me that the British example is entirely flawed, it is given to students during their first year to weed out students with remedial problems, they are hardly likely to be hard questions now are they? The tests for the Chinese students will be to find the Elite students, since most UK universities don't do entrance exams and they rely entirely on the UCAS / A Level system you can't make a valid comparison. Perhaps the UK Universities should not rely on a system that is flawed in a way to prejudice against their subjects.
The kind of person who would major in Math is generally very good at it anyway. Why else would someone major in it? It's not exactly a high-demand career path. It's not going to bring in the big bucks...
--The universe will not be altered by forum threads, even those which are very wry. --Tycho Brahe (Penny Arcade)
Thats fine.. the students the DO take math and finish such a hard subject will be all the more respected and valuable.
Bringing liberty to the masses. - http://freetalklive.com/
Please identify the shape ABC:
A) Octagon
B) Triangle
C) Square
D) Circle
I can't truely speak for the whole nation, but in this little corner (Newfoundland) the situation is much the same. I haven't heard of people being actively asked/told not to take mathematics, but I know that the majority of people (~55%) of students entering MUN (Memorial University of Newfoundland - largest university in the region) fail the standard Math Placement Test and are therefore either required to do creditless math courses in order to continue with any other math/science courses or do a degree which does not require any math credits.
So we have a lot of B.A.s around here.
And now for a joke I'm going to get modded flamebait for: What did the B.A. say to the B.Sc.? Do you want fries with that?
Godless heathen.
I tried to do the math and I ended up at an angle of about 95.41 degrees. Initially I was pretty sure it was correct. I'm however starting to doubt a bit after not seeing the answer here. Anyone can confirm, or deny?
Well, knowing a few Chinese uni students, I've learned that for the most, they're not allowed to use calculators, quite different from the TI-92 that aided me through advanced math.
It is true that they have a far lower percentage of high-level students, that's due to the capacity of their educational system, they simply don't have as many seats available as there's students willing to educate, so the very difficult entrance exams is used to limit the number of students.
I won't conclude anything, it's just worth a thought...
Back then I was a CE major, with minors in both math and physics.
You might say I was purpose driven back then and I saw her drinking as wasting her life. I'm not against drinking alcohol but I am for moderation and responsibility. Heck I believe hemp aka marijuana should be legalized, along with other street or illegal drugs. Government has no place dictating to individuals what they do or don't do with their own bodies as long as they don't harm another.
FalconShould there be a Law?
How come an 'A' in an easy course shoud count the same as an 'A' in a math course? do you see it logical that the highest honors tend to go into Students in 'soft' humanistic careers?
I say this because it also happens in my country. And I consider it a shame that such students taking the easy paths are having hte highest honors and benefits....do you think it's reasonable and encourage students to go into the hardest path?
Having students graduate relatively dumb in something as crucial to understanding much of the modern world as mathematics is an act of major intellectual sabotage and sabotage of the future of the students concerned. An teachers or administrators guilty of this in any school should be dismissed and sued by concerned students and parents.
If you want to compare how well-versed the students are in math, then wouldn't it be important to actually look at the (average) test scores? What if the Chinese students average 50% for their test while the students in the UK average 80% for theirs?
In the end the Chinese students may in fact be better at math, but the difference in test difficulty alone doesn't prove it.
Alioth hit it right on the head. Most people who claim "I suck at math" have a good understanding of the basics. Calculus is the first bit of "real" mathematics that people encounter in high school and they generally have a hard time understanding it.
I think that the bigest difference is the set purpose behind those questions. Each year in China there are more than 8 or 9 million attendees of the National College Entrance Examination. Only an half of them can get the next schooling in their life, and a very tiny fiction can reach the best school(a total of 20 thousand freshmen in Peking U. and TsingHua U. each year). Competition here is like bloodbathing. Therefore this National Test is born for differentiating students. Its questions are NOT to test whether you know to crack or whether you have talent to do on your own but to ask you to provide every detail of the solution, on the purpose of demonstrating how fast a human can answer(are you faster?), how precise you a human being can follow the standard method(are you disciplined? the answer to the chinese question requires using of a standardized mathematical language of symbols), how efficient you remember(from the textbooks), and how better you are over the millions of your fellow mates(are you outstanding?). That english question seems to me very clear , nothing about to test whether a student got the idea of solution.
China, in fact, is very fragile.
If the universities make the entrance exams harder to better reflect the actual knowledge required to be successful in their chosen field of study they won't make as much money. Of course they're not going to stifle their flow of income!
In a plane, you are correct. But in three-space, lines can be perpendicular without intersecting.
Imagine perpendicular lines in a plane, then "lift" one of those two lines straight up in the third dimension. The two lines are still perpendicular: one points north-south, the other east-west.
That said, I honestly don't know the answer to part iii of the question. I suspect that it's not terribly difficult, given that the rest of the problem really isn't all that hard. In fact, nearly all of the angles are 30-60-90 and I bet it's one of those. But I don't know how it's done.
Last time I checked I read an article that discussed 8 different types of learning patters in developmental psychology, and I'm sure a lot of these methods aren't being adequately implemented in classrooms. Of course, this doesn't really take into account slackers and hormone-crazed adolescents.
A simple case study: I remember sucking at long division in the 4th grade, and then after working at it hard for a while I got it, and it became fun. When our teacher put problems onto the board for students to solve, I could go up there and instead of being the last to finish I was first! Then again, when there's all proofs and no examples it is very difficult for me to sit there and watch how to find the volume of a sphere. Until I understood the underlying mechanisms of how arithmetic worked I couldn't do well in it or understand it, but some people can just do it.
So how did I get good at math and become a computer science major? Talking with my teachers during office/lab hours, doing more problems than required so as to practice, and taking summer courses. By the time I finished all that I got As in Algebra, Algebra II/Trigonometry, and Calculus. Ultimately, since mathematical reasoning and deduction should be considered a skill, the only way to get good at it is to practice!!! Is anybody surprised by that answer? That's how to improve their math skills.
kids, kids, kids - don't think to much - do more sports!
(because you know - if you think to much you might come up with some unplesant ideas
http://video.google.de/videosearch?q=terrorstorm )
Hitler-youth anyone? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler_Youth
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
While I don't have the exact stats with me to prove this, it appears likely to me that the Chinese education system would have a much larger number of candidates vying to get into a smaller number of available university slots than the British education system. This would lead to the Chinese universities setting tough entrance standards, while Britain lets in those less qualified. i.e. this does not necessarily mean the British education system is failing, but could just mean that Britain can afford to provide university level education to a larger percentage of its population than China can for its population.
Johnston county, NC routinely stopped average scoring kids from taking the SATs and applying to college. A few schools worked actively to get rid of low performing students completely. This was done in an effort to boost scores in order to pump up property values for the real estate market
This is happening in the US too; it's just parents and teachers trying to get students into "good" colleges instead of schools trying to boost rankings.
Students here in the US are being encouraged to take fewer, lower-level courses than are offered at their schools because "an A in standard math looks better to colleges than a C in higher-level math." Sadly, this is mostly true.
This is mostly due to the grade-point-average system and due to grade inflation. Colleges often summary-reject students with a GPA lower than e.g. 3.0, without looking at what classes they took. This leads to the common scenario in U.S. education:
In many US high schools, A no longer means a student is extremely bright and talented. As are average. A C is nearly failing. Students who aren't getting As complain to their teachers (and engage their parents to complain) as though they're failing the class.
This problem is compounded by the difference in a class's difficulty depending on teacher, school, and date taken. At my school, "IB Calculus I" is taught by three teachers. One doesn't teach well and gives amazingly hard tests. His students tend to have Cs and not know what they're doing (through no fault of their own). One teaches well and is a total hard-ass. His students are probably the most well-versed, but they also have Cs. One teacher gives open-note, multiple-choice tests. His students are generally clueless and have As.
A college has *no way* to tell which students are which, since the class is the same on transcripts. This Is Broken.
Colleges need to take a closer look at what classes a student took and other methods of aptitude testing before they accept or reject students.
judging by the fact many kids in college are taking 'college algebra and trigonometry' (where they learn the staff they should have learned in high school but for whatever reason did not), the things in USA are as screwed up as in UK.
Something that many people may not realize is that the math (quantitative) on the GRE (the US "Graduate Record Exam," required for admission to most graduate schools) is not much more difficult than the math on the SAT. The GRE's verbal section, on the other hand, is really difficult - much harder than the SAT.
Please note - I am speaking of the GRE as it existed in the early 90s, because that's when I took it, and taught GRE and SAT prep. I think it's still fairly similar, although the SAT has changed considerably.
The reason? The GRE is taken by all prospective graduate students. Almost every college student has had some additional English the roughly four years spent as an undergraduate, but it's not unusual for a student to take no mathematics. Mathematics is not normally a core requirement for the humanities, but every degree program normally requires at least a couple semesters of English.
Because science and engineering majors can easily finish the GRE math with only a handful of incorrect answers, scores in the mid 700s are only in the mid 90s percentiles. The verbal is another story. The 99th percentile is somewhere in the low to mid 700s.
What all this is leading up to is that I am reasonably happy with the 780 I scored on the math section, but I am downright smug about the 780 I scored on the verbal.
Actually, what I am leading up to is something a little different, which is that I don't think students should be wasting time and money taking classes they aren't going to need. Frankly, literature majors don't need to know math to read Shelley. Forcing students to take courses they don't need can be incredibly awkward for everyone involved. I'm a believer in well-rounded "liberal" education, but having art majors spend a semester in macroeconomics is not going to improve the world in any significant way.
It's "maths".
The thing that is missing in the comparison is how much time was allowed for the students to attempt each of these two problems. Based on my (albeit somewhat dated) knowledge of British maths tests I'd guess that the example given would be the first question on the paper and one would be expected to solve all three parts in one or two minutes. I wouldn't be surprised to have seen the Chinese question on a British paper back in when I did A-levels but it would be towards the end of the paper and given rather longer to solve. Without the context for the questions the comparison is meaningless.
If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
Why do western societies penalise intelligent people?
If you go to University you get lumbered with a huge debt which takes many years to pay off. That's irrespective of how well you study.
To encourage scholarship we all need to establish systems so that the cream of the crop can study without both having to live like a church mouse while studying, and also go into life without this heavy debt burden.
The whole idea of dropping math is ridiculous. Math is necessary for a society to master technology. Artistes and social workers, is that all the Brits want to have?
If Brits are too stupid to be able to do better in math let them do an extra year or two in college until they do better.
Math is so easy that I took advanced calculus as one of my basket weaving classes when I was studying to be an Electronics Engineer. Another one of my basket weaving classes was ballet. I ended up with a higher grade in math. I thought that I picked the two easiest classes but for some reason some people in my engineering class thought that I took hard stuff and were suggesting some litterature or philosophy crap instead.
One thing that pissed me off at university was the number of people who were cheating. It was quite a challenge to keep cheaters from copying on me.
As an undergraduate reading Maths at a UK university, I am appalled that the BBC would publish such a mis-representative and biased article. Whilst I understand that there might be concern over a decline in students taking Maths post-GCSE, the content of the article is hideously extreme and clearly very far from actual standards of maths.
Notice that the RSC has quoted the UK Maths test as being from a Chemistry degree. If the question was from an actual Maths degree, then you would see something like this: http://tinyurl.com/ynnasn (a question from a first-year geometry module I took).
It is not stated, however, for which subject the Chinese entrance exam is for. I highly doubt it is for a Chemistry degree at all. Even if it was; before I went to university I considered a degree in Chemistry - at the time I could easily have answered both of the maths questions. The questions posed to me in my entrance exam (albeit for a Maths degree) were far beyond the difficulty of the ones quoted in this article. As well, I could have easily answered the UK question back in year 7.
I do not doubt that the standard of education in China is at a similar level to the UK and USA, but the facts have been severely warped here. Mirroring the quote at the end of the article, I also believe that the RSC's attack is nonsense (though I would cite bullshit). This article reminds me of another published by the BBC last year, of a CS professor who had defied the mathematicians and could divide by zero. Sensationalist rubbish.
You translate the lines until they do meet at a point. Since they're not parallel, they define a plane. The translation can translate the plane, but it won't change its slope. You can do all the subsequent math in the plane.
To be even more specific, don't consider them as lines, consider them as vectors, by taking two points on them and letting X = D-A and Y = C1 - B. Then use X.Y = |X| * |Y| * cos(theta), where theta is the angle so theta = acos(X.Y / (|X| * |Y|))
where theta is the angle between them.
I have to agree; even though it uses fairly simple triangles and isn't particularly nasty, the chinese test requires much greater mastery of the subject. You need to take multiple steps, applying the principles repeatedly, to solve the problem.
This is the only way I know how...
Encouraging students to drop mathematics?
... "making new art history majors daily".
... at least at a subconscious level, I'm pretty sure that's going on with a lot of 'em.
Hell, the establishment has been doing this foerever!
What is the primary function of Statistics, Calculus and Diff-EQ classes in most universities?
Answer: weed out the "non-hard-core engineers", in other words
These subjects don't have to be hard. I realize that after going through the hell it took to get through them. In college at least, these things are presented in a way that is INTENTIONALLY OBTUSE.
First there's the shitty textbooks, which are intentionally shitty, in an attempt to sell a)study guides, b)subscriptions to "study help" websites.
Then there's the professors. Some are great. I had exactly one truely great math professor in college for Calc 2. Sure the material was challenging, but the approach wasn't, which is more than I can say for the rest of my math professors. They're sole motivation seemed to be to throw up barriers to understanding. Why? Hell I don't know for sure. My guess is at the core, it has something to do with being in the situaion where you have to daily give the knowlege away that makes you valuable in the marketplace
Almost nothing we teach in maths below graduate level is newer than 200 years old.
We should have learned how to teach it propperly by now.
Students have been "encouraged" to drop maths all along, so what's the big deal that we're saying it out loud now?
US and UK GDPs are largely driven by services (medical or otherwise) or brand royalties (Coke etc) rather than real production. Good healthcare and the ability to pay brand royalties should really be the flab we can pay for by having a strong economy rather than being the driving force behind the economy.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/22/health /policy/22pros.html?ex=1177646400&en=8101d968fbe8b 365&ei=5070 shows the insanity of this all. Paying $10k a day for a hostpital room is insane, but it looks good when the numbers are added up to be able to show that the US has a striong GDP. In India, where many foreigners go for procedures in medical custom facilities, you can likely get the same level of service for $500 per day. That really means that in the US you're paying $10k for a $500 service. That kind of spending cannot be sustained for ever and does nothing to make the country any richer (apart from on the GDP which is a ficticious measure).
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I hope this gets modded up...
Here is something to think about: In the 80's and 90's, the US (and probably UK) had a really strong economy. LOTS of really smart people that considered teaching ultimately chose the money and job opportunities that the strong economy had to offer. Meanwhile, in China and India there were not enough jobs for all of the really smart people. Most of these people became teachers.
It is certainly ironic that a good economic state has a negative effect on education. Keep in mind this reasoning only makes sense under certain circumstances. For example, by this logic Somalia would have the best education in the world! But that is a totally different situation for many reasons (education is not organized, children are starving, civil war, the guys driving around with guns don't care, etc...).
And I am not saying that teachers are too incompetent to find real jobs. I'm saying that the AVERAGE teacher in China is better at educating students than the AVERAGE teacher in the UK/US. Infact, in the US, the general public has been losing respect for K-12 teachers over the years because of some of the trash getting hired. This stigma, which is sort of self perpetuating, has caused a lot of potentially great teachers to do something else.
As I understand it - the English system forces a high amount of specialization from an early age with the a level deal. Why do we need a future political science major taking all kinds of math? The mechanical issues and such that you guys were talking about are due mainly to appropriation of resources. If fewer kids are taking math - then math teachers can concentrate on teaching kids who are really gifted. Math is becoming less essential nowadays anyway for a lot of fields, and we should have the choice to add it to our problem solving vocabulary at will. Like how you go out and learn a new programming language if youve got a problem you need to solve.
In the US schools are now lying to colleges about what their classes cover. The highest math class my high school offered was Math Analysis which they said was the same thing as Pre-Calc. I got to college and had a very difficult time because I found out Math Analysis was really pre-statistics. On top of that in high school I was allowed to make my own note cards with what ever I wanted on them(formulas, examples, etc) as well as have a calculator. In college I'm not allowed either. Really high schools now are just trying to get the highest grade so they do well on the no child left behind tests so they get more money, it doesn't matter if the student really isn't learning.
Comparing the ability to write War and Peace to ability to do differential calculus is misguided. It would be more like an ability to do independent research in mathematics, and to publish articles in peer reviewed journals. Ability to do differential calculus could be better compared to an ability to produce well written reports or short stories.
And no, most people I have met who claimed that they "suck at math" did not have a good understanding of the basics. My experience is that by "sucking at math" they usually mean they have serious trouble with introductory algebra, like solving all but the simplest equations and inequalities. As far as calculus go, they ususally have no clue what that is even about. I don't know where you live, but most people who "suck at math" around here do not encounter calculus at high school.
AccountKiller
One of the biggest misconceptions in the history of education is that any one subject it harder than another.
Take any Math nerd you know and have them try to learn Spanish (supposedly an easy course). Enjoy the ensuing mayhem. Right brain left brain realities still exist, and what is easy for me, is not easy for the next guy.
I applaud schools who step away from stiff requirements, such as 4 years of Math, no questions asked. I would prefer my child to take four years of English in the place of Math, if my son has more interest and aptitude in Language Arts. Otherwise, we are shoe-horning square pegs into round holes.
But please ignore this, and proceed being alarmed. It's certainly easier than thinking.
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Also note that there are much fewer universities per citizen in China than in the UK, so Chinese universities have a much larger pool of people to choose from - and can therefore require higher levels of knowledge and still get as many students.
Yeah, well luckily they won't be able to understand how far behind they are from the statistical rankings...
(Uh, you want fish & chips with that?)
Lemma1: Every student who can solve the Chinese test can also solve the UK test.
Lemma2: Not every student who can solve the UK test can also solve the Chinese test.
From Lemma1 and Lemma2 follows: the Chinese test is harder than the UK test. QED
The questions are in no way comparable, because the intent behind them is different. The first is from an entrance exam, while the second "diagnostic" question is trying to identify students who might need to take remedial classes (the original posting classifies it as from an entrance exam as well, which is incorrect). In other words, the first question tries to identify those who _can_ answer the question; the second tries to identify those who _can't_. This explains any perceived difference in difficulty - making the first question harder reduces the size of the first set, while making the second question easier reduces the size of the second.
I don't see this as a story about the comparative benefits of the Chinese vs UK education system ; what I see it is is a story about the absurdity of league tables in the context of public services.
It's all part of the giant lie that The Market Will Save Us All.. maybe a perfect market would, but you're never going to achieve one.
Instead of improving the education of children, the metrics used to rank the schools are leading to the system being gamed, at the cost of the education of the children. The same occurs in the health service, everywhere in public services that this ridiculous concept is applied.
I have to say coming from the UK school system to the Australian school system 10 years ago now *sigh* it was massively the other way around, with my maths being literally years ahead of what they were doing in Australia
stupid septics
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Back home one studies Mathematics every year until one is 17 years old, basic arithmetic, set theory, algebra, some 2 dimension differential calculus and analytic geometry, the full works. It does not matter if you are going to study Engineering, Law, Arts or Music.
:-)
It is considered a frigging basic skill for bunnies sakes.
One can give it a miss the last year of college if one is going to study something not related to science and technology at University, but otherwise you get even one more year of mathematics.
I remember a friend that would bring all these "difficult" books they use in UK universities to teach maths, thinking none of us could solve the exercise problems (some buddy of his was English).
We tested our skill solving the exercises, having no major problem whatsoever. If there ever was a confidence boost regarding the quality of Mexican Public Education that incident was the one
The more I know about UK (English?) education system, the more surprised I am. Now that slavery was remembered recently I was shocked to learn that the topic is harldy mentioned. Ditto for British Empire and other topics that do not make the country look in a good light. Shameful....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
All an entrance exam has to do is rank candidates. The difficulty of the questions within a subject area has no effect on the test's usefulness, unless the body of questions strays into the extremes of simplicity or difficulty, or the number of questions is too small.
What makes more sense is to compare qualification exams -- what you need to get out of secondary school. Alternatively, if one exam covers fields of knowledge that another doesn't, that probably means something. If the Chinese exam includes calculus and the British does not, that would tell you something.
Finally, you have to look at the body of students being tested. For years we had conniptions in the US over declining college entrance exams - despite the fact that the tests were deliberately recalibrated every year with full knowledge of the likely statistical result. The reason for the falling scores was that a much larger percentage of students were going on to college. Every year, more and more lower scoring students were making the attempt.
This is not say Chinese education might not be better than UK education. But we can't even conclude, just by looking at the tests, whether it is any different.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
.... that a basic educational skill are valuable to all, even if you suck at it.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I never said that logic was a waste of time. I agree that it should be mandatory learning for everyone. Learning high level math does not make you intelligent or disciplined either.
This is a UK news story, don't call it "math" in the story. There's no reason to grind flat the subtle differences in dialect, that sort of thing just makes the world a miserable, grey place. I know we may be fighting a losing battle here, as all our youngsters look forward to their high school proms...
Most mathematics jobs at the higher level are being outsourced to countries like India anyway.
Use your head, can't you, use your head,
You're on earth, there's no cure for that - S. Beckett
According to BBC news, Chinks are better at math than the English. Who'd a thunk it?
I sit on the graduate admissions committee for William and Mary Computer Science. Year after year I see lots of applications from abroad with 780-800 GRE quantitative scores. As far as domestic students go, we get excited if we see someone with a 700. I asked one of our Greek faculty why we never see a Chinese or Easter European student with a 700, and she said that they would be ashamed and embarrassed to get such a low grade on what is basically high school math to them.
The sad fact is that here in the US we take very little math in school compared to, say, Greek students. Surely there are other factors such as the large number of Chinese students, Americans going into industry instead of grad school, etc. But when one of our recent admittees told me he did poorly on the GRE math because they were asking him to do things like exponents without a calculator, I have to wonder...
"Math is hard!"
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
No, the difference that matters is that the Chinese question requires you to use the knowledge in a chain of logical deduction (and to reproduce tht chain of reasoning explicitly to answer question), while the UK question simply requires the student to regurgitate facts. In other words, the Chinese question actually requires the student to understand, and do mathematics, while the UK question requires students to be able to recite arbitrary facts about mathematics. by Coryoth (254751) on Wednesday April 25, @04:09PM
The Chinese test required to use, and demonstrate, logical reasoning (that chained together over many steps) about a formally dedfined system. That's mathematics, and what mathematics is really about. The UK test required you to recite some basic facts about mathematics, but not actually do any mathematics. by Coryoth (254751) on Wednesday April 25, @04:22PM
The complaint against the UK test is that it requires nothing more than mindless regurgitation of facts. There is no requirement for logical thought and deduction, nor for being able to present formal reasoning about a problem. The complaint against the UK test is that it doesn't actually require you to do any math. by Coryoth (254751) on Wednesday April 25, @04:33PM
The difference is that the Chinese version requires you to now simply know (and be able to mindlessly regurgitate) a few facts about mathematics, it requires you to analyse a problem, reason about it, chain together a sequence of logical deductions, and present that reasoning in a clear way. That is, the Chinese question actually asks you to do mathematics, as opposed to reciting facts about it. by Coryoth (254751) on Wednesday April 25, @04:38PM
the Chinese questions requires you to do significant logical deduction, and to actully present that reasoning clearly. The UK test requires absolutely nothing beyond regurgitation of facts. by Coryoth (254751) on Wednesday April 25, @06:22PM
The difference is that the Chinese question actually requires you to chain together a sequence of logical reasoning -- and to present that reasoning clearly. I'm not suggesting its an ideal question (I didn't write it), but it is asking for something more than the UK question, which requires little more than mindless regurgitation of fact. Sorry, I missed that. Did you say something about mindless regurgitation?
[[[I wasn't trying to maximize my education or potential, but to simply meet requirements in order to "break into the middle" of the pack. I couldn't see any benefit in learning more than what was required to get a B to an A on the upcoming test. After that, it's gone forever. There wasn't a reward in education anywhere in sight, only punishment for failing. This encourages bare minimums of performance. If the kids are ending up at bare minimums of performance the last thing that should be done is a reduction in the level of challenge. If the kid isn't challenged then they won't even learn what they're capable of.]]]
See, therein lies the difference in "attitude". A kid in India or China knows that if he/she doesn't study hard and do well academically, no amount of natural talent will get them to even be looked at (in a way sad, but effective). If the kids in the West can get their minds out of TV, Music and pop-culture, they can probably focus a "little" better on academics. That's not to say that one should take all the fun out of growing up.
I heard an interesting statement by a russian friend once -- she said --
"In russia, kids learn responsibilities and only then have rights" (This can be thought of as being universally true in asia as well).
"In the US, kids learn all about their rights, but only later discover their responsibilities" (admittedly, that was extreme generalization, but it made sense in a way).
What does the Western Popular culture teach the impressionable minds of teenagers? Does it make them cognizant of the imminent threat they face (from a socio-economic perspective) from their Asian counterparts? No, instead it fills their minds with drivel which will not benefit anyone except the winners , producers and developers of shows like "American Idol".
That's not to say that we should become "Doomsday prophets", if the fact that by studying pragmatically one will gain knowledge and wisdom is not enough, shouldn't a healthy dose of fear (of competition) be reason enough? What more incentive do we need?
So, basically, people who suck at math are advised not to waste their time and everyone else's money, pursuing something they suck at anyway.
What's the catch?
You, sir, have got to the root of the problem. We, as a society (or maybe the West in general), have forgotten the point of education.
Stick Men
Good to see that dumbing down is now popular across the pond! So, Gordon Browne, how do you spell potatoe crisp?
You have got to be kidding me. For goodness sakes- CALCULUS was born on their shores! What politician got it in his head to kill the ed system even more? If you take harder subjects your senior year with menial grades you still have a better chance of getting into a good university rather than some crazy slacker!