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100% Failure Rate On University of Liberia's Admission Exam
slew writes "Apparently none of the 24K+ students who sat for the 2013 Liberia University entrance exam got a passing mark, and fewer than a hundred managed to pass either the english (pass level 70%) or math (pass level 50%) sections required to qualify to be part of the normal class of 2k-3k students admitted every year... Historically, the pass rate has been about 20-30% and in recent years, the test has been in multiple-guess format to facilitate grading. The mathematics exam generally focuses on arithmetic, geometry, algebra, analytical geometry and elementary statistic and probability; while the English exam generally focuses on grammar, sentence completion, reading comprehension and logical reasoning. However, as a testament to the over-hang of a civil war, university over-crowding, corruption, social promotion, the admission criteria was apparently temporarily dropped to 40% math and 50% English to allow the provisional admission of about 1.6K students. And people are calling foul."
"fewer than a hundred managed to pass the either the english"
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
If you have to have an admissions exam for a university, access to any university, or to secondary level education, something is wrong with the education system. Doubly so if it gives rise to the faulty concept of educational streaming(the concept of shaping people's entire lives through test scores and controls on education acccess).
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Sounds like somebody didn't make it into a good college.
They screwed up the answer key when they graded the tests. It's a lot more likely than 24,000 people taking the test and none of them managing to get enough correct answers.
If you have to have an admissions exam for a university, access to any university, or to secondary level education, something is wrong with the education system.
Why??? No, seriously... what makes you say that?
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
This was in Boston,amI right? Liberia Universety is in Boston? Tax dis tea?
You're not a decision maker.
If you have to have an admissions exam for a university, access to any university, or to secondary level education, something is wrong with the education system. Doubly so if it gives rise to the faulty concept of educational streaming(the concept of shaping people's entire lives through test scores and controls on education access).
What's the alternative? Let anyone study anything?
In countries where universities are heavily subsidized, it's too expensive to pay several more years (and the most expensive ones, due to labs, equipment and higher paid teachers) for people who have a proven an inability or unwillingness to study.
And the alternative, let anyone in and raise the price to control the excess of population, is much less fair than exams.
Eventually it will be possible to receive the entire university education online and almost free. At that point I will advocate for free access. Until that happens, if you want my taxes to pay for 9/10 of a kid's university, I'm going to ask for proof he is capable and willing to study.
The test isn't the goal, selecting students for admission is the goal.
Really? Selecting candidates that don't have the prerequisite knowledge to understand what's being taught? Wouldn't this be a waste of time/money?
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
We need to drop our standards and make everything in life easier so more people can pass through with out trying?
If you actually read the article, you'd know what they're going to do.
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
"multiple-guess"
Maybe no one can pass because they're taking a multiple guess test rather than a multiple choice test.
If nobody passes the test, then it seems to me that the problem is with the test, not the people. What are they going to do? Close the university? The test isn't the goal, selecting students for admission is the goal.
This is just another story that should not even have been posted here.
1 - There are people in the other courses even if no one gets in this year.
2 - The objective is not to select the least incompetent but to select people who posses the knowledge required to adequately receive the teachings given in the first year.
So you think that someone that can't even begin to comprehend the course material should be allowed in just because they want to go there?
When there are more qualified applicants than available slots, you need to limit the number you admit to supportable levels.
On the other hand, you shouldn't let unqualified people that just don't have the requirements because they can't succeed, and will just be wasting resources, especially when there aren't enough slots for the qualified ones.
In this case, there were no qualified applicants. Do you expect them to repeat grade school & high school math and teach remedial English just so they could admit new 'students'? That's a waste the colleges resources. Colleges and Universities are Advanced or Higher education. If you don't have the lesser ones yet, you can't be taught the next level. It's like trying to build a skyscraper without a foundation. It will fail and topple, wasting a lot of time, effort, and other resources.
So no, I can't agree with your opinion that it's a failure of a university to have an entrance exam. Rather, if it's any ones fault, it's a failure of the prior education system or students that makes an exam necessary.
It does make sense. If you can't demonstrate that you're ready for higher education, then it's just a waste of time going to university (or even college).
And what's that about educational streaming? I didn't do too well in highschool (was more interested in computers and playing the guitar). After "gratuating" I spent a year or two doing silly jobs, then I got tired of i and a few exam for the subjects i had ignored in highschool, but needed to get admitted to the universities. Also, I took something which I think is might be a bit like the US SAT (and got high scores) to make sure I would be admitted, while other people had extra going-to-uni-points due to work experience. No streamlining there.
It's much worse in countries where you have to pay to get an education, which means that there are young people who can't afford going to university (or college) even though they might be better suited for it than their dumb but rich neighbours,
For those of you who know something about statistics, consider this math problem:
A sample group of 24,000 students who think they have what it takes to go to a university take the entrance exam. Out of those 24,000, none of them pass the exam.
Let event A be a randomly selected student from this population passing the exam. Find the maximum value of P(A) that would keep the results of the sample group above within a 95% confidence interval.
Then, once you've done that, think long and hard about the reasons why nobody passed the test.
'US colleges increasingly view anything published before 1990 as 'inaccessible' for students. So much for timeless themes` ..
"For American college students, 1990 appears to be a historical cliff beyond which it is rumored some books were once written, though no one is quite sure what. Why have US colleges decided that the best way to introduce their students to higher learning is through comic books, lite lit, and memoirs?" link
AccountKiller
how are these more relevant than the money that flows to the university with each student they take ?
If you let any idiot go to college by lowering standards then eventually the college degree is worthless. When that happens having a college degree will mean nothing. This is already happening in America. A bachelor's or 4 year college degree is worth the same as having a high school degree 50 years ago. In Liberia, it just means that elementary and high school education sucks because of the civil wars.
Liberia is a failed state, ranking 174 (of 187 countries) in the Human Development Index. Probably, somebody has manipulated the admission exam for his own profit. Reminds me a bit of Robert Mugabe winning the lottery.
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I can't agree with your opinion that it's a failure of a university to have an entrance exam. Rather, if it's any ones fault, it's a failure of the prior education system or students that makes an exam necessary.
Well then it's a good thing that's exactly what he said.
This "multiple guess" business is clearly preventing educated people from passing this test. I they adjust for this deficiency and make it a "singular guess" they will have pass rates that would be the envied the world over.
It what you know when you have a basic grasp of probability. If there are less possibilities, namely 1 then the probability of a single possibility as an outcome becomes very high. Look what eliminating multiple options did for Mugabe's career. His pass rates are stellar.
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
Liberia is in Africa, so it must be the former colonial power's fault.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
so, how's life at starbucks these days, champ?
The problem here is the primary education system, if you defend primary education(or let the anti-science crowd run the show) your not able to run a sensible university system for the general masses to the point where you need to be able to import skilled workers while the unemployment lines grow,
With a effective primary and secondary education system pretty much everyone who apply will be ready for university levels, and you can generally depend on primary and secondary grades to Scandinavia works this way for instance, and most of Europe tries to adopt to that model. And were talking about countries where universities are far more subsidized then the US here.
The problem here is either that the primary education system was teaching different facts then the university exams expected, or that someone screwed up on the auto-grading multiple choice system(multiple choice exams are notorious for being either easy to game or rigged toward memorization of very specific phases).
You have to remember that a test measures several levels of knowledge by having a range of easy to hard questions. A properly performed test on a random population should result in a normal distribution around a defined average. That average is solely based on the test so it has no bearing on the actual intelligence of the population. The test is more sorting the population then comparing it to a standard.
IQ and education are not directly related, however university entrance exam material does depend on education. And given the crap Liberia has been through, most of their kids are likely not educated sufficiently, as they've had other more pressing needs, like say, staying alive.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
What he probably means, but does not express fully, is that the filtering should happen at the end of secondary school (high school, whatever the name is in the country of your preference) instead of at the beginning of university. If you manage to pass the exams of the highest level of secondary school; shouldn't that indicate that you are ready for university? In the Netherlands we only have exit exams in secondary school and if you manage to pass the highest level (called VWO or liberally translated: preparation for scientific education) you can go to any university within the Netherlands (ok; there's three different tracks and if you want to go to say the technical university to study computer science, you need the track with math, physics, etc.). All schools 'train' their students for the same exit exam and as a university you know what the level is of your incoming students and what they know and don't know. Having an admission exam basically says: we don't trust the exit exam of your school or we think it tests for the wrong things.
That's why in the USA, interviews are used instead.
Questions like who's your father? what fraternity were part of? do you know any powerful people? safeguard university entry only for establishment.
Add to that mix couple minority people and everybody is happy. Status Quo is maintained.
> And what's that about educational streaming?
It forces children to decide their life course as young as 14 or 15 years old.
If nobody passes the test, then it seems to me that the problem is with the test, not the people.
Too afraid to tell people they're stupid? No, it's not you fault. We're expecting too much.
It's thinking like this that leads to grade inflation, and ultimately to even the most mundane of jobs requiring a college degree.
Maybe this wouldn't bother me if going to college didn't cost thousands of dollars.
Plus I love the idea of spending four years of my life studying to get a piece of paper to be taken seriously for a job I could have done while still in high school.
Too afraid to tell people they're stupid? No, it's not you fault. We're expecting too much.
If you think that a test can gauge "stupidity", you're stupid.
Humans have got voodoo brain measurement down to a tee. And the more people are admitted to work/study based on the results of multiple guess tests, the more test performance appears to correlate with life success, the more justification people make for these same tests. It's a feedback loops which no one wants to break because the modern organisation is so risk-averse and no one gets fired for doing what everyone else does.
(Before you go on a "hurr bitter" rant, I'm far better at being examined on paper than I am in real life. I'm unfairly advantaged, and I'm prepared to admit it.)
Letting anyone study anything is what we do here in France: public universities do not have admission exams nor selection process, their only limit enforced is their total capacity. The result is that the selection process is simply post-poned.
For example in medical universities, the real admission exam is at the end of first year instead of being at the start (if you've seen the movie The Adversary, the protagonist is noted for having redone the first year of medical university twelve times in a row, and never bothered attending the exam, until he simply faked being a MD).
A sick side effect is that for many studies (liberal arts ?) the selection is post-poned until after graduation, when those people enter the job market for the first time. We have lots and lots of students in litterary, artistic, sports and historical studies, lots more than jobs in those domains, while sectors like restaurants, tourism and construction have a hard time finding workforce. Tuition fees are heavily subsidised so universities benefit from keeping students as long as they can, students don't face any real test beyond what is enough to maintain the school's reputation, so all too often they pursue studies not as a step into a lifetime project, but rather as a passing interest, intellectual endeavours are highly regarded while anything to do with manual labor, entrepreneurship or commercial operations is dismissed as being much less prestigious ; and then the students are left on their own to face the hard cold reality of the marketplace.
Another consequence is that there are many people who are overqualified but inexperienced competing for jobs that require no specific qualifications, which often means having no diploma = no job at all, further inciting young people to get into college - any college that will have room left. As a result we spend less per student compared to neighbouring countries, and we may well have the most over-diplomed unemployed people on Earth, and the most professionally miserable employed people of the planet - doctors in all kinds of subjects, people with university baggage worthy of a college teacher, even engineers with high technical skills, and whose best career prospects are flipping burgers, managing office menial paperwork or, for the lucky few, teaching in junior high school.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
Liberia is one of two countries not using the metric system. :)
I wonder if there is a relation between and lack of education
I studied university level engineering, in my country that comes with a pretty heavy admissions exam. Back then, we were with a group of 5 secondary school students preparing for the exams.
Considering the real studies afterwards, I am pretty sure that 95% of the people who dit not pass the admissions exam (be it by talent or commitment) would never pass the first year of the studies. In a way the admissions exam saved them a year of time, and saved the country a lot of money (I come from a country where education is heavily subsidised).
Great. That's just what we need, people who absolutely detest their job because they were forced to choose too early.
The problem here is the primary education system; if you defend primary education -- or let the anti-science crowd run the show -- you're not able to run a sensible university system for the general masses... to the point where you need to import skilled workers, while unemployment lines grow. run on sentence; sentences end in periods; inappropriate punctuation
With an effective primary and secondary education system pretty much everyone who applies will be ready for university levels, and you can generally depend on primary and secondary grades too; Scandinavia works this way for instance, and most of Europe tries to adopt that model. We're talking about countries where universities are far more subsidized than the US. vowels are preceded by 'an', not 'a'; 'everyone'..'applies'; 'too', not 'to'; do not begin sentences with a conjunction; run on sentence; inappropriate punctuation; hanging trailing clause
The problem is either that the primary education system was teaching different facts than the university exams expected, or that someone screwed up on the auto-grading of the multiple choice exams (multiple choice exams are notorious for being either easy to game or rigged toward memorization of very specific patterns). grammar: 'here is either the' OR 'is either that the'; 'that', not 'then'; grammar on auto-grading phrase; no space preceding the parenthetical clause; 'patterns', not 'phases'; run on sentence.
Just saying... pot, kettle, black.
All the uni has to do is only accept the top nn% of students, taking the rep of each student's alma mater and the student's other accomplishments (including having the persistence & drive to have overcome major obstacles to their education) into account -- basically what the top American universities do, as many no longer require SAT scores.
That method tends to work much better for identifying which students are bright, willing to study and work hard than relying on standardized testing. A lot of this is simply that being talented at taking standardized tests, studying how to perform well on them, certain disabilities affecting performance with a question type (like essay or multiple-choice), and so forth can have a *huge* impact on the test results. That's why so many major universities have stopped requiring SAT scores and rely more on the student's history.
Also, don't forget that a college education wasn't intended to be vocational or a matter of fact memorization as in high school, which is what online classes are good for -- and a student is missing out on the main purpose if he/she is handling college that way. College is best for giving the student the personal experience & knowledge that they'd otherwise have to travel the world for a few years to achieve, and that we can't truly learn just through reading, watching videos, or communicating remotely -- it takes dealing with different kinds of people on a daily basis when still young enough to have malleable beliefs, reacting to ideas they'd never considered, seeing others react and discussing it at length... The person returns home a much wiser, more knowledgeable citizen that is harder for politicians or charismatic authority figures to manipulate, better-equipped to handle personal or societal crises, more able to see the most likely long-term results if a politician is elected or law is passed, far more capable of grasping why people do things or act in ways they'd never consider & knowing how to help or deal with them...
Or, as someone I saw put it once: it's the training-wheels period for being a great adult citizen likely to improve their society, not just live in it.
Maybe it would be better for you to say that you'll be willing to help foot the bill for *vocational* education, as that's more the kind of "college" you're thinking of -- it's remotely not as beneficial for society as a genuine education is (IF done right via having students take a wide variety of classes they might otherwise overlook), but it'll churn out more obedient, good employees.
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The whole point of a national university is to educate the populace. If you set your admission standards so high that nobody can enter, either call it a "research institute" or close the doors. Changing the pass level was the correct move. Lowering the standards may mean that a degree from the university isn't worth as much as it would be if the standards were higher, but it's still better than no university at all if we assume actual teaching takes place there.
mod parent up (where are the mod points when you need them)
I think this exactly what OP meant. Secondary school should have an exit exam that is the input into your university qualification. In Germany you have three tracks each ending respectively at grade 9, 10 and 12 (used to be 13). If you take the Gymnasium track (12) and finish the exit exam you can go the the university, no questions asked. Few degrees require minimum score, such as medicine, but these are the exception. (To complete the info, the other two tracks are geared towards apprenticeships.)
In the states you can sort of get through high school without too much effort. That is basically why SAT was invented and why you have basic courses for all degrees, such as English 101. The US school system is not very good at fostering high achieving students, they focus on getting most people to average education and the "no kid left behind" policy is not helping either. I am not saying that it is bad per se, but at some point the slow learners are slowing down the bright ones.
Before anybody complains, I saw both systems first hand...
Allow exit exams determine fitness? Terrible idea. In the public American educational system, it is very difficult for any teacher to give students a failing grade. To do so, paperwork must be drawn up and the teacher often has to defend the failing grade before a review panel. Count on the review panel to reverse the grade letting the student pass, and the teacher can begin worrying about his/her job security. No, any academic troubles a student might have can easily be fixed at the beginning of the next level. Ask any teacher.
Second, it's just not logical that any educational institution must accept the exit exams of another body as proof students are ready for this coursework. The variance is off the charts.
It's much worse in countries where you have to pay to get an education, which means that there are young people who can't afford going to university (or college) even though they might be better suited for it than their dumb but rich neighbours,
Being rich doesn't mean you pass and get your degree, even if you can afford to be there. Beauty is skin deep; stupid goes to the bone.
Egalitarianism is a great social philosophy in theory, but it fails pretty quickly in the face of inequality of ability. You can guarantee equality of opportunity, and most modern societies try to do this - this is why there are scholarchips and BEOGs (Basic Educational Opportunity Grants), but there is no way, given inequality of ability, to guarantee equality of outcome.
I'm currently enrolled in an engineering course in a heavily subsidized university. I've been taking that course for about 10 years now, and currently I'm only missing a couple of courses before I finish my degree.
I don't attend classes. I study when I can make time for it, on my own, in my house. Then, come the finals, all I do is pop up on campus and take the exams.
So, although my university is heavily subsidized, I actually don't cost my school anything, and I essentially pay the tuition for the priviledge of taking that school's exams.
So, no. It is not too expensive to pay several more years for people who, according to you and yourself alone, "have a proven inability or unwillingness to study", particularly when people like me spend thousands of dollars for the priviledge of, once or twice a year, sit on a small room for 4 hours and take an exam.
You should refrain from spewing uneducated opinions.
2 - The objective is not to select the least incompetent but to select people who posses the knowledge required to adequately receive the teachings given in the first year.
In this case I'd say it would be more worthwhile to select the people with the skill required and teach them whatever they are missing along the line. In Liberia not educating people because there primary education sucks seems a really stupid decision to me.
There's different ways to deal with that. The university I studied at allowed anyone to enter the first year. You could however only proceed to the second year if you completed the first year with a minimum score.
IMHO this is more fair than an entrance exam because you get judged on your ability to keep up with the particular program, not on how shitty your previous school/program was.
What he probably means, but does not express fully, is that the filtering should happen at the end of secondary school (high school, whatever the name is in the country of your preference) instead of at the beginning of university. If you manage to pass the exams of the highest level of secondary school; shouldn't that indicate that you are ready for university?
Well, I do have some issue with that: imagine an University searches for a certain student profile, that is not tested by the "secondary school exit exam" (e.g. special skills or talents. Take a military academy or a music higher education school).
After all, in a civilized society, there still exist the so called "academic autonomy", does it not? (if it still does, it mean any University is free, among others, to choose whatever student profile it wants, as long as it's not based on sex/religious/gender discrimination).
Except for the extra cost (supported by the University), what's wrong with an University wishing and organizing an admission exam (if it's board decides that would be beneficial)?
Having an admission exam basically says: we don't trust the exit exam of your school or we think it tests for the wrong things.
Well, that exactly so.
And I come back to my original question: what's wrong with the University not trusting the secondary school exams? Even more so as the mistrust seems to be well placed.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Start an American football or basketball program at the university. Then, they'll admit pretty much anyone regardless of actual intellectual qualification.
You have to remember that a test measures several levels of knowledge by having a range of easy to hard questions. A properly performed test on a random population should result in a normal distribution around a defined average. That average is solely based on the test so it has no bearing on the actual intelligence of the population. The test is more sorting the population then comparing it to a standard.
Actually, no: it should result in a normal distribution around an average, not a defined average. The range of the resulting distribution is then compared to a standard. In this case, the range failed to overlap the standard boundary, and so everyone flunked out.
If you futz with the standard based on the observed average every year, then you are effectively cheating the people in better performing years by causing the higher education to contain remedial elements that the higher performing students already know, and you move the sliding window of the top end of what can be learned at the institution downward.
This is effectively the same reason there are admissions tests in Japan as well, although in Japan, the majority pass, so it ends up being a numbers cut-off at the top end of the range instead, for the number of available slots.
If everyone in Liberia who took the tests had passed to the acceptance standard, they'd have to institute a similar numbers based cut-off to that of Japan, since there would not have been sufficient slots for all potential students.
lol its simples
exam fee is $24
25,000 x $24= $600,000
or 47,100,000 in liberian currency, sounds like a large portion of the university operating cost
probably embezzled by the administrators
>Being rich doesn't mean you pass and get your degree [...]
No, but in my experience at a European High School and University, a mediocre student from rich parents can
get all the tutoring they need, bumping their grades/ability to university levels.
OTOH, a student from less than average means parents would have to be rather smart as there is (in general)
not much money for tutoring or interest in grades etc from the parents.
I still agree that dumb rich kids cannot get through university, but the picture is a lot more complicated
than you suggest.
> there is no way, given inequality of ability, to guarantee equality of outcome.
Why yes there is: thanks to lots of tutoring, it is possible (to some extent) to make
up for the gap in ability.
This does not work when the ability gap is too wide, but does skew the number of
rich kids in universities.
We need to drop our standards and make everything in life easier so more people can pass through with out trying?
If you actually read the article, you'd know what they're going to do.
Time to reread 'Harrison Bergeron' by Kurt Vonnegut...
You have to remember that a test measures several levels of knowledge by having a range of easy to hard questions. A properly performed test on a random population should result in a normal distribution around a defined average. That average is solely based on the test so it has no bearing on the actual intelligence of the population. The test is more sorting the population then comparing it to a standard.
Statistics and distributions or not: have you heard of the zone of the proximal development?. Jump too far outside it and the student is lost and you'll be wasting your time - has absolutely nothing to do with democracy or fairness or statistics, means and standard deviations.
I don't care s/he obtained the maximum score if this maximum is below the threshold: the student will be just the most brilliant from a bunch of exam failures.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
I think that someone ought to submit a sociological article on this event to the Journal of Universal Rejection. I'm sure the editors will find this subject matter close to their heart and that their rejection letter will be warmer that usual.
Ezekiel 23:20
There's a lot of failure to spread around. But let's say that "once upon a time" there was a school for dogs. And someone tried to put a cat through the school hoping they could get a well trained cat out of it. The problem with that was that (1) the school only knew how to train dogs and (2) cats can learn but not the same things or in the same way as dogs.
Yes, I am saying the school and methods are unsuitable for the people being taught. They are a completely different people. They will not become European or American because they were taught in that way. That experiment failed long, long ago. "Everyone is equal." "Everyone is the same." "Everyone has the same potential." It's a lie. We all know it's a lie. Let's accept it and move on. I'll never be a celebrated athlete. We never have problems dealing with that reality. Why do we think that intellectual potential is any different?
Indeed. Why have grades in secondary school at all ? There's basically two points to it. One is to give the students feedback on their performance. The other is to make it possible to (roughly!) sort students based on skills for higher education.
If the grades can't be used for the second purpose, you might aswell drop them entirely, and instead just give the student a summary of his weak and strong sides.
Being top student with great aptitude for history is not the same as being the top students with great aptitude for math. Entrance exams measure knowledge and skills in area that you are really going to study. So, you do not kick out great mathematician for weaker essay writing skills.
What you suggests would mean bigger mismatch between study subject and students abilities.
Agreed. It's similar in Norway, but with the caveat that certain studies weigh the different grades differently.
Most studies just rank students based on average grades, with a bonus for those who've taken more than the required minimum of advanced courses. But a few educations prioritize certain grades higher.
For example, if you apply to become a engineer, they'll consider your grades in math and physics more important than your grades in history and gymnastics.
But they still all computer your score from the exist-exams in secondary school, so there's no entry-exams required.
You're just coming from different viewpoints. Universities in Germany are overwhelmingly financed by the state. As such, it's reasonable to ask that they admit students according to a objective, measurable standard as opposed to "whomever they like".
The latter would open the door wide for corruption, it has to be tempting for a private university to admit the children of well-known rich people, for example, both for the PR, and for the potential funding. That's incompatible with a meritocracy.
A anonymously graded entry-exam would be fine. But in my experience, the admission-process to many private universities is not really anonymous, and it seems to me the scope for corruption and basically choosing the richest kid rather than the best-qualified one, is high. (plenty of mediocre sports-stars seems to get in no problem, for example)
That's fine if you see university as a private institution that exists to do whatever it wants to do, including maximize profit. It's more of a problem if your univiersities are publicly funded and exist in order to educate students, prioritizing the best-qualified ones.
It's possible to lower the standards of the test without lowering the standards of the school. Just require the people who scored poorly in english or math to take a few low-level math or english classes, in order to get up to where they need to be for the course of study they wish to take.
That is what my school did to boost enrollment in a few programs. They lowered the math requirement by one notch, with the stipulation that the student must take the required level of remedial math classes during the first semester
Typical governmental corruption.
The bar is raised on the entrance exams to the point no mere mortal has any chance at passing. Then, you either pay in advance for a copy of the exam and memorise the answers accordingly, or pay anyone in the later stages of evaluation to turn a blind eye.
You see it time and time again in public contracts. Either you have them write the exam tailored to you, or have the committee vote in your favour despite whatever.
If this incidents shows anything, is that either the university stuff was advertising "We're open for bribes!" by failing everyone like that, or that the previous head-of-bribes recently left his position in the university but no one else took the position or the difficulty was lowered accordingly.
On the other hand, the same overqualified people also make better decisions when voting or keeping in check their government. You have people who understand the world surrounding them (and well beyond their borders) and who aren't prone to democratic apathy (and I guess that's why frequent strikes are a well-known French phenomenon).
The economic/employment viewpoint is certainly a valid one, and I agree with you to a great extent, but it's good to look at the civic one as well. Ideally, maybe a great portion of the people out of high school should go to a vocational school first, then go work, make some money, gain some experience, and only then at some point spend some time at university to gain a better understanding of the world. With MOOCs now, this should be easier hopefully.
"In our tactical decisions, we are operating contrary to our strategic interest."
Well, I do have some issue with that: imagine an University searches for a certain student profile, that is not tested by the "secondary school exit exam" (e.g. special skills or talents. Take a military academy or a music higher education school).
There is no reason why you cannot have both. Where I live, most university courses use the exit exams with weighting of the grades based on the course.
Some will in addition have an admission test based on the students specific skills and talents. Music and fine arts are two examples.
In addition some courses will require minimum grades above "passed".
Your "terrible idea" point of view comes from an American point of view, based on the American system. Here in Europe (Netherlands), you can give students failing grades (and they will!) and either they redo the whole year or they get kicked to a lower level education which will no longer give access to university.
Secondly, this "another body" that provides the exit exams are national exams, hosted by your own school, but graded by another school and then the grading is reviewed by yet another school. There is no variance as all kids take the exact same exam at the exact same time.
Being top student with great aptitude for history is not the same as being the top students with great aptitude for math. Entrance exams measure knowledge and skills in area that you are really going to study. So, you do not kick out great mathematician for weaker essay writing skills.
There is no problem with assigning higher weight to the math grade when selecting students for (as an example) engineering and assigning higher weight to history grade when selecting students for history classes.
It is actually being done,
Also, the exit grades will be (at least where I live) based on both exams and tests during the course, so it is likely that they are more representative for the students knowledge than one single entry exam.
Having an admission exam basically says: we don't trust the exit exam of your school or we think it tests for the wrong things.
Well, that exactly so. And I come back to my original question: what's wrong with the University not trusting the secondary school exams? Even more so as the mistrust seems to be well placed.
Simple: secondary education is all directed to passing those exams. If the exams are not reliable, then the education towards those exams simply won't be adequate. It follows logically that someone who sat an exit exam that is insufficient for university entry is unprepared for university, so the sytem is fundamentally broken. The only effective solution is for the universities to impose standards on the school system. The hardest subject in Scottish highers (fifth year secondary, the first optional year in Scottish schools) is Chemistry. Why? Because when they tried to dumb it down, the British Medical Association threatened to stop recognising it as an entry qualification for medical degrees. Had they done so, Scottish schools would have effectively been forced into adopting the English exam system, and the Scottish exam board would have been destroyed.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
"If you manage to pass the exams of the highest level of secondary school; shouldn't that indicate that you are ready for university?" - No because schools are controlled by politicians.
This is why it is not some "other body" grading it but it is done country-wide by a single entity. The same that sets educational standards.
What you say is correct iff the test is of equal difficulty each year.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Really? Selecting candidates that don't have the prerequisite knowledge to understand what's being taught? Wouldn't this be a waste of time/money?
Let's say you have money to run a university that teaches 1000 students. You set up some reasonable entry criterion and 10,000 students pass. You can't take them all so you make the criterion harder. Tough for 9,000 that were good enough to enter, but you get the best value for your money.
Now say only 100 students pass your entirely reasonable entry criterion, because education in that country is just awfully bad. There are no 1000 students who can pass. What are you going to do? Educate 100 people only? Or take the 1000 best, and scale down your courses so these 1000 can handle, and give 1000 people the best education you can give them?
Posting to brag about the fact that my English is great and i find it to be the easiest language in the world. All spelling and grammer rules makes sense, youo don't even have to think about what you write. Best language this year, every year.
....if you want my taxes to pay for 9/10 of a kid's university, I'm going to ask for proof he is capable and willing to study.
Until it is your kid trying to get into university. Maybe not yours per se, but millions of other parents whose attitude is, "I pay taxes for this, let my spoiled brat in."
Silence is a state of mime.
1 - There are people in the other courses even if no one gets in this year.
If the problem is not with the test then unless the problem is fixed you are going to run out of people in "other courses" in just a few years.
2 - The objective is not to select the least incompetent but to select people who posses the knowledge required to adequately receive the teachings given in the first year.
The objective is to further the education of the next generation. If they have to "dumb down" the university to achieve that, then that's what they need to do. The alternative is a lot worse.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Most of these tests are just garbage anyway. All one needs to do to pass them is memorize the material; you don't need to understand any of it. I find it sad that many people fail at even memorization.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
In the Netherlands we only have exit exams in secondary school and if you manage to pass the highest level (called VWO or liberally translated: preparation for scientific education) you can go to any university within the Netherlands (ok; there's three different tracks and if you want to go to say the technical university to study computer science, you need the track with math, physics, etc.).
This is exactly the system that sethstorm seems to be arguing against. ie:
Doubly so if it gives rise to the faulty concept of educational streaming(the concept of shaping people's entire lives through test scores and controls on education acccess).
He appears to be suggesting that education through secondary (prior to university) should be completely generic, sort of life-preparatory, rather than training focused on 'streaming' people into university, trades, or other focus areas.
we don't trust the exit exam of your school or we think it tests for the wrong things.
They most likely shouldn't trust any exit exams, and it probably does test for the wrong things. What does it fail to test for? Understand of the material. I find it comical that all these universities and schools believe they can truly test your expertise without ever asking questions that cannot be solved by mere rote memorization.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
according to a objective, measurable standard
They don't seem to be doing a very good job of measuring understanding.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
The other is to make it possible to (roughly!) sort students based on skills for higher education.
I suppose that having a good memory is a skill, but it's sort of sad how that's the only thing schools seem to test for in most cases.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Odd. In my country, the cost of university tutoring is approximately 500 bucks a semester (no, I didn't forget a few 0s there). And if you cannot afford THAT, yes, there are grants and loans and whatnot.
As you may imagine, the universities are packed to the brim during the first semesters. Which is ok, the entry level tests are SO insanely difficult, that after 2-3 semesters only about 10% of the students remain. About 1% graduates.
Yes, that's a rather low rate of graduations, but in absolute numbers, it's about the same as in most other countries, with us getting the 1% BEST. Not the 10-20% that can afford it. Nobody coddles you. Nobody holds your hands. It's amazing how cooperative and friendly the corporation world seems after you get out of that dog-eat-dog world.
That's one degree you can show off with, and one that is very well received internationally, because it actually MEANS something. If you get a degree from my university, you've shown a few things. First, that you're very capable of getting things organized yourself (because nobody gives a fuck about you in our university system, whether you come or whether you don't... who cares, there's like a 100 waiting for your seat who can get their act together), then that you're determined (you kinda have to be if you want one of the 30ish lab slots for the 500ish students...) and finally that you ARE amongst the 1% brightest in the world (ok, at least the EU).
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Don't forget your happy pills, though, its closeness to reality is kinda depressing.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Because you're comparing apples and prunes here. Yes, YOUR potential is not in being an athlete. But that doesn't mean that there are no good athletes in your country, or that they are by definition inferior to athletes somewhere else because some ethnic group is inferior in some areas. That's the fallacy here.
I'm a pretty decent programmer. And there are others like me everywhere around Europe. So, by your logic, we should be the coding central of the world. Well, we're not. Because there are equally many (if not more) people around here that are NOT great coders, while there are certainly good programmers in the Americas, Asia, Australia and yes, Africa, with the latter probably having a rather low "good programmer" count, but not because they are "inferior" programmers, more because they have no chance to find out THAT they're great programmers.
If you compare the amount of great spear fishers, you'll probably come up with reverse numbers, but mostly 'cause we catch our fish from the fridge in the supermarket and we rarely need spears for that.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Too afraid to tell people they're stupid? No, it's not you fault. We're expecting too much.
It's thinking like this that leads to grade inflation, and ultimately to even the most mundane of jobs requiring a college degree.
If 24,000 people actually paid money to take a test, and not one of them passes, then I'm not afraid to call you a stupid idiot for blaming it on the people taking the test.
Among 24,000 random people you will have a few hundred with an IQ > 130. You will have two or three with an IQ of 150. These two or three with an IQ of 150 failed the test, even though they would make me look stupid and you look like an imbecile in a fair competition.
24,000 failed out of 24,000 taking the test cannot be explained by stupidity of the people taking the test. Far more logical explanations would be tampering with the results, or stupid things like giving students a test A and checking if they gave the right answers for test B. Or asking students to write an essay in French and then telling them they failed their English test. Or calculating percentages wrong, like percentage = (correct answers divided by number of questions) times ten instead of times hundred.
In America, those exams would be considered racist.
Everything above is my opinion....YMMV
of Liberia.
How can one fail that?
Your links highlight the problem. They're probably well-researched. But they're in French.
The same problem holds back your educated unemployed. They could go North - anywhere from Northwest (UK) to Northeast (Germany) - and get a job, provided only that they'd speak a foreign language. Engineers in particular are in short supply in .be/.nl/.de.
What he probably means, but does not express fully, is that the filtering should happen at the end of secondary school (high school, whatever the name is in the country of your preference) instead of at the beginning of university.
So the University should not accept mature students, foreign students, student who are freshly nationalized, nor those who did not go through the secondary school system for one reason or the other?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Really? Selecting candidates that don't have the prerequisite knowledge to understand what's being taught? Wouldn't this be a waste of time/money?
Now say only 100 students pass your entirely reasonable entry criterion, because education in that country is just awfully bad. There are no 1000 students who can pass. What are you going to do? Educate 100 people only? Or take the 1000 best, and scale down your courses so these 1000 can handle, and give 1000 people the best education you can give them?
And what?
Dumb down the teaching to accommodate the 900 know-nothing and screw the 100 that has chances to learns something? Where's the social benefit in doing this? This is one of the best example of compromise-that-compromises (a.k.a. lose-lose solution).
Maintain the level of teaching at normal level and lose in the woods the 900 after the first course? At best, one can try, but the result will be the same after the first semester.
Wouldn't it be better to let the professors engage in research instead?
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
"Me fail english? That's unpossible."
Actually the German system is much more complex than that. Some of my most successful friends have gone side tracks via apprenticeships and then further education.
There are all sorts of specialized schools here. After an apprenticeship you can go back to school for a year (Fachoberschule) and then go on to study at a polytech (Fachhochschule).
There are other specialized schools that slot in at various secondary school time slots that give you a leg up for either various vocational trainings or again allow studying at a polytech of some sort.
There are also schools that provide actual vocational training.
I wished I had known about some of those options earlier on.
... while sectors like restaurants, tourism and construction have a hard time finding workforce
Not even close to right
Leisure and hospitality: 10% unemployment
Construction: 9.1% unemployment
If they were having a hard time finding people, they'd be looking at the closer to 5% found in finance, resource extraction (oil, natural gas, quarrying, mining), IT, government, or education. Instead, what you have are millions of unemployed fully qualified construction workers and servers and concierges.
I am officially gone from
In Russia .. oh, never mind.
ACT. SAT. Also some specific ones like for medical school, etc. Hell even for army service you have the ASVAB. In the USA those are your entrance exams. Just because they aren't called "entrance exams" doesn't make them something else.
Well there is a massive export of brainpower underway, which has been ongoing for years: lately it seems that anyone who can expatriate does. Of the half dozen friends I kept in touch with since college, I am the only one who has not yet moved abroad, though I'm now looking for a job in Switzerland. The yearly canadian quotas of french immigrates are expended in mere hours instead of the weeks or months it used to take. Swiss companies have started discriminating against cross-border candidates ("Swiss residency mandatory" is increasingly common in job ads). The economic crisis has worsened this situation, just like with Spain.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
Being rich doesn't mean you pass and get your degree, even if you can afford to be there. Beauty is skin deep; stupid goes to the bone.
Rich means your parents have done well, of theirs before them. That means they'll be on top of you throughout schooling. People still need to qualify before they gain admittance to a university, unless they're phenomenally good at a given sport. The "dumb rich kid" still has a decent education with good grades, they're far removed from the dullards you think they are. Just because they make dumb life decisions, which are invariably down to their parents being lousy role-models, they not middle school dropouts like most of the country.
Here in the UK there are national exams at the end of secondary school (A-Levels in England and Wales, Highers (IIRC) in Scotland) that are set and assessed by national bodies independently of the schools. Papers are graded by independent examiners, usually in a double-blind assessment. In some subjects these do include course work assessment by the teachers but each year work from a random sample of students are audited to check that the grading by the teacher is in line with national standards. Teachers who tend to grade too high or too low are given feedback (usually copied to their head of department and head teacher) and the work regraded. The size of the sample will depend on the length of experience and how good the teacher has been in past years so experienced teachers who are usually very close will have only a small sample audited but new teachers or teachers who have a record of being off the mark may find every assignment they graded being audited. Similarly a sample of the independently assessed papers are audited.
"Don't write down to your readers, the only people less intelligent than you can't read" - Sign on Newspaper Office Wall
For all the overqualification we get "on paper", we french still have the poorest understanding of economics in the entire OECD, and it shows in the polls and election results. Where else in the western world can there be overtly authoritarian communist candidates to the presidency or representative elections raking in a two-digit percentage of voters ? Defiance towards politicians is on a all-time high in France, yet they are the ones we turn to in order to fix all our problems.
You're right that we are more vindicative and aren't prone to political apathy, but it's clearly not helping when it's radical politicians who stand to be the only beneficiaries. If I were to summarize the mainstream french political sentiment, it would seem completely schizophrenic:
- we want more money individually, but do not want prices to inflate nor income discrepancies to increase,
- we want to determine our lives and be free of bureaucracy yet clamor for more government regulation with every bad news,
- we want more public expenses but do not want to deprive the private sector of the funds it needs to create jobs and wealth.
I'm pretty sure some of it will sound familiar to Americans.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
Here in the UK Oxford and Cambridge have entrance exams, and some courses at other universities will require applicants to sit an entrance exam or submit an assignment to gain entrance. These are in addition to the exams sat at the end of secondary education and, certainly in the case of Oxford and Cambridge, owe more to tradition than to any serious requirement for additional assessment.
"Don't write down to your readers, the only people less intelligent than you can't read" - Sign on Newspaper Office Wall
Dumb down the teaching to accommodate the 900 know-nothing and screw the 100 that has chances to learns something? Where's the social benefit in doing this? This is one of the best example of compromise-that-compromises (a.k.a. lose-lose solution).
What a fucking ignorant post. This is Liberia. After a civil war. By educating the 1,000 best candidates at a level where they can achieve, you end up with 1,000 people who may not know as much as you'd like, but who know enough to bring their country one level forward.
And judging by your post, these 1000 would have a lot more intelligence than you show and a much better chance of achieving.
I don't know about other places but in my area of the US the response to situations like this has been to blame the test and not the students. Most of the schools I have dealt with would admit the students. Then they require additional testing, after you are accepted to the school, to show that you really can or cannot manage the course material in areas like math and english. For the students who can't they end up teaching, or outsourcing to the local community college, remedial courses in those subjects. Basically reteaching what you should have learned in high school.
I suspect the difference here is that Universities in the US have the resources to teach these remedial courses or at least access to a community college system to teach them. Were the University of Liberia most likely has neither of those things. Whether the Universities should be responsible for making up for the failings of the public schools and of the students is open to debate. In practice though at least the state schools here do exactly that.
If you have to have an admissions exam for a university, access to any university, or to secondary level education, something is wrong with the education system.
Why would you say that? You should realize that not all University/Collage applicants are people straight out of High School. There are also many who are what are classified as "Mature Aged Students" such as those who went into the workforce after leaving secondary school and later on (from approx age 20 plus) decided to further their education however it is stupid for any Tertiary education facility to just accept anyone without some screening and it is fairer to have everyone sit for admissions tests specific to the Tertiary education strand they are enrolling in.
It also must be remembered that Tertiary education can be quite a culture shock for students who have just finished High School since there can be many distractions that the new student is unprepared for and not all is academic.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
Grammar and punctuation are taught at the college level in the US? No fucking wonder...
This is how it is done in Canada as well but your school system is taken into account (e.g., how well students from your school have performed in uni/college, whether your school is known for science or trades, etc). They are already forcing 12-13 year old children to choose what they want to do in university. We got rid of Grade 13 in Ontario which I think was a big mistake as it allows for little change between subjects (e.g., you can't take all of comp. sci or more than 2 sciences and that's if you've already decided not to take gym which really should be mandatory given north america's average weight. There's not enough room for kids to explore different subjects).
That very much depends on the subject being evaluated. I can easily assign you an open book exam where your memory is completely useless, and you will still fail. But in the memory based test there will be absolutely no complaints - the right answer was "x" and you put "z", whereas in the latter test I expect a line of at least 30 parents wanting to see my outside my office about how "unfair" my test was...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Here in the UK Oxford and Cambridge have entrance exams, .... certainly in the case of Oxford and Cambridge, owe more to tradition than to any serious requirement for additional assessment.
No it is a serious assessment. If Oxbridge were satisfied with top grades at A-level, they would be vastly over-filled, and there is nothing to differntiate the applicants, so they can and do set a higher standard for admission. It has become too easy to get a top grade at A-level (thanks to teacher assessment, league tables, and the exams simple getting easier).
When my son was taking A-levels I showed him my old A-level maths papers. While some new areas of maths had been introduced (and some dropped), he commented that where comparable my papers were harder than his. Some of the maths I did at A-level he did not do until the university first or second years. I took the Cambridge entrance exam back then and it was much harder than A-levels - we did two terms of futher study after A-levels just for that exam.
I don't know, I detest my job and I didn't decide on it at the age of 14 or 15. It is a truly shitty profession that gets shit on regularly from all parts of the organization, and blamed for all the ills, but I happen to be quite good at it. Doesn't mean I like it, and every time I try to escape, I fall back into it.
Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress
But doesn't IQ measure the *ability* to learn, not what body of knowledge someone has?
IE, if Einstein had an IQ of 190, but you gave him an exam about programming in Python, do you think he'd pass?
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
Dumb down the teaching to accommodate the 900 know-nothing and screw the 100 that has chances to learns something? Where's the social benefit in doing this? This is one of the best example of compromise-that-compromises (a.k.a. lose-lose solution).
What a fucking ignorant post. This is Liberia. After a civil war. By educating the 1,000 best candidates at a level where they can achieve, you end up with 1,000 people who may not know as much as you'd like, but who know enough to bring their country one level forward. And judging by your post, these 1000 would have a lot more intelligence than you show and a much better chance of achieving.
Yes, sure. Quantity over quality: quite an intelligent choice.
(education tends to have a positive feedback into society. Dumb it down and down you'll go; faster as the time passes. Just look around you on how "No kid let behind" is progressing. Have you reached the "no kid gets ahead" level yet?)
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
In the states you can sort of get through high school without too much effort.
In my case, almost 0 effort. I never did homework. I rarely worked on anything school related outside of school, and only if it was on a topic that interested me. I started skipping school in 5th grade (I have older brothers who I can thank for teaching me those tricks), and missed hundreds of days of high school. And yet I graduated and went on to university. The problem is definitely the slow kids. I had no interest in honors or AP classes that gave you homework throughout the summer. I didn't want more homework, I wanted to learn more during the school year. In university, I was much more motivated.
It was more challenging, most professors refused to coddle the slow or lazy students. I went from barely graduating high school to being in the top 1% of the #1 Community College in the US (at that time), to a regular university, where I graduated with honors. All because I felt like there was a purpose in showing up every day. Its amazing what a little trial and tribulation can do to make you rise up and succeed.
It's not schizophrenic:
- you want a higher standard of living
- you want more individual freedom but more government control of powerful institutions
- you are willing to pay higher income taxes but also understand the need for low corporate taxes
Pretty reasonable (and achievable).
Don't forget the underground economy.
Many construction workers declare themselves as unemployed while they are actually working under the table.
... because you generally want a fixed number of students. So rate each student (preferably with a test so hard no one can reach 100%) and skim off the top x percent that you want.
Indeed. However, the current goal in Germany is to re-shape the system according to the US model *in order to* get most people to average education and "leave no kid behind".
Even if you don't attend lectures, the university is still paying a lecturer to come in and speak to those students who do attend lecturers, so your sitting it out doesn't save the university anything.
The US school system is not very good at fostering high achieving students, they focus on getting most people to average education and
This is actually one of the unsung successes of the USA system. Almost no other country in the world even attempts to educate everybody like we do. Others tend to wash out (aka: "leave behind") low achieving kids, shunting them off to lower "tracks" where they are groomed to be menial laborers. It makes us look bad on international tests, as our below-average kids get their scores thrown against everyone else's college-track kids.
You are also quite right that it means we aren't serving our high-achievers as well as a system set up to specifically do that would. There are measures that districts take to try to alleviate this (eg: Magnet Schools), but it is a fact that with so much of our energies absorbed by trying to teach everyone, the high achievers aren't going to fare as well here.
However, I kind of like this feature of our system. A lot of "low achievers" have issues that are holding them back (bad eyesight, dislexia, ADHD) that they might eventually get a handle on. I'd really hate it if we just gave up on those kids at an early age and consigned them to menial labor for life.
The thing is, the test you're positing probably is unfair if 30+ of your good kids who care about their grades and have motivated, involved parents are complaining that it's unfair and impossible to pass even with an open book.
In an education system where your grade matters so much for getting into the right college, having a hard-ass teacher who likes to fail most of his students is horribly unfair. Around the country millions of kids not as smart as one of these complaining students are going to get A's in physics or math or English or whatever, whereas he gets a C- in a class with the same label and ostensibly the same content but a different set of tests.
In Canada (Ontario at least), there are no standardized exams whatsoever. You get into university based on your marks obtained in high school classes. The universities and the application center know which schools give out easier grades than others, and take this into account when deciding who to accept. Some universities (Waterloo for example) do have exams you can take to show that you are among the elite, but they aren't required, and they aren't the only thing considered to get you into the programme of your choice. This means that schools aren't "teaching to the test" but are actually trying to provide you with real skills that will allow you to succeed in university.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
If the problem is not with the test then unless the problem is fixed you are going to run out of people in "other courses" in just a few years.
Some of the people who took the test this year will say "Wow, my school sucked. I didn't know a lot of that stuff. I'm going to study for next semester/year/whatever." Some number of those people will retake the test and hopefully pass. It's unlikely that nobody in Liberia is smart enough and motivated enough to eventually pass the test.
The objective is to further the education of the next generation. If they have to "dumb down" the university to achieve that,
That sounds more like the objective of primary school, not university. (And look how wonderfully "dumbing down" is working here in the US in primary school, versus the more selective and rigorous university system which has a number of world-class institutions.)
If someone isn't able to get a degree in statistics comparable to the degrees in statistics throughout the world, then what is the point in giving them the "dumbed down" degree? They can't use it to get a job doing statistics, nor for grad school, and you've just made your university a meaningless joke.
what about more trades / tech schools? or cutting of a lot of filler and fluff at some university's?
If you think that a test can gauge "stupidity", you're stupid.
So basically you've invented a test that can gauge one type of stupidity, but you think people who think your test is accurate are stupid.
Do you think your own test is accurate??
it has to be tempting for a private university to admit the children of well-known rich people, for example, both for the PR, and for the potential funding
Tempting? That's exactly what they do. Do you really think GW Bush got into Yale on merit? The same with lowering admission standards for legacy students of less nobler parentage.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
This is why God is sending us to Liberia. Www.hopingliberia.org Www.facebook.com/hopingliberia Www.internationalministries.org/team/513-Stanton
For the American private universities who matter, there is no profit to maximize - the Ivies, Stanford, MIT, etc. are all non-profit organizations. University of Phoenix and the other for profits are not taken seriously as elite institutions, though in fairness, their students are generally a weaker group, so it may not be fair to say that they do a poor job. You claim that letting in the children of the wealthy is corruption, but it is really a tradeoff - if by admitting a weak student, you can afford to offer scholarships to highly talented students, you can improve your student body overall. Having the rich kid there also opens networking avenues for those talented students to move up in the world after graduating. It is not nearly so cut and dry as you describe it.
When there are more qualified applicants than available slots, you need to increase the number of available slots.
How many gifted people, geniuses, are we losing every year merely because they went to a bad public school, their family does not have enough money for college, or they have attitude or outlook issues because they have been stepped on their entire lives?
If we want less successfull sociopaths and more achievement from the greatest minds of each generation we need to start taking into account people's opportunities while judging them. The only reasonable way of doing that is by treating people equitably.
Then don't call it a university. Don't call it a higher education. Call it a school or something
...representative elections raking in a two-digit percentage of voters...
A two digit percentage represents 89% of the total possibilities, ranging from a lousy 10% to an astonishing 99%. Perhaps this is not what you meant to say (or perhaps you're demonstrating your point for us)?
OTHER THAN examinations of various sorts, do you know of a reliable and reproducable means of comparing tens of thousands of people and selecting some small fraction thereof?
I don't think anyone will seriously claim that multiple guess testing is the best means. It is chosen as the least bad means that is sufficiently efficient to justify.
Certainly, you could hire an army of interviewers and interview everyone, and then have some large graded scale on which they are compared. Preferably everyone would be interviewed multiple times by teams of multiple people, so there was a fair playing field and an accurate ranking system. Maybe you could even do an elimination tree to weed out the best and worst in a group.
But then, the University entrance exam takes months and 200,000 man hours to conduct.
This is not practical. I agree that the test does not 'define stupid', but it certainly isn't some sort of entirely contrived self-supporting principle (that of testing being at least a somewhat reasonable indicator of ability to learn).
Yes, sure. Quantity over quality: quite an intelligent choice. (education tends to have a positive feedback into society. Dumb it down and down you'll go; faster as the time passes. Just look around you on how "No kid let behind" is progressing. Have you reached the "no kid gets ahead" level yet?)
Assume you have the choice between having 100 excellent school teachers or 1000 not quite so good school teachers in five years time. Instead of 4000 kids educated by good teachers and 36,000 getting no education, you have 40,000 kids with teachers who do their best.
The problem with that is that there are many who do not enter university straight from high school. There needs to be an entrance exam so that anyone who wants to attend university can try to gain entry - freedom of education and all that. For people who recently graduated high school, the entrance exam should be theoretically easy.
But that doesn't mean that there are no good athletes in your country, or that they are by definition inferior to athletes somewhere else because some ethnic group is inferior in some areas. That's the fallacy here.
If you're focusing on the absolutes like "no good athletes" or "by definition inferior" then you're right but it's a strawman fallacy. Nobody's saying NO girls are good at basketball, but at the same time, you'd be nuts to say "The awesome basketball playing girls who should make up 50% of the NBA just haven't had time to discover themselves!"
Picking athletes is a terrible example because physical differences between groups based on race, sex, age, etc are widely accepted.
I agree with GP that there is no evidence that intellectual differences don't exist. In fact it's pretty much acknowledged -- the debate is what to do about it, if anything is to be done. As an example, girls and boys learn differently. Even Reader's Digest talks about it. Not very controversial -- though if you read that page, notice how they try to tie it to physical differences where possible, because that's more palatable than intellectual differences. Still they're grasping at straws when they say why girls and boys react to loud voices differently, as if having "finer aural structures" means you interpret noise as aggression. They're grasping at straws there.
I'm a pretty decent programmer. And there are others like me everywhere around Europe. So, by your logic, we should be the coding central of the world. Well, we're not. Because there are equally many (if not more) people around here that are NOT great coders, while there are certainly good programmers in the Americas, Asia, Australia and yes, Africa, with the latter probably having a rather low "good programmer" count, but not because they are "inferior" programmers
You're not taking into account non-ability-related issues like quantity and cost. If money were no object, perhaps Europe would be the coding center of the world.
For crying out loud. It's Liberia! Have you watched the documentaries on youtube about this place? I am shocked they haven't gone all Easter Island and eaten each other. If any of the students do pass that test, they'll be sacrificed to some voodoo pagan god like in the Gold Child.
For all the overqualification we get "on paper", we french still have the poorest understanding of economics in the entire OECD, and it shows in the polls and election results.
Except the US, who expects the free market to solve all problems.
Where else in the western world can there be overtly authoritarian communist candidates to the presidency or representative elections raking in a two-digit percentage of voters ?
Somewhere where they're informed enough to realize authoritarian capitalism isn't any better.
Defiance towards politicians is on a all-time high in France, yet they are the ones we turn to in order to fix all our problems.
And who else is going to do it? If we're going to work together to solve our problems, government is how we do that. The only other alternative is to surrender to the rapacious greed of the rich.
- we want more money individually, but do not want prices to inflate nor income discrepancies to increase,
Nothing wrong with that. When there is such vast income disparity like that in the US, bringing everyone closer to the average would increase almost everyone's economic status. For those whos status would decrease, boo fucking hoo.
- we want to determine our lives and be free of bureaucracy yet clamor for more government regulation with every bad news,
What we really want is regulation that works and is enforced. That corporate owned cronies in government have passed regulations designed to not work, and deliberately fail to enforce the ones that do doesn't mean regulation is bad.
- we want more public expenses but do not want to deprive the private sector of the funds it needs to create jobs and wealth.
Providing services to those who need them will increase the funds available to the private sector. When you give aid to the poor, they spend it. That money goes directly to the bottom line of businesses, allowing them to create jobs. Give aid to the rich like the US does, and they just sit on it.
In other words, France only has the "poorest understanding of economics in the entire OECD" if you're a free market fundamentalist. That's like a creationist saying that France has the "poorest understanding of evolution".
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The issue in America is that when racial minorities, for whatever social or cultural reasons, do statistically worse in primary school, the government instead of addressing the problem simply lowers the standard to hide the problem. Hence why some 50% of high school graduates in many cities are functionally illiterate.
If I hadn't already posted, you would get my mod point. Yay pragmatism :)
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
Sadly most people simply are not suited for higher education. Many nations have confronted that fact in history. In pre WWII Hungary there was a separation of children after about our sixth grade level based upon past school performance. Those who did not show academic promise were sent into very good trades training. That training often lasted until the young person was about 22 years of age and was extensive. So they ended up with really good chefs, cabinet makers and machinists.
There are two ways to evaluate a person in education. We could take a teacher and require them to list their ten best students in every class and take only those students who made that list from all of their teachers into our colleges. The next group of ten who we could judge as being in the middle could be trained for trades. The bottom ten could be assigned to menial labor. One benefit is that school age kids would not be deceived about the importance of academic success. I have seen a high school top honors student absolutely fall apart when confronted with the requirements of a good university. The American system of secondary as well as university education is in deep trouble.
Nice equivocation on "test", there.
It's unlikely that nobody in Liberia is smart enough and motivated enough to eventually pass the test.
But it is likely that out of 24,000 students nobody was smart enough and motivated enough to pass it this time? That none of them studied the tests from previous years and realized that they were already deficient?
If someone isn't able to get a degree in statistics comparable to the degrees in statistics throughout the world,
That's begging the question, the quality of degrees varies significantly throughout the world. Besides the article suggests that the problem was only with the english mechanics portion of the test, so not particularly relevant to math degrees.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Let me distill down a Quarter of College-level Econ for you:
Of course, one (i.e., you) could claim that the simple fix is to increase the number of spaces at the university, or perhaps build more universities. Then you run into the issue of scarcity of competent professors. Would you wish to staff your university with the first bumblefnck that was able to stumble through your doors, clutching a freshly-minted Masters or PhD?
* Discrimination, in this case, means "a method of choosing". It could be the first 500 students in the door, those whose last name starts and ends with a vowel; or those who passed some godawful test.
Scenes I'd like to see: implement national driver's license test standards so that 70% automatically fail their first try, and boost the penalty for driving without a license. Then we'd finally have a nation of good drivers, I mean good test takers. Wait...what?
Yeah, right.
I'm guessing the official answer sheet was fed to the automated multiple-choice grader upside down. Or, less likely, someone with control over the test decided their pockets would be lined well if nobody could pass the test. They're going to check the test and how students scored; that should identify those sorts of issues.
but one thing is certain: they screwed up the design of their admission exam.
There's a simple-minded attitude that takes the position that when it comes to tests and scores, tougher is better, but this ignores the fact that tests are administered in order to support good decisions. That's why tests like the SAT are continually recalibrated, so they yield the maximum useful information about the current crop of college-bound students.
Having a 100% failure rate may be telling the authorities that there are no students prepared to undertake the program at U of Liberia, but if this is a surprise to them, then they're incompetent. They *must* know that there are practically no prepared students, and they ought to have a plan to address this. Unless the plan is "stop admitting students until the country's education system is fixed", then the test ought to identify students who are sufficiently prepared to undertake the remedial program they've devised.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
For those whos status would decrease, boo fucking hoo.
If a multibillionaire loses a billion dollars, he's still a billionaire. No loss of status.
Secondly, this "another body" that provides the exit exams are national exams, hosted by your own school, but graded by another school and then the grading is reviewed by yet another school. There is no variance as all kids take the exact same exam at the exact same time
In America the SAT and ACT tests serve this exact purpose. You can see them as exit exams or entrance exams, depending on your point of view, but you take them while in High School and they're the biggest factor in University acceptance.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
That is really a great argument for outlawing the use of high school grades as university entrance criteria. If grades served no purpose but feedback to kids and parents, they might actually be useful for that.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
So how do Ontario Universities handle students from high schools that they can't assess what the grades mean, or adult applicants, or anyone else with a background that makes high school grades uninteresting or unavailable?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Having an admission exam basically says: we don't trust the exit exam of your school or we think it tests for the wrong things.
Which makes perfect sense when you realize that students come from thousands of different schools with different levels of expectations placed on their students.
If the University is concerned with ensuring they only admit students with a certain level of capability than it makes much more sense for them to have an entrance exam than for them to validate the exit exams of every potential student's previous school. It also allows them to accept students who didn't attend a school with an exit exam (say the student was homeschooled, or educated in a different country).
The biggest selling point of the US education system is that they get all the students to drink the kool-aid.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
If there's a good place to do the filtering, do it with the internationals and leave the citizens unfiltered. Once the internationals are controlled in population, the remaining population of a country's citizens provide no more pressure than what is placed on primary/secondary education.
That, and online education provides an inferior environment (from teaching to material) versus on-site - and should not be made the default option for the masses.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Ideally, maybe a great portion of the people out of high school should go to a vocational school first, then go work, make some money, gain some experience, and only then at some point spend some time at university to gain a better understanding of the world
Which means you've effectively kept that part of the population from being considered as a skilled worker and thus less free to move about just because his or her score didnt meet the arbitrary minimum.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
That's one country that would rather have as few people educated and able to move internationally.
High selectivity/streaming in admissions/etc. only makes things worse in the long run.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
The American way at least gives an opportunity for all, although not enough is shifted onto international students.
Do that, change funding to a percentage(instead of easily bypassed fixed amounts), eliminate avenues of selectivity, and perhaps things might get better here in the US.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Alternatively you can remove all the tests and have a pay-for-certification model.
Then all your graduates can be piss-poor broke and in debt for the rest of their natural lives. Does this sound like somewhere I know...?
That very much depends on the subject being evaluated.
Not from what I've seen. It's all about memorization of facts, patterns, and procedures pretty much regardless of the subject.
really should be mandatory given north america's average weight
Yeah, because 2h per week of gym at school is going to do very much to the weight, ha ha ha. All you need to do to undo it is to drink a couple cans of a soft drink, even if they really did work out like crazy for the entirety of those 2h.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Mathematics is a special case. Yes, Oxbridge has separate exams for mathematics because the undergrad mathematics programme, no matter how fast paced, has to begin at the initial level of the intake and they don't want to begin with the basics.
This is already true for Mathematics at less prestigious universities, you won't get into ANY serious university for mathematics based on A-level Mathematics, you'd need at least A-level Further Mathematics. An 18 year old entrant at my (non-Oxbridge) university twenty years ago would be expected to have a "double A", that is, the maximum grade in both Mathematics and Further Mathematics. It is usual to employ people with Maths PhDs to teach Further Mathematics because it's quite demanding and it's essential that pupils achieve a clear understanding of the topics. Oxbridge just turns it up to 11 by having yet harder exams covering even more advanced material. The topics in a typical S paper are stuff you would NEVER need outside of a mathematics degree. No wonder it isn't taught as part of the A-level mathematics syllabus that's consumed by future engineers, linguists, economists &c.
The situation is very different for most degree subjects, even the medics can get away with being a bit loose on some topics so long as they have the general ability to absorb a colossal amount of information. Chemists, Biologists, Historians all will find the degree subject hugely different from what's gone before and it won't matter if their understanding at A-level wasn't perfect. Civil Engineers, Lawyers, Astronomers, Computer Scientists and many others will find that nothing they'd done before was any real preparation beyond the process of learning how to learn.
so your sitting it out doesn't save the university anything.
In the real world, that is thermodynamically impossible. Just think about it. Both heating and cooling with people in the building (and going in/out) is usually more expensive than with people out of the building.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Well, if you consider learning learning pre-college Algerbra, literary analysis, and writing skills "drinking the kool-aid", then I suppose so. If in your world that's a bad thing, there's always places like Kenya, where even the elementary schools cost money. Very little kool-aid drinking of any kind going on there!
Congratulations! Give yourself a well deserved pat on the back and have a little more kool-aid.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
Latvian here. Replace France with Latvia, french with latvian and it will still be true.
Happened to me:
Ring, ring, ...
Hello, I am calling about Friday's exam, I would like to know the result, my name is....
You failed the exam..
(shrug, wtf, ???).. Excuse me, but I haven't had the chance to tell you my name.
Everyone failed.
Oh.. OK.. thanks.... ahm... good day!(??)
It was a physics exam in an IT college... just for the record... Passed on the 2nd try, but I heard many had to take a stab at it multiple times:)
Yes and its been sooo successful. Most high school graduates can't tell you the identity of any of our political leaders, the location of the capital of their own state or what the national debt is. Many can't read, and don't read. They can't balance a checkbook or follow a simple cause and effect chain.
So we're penalizing our high achievers, failing to improve the functioning level of our low achievers and rather than preparing them for a job in a skilled trade, which would allow them a decent paycheck and comfortable life, force them to sit through classes on subject in which they have no interest and will never master.
As someone who has worked in both "menial labor" jobs, which keep our civilization going, skilled labor jobs which make our technology work and administrative jobs which tie everything together I can tell you that there is no job which is beneath a person. There are people who think they are too good to work particular jobs and those who somehow believe because they have mastered a specific skill or knowledge they are somehow better than other people.
While I can believe that there might be genetic basis for differing IQ values in various ethnic groups it is doubtful that it would be a significant factor compared to things like education, nutrition, and a stable home and family environment.
Just because they make dumb life decisions, which are invariably down to their parents being lousy role-models, they not middle school dropouts like most of the country.
You are confusing 'wisdom' and 'knowledge' with 'intelligence'.
A basic definition of wisdom is the right use of knowledge. The opposite of wisdom is folly. People who make unwise life decisions, in other words, commit folly, do so from a lack of wisdom.
This is orthogonal to the 'intelligent'/'dumb' axis. A basic definition of intelligence is the capacity to acquire and apply knowledge. People who lack intelligence may acquire knowledge; we have a lot of techniques, including rote memorization, which can be used to instill knowledge. But even with knowledge, if you lack the ability to generalize to apply it, you are dumb as a box of rocks.
So to recap:
(1) If you can acquire knowledge, you are not ineluctably learning disabled; there is at least one workaround
(2) If you can apply the knowledge you have, you are intelligent
(3) If you choose to do so in a correct fashion, you are wise.
Yes, it's possible to spend gargantuan sums of money being a helicopter parent and cosseting your child's every move, or, if you have to tend to business in order to remain rich, which people who are not second generation rich must do, to delegate that task to a hired proxy. In doing this, you might be able shepherd them through a non-tehnical degree in a prestigious university, or a technical degree in a community college, where the major requirements allow for C's as passing grades toward the degree.
But you can pound as much sand as you want into a dumb persons ears, and it's not going to make the inside of their head a beach.
OMG, you better tell the number crunchers about this underground economy they've never heard of, they might want to take it into account in their analyses!
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
If you don't want to live in hell then why brand yourself with the number of the beast?
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
Such a brilliant country and university, how could you possibly forget their names?
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
A waste of time and money is of no concern to a school when it's the paying customer that is losing their time and money. Better than shutting down for a whole year.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
Being rich means you can like one of our Royals did pay someone else to do the work for you and deprive someone else of a place they earned and have the situation excepted and swept under the carpet because your 'royal'.
Something seems amiss but not sure what. It is easy to believe the education system is in shambles and really didn't adequately prepare any students for university. But did the exam change this year? Hard to believe that big a shift in student ability in one year. Was somebody trying to limit enrollment and accidentally made it too hard? Or some corrupt conspiracy although I don't see who benefits. Was the test grading automated and an audit needed to rule out a computer problem? Did everyone use a 4H pencil instead of an HB? Were all these students unmotivated? Well they did sign up for the test and pay for it which shows some initiative. I do agree with temporarily lowering admission criteria to allow some students in to a remedial program and they stay there until they can pass a reasonable exam. Keep the graduation criteria the same but keep some flow of students. The way to fix an education system is not by ceasing to have students. We can be sure they weren't all stupid people incapable of being educated. Human intelligence is pretty much distributed the same among all populations although education isn't. The long term need of course is to fix the pre-university system but even if it were magically made perfect today it would take years to seriously improve the calibre of university applicants.
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Either they go to a very small subset (ASVAB) or have very little relevance (SAT/ACT).
If you get a bad score on those, you can recover from those much faster than one can from streamed education.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Somewhere where they're informed enough to realize authoritarian capitalism isn't any better.
I'd prefer non-authoritarian anything (preferably, non-authoritarian free market capitalism).
For those whos status would decrease, boo fucking hoo.
So they have no say in how YOU spend THEIR money? That's not democratic, nor is it moral.
Providing services to those who need them will increase the funds available to the private sector. When you give aid to the poor, they spend it. That money goes directly to the bottom line of businesses, allowing them to create jobs. Give aid to the rich like the US does, and they just sit on it.
The problem is government aid is an expense which requires money. National budget money comes from 3 sources: 1) Taxes. There's a big misconception about taxes: people think that these can be raised arbitrarily to raise all the money the government needs. In practice, this doesn't work; businesses close and rich people move their money. 2) Borrowing. This is good for present generations, but bad for future ones, especially considering that borrowing comes with interest. 3) Inflation. Past a certain point, this is universally considered bad (it turns into hyperinflation). If there isn't enough money from these 3 sources, there's really no other reasonable choice but to limit aid.
The statistical analysis I'd like to see is the probability of someone passing who was purely guessing. When you have multiple tens of thousands taking it, shouldn't someone have accidentally passed?
Learn to love Alaska
I don't think he'd even be able to complete the exam (or start it for that matter). Unless you accept Ouija correspondence test taking.
Learn to love Alaska
. "Everyone is equal." "Everyone is the same." "Everyone has the same potential." It's a lie.
The second doesn't belong with the other two. Equality and potential isn't the same as being the same.
Learn to love Alaska
"Menial Labor"? I have a brother that dropped out of high school because of dyslexia (and biased teachers), he had no desire to go to college, but became an automobile mechanic, and eventually a diesel mechanic. A very good one. Good enough that he's consistently earned more than I ( a degreed electronics technician with 20 years experience ranging from communications to avionics to industrial controls to network administration) during our careers. He has provided extremely well for himself and his family, in a career field that he has thoroughly enjoyed.
I think part of the problem is that teachers think, "College was what I needed to get ahead in life, so obviously everyone that wishes to get ahead in life needs to go to college." The experience of the teachers puts blinders on them, and gives them a very narrow tunnel vision. It's much like veterans that think, "The military was great for me! Everyone should go in!" They neglect to think about the many people that the military has ruined physically and emotionally.
Apprenticeships would be great, if there were anyplace left in America that actually had them besides Union construction workers, and good luck getting into those if you don't have a family member in there already.
Australia has a somewhat similar system. Students are graded at the end of their highschool and are given a score from 1 to 25. The universities then have places available for each degree, and depending on the applicants start accepting all the 1s the 2s the 3s etc until the places are full.
That way they fill their quota and you get the brightest of the bunch in uni.
This also leads to some peculiar results like idiots doing engineering and only the brightest students doing arts degrees because arts just happened to be far more popular that year. But second year maths typically weeds out the students with an OP>5 in a sort of natural selection process.
There is a big problem here. Tax payers fund a University. It turns no student can take its courses. Obviously, tax payers will have to reconsider what they are paying. Will they remove funds from the University for undergraduate studies? Ask University to be some kind of high school?
Probably because he doesn't actually understand anything.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
You didn't quote his entire sentence.
"Where else in the western world can there be overtly authoritarian communist candidates to the presidency or representative elections raking in a two-digit percentage of voters ? "
While the "or" makes the sentence sound awkward (and maybe be a mistake of some sort), he is clearly referring to a particular platform of candidates receiving a double digit percentage of votes, not the percentage of voter turnout.
ll the classes? I used to come top 3 in every class I had to take at school except one art. I cant get a degree in engineering because I cant draw or paint?
Also PE was a graded part of my school life, if not being a jock meant you dont go to higher education meant you dodnt go to HE then thats most of the people who went struck off.
Yes I know there was a section of people who went because they were good at ruggers etc in the UK we call them Lawers or media consultants.
In the USA, high school does nothing to prepare most students for higher education. The first year of university mostly entails unlearning the rote structure of previous schooling.
The exit exams, where they exist, are a joke unless you're talking about private or charter schools. Public education in the US is a mountain of fail.
I hope they don't do that. The US system is thoroughly broken.
In the US, "free market" doesn't mean an actual free market. I cannot think of a single one off the top of my head where it actually applies. The term "free market" in the US is invariably doublespeak. Crony capitalism does not a free market make.
Government is not the only way to work together in order to improve things. One of the great downfalls in the US is the growing belief that only through government can things be made better.
It depends, case-by-case, and school-by-school. Often considering a resume like a job applicant. If they come from the United States, for instance, then they may actually take the SAT into consideration for some courses. There is a system in place for evaluating applicants from virtually every country/education system you can name.
For mature students / adult applicants, it'll again be case by ase, but some programs will take a hard line and ask you to repeat high school courses if you didn't graduate sufficiently recently (I expect there are ways to achieve credit on a "fast-track", but I've never looked into that).
The system is optimized for the common case of Ontario students going to Ontario Universities straight out of Ontario high schools.
Yeah that's possible, but there might be a genetic basis for the factors you're talking about too. For instance, "stable home and family" might be affected by physical factors like if one group has higher testosterone than others. Let's say that's true -- then indirectly, higher testosterone also leads to lower academic achievement, lower cognitive development, and in the end, a dumber person. There could be a crap ton of those types of secondary effects based on genetics and we don't know because it's not really a studied field. It seems plausible to me.
I thought it was funny. Well a serious question then --
I'm far better at being examined on paper than I am in real life. I'm unfairly advantaged, and I'm prepared to admit it.
Why do you feel this way? The only thing I can imagine is that you regularly run into people who are smarter than you but do worse on tests. How do you judge them to be smarter than you? Have you ever asked them to rate your own intelligence? It could be you have low self esteem and/or impostor syndrome and that you're quite smart but despite the evidence you just can't believe it.
In my own experience, in case you're curious, the people I know who did well on tests in school are smart. The people who did badly in school are usually dumb, though there's the occasional person who seems smart but has some secondary problem that prevented them from doing well -- pretty rare. As for myself, I do extremely well on written tests and I'm very smart.
Smart people have the ability to do well on written tests (most of them do), and dumb people only do well on written tests when they put in an enormous amount of effort (most of them don't), so to me it seems like you're looking at the false positive/negative rate and dismissing the entire idea of testing because it's not perfect.
But it is likely that out of 24,000 students nobody was smart enough and motivated enough to pass it this time? That none of them studied the tests from previous years and realized that they were already deficient?
No it seems very unlikely but I was responding to your hypothetical that if the problem isn't the test, they're going to run out of students. That is even more unlikely.
Also if the problem IS with the test, in terms of mismatched answer keys or something like that, I think the university would just fix the problem and blame it on computer error instead of temporarily lowering the admission standards and letting in essentially random people.
That's begging the question, the quality of degrees varies significantly throughout the world.
No I'm not considering the degrees that are worthless. Those places are degree mills, not reputable universities that other institutions should aspire to match.
Besides the article suggests that the problem was only with the english mechanics portion of the test, so not particularly relevant to math degrees.
The guy in the article referenced English because that had the biggest drop (formerly required 70% score and dropped to 50%, versus math originally at 50% and dropped to 40%). You don't think missing 60% of the math questions that you're supposed to know at that point in your academic career isn't a problem?
Yeah, that or a great argument for more standardization. Why not have a national curriculum and national tests for core classes, and then local leeway for the stuff nobody else should care about like "History of [Your State]," physical education, or stuff that is difficult to grade objectively like creative writing. That stuff shouldn't be counted in your GPA for college either. There should only be a Core GPA of the core nationalized classes.
I mean the curriculum for an AP classes is effectively national since everybody takes the same test at the end. It works well.
No I'm not considering the degrees that are worthless. Those places are degree mills
Again, begging the question. The quality scale is not binary.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I don't know why you think I'm begging the question. I let it go the first time but now I have to wonder what you mean since it seems central to your problem with my reasoning.
When I said "No I'm not considering the degrees that are worthless. Those places are degree mills, not reputable universities that other institutions should aspire to match." which part did you think was my conclusion, and which was a restatement of my conclusion as a premise that leads directly to it? "I'm not considering" is not an argument it's a statement of fact that is indisputable by you unless you want to enter the game of arguing in bad faith and accusing someone of lying with no reason or evidence.
Do you have a problem with "worthless degrees" and "degree mills?" You're admitting with your reply that there is a quality scale for degrees with the reservation that you think it's not a binary scale. I fully agree and I never said it was binary, nor does "worthless" imply binary. So in no way am I introducing a premise that is as questionable as my conclusion (that I'm not considering them.. which isn't a conclusion at all as I mentioned).
I don't get it. Perhaps you can elaborate instead of being so cryptic.
Since you didn't reply to my other points can I assume we agree on those?
Yeah, our system is great. It holds back everyone to the lowest common denominator. You can see the wonderful things it has done for our economy.
I'd prefer non-authoritarian anything (preferably, non-authoritarian free market capitalism).
No such thing. Ownership itself is a totalitarian institution. Under free market capitalism, money makes money faster than labor does. This leads to amplification of economic inequality, leading to a small elite owning most of the economy. Since ownership is totalitarian, and the need to eat is just as coercive as the need not to get shot, the result is a de facto totalitarian government.
So they have no say in how YOU spend THEIR money? That's not democratic, nor is it moral.
They should have the same say as anyone else in how WE spend OUR money.
1) Taxes. There's a big misconception about taxes: people think that these can be raised arbitrarily to raise all the money the government needs. In practice, this doesn't work; businesses close and rich people move their money.
Why is it that free market fundamentalists always assume that because the Laffer curve exists every government everywhere is always on the righthand side of the curve? The fact is, taxes are at historical lows, and they were much higher during much better economic times. We're well to the left of the peak of the Laffer curve.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
In the US, "free market" doesn't mean an actual free market. I cannot think of a single one off the top of my head where it actually applies. The term "free market" in the US is invariably doublespeak. Crony capitalism does not a free market make.
There's no such thing as "free market". It's at best an abstraction, like a "frictionless surface" in physics. In reality, economic networks are scale free, meaning that they become dominated by a few big players. At that point, the markets are no longer free. The only way to stop this is through regulation. That's right, government regulation is *REQUIRED* to maintain a free market.
Government is not the only way to work together in order to improve things.
And when one company refuses to play fair, what exactly do you intend to do about it?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Some people "coast" through college as well. My son told me the first time he studied for a test was in law school. His mediocre grades meant he couldn't get into the best school but he has a great position at a large corporation.
While highly educated people design the products and services we use, the world you experience was built and is maintained by people who dropped out of high school or skimmed through not learning much. The guy who fixes your cars brakes, your houses plumbing, those who built your house, no degrees. We trust that our cars will stop, pipes and roofs not leak. We depend on those good, obedient employees.
I am one of those non decreed workers that make sure the stores are stocked with fresh food, your internet cable works, your garbage is taken away, the nations warships are on station. Your welcome.
Are all non-mill degrees equal, yes or no?
If yes, you are begging the question that a degree from these two schools would not be up to standard because the entrance exam is, like degree mills, is not meaningful.
If no, your argument that this particular test as written is necessarily meaningful as to what a degree four years later means falls apart.
> Since you didn't reply to my other points can I assume we agree on those?
Nope, just that your begging the question is so bald-faced obvious and I really onlly care enough to go after the low-hanging fruit.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
That's an entirely different objections. Are grades actually particularly good at measuring a persons skills in a subject ? The answer, obviously, is "it depends".
It depends on the subject at hand. It depends on what skills you're interested in. And it depends on how the grades are set. All of these vary considerably.
Yes. And if Wikipedia didn't get their sources messed up, then between 15% and 30% of the students would not have qualified, if not for their lineage. Meanwhile 75% of americans oppose the practice, which makes perfect sense to me. The American mythical dream is about working hard to achieve your dream - not having positions and educations handed down to people based on who their PARENTS happen to be.
There's no such thing as "free market".
Yup, that's pretty much what I said.
And when one company refuses to play fair, what exactly do you intend to do about it?
My comment was not limited to commercial interaction. That government is required to do certain things does not immediately invalidate ways of cooperation which don't require government. There are many things which can be done by groups of individuals to make any number of things better.
An example would be an organization called Project Access, which provides free healthcare to those who are below the poverty level. The only government support is in verifying someone qualifies financially. Physicians and hospitals donate their time to provide services.
If yes, you are begging the question that a degree from these two schools would not be up to standard because the entrance exam is, like degree mills, is not meaningful.
I wasn't talking about dumbing down JUST the entrance test. Look back at what you originally said:
The objective is to further the education of the next generation. If they have to "dumb down" the university to achieve that,
I see how you could think I was begging the question that a dumbed down entrance exam will inevitably lead to a dumbed down university. But of course that's not what I was saying.. we were both discussing a situation where the entire university is dumbed down to accommodate poor students.
If no, your argument that this particular test as written is necessarily meaningful as to what a degree four years later means falls apart.
Well I think it's inconsequential at this point, but that's also wrong. Just because non-degree-mill degrees aren't equal doesn't mean there isn't a clear separation between various tiers of universities.
Like the crap they did with the university system.... The mapped the Dipl. to Bachelor totally missing the point that it is in most cases almost Masters level... yes currently the German politics are totally missing what is good about the German education system and try prepare students for a "globalized world". The shame is that they are either making the system worse or underselling themselves.
"However, I kind of like this feature of our system. A lot of "low achievers" have issues that are holding them back (bad eyesight, dislexia, ADHD) that they might eventually get a handle on. I'd really hate it if we just gave up on those kids at an early age and consigned them to menial labor for life."
I take that personally and must say that you are so wrong on so many levels. The different tracks have one benefit and that that the teacher have roughly a similar set of skill and can adjust accordingly. They are not left behind, they get good targeted education and what you do in 9th grade Hauptschule (lowest track) is what the US highschools do in 12th grade. In addition there is a system of apprenticeships in place that bring the people into qualified jobs, such as accountants, mechanics, educators (i.e. kindergarten) or programmers. There is relatively little "untrained" labor in Germany. In the US you bore yourself for 12 years and then. There are little directed ways you can go.
The reason I take that as a personal offence is because I have severe dislexia. And yet, I got though the highest track and completed a university degree with honors. What you are alluding to are problems (eysight, dislexia and ADHD) that have nothing to do with intelligence and the system and teachers can adapt to it. Yet you have people with different intelligence and different skill levels. (I can program a computer, but for the life of me I could not carve wood.) You are doing all of them a disservice by putting them into the same pot.