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.
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
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.
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.
This news post reminds me of Dumbing Down Our Kids by Charles Sykes. Here's the list:
Rule 1: Life is not fair; get used to it.
Rule 2: The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something before you feel good about yourself.
Rule 3: You will not make 40 thousand dollars a year right out of high school. You won't be a vice president with a car phone until you earn both.
Rule 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss. He doesn't have tenure.
Rule 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping; they called it opportunity.
Rule 6: If you screw up, it's not your parents' fault so don't whine about your mistakes. Learn from them.
Rule 7: Before you were born your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way by paying your bills, cleaning your room, and listening to you tell how idealistic you are. So before you save the rain forest from the bloodsucking parasites of your parents' generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.
Rule 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers but life has not. In some schools they have abolished failing grades, they'll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer. This, of course, bears not the slightest resemblance to anything in real life.
Rule 9: Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off, and very few employers are interested in helping you find yourself. Do that on your own time.
Rule 10: Television is not real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.
Rule 11: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.
The solution is obvious to anyone who actually took the math courses. You weight the grade in math courses differently such that a B in a hard math course is worth more than a A in basketweaving. Make it so the maximum GPA anyone can attain without a math course is 3.5. I know this seems like witchcraft, but trust us math geeks.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
I'm an engineering student, and have always kind of thought that, and of course made fun of business math with all the others. But, I've been doing a help session for business math for a couple of years now, and let me tell you, some of that stuff is important and fairly difficult beyond your basic four functions.
For instance, lately most of the questions have been over car and house payments, interest, and trying to basically handle finances. This is not simple four function math, and it's very relavant for what normal people need to know. Another topic that is covered heavily is probability. While the average person may not need to make statistical studies on a regular basis, they do need to know what a bell curve is, how standard deviations work, and have a basic understanding of risk management based on probabilities of risk.
Sure, most people don't need calculus, differential equations, or even trig. Hell, most of the time engineers aren't going to be using calculus all the time (but of course we need to have it as background.) However, there is some complex and difficult math that is important for succeeding in business and keeping personal affairs in order.
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.
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 have a point, if the only purpose of college is job training. Some of us believe that a university education is about molding tomorrow's great thinkers by not only providing education in their area of expertise, but also giving them a well-rounded education. Of course, this is opposed to corporate interests that demand that a person does one thing only and does it well, doesn't ask questions, and doesn't think how their work relates to or impacts the world at large.
I only wish academia fulfilled the role you mention, but these days it's nothing more than a corporate drone generation machine as you've mentioned.
I guess at this point I'm still coming to terms with the world's realities, and taking more and more utilitarian/cynical views on many social aspects of existence.
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. No - your problem is that you are expecting a degree of honesty from the Department of Education and Skills. They think absolutely nothing of a bare-faced lie like this. To give another example, when asked they insist that most maths teachers are in favour of coursework for GCSE maths. If OTOH you ask a group of maths teachers at an examiners' meeting you will almost certainly get 100% opposed to it. The government and some schools are in favour of it because it allows students to cheat and thus artificially inflates grades. Teachers are opposed to it for the same reason. The solution is simple in the eyes of the government department - just lie about it.
In 2004 the pass mark (i.e. the mark for a grade C) in the EdExcel higher level GCSE maths exam was, wait for it... 13.5%. Without the benefit of coursework they would have had to make it even lower to achieve the improvement in passes required by the government.
To do A-level maths you have to study 6 modules. Up until a couple of years ago, these consisted of three pure maths modules (P1, P2 and P3) plus a choice of three applied maths modules (Mechanics (M1, M2), Stats (S1, S2), Decision maths (D1, D2)). The problem is that most students start 4 A-level courses and drop one at the end of a year after their half-way exams. By this point the students have realised the difference between a real A-level like maths and the joke A-levels like Media Studies. The maths involves serious learning and the Media Studies doesn't. They therefore choose maths as the one to drop.
In an attempt to stem the losses, the exam boards did a really blatant bit of dumbing down. They took the three pure maths modules, threw them up in the air, chopped out a few arbitrary bits, and re-assembled them into 4 new pure maths modules (labelled C1, C2, C3 and C4). The requirement to study six modules could now be met with these 4 pure modules and just 2 applied modules - they'd reduced the work by a sixth. "Oh no, it's not dumbing down" - my arse.
As a maths teacher it really makes me sick.
The only bright point that I can see is that universities (or at least, some universities) do know the difference. If you study proper A-levels like maths and further maths, and turn in a couple of As they will value them much more highly than As in the noddy subjects.
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.
"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.
No, you'll be modded troll because you are an idiot. For one, you got basic facts wrong in your initial post. Second, you are insulting about 51% of the world's population. Third, being an ass for the sake of staying true to yourself is.... wait for it.... being an ass.
So any troll mods you get - well deserved. And please, stop with the beaten-down hero crap. No one's buying.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
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.
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
I tried to let this pass, to not reply to such an 1890's mindset, but I can't help myself, especially when I see people modding it up.
The line between great goals and being stupid is pretty fine. The guy who builds a set of wings and jumps off a cliff to his doom while flapping *as hard as he can* is still stupid, even if he did the hard work to accomplish his great goals. Let me illustrate, using your examples. When those planes were hijacked, there was a protocol in place, that officials knew and most people were aware of: you comply with the hijacker's demands, and eventually he -- note 'he', coz in every one of your examples it was a *man*, not a woman or girly man, who was killing people recklessly -- gets tired and gives up. That's the way it had been for a very long time, with a few practically unknown exceptions. So, the people on those planes were doing the smart thing -- if they'd started a fight, someone might get killed, and then they'd be worse off, given their reasonable assumptions, than they would have if they just stayed put. As soon as news got to them that this wasn't a standard hijacking, on flight 93, they changed their plan. Both are examples of intelligent behavior: you don't get yourself killed for nothing. Likewise, as much as I hate to say this, the dumbass with a gun at VT. Those athletes, who jumped out windows? Most of them are still alive. The professor who blocked the window? Dead. Yeah, he's a hero, but they're still alive. Not as romantic and ivory-tower as your idyllic world, but a lot more satisfying to each individual not-dead person.
On the subject of women running things: my ex-gf was 13 when she started college, and 23 when she got her first PhD in engineering. Plus she could probably kick your butt in akido and certainly in a bike race, unless you're secretly a CatI USCF. So don't go insulting half the human race unless you can back it up.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.