Slashdot Mirror
MIT's SAT Math Error
theodp writes "The Wall Street Journal reports that for years now, MIT wasn't properly calculating the average freshmen SAT scores (reg.) used to determine U.S. News & World Report's influential annual rankings. In response to an inquiry made by The Tech regarding the school's recent drop in the rankings, MIT revealed that in past years it had excluded the test scores of foreign students as well as those who fared better on the ACT than the SAT, both violations of the U.S. News rules. MIT's reported first-quartile SAT verbal and math scores for the 2006 incoming class totaled 1380, a drop of 50 points from 2005."
Your intelligence doesn't determine how ready you are for school. I have a high IQ but I score badly because other people put more work into school than I do.
Ahh, parent poster is a Troll, eh? Forbes publisher Rich Karlgaard would probably agree with AC. Is he a troll too? I saw far too many kids there for the party myself... the 'life experience' they called it. We even have online encyclopedias citing which schools paaar-tay the hardest. I'm sure that image doesn't hurt enrollment numbers and the government money flowing into universities. I wouldn't be surprised if universities quietly encourage that 'rep' via PR firms. College is big business. So big in fact that university finances have begun drawing the scrutiny of congress. We've even begun exporting American-style higher education. It may not be the best in the world, but it sure makes a shitload of money.
In the meantime, there's a lot of kids leaving college with a worthless degree and lots of debt. The university was enriched by the process, but you can't say that for all their graduates. I'll bet if the OP had mentioned something about outsourcing the post would be +5 Insightful.
" I saw far too many kids there for the party myself "
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m4422/is_n6_v15/ai_20860361
"Her dad once chastised her for wasting his tuition money by not going to her classes. With typical Esther aplomb, she countered, "Daddy, you don't understand. You don't come to Harvard to study. You come to Harvard to get to know the right people."
Need Mercedes parts ?
Because the IQ score gives no useful information.
If the person has a high SAT score but a low IQ score then they are in the "work really hard" group, you want them.
If the person has a high SAT score and a high IQ score then they are in the "gifted" group, you want them.
If the person has a low SAT score and a low IQ score then they are in the "dumb" group, you don't want them.
If the person has a low SAT score and a high IQ score then they are in the "smart but lazy" group, you don't want them.
Since all you don't actually care about the groups, just the "want them"/"don't want them" decisions IQ provides nothing.
"I had been under the impression that engineering degrees were generally for people who wanted to make money (in a normal-ish job) after graduation, while sciences were for people who either wanted to be, or accepted the risk of being in academia for life. Is that not the case?"
I think that anyone who wants an engineering degree for the money will be disappointed. I have a degree in chemical engineering, and I make $55,000 (that is with 10 months of experience). That sounds like a lot for being just out of school, but given the extra effort of obtaining the degree, and the amount of work that is expected from me at my job, I don't think it's a better deal than a liberal arts degree would've been. I think that the value of any degree is what you do with it. If you work to gain valuable experience, advocate yourself, and work well with others, you can make a 6 figure income with any degree.
I am in the field because I am passionate about making peoples lives better, and I feel like engineering accomplishes that. I don't want to work forever in academia, because I feel like all the mindless bureaucracy and politics of the university makes enriching the lives of others nearly impossible. Of course, if I did want to work forever in academics, I could still do that with an engineering degree.
Let me fix that for you... 1) Work 2) Profit! There you go.
Most people aren't thought about after they're gone. "I wonder where Rob got the plutonium" is better than most get.
I think you'll find that it isn't a vocabulary test, it's a test of whether you can on-the-fly generalize and intuit how to reapply pieces of language (after all, IQ tests are basically designed to test your ability to see patterns and apply them).
Sure, if you don't know anything about the English language, you'll be screwed, but if you don't know anything about geometry you'll be screwed just the same. You could TRY to memorize the whole dictionary, or you could be abstract enough to recognize (whether consciously or not) the functions of prefixes, suffixes, letter combinations that indicate the mother language of the root word, etc. You don't have to have studied language or vocabulary to recognize that words where "j" makes a "y" or "h" sound behave differently than words where "j" makes a "j" or "g" sound, and then draw rough conclusions about the meaning and behavior of similar words. Certainly well enough to do simple antonym, synonym and verbal relationship tests.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
MIT is a prestigious institution. Does anybody really decide between Universities based on a US News rating?
Scoring high may or may not help you get into the right school. The right school will make a difference for pretty much your first job. After that, if people are even mentioning your education other than in passing during an interview, you've already lost.
I know very few people who value educational qualifications over proven experience. Of course, the tech world is a bit different than the rest of the business world, but this is slashdot.
Mr T pities all of the fools, all of the time!
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
Showing interest in indicating intelligence to MENSA is a clear sign of lack of intelligence.
Having a college degree confirms that the bearer can finish college. This isn't trivial: someone who claims to have equivalent knowledge without the degree may, in fact, lack discipline or the ability to embark on long-term projects. Just knowing that someone can do the things required to get a degree is an important piece of positive information above and beyond the demonstrated learning that the degree indicates.
...And where you go to school. I got a philosophy degree at Rutgers, one of the best analytic philosophy schools in the world. Whenever someone asks me, with a superscillious smirk, "How is philosophy useful in computer science?" I give them a deadpan look and say, "I did my senior thesis on finite automata and fuzzy logic trees, I took 4 more hard logic classes than are required for a CS degree, and my advisor was one of the greatest living cognitive scientists in the world. You tell me." Of course it helps that I took a frickton of CompSci as well.
Unless you went to some school whose idea of philosophy is ancient philosophy and subjective continental philosophy, you can pitch it successfully to anyone, as long as you can also show skills in whatever you're actually applying for.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
You don't need to memorize the whole dictionary, though. Haven't you seen those "Top 500" lists that contains the 500 most-missed words? That combined with an otherwise average vocabulary is pretty much enough.
The reason geometry is better is that you don't need to memorize several thousand or even several hundred rules. You probably need less than 50 to do well in high-school level geometry. After 50 it's just applying them in the right sequence. The reason that's acceptable in the US is that in most states (all?) geometry is taken (or available to take) by every single high school student. Here in North Carolina it's a high school graduation requirement in all the local school systems. But how many school systems require a class with a high enough reading level requirement where all of these words would even be used, let alone understood by the average high schooler? Yes, you could approach it from the Greek and Latin root perspective, and that would make it much closer to geometry. However, again I haven't heard of a single class where that is the actual goal of the class, whereas the goal of a geometry class is exactly to solve a wide range of geometry problems.
I would applaud something like what you're talking about, but it would have to be done in an artificial, randomized language for it to be a puzzle and not a vocab test.