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."
When I was in high school a counselor asked me what I was thinking about doing after high school. I replied and said "I would like to go to a University of California school." For those of you without the background, UC schools are the highest available public education schools in the state of California, are rated above public California state schools, some UCs are rated at or above highly recognized private schools. He looked at my GPA and told me that he didn't think I would get accepted to ANY UC and that I would be best to apply for state schools. That pissed me off quite a bit because I knew that while my GPA wasn't glamorous that I had purposely taken advanced classes along with all of the top students in my high school and had proven to at least my teachers that I was capable of being there and continuing with higher education. Unlike other students in the school who just routinely take the normal classes in favor of a higher GPA at less workload, I forced myself to be challenged.
I applied to the UCs anyway. The UC application (at the time) required all of your high school course work, any notable extra activities (sports, music, awards/achievements, etc), GPA, SAT, SAT2 test scores, and finally a personal statement. Everything but the personal statement (which is basically an essay with a limit to how many words on why they should accept you) was straight forward. I knew that in my case, this essay was the "make or break" portion of my application. Fortunately for me, because I had challenged myself all throughout high school, I had something meaningful to say. Other students were frustrated with it and didn't know what to write, what they should talk about. But I knew that they were better at writing than I (or at least I assumed that) and that whatever they wrote was probably better structured and better grammatically than anything I could put out. So as a precaution, I took my essay to be proof read by two different English teachers, one of which was an advanced English teacher and the teacher in charge of the Speech and Debate team.
Based on my past history with essays, I thought that my essay would come back with something incredibly wrong with it--that I would have to really revamp it completely and get it proof read a second time before I would have any confidence in submitting it. But when I returned a few days later for my proof read essay, one of the speech and debate students said to me that my essay was the best essay our teacher read out of all of the personal statements she reviewed. I was confused because I didn't know if she (the student) somehow had gotten my essay and actually read it or if she just overheard our teacher talking about it. I muttered along anyway and confronted my teacher and sure enough, she confirmed that my essay was probably the best it could be and better than any others she read. She even went on to say that she did nothing to the content except correct some grammar mistakes and make the language tighter (which was a relief for me because I was having trouble trimming it down). It was a surreal experience for me because previously every essay I ever submitted had something wrong and needed significant corrections, yet here is the same teacher saying that I had exceeded everyone's expectations.
So I went on to submit my application to 6 different UC schools, hoping that by increasing the number of schools I applied to I might increase my chances of getting accepted to at least one of them. After all, the same application was used for all UC schools so applying to more than one just increased your application fees. But based on what the counselor had said, I was doubtful. I felt that he, having more experience, probably already knew the outcome, and I was just throwing away money. But I had to try.
At the end of the day, four out of six UCs accepted my application as well as two of three state schools (screw cal poly). I received two rejection letters from the top two UCs (obviously), but I never expected to be sitting down and choosing between 6