I dont think there is true grade inflation, for one the colleges are more selective than they were. There is no evidence of grade inflation on the highschool level, the college students have better tools now like computers, the college students are generally more educated and come from a wealthier backround than they did before.
Are the work assignments easier? Prove that, and how? Did we lighten the worldload? Prove this too. I think computers may have allowed a student to do more work in less time, and that students can gather information faster without going through the library and just getting it on the internet, so this saved time allows a student to get better grades.
I know I couldnt get all As the old fashioned way, it would just be too time consuming to be realistic, but now I can research 3-4 things at once and write 3-4 papers all at once, I can then spell check them in less than 1/5 the time it would take me to do it the old fashioned way with a dictionary next to me looking up words and correcting via peer review.
But if that's not what you mean, I'm going to take umbrage at that--education is VERY important to me, and I think I have spent a very focused four years learning as much as I can. I may not have a 4.0 GPA, but I have learned a great deal.
To some people, school is everything.
I take a different tack--I'm the smartest, and all those fools who work harder than me just have to work so hard because they don't have the brains I do;) (joking)
I've met people who are truely smarter than me, but these people are rare. Take Bobby Fischer, I would never challenge that man to chess, hes just smarter than me when it comes to these things, but I did better in school than he did.
Intelligence does not mean you'll have intelligence in areas that matter or they you'll be well rounded. I've met alot of people with photographic memories, literally can remember every detail of something they just glance at, who failed in school.
Just because you are intelligent does not mean you know what to do with this intelligence or how to use it to your advantage.
Do I think Bush could have gotten a 1500? I think he should have, why didnt he? I guess he cant. I mean he went to the best schools, he had tutors, he studied all his life for it and still didnt get a 1500, this is why I call him an idiot, a moron etc.
I know he has dyslexia, but he also had the money to hire tutors, whats his problem?
" Like I said--I'm interested in a person's skills, abilities, and knowledge (and of course willingness to work). The ancient greeks were a sound believer in a sound mind, and a sound body. Athletes aren't all "dumb" and they, as I said, bring their own type of excellence. I could care less about someone's race--if that someone is smart, a good worker, an excellent athlete, they bring good things. Race is irrelevant to that.
Being an athelete has nothing to do with academics just like being of a certain race has nothing to do with academics, diversity is good and I respect the intentions, but it should not be forced diversity because it creates a racist backlash, racists will claim the only minorities who can get a degree did so because they had help and not because they were smarter.
Oh don't get me wrong, I agree 100% that Bill CLinton was a very smart man. Nixon apparently has the highest _tested_ IQ that we know of any 20th century president, and look where it got him? And yeah, Bush's IQ was an estimate given his SAT scores (sinc the two ARE correlated, but since you don't acknowledge this fact, it's not worth discussing further).
Really, you're wrong about anyone being able to get a 1500. The most common number I've heard is that someone can, on average, race their score ~100 points from study courses (a friend of mine used to teach one). Google the topic.
Anyone can get a 1500 if they study hard enough for long enough. Most people who get 1500s spent their childhoods in the house reading books while the rest of the kids were outside playing sports and talking to girls.
You are right a person can only raise their score maybe 100 points per year, but if you had your whole lifetime to study for the SATs why cant you get a 1500? Asian kids do this all the time, their parents literally force them to spend their childhoods studying for the SATs and this explains why Asians as a race have the highest average SAT score.
Alot of it depends on your parents, alot of it depends on you and how well you are able to obey your parents, and how much money your parents have to buy books and send you to good schools.
The SAT is a knowledge exam, if you force your kid to learn exactly the knowledge that will be on the SAT test, it wont make them a better test taker, but they will definately be capable of a 1500 score if they focus on doing so. So force your kid to study 12 hours a day, dont let him watch TV, dont buy video games or toys, and your kid will be like Sho Yano, the teenager who is in medical school. It all depends on culture really, if your culture says its cool to be a nerd who does nothing but study, you'll become good at studying and you'll gain alot of knowledge, you dont need a photographic memory, you dont even need to be intelligent you just need to be properly trained, or taught that the most important thing in life is your education.
I can tell from speaking to you, that you dont take education as seriously as some people, You said that a C average is respectable, but trust me if you took education seriously and if you were of a certain culture, a C average is a disgrace not only to you but to your parents, your family, your race, etc. Its about honor, you have to believe you are the best, the smartest and you then must work the hardest in response to prove that to others.
C averages are terrible if you have family members who all got 4.0 GPAs. So I can understand where someone like Sho Yano is coming from in terms of culture, could I have done what he did? I doubt I could have done it as early or for as long as he has, but I could surely have made it into an ivy league school, its all how you are raised and where you rank education on your list of things that are important.
Incidentally, I think you're wrong that "anyone" can get a 1500 SAT score. It's highly linked to IQ. Incidentally again, on the topic of IQ--Bush has about the same IQ as JFK it's estimated. Was he too dumb to be president too?:)
No its not. The SAT test is a knowledge test, you arent testing IQ you are testing knowledge. Anyone can be trained to get a 1500 on their SAT.
Also Bush's IQ tests you cant even prove are real, at least the Yale transcripts are said to be real straight from Yale. But ok, speaking of IQ, JFK was a rich kid too who went to private schools, he in my opinion was average intelligence, at least by my standards, I think Bill Clinton was smarter than JFK considering unlike JFK Bill Clinton was not born into a political family, he had to be a genius to go from being a poor kid raised by a single parent to being president.
And I don't know if Duke is a difficult school. I know it's signifigantly more work than my friends who go to public school (UNC, NCSU, etc) do, but I don't know how it compares to Harvard,Yale,Princeton etc. Duke is a top 5 school though, so I imagine it's not too far off.
Duke is a good school, but its not on the level of Yale or Harvard.
That being said -- there IS rooms for all kinds. Atheletes who are otherwise slightly (SLIGHTLY) below standards bring their own kind of excellence. And I focus on minorities because duke has a tremendously high graduation rate, and it just so happens that the only people I've known who have been forced to leave have been minorities. And the lowest SAT score
Thats because you choose to focus on minorities instead of Atheletes and Jocks, potheads etc.
Oh come on you sound like a damn idiot now, how can you make excuses for a man with a C average and blame it on grade inflation?!!?!?!
"95% of people graduated from Harvard Law school w/ "Honors"
Thats because its Harvard, 95 percent of the people there are geniuses who SHOULD be graduating with honors, Its Harvard, its the best of the best, now if this were community college you'd have a point, hell if this were Duke you'd have a point.
640 math is not bad at all btw...I think it would be like a 700 today (though it's hard to tell w/ the scaling for sure).
I dont believe in the myth of grade inflation, students could be getting better grades because they are SMARTER! I mean you'd think after 20 years we would be smarter than we were 20 years ago.
George Bush cant even read, I saw his college transcripts and his grades are horrible, he was in the slow reading classes inn highschool, all of the information is public record, do your research, Bush is not Yale material just like those minorities you cited were not Duke material.
Someone who goes to Yale and has a C average at Yale does not belong at Yale.
I suppose you would have laughed at Thomas Jefferson and guffawed at how you were _so_ much smarter than him (from you community college nonetheless!!!). Thomas Jefferson, like Bush, couldn't speak in public to save his life.
Thats just my point, George Bush should have been in community college with me, not at Yale, he is only at Yale because of his last name. George Bush has no excuse, unlike me, this guy was rich, went to the best schools in the country, and still can't read. He can blame it on dyslexia if he wants, but thats no excuse, he sucks at math too, just look at his grades.
I look up to people who started with nothing, like Bill Clinton and then work their way up into Georgetown, Harvard etc, someone like George Bush who clearly is not Yale material gets into Yale just because his father was President pisses me off.
You can say hes not stupid but you know thats a damn lie, the guy is STUPID, if you are rich and privileged you should be able to get a 1500 or so on your SATs, and you should be able to get at least a B average from Yale.
Thomas Jefferson, didnt he have slaves? Thomas Jefferson was intelligent yet stupid.
Bush is just plain stupid, Bush's problem with speaking is due to the fact he cant read. Bush also cant do math, he got bad grades in economics yet he claims to know how the economy works, hes an idiot.
"had a 1030, and has constantly been on academic probabtion. One of my best friends is african america, and had a similarly low SAT and has been on academic probation."
Thats not enough evidence to prove that they got in due ot race, I'm sure you will find alot of white females who also have low SAT scores, I am also sure people who came from their neighborhood even if white could get extra credit on admissions.
There are too many factors for you to come to the conclusion that they got into Duke just on race. 1030 is just plain low, period so either Duke has a ridiculous system for admission or they must have had other qualifications besides race, like perhaps what neighborhood they came from and their life experiences/essay.
My biggest problem with changing admissions standards to accomodate race is that it doesn't help ANYONE. I've met some very, very intelligent people from all races while at Duke. And the people who have to struggle in the easiest classes because they shouldn't have been admitted, and then get terrible grades are not in a good situation--they would have been off going to an easier school, where they could have dominated the competition, and instead of being in over their heads.
There are alot of white kids, atheletes and others who get into Duke and who cant handle it, so why do you choose to only focus on minorities?
You have a point, they perhaps shouldnt just be accepted in wit only a 1030 score, that is ridiculously low, but Duke is not really what I'd consider a difficult school, someone with a 1030 SAT should be able to handle Duke if they arent lazy.
The point is this, SAT scores alone cannot judge character, perhaps Admissions saw something in these kids, or perhaps they wrote good essays, but really you are right they dont belong in Duke if they are getting bad grades.
The academic probation thing is over rated, anyone can end up on academic probation, however if you get into Duke and cant keep up your GPA perhaps they dont belong there.
I think we should give people a chance, race based or gender based admissions allows these people to have a chance, some are too stupid and will flunk, and others will pass, but its not like white people dont flunk out of Duke, so why pick on them?
Yeah but Bush is Christ, I mean he cant make mistakes, hes perfect, even if he clearly lies or says some of the stupidest speeches I've ever heard in my life, people say hes a great leader.
Hes the President and the President(if republican)can do no wrong, just ask foxnews.
people to read quality literature - or even sub-par literature, if the students can recognize it as such. Teach them all the grammar rules and word definitions you want, if students don't read they won't be able to write well.
You can write well if you know technically how to write. Students get enough reading when they read every textbook, history book, etc.
Gender is just as much of a factor, as is atheletic ability, and who your parents are.
To stress race when we have all these other unfair admissions going on, is simply racist. Affirmative Action itself isnt even about race, I dont know how people can make it some kinda black and white issue when white women make up the majority of those who benefit from Affirmative Action.
The university of Michigan had some stupid policies but these policies had nothing to do with Affirmative Action, the University of Michigan was using the excuse of Affirmative Action to set up a quota system.
The points system sounds like a Quota to me, Affirmative Action however is fair. "It was the fixed number of points that got them into trouble. The courts decided that factors such as race could in fact be used, but only if the process was flexible. What that meant exactly posed an interesting challenge. They basically looked at what everyone else who wasn't getting sued was doing, and did an amalgamation of that."
Admissions arent fair, whats new? If we want to make it fair we will take all of these things out and only look at the numbers. If we were to do this, George Bush, Shaq, Dennis Rodman and lots of others would not have made it into University.
Just like sexist guys will complain if women get into colleges on gender.
Do I care? Absolutely not considering the Athlete and the rich upperclass kid will both get in. It seems everyone is getting into college via loopholes, including white males who like to complain so much, I mean George Bush complains about Affirmative Action but how on earth did he get into Yale?
Ah so George Bush does not have the right to say "Bring em on!"?
My spelling and grammar isnt 100% perfect, but you act like this is my website and I'm the admin here making posts. I am going to admit it, I'm too lazy to double and triple check my grammar over slashdot postings.
If you waste your time doing this, maybe you'd make a good English teacher, but you still are wasting your time.
SAT's do not test intelligence, they test knowledge.
Knowledge can be purchased with money, or with time/hard work. Getting a good SAT score does not mean you are intelligent and it does not mean you work hard.
Linzeal, you can get a 1500 on your SAT and be an idiot, I've met people who have high SAT scores and who lack the intelligence to learn on their own, they must be spoonfed, also while they may have the recommended range of knowledge that the SAT asked for, they arent bright enough to gather new knowledge on their own and they are very well rounded yet mediocre.
Now, I admit if I had a kid I'd stress the SATs, but not because the SATs is a fair test, or because I like the SATs, but because getting a good score will get them into Yale and Harvard.
There are a few problems with the SATs, SATs are culturally biased. This means if you grow up in a culture which stresses conformity over creativity, obedience over rebellion and a good example of such a culture is the Japanese or Chinese, the result is because of the structure of their society, rule based and all about conformity, its very easy for a person from this culture to come to our schools which are far less structured than theres and into our society which has far less structure than say Japan or China, and learn all the required knowledge and get a 1500 on the SATs.
This does not make them smarter, it simply means that their culture is designed to be compatible with the culture of the academic world, and their style of rule based living neatly fits in with certain things.
I'll give you examples, if you were a kid and all your life you were taught to follow the rules, all you know how to do is follow the rules, and do what you are told and I as your parent give you a book and create a new rule, and this rule is to study what I tell you to study whenever I tell you to study it, in this culture I could have you reading every academic textbook I can find.
Now, if you spend 12 hours a day studying yes you will be that 15 year old kid who gets into college with straight As and a 1500 on the SATs but it wont be because you are intelligent, it will be because you know how to obey me, and you know how to follow the rules of society.
The rules of society say "Study, get good grades, get your degree, work." Some people catch onto these rules earlier because their culture neatly fits in with these rules, while others dont learn until they are an adult, after they spent their teen years trying to rebel.
How do I come up with this hypothesis? It explains my situation, I was NOT brought up to be some kinda nerd, in fact my culture frowned upon it, it was not cool to be a nerd, I had no one in my life to explain to me how society worked, I just had MTV telling me that its cooler to be a musician.
I'm sure ALOT of kids have their culture influenced by MTV and other outlets which promote being a dumb athelete or a rockstar above being a geek. How many American kids do you know who look at Bill Gates as a hero? Bill Gates is a smart guy, hes successful, but when you ask anyone about Bill Gates hes just a dork.
Until our culture says being a dork is a good thing, and that being a nerd is cool, kids are going to rebel, intelligent kids who may have the brain power to easily get a 1600 on their SATs will be told that its more important to dress nice and talk to girls, and so they will focus their mental abilities on getting girls, they may buy a car and nice clothes, they may slack up on their studies or be the class clown on purpose because everyone likes them when they act this way.
So this is why SATs are culturally biased. Our kids will not master the SATs until we get rid of MTV and all of these negative influences, and put only academic type programming on TV.
Class is more important than SATs too, if you come from the upper class (think George Bush) it helps you even more than being a female or minority would help you.
Despite what you might think, most minorities dont get free degrees from Yale, if you want a degree from Yale, you need a 1500 on your SATs just to get in, period, it does not matter if you are a minority, this is Yale.
Affirmative Action only helps people get into state universities, these are schools which any one of these minorities would get into if they went to community college for a while, so really Affirmative Action does nothing for a person with poor SAT skills but maybe help them get into University a year earlier than they should.
Highschool should be to prepare you for the real world (ie: A job, life, maybe marriage).
NO, That is a PARENTS job.
University is there to prepare you for a lifetime of learning on a subject.
How do you expect to get into university if your highschool never prepares you? Sure you can go to community college and work your way in, but highschools should focus on getting people in.
University Education is a much needed filter, if you havent noticed, we are LOSING not GAINING jobs, if we dont increase the filters, we will suffer a depression, cant you see that when theres less jobs to choose from that you must be more qualified to get the same job which you once could get with little to no qualification? If you want to be a secretary go to school for it, if you are too dumb to go to school and get an assosiates degree, go work at McDonalds. There has to be levels so people can work their way into the middle class, for you to think that everyone can be middle class is insane.
on a personal (read offtopic) note: if you go into a class knowing everything, perhaps it is better for you to skip it altogether. thus a teacher helping you skip the course (by flunking you) is really giving you what you are asking for.
You dont make any sense with this statement. Any intelligent person usually knows a bit about a class before they take it, they usually do some research on it, the reason to take a class is to get the credits and get a degree. You do understand that degrees are a requirement in this information age right?
If you skip courses on a regular basis, why do you go to school anyway? you obviously know everything, perhaps the teachers aren't flunking you because of your poor attendance, but for your poor attitude. might want to thing about that while ditching class.
To get a degree. Its not about the classes, its about getting points and getting the degree. If I wanted to learn I could do that on my own.
a teacher's primary job is to teach, not "judge [your] work". although, testing the knowledge you have gained may be a part of that task. objectivity in grading is important. this is why any student can complain to the dean of unfairness. seems to me that this has often been acceptable in eliminating unfair teachers. compare this system of checks and balances to a program that may or may not be 100% correct. every student that gets an unfair grade will still complain, and then the work will be hand checked (by the teachers that you call unfair). no non-trivial program is ever 100% correct; just like people.
A teachers job is not to teach, despite what you may think, its a students job to learn, its the teachers job to guide the student. The student needs to learn how to teach themselves using the tools, and the teacher should teach students to teach themselves, spoonfeeding students information only punishes those who are intelligent enough to learn at a faster pace.
And yet you seem to despise the role of emotion in politics.
Emotion prevents a person from making logical decisions. Computers dont have this problem.
This is why I prefer computers over people when it comes to judgements, I'd rather have a world thats 99-100% fair, than have an emotional world which is 50% fair.
You see my point? Emotions have allowed us humans to do some very stupid things, it was emotions that allowed Hitler to kill millions of Jews. Now its emotion being used by the Jews to pass certain laws.
Its emotion which we used when we decided to attack Saddam, and now its emotion being used by some politicians who just want us to pull our troops out of Iraq.
Look, decisions should be seperate from emotion, when I make a decision I try my best to avoid all emotional influence, some people do a good job ignoring their emotions when the time comes to make a tough decision, other people cannot ignore their emotion.
Want another example? Freenet, should you support it or not? Emotional people will say "Well kiddie porn could be on Freenet so I cannot support it"
But when you make a very logical decision, without any emotional influence, its clear that Freenet as a technology would improve perhaps the whole internet as we know it, as well as give Freedom to the world.
So when you make a decision like this you have to weight it, what is more valueable to the world, Freedom, or should we avoid Freedom to fight kiddie porn, racism or insert what you like.
Most people when they think logical will be for Freenet, for Filesharing, etc, its only when people think emotionally, and theres plenty of very intelligent manipulators including our government, the RIAA and others who use emotion to convince people to go along with illogical ideas.
So yes I despise emotion in politics and in decision making, I want people to make the logical decision first. Logic is always right, and it can be proven, emotion is almost always wrong but we keep using emotion as an excuse for wars, the death penalty, and many other actions which in theory are illogical and against what America is all about.
Since when could computers write Essays? I dont know about this technology. Yes you can use computers as a tool to assist YOU in writing an essay, but the computer will not write the essay for you.
The same criteria that the program would use to grade the essay could very easily be turned around and used to generate an essay that the computer will love. Having a computer written term paper given an A by a computer grader is worthy of an Ionesco play.
If the computer loves it, then its proper English.
Beyond that there is no way the computer will be able to distinguish between something truly interesting and something that just lists the facts in simple Dick and Jane language with an occasional compund sentence to keep the grammar checker happy.
We arent trying to create fantastic writers, we are just trying to teach everyone how to write. IF you want to write good stories, major in English, most scientific journals are boring and just list facts.
All it can do is check for fact1, fact2, fact3, and any interesting conclusion you draw in the paper will be completely lost. Anything more would be turing test worthy, and I heartily doubt they've achieved anything close to that.
For a scientific journal what more do you need? You just list the introduction, then you show a table of contents of sort, you explain your experiments/tests, and its conclusions and then you plug in your opinion based on these conclusions.
Really its all just mechanical in nature.
In conclusion, this idea is a pipe dream which would discourage high quality writing (i.e. the kind actual PEOPLE like to read), teach people the substandard grammatical constructs used by most grammar checking software, and create a market for software that writes term papers, thereby removing the last actual bit of work your average liberal arts major has to do. I think it's a hopelessly terrible idea. TA's already do this work; why waste time coming up with a program which will do the same thing, poorly?
Are we teaching English or are we trying to write novels? This isnt about writing stuff people like to read, its about learning English.
Take a creative writing class or major in English if you want to learn how to write stuff that others want to read. You cannot really teach a person to be good at writing you can only really teach them to write, people who want to see if they have talent can major in it and find out.
That's BS. Lets see the things you noticed--more personal attention, more personal attention, more personal attention, and oh, you can't slack off as much. How is any of that a bad thing? I don't know about you, but in my college experience I've NEVER had a teacher who singled out a student for getting bad grades because of personal dislike.
First, personal attention isnt always good. Second, a person should be able to slack off as long as they produce high quality work. IF I can produce work thats high quality, why does it matter if I get to class on time? My work is good, I passed all the exams.
Also just because in your personal limited experience you have never once had a bad teacher, it does not mean that these types of people do not exist. I have seen it, I have spoken to others who have experienced it, it happens. I know kids who failed classes for ridiculous reasons/excuses, others get bad grades because the teacher just didnt like the style of their writing even if the paper was technically correct.
Well you know--you mention being late to class and not showing--yeah, that will make a teacher pissed off.
Well too damn bad, this isnt about the teacher, the teachers job is to grade papers, its my job to submit paper work. What I do in between is none of the teachers business, as long as I do my job the teacher should do their job.
If you slack like that, it's not wonder you think a teacher doesn't like you for personal reasons.
Its not the teachers job to judge me as a person, its the teachers jobs to judge my work. This is exactly why we need machines, because certain people such as yourself want to judge the person and not the work.
"This person doesnt dress nice, this person has long hair and looks like a hippy, this person is always late, I dont like this person"
Its these feelings that can bring an A to a B or a B to a C.
You can learn so much more from a professor than from a textbook. That depends on the professor, and on the textbook. Most of the time I learn better from the textbook, mainly because I am not designed to learn in a structured environment, and because I dont learn at the pace of the class, also because rarely did I have great teachers so I'm more comfortable just looking information up myself instead of asking questions.
Really professors are coaches, I dont learn directly from them, they do sometimes make absorbing the textbook material easier when they give good lectures based on the material but most of the time, I could just read a transcript of their lecture and get the same knowledge.
If I do decide to become a teacher one of the things I will do for sure is check attendance EVERY day (in a small class environemnt).
Yes and I will drop your class if I were ever one of your students. I dont want to be judged by stupid shit that has nothing to do with my intelligence or my ability to learn. I want to be judged on my knowledge. Some people just live too far away from school, sometimes they dont have cars, other times they just overslept, either way this has absolutely nothing to do with learning and I dont see why you should have a right to punish me for my attendance if I get an A on ever paper.
That pisses me off, to get a drop in grade because I was late, or to get a drop in grade because of poor attendance, even though my work is 100% correct.
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I dont think there is true grade inflation, for one the colleges are more selective than they were. There is no evidence of grade inflation on the highschool level, the college students have better tools now like computers, the college students are generally more educated and come from a wealthier backround than they did before.
Are the work assignments easier? Prove that, and how? Did we lighten the worldload? Prove this too. I think computers may have allowed a student to do more work in less time, and that students can gather information faster without going through the library and just getting it on the internet, so this saved time allows a student to get better grades.
I know I couldnt get all As the old fashioned way, it would just be too time consuming to be realistic, but now I can research 3-4 things at once and write 3-4 papers all at once, I can then spell check them in less than 1/5 the time it would take me to do it the old fashioned way with a dictionary next to me looking up words and correcting via peer review.
But if that's not what you mean, I'm going to take umbrage at that--education is VERY important to me, and I think I have spent a very focused four years learning as much as I can. I may not have a 4.0 GPA, but I have learned a great deal.
;) (joking)
To some people, school is everything.
I take a different tack--I'm the smartest, and all those fools who work harder than me just have to work so hard because they don't have the brains I do
I've met people who are truely smarter than me, but these people are rare. Take Bobby Fischer, I would never challenge that man to chess, hes just smarter than me when it comes to these things, but I did better in school than he did.
Intelligence does not mean you'll have intelligence in areas that matter or they you'll be well rounded. I've met alot of people with photographic memories, literally can remember every detail of something they just glance at, who failed in school.
Just because you are intelligent does not mean you know what to do with this intelligence or how to use it to your advantage.
Do I think Bush could have gotten a 1500? I think he should have, why didnt he? I guess he cant. I mean he went to the best schools, he had tutors, he studied all his life for it and still didnt get a 1500, this is why I call him an idiot, a moron etc.
I know he has dyslexia, but he also had the money to hire tutors, whats his problem?
" Like I said--I'm interested in a person's skills, abilities, and knowledge (and of course willingness to work). The ancient greeks were a sound believer in a sound mind, and a sound body. Athletes aren't all "dumb" and they, as I said, bring their own type of excellence. I could care less about someone's race--if that someone is smart, a good worker, an excellent athlete, they bring good things. Race is irrelevant to that.
Being an athelete has nothing to do with academics just like being of a certain race has nothing to do with academics, diversity is good and I respect the intentions, but it should not be forced diversity because it creates a racist backlash, racists will claim the only minorities who can get a degree did so because they had help and not because they were smarter.
Oh don't get me wrong, I agree 100% that Bill CLinton was a very smart man. Nixon apparently has the highest _tested_ IQ that we know of any 20th century president, and look where it got him? And yeah, Bush's IQ was an estimate given his SAT scores (sinc the two ARE correlated, but since you don't acknowledge this fact, it's not worth discussing further).
Really, you're wrong about anyone being able to get a 1500. The most common number I've heard is that someone can, on average, race their score ~100 points from study courses (a friend of mine used to teach one). Google the topic.
Anyone can get a 1500 if they study hard enough for long enough. Most people who get 1500s spent their childhoods in the house reading books while the rest of the kids were outside playing sports and talking to girls.
You are right a person can only raise their score maybe 100 points per year, but if you had your whole lifetime to study for the SATs why cant you get a 1500? Asian kids do this all the time, their parents literally force them to spend their childhoods studying for the SATs and this explains why Asians as a race have the highest average SAT score.
Alot of it depends on your parents, alot of it depends on you and how well you are able to obey your parents, and how much money your parents have to buy books and send you to good schools.
The SAT is a knowledge exam, if you force your kid to learn exactly the knowledge that will be on the SAT test, it wont make them a better test taker, but they will definately be capable of a 1500 score if they focus on doing so. So force your kid to study 12 hours a day, dont let him watch TV, dont buy video games or toys, and your kid will be like Sho Yano, the teenager who is in medical school. It all depends on culture really, if your culture says its cool to be a nerd who does nothing but study, you'll become good at studying and you'll gain alot of knowledge, you dont need a photographic memory, you dont even need to be intelligent you just need to be properly trained, or taught that the most important thing in life is your education.
I can tell from speaking to you, that you dont take education as seriously as some people, You said that a C average is respectable, but trust me if you took education seriously and if you were of a certain culture, a C average is a disgrace not only to you but to your parents, your family, your race, etc. Its about honor, you have to believe you are the best, the smartest and you then must work the hardest in response to prove that to others.
C averages are terrible if you have family members who all got 4.0 GPAs. So I can understand where someone like Sho Yano is coming from in terms of culture, could I have done what he did? I doubt I could have done it as early or for as long as he has, but I could surely have made it into an ivy league school, its all how you are raised and where you rank education on your list of things that are important.
Here is your grade inflation research straight from the university of texas.f lation/Inflation.html
http://www.utexas.edu/student/research/reports/In
Incidentally, I think you're wrong that "anyone" can get a 1500 SAT score. It's highly linked to IQ. Incidentally again, on the topic of IQ--Bush has about the same IQ as JFK it's estimated. Was he too dumb to be president too? :)
No its not. The SAT test is a knowledge test, you arent testing IQ you are testing knowledge. Anyone can be trained to get a 1500 on their SAT.
Also Bush's IQ tests you cant even prove are real, at least the Yale transcripts are said to be real straight from Yale. But ok, speaking of IQ, JFK was a rich kid too who went to private schools, he in my opinion was average intelligence, at least by my standards, I think Bill Clinton was smarter than JFK considering unlike JFK Bill Clinton was not born into a political family, he had to be a genius to go from being a poor kid raised by a single parent to being president.
And I don't know if Duke is a difficult school. I know it's signifigantly more work than my friends who go to public school (UNC, NCSU, etc) do, but I don't know how it compares to Harvard,Yale,Princeton etc. Duke is a top 5 school though, so I imagine it's not too far off.
Duke is a good school, but its not on the level of Yale or Harvard.
That being said -- there IS rooms for all kinds. Atheletes who are otherwise slightly (SLIGHTLY) below standards bring their own kind of excellence. And I focus on minorities because duke has a tremendously high graduation rate, and it just so happens that the only people I've known who have been forced to leave have been minorities. And the lowest SAT score
Thats because you choose to focus on minorities instead of Atheletes and Jocks, potheads etc.
Oh come on you sound like a damn idiot now, how can you make excuses for a man with a C average and blame it on grade inflation?!!?!?!
"95% of people graduated from Harvard Law school w/ "Honors"
Thats because its Harvard, 95 percent of the people there are geniuses who SHOULD be graduating with honors, Its Harvard, its the best of the best, now if this were community college you'd have a point, hell if this were Duke you'd have a point.
640 math is not bad at all btw...I think it would be like a 700 today (though it's hard to tell w/ the scaling for sure).
I dont believe in the myth of grade inflation, students could be getting better grades because they are SMARTER! I mean you'd think after 20 years we would be smarter than we were 20 years ago.
George Bush cant even read, I saw his college transcripts and his grades are horrible, he was in the slow reading classes inn highschool, all of the information is public record, do your research, Bush is not Yale material just like those minorities you cited were not Duke material.
Someone who goes to Yale and has a C average at Yale does not belong at Yale.
I suppose you would have laughed at Thomas Jefferson and guffawed at how you were _so_ much smarter than him (from you community college nonetheless!!!). Thomas Jefferson, like Bush, couldn't speak in public to save his life.
Thats just my point, George Bush should have been in community college with me, not at Yale, he is only at Yale because of his last name. George Bush has no excuse, unlike me, this guy was rich, went to the best schools in the country, and still can't read. He can blame it on dyslexia if he wants, but thats no excuse, he sucks at math too, just look at his grades.
I look up to people who started with nothing, like Bill Clinton and then work their way up into Georgetown, Harvard etc, someone like George Bush who clearly is not Yale material gets into Yale just because his father was President pisses me off.
You can say hes not stupid but you know thats a damn lie, the guy is STUPID, if you are rich and privileged you should be able to get a 1500 or so on your SATs, and you should be able to get at least a B average from Yale.
Thomas Jefferson, didnt he have slaves? Thomas Jefferson was intelligent yet stupid.
Bush is just plain stupid, Bush's problem with speaking is due to the fact he cant read. Bush also cant do math, he got bad grades in economics yet he claims to know how the economy works, hes an idiot.
His official SAT scores, 566 verbal and 640 math.
http://www.yaledailynews.com/article.asp?AID=2636
He had a C average at Yale and hes intelligent? He pretty much flunked astronomy! ASTRONOMY!
He got a 71 in political science! A 70 in sociology! A 71-72 in economics!
This man pretty much flunked his way through college, professors cut him some slack and passed him because of his father.
I got an 80 in sociology, same class as George Bush, the guy is an idiot, period.
"had a 1030, and has constantly been on academic probabtion. One of my best friends is african america, and had a similarly low SAT and has been on academic probation."
Thats not enough evidence to prove that they got in due ot race, I'm sure you will find alot of white females who also have low SAT scores, I am also sure people who came from their neighborhood even if white could get extra credit on admissions.
There are too many factors for you to come to the conclusion that they got into Duke just on race. 1030 is just plain low, period so either Duke has a ridiculous system for admission or they must have had other qualifications besides race, like perhaps what neighborhood they came from and their life experiences/essay.
My biggest problem with changing admissions standards to accomodate race is that it doesn't help ANYONE. I've met some very, very intelligent people from all races while at Duke. And the people who have to struggle in the easiest classes because they shouldn't have been admitted, and then get terrible grades are not in a good situation--they would have been off going to an easier school, where they could have dominated the competition, and instead of being in over their heads.
There are alot of white kids, atheletes and others who get into Duke and who cant handle it, so why do you choose to only focus on minorities?
You have a point, they perhaps shouldnt just be accepted in wit only a 1030 score, that is ridiculously low, but Duke is not really what I'd consider a difficult school, someone with a 1030 SAT should be able to handle Duke if they arent lazy.
The point is this, SAT scores alone cannot judge character, perhaps Admissions saw something in these kids, or perhaps they wrote good essays, but really you are right they dont belong in Duke if they are getting bad grades.
The academic probation thing is over rated, anyone can end up on academic probation, however if you get into Duke and cant keep up your GPA perhaps they dont belong there.
I think we should give people a chance, race based or gender based admissions allows these people to have a chance, some are too stupid and will flunk, and others will pass, but its not like white people dont flunk out of Duke, so why pick on them?
Yeah but Bush is Christ, I mean he cant make mistakes, hes perfect, even if he clearly lies or says some of the stupidest speeches I've ever heard in my life, people say hes a great leader.
Hes the President and the President(if republican)can do no wrong, just ask foxnews.
If its an English class you should get an A. If Its a writing class you should get an F.
people to read quality literature - or even sub-par literature, if the students can recognize it as such. Teach them all the grammar rules and word definitions you want, if students don't read they won't be able to write well.
You can write well if you know technically how to write. Students get enough reading when they read every textbook, history book, etc.
If you understand the technical side, you can interpret anything, it just may take you longer.
If you dont understand the technical side you wont even be able to read a sentence.
Gender is just as much of a factor, as is atheletic ability, and who your parents are.
To stress race when we have all these other unfair admissions going on, is simply racist. Affirmative Action itself isnt even about race, I dont know how people can make it some kinda black and white issue when white women make up the majority of those who benefit from Affirmative Action.
The university of Michigan had some stupid policies but these policies had nothing to do with Affirmative Action, the University of Michigan was using the excuse of Affirmative Action to set up a quota system.
The points system sounds like a Quota to me, Affirmative Action however is fair.
"It was the fixed number of points that got them into trouble. The courts decided that factors such as race could in fact be used, but only if the process was flexible. What that meant exactly posed an interesting challenge. They basically looked at what everyone else who wasn't getting sued was doing, and did an amalgamation of that."
Admissions arent fair, whats new? If we want to make it fair we will take all of these things out and only look at the numbers. If we were to do this, George Bush, Shaq, Dennis Rodman and lots of others would not have made it into University.
Only racists complain about race being an issue.
Just like sexist guys will complain if women get into colleges on gender.
Do I care? Absolutely not considering the Athlete and the rich upperclass kid will both get in. It seems everyone is getting into college via loopholes, including white males who like to complain so much, I mean George Bush complains about Affirmative Action but how on earth did he get into Yale?
Ah so George Bush does not have the right to say "Bring em on!"?
My spelling and grammar isnt 100% perfect, but you act like this is my website and I'm the admin here making posts. I am going to admit it, I'm too lazy to double and triple check my grammar over slashdot postings.
If you waste your time doing this, maybe you'd make a good English teacher, but you still are wasting your time.
SAT's do not test intelligence, they test knowledge.
Knowledge can be purchased with money, or with time/hard work. Getting a good SAT score does not mean you are intelligent and it does not mean you work hard.
Linzeal, you can get a 1500 on your SAT and be an idiot, I've met people who have high SAT scores and who lack the intelligence to learn on their own, they must be spoonfed, also while they may have the recommended range of knowledge that the SAT asked for, they arent bright enough to gather new knowledge on their own and they are very well rounded yet mediocre.
Now, I admit if I had a kid I'd stress the SATs, but not because the SATs is a fair test, or because I like the SATs, but because getting a good score will get them into Yale and Harvard.
There are a few problems with the SATs, SATs are culturally biased. This means if you grow up in a culture which stresses conformity over creativity,
obedience over rebellion and a good example of such a culture is the Japanese or Chinese, the result is because of the structure of their society, rule based and all about conformity, its very easy for a person from this culture to come to our schools which are far less structured than theres and into our society which has far less structure than say Japan or China, and learn all the required knowledge and get a 1500 on the SATs.
This does not make them smarter, it simply means that their culture is designed to be compatible with the culture of the academic world, and their style of rule based living neatly fits in with certain things.
I'll give you examples, if you were a kid and all your life you were taught to follow the rules, all you know how to do is follow the rules, and do what you are told and I as your parent give you a book and create a new rule, and this rule is to study what I tell you to study whenever I tell you to study it, in this culture I could have you reading every academic textbook I can find.
Now, if you spend 12 hours a day studying yes you will be that 15 year old kid who gets into college with straight As and a 1500 on the SATs but it wont be because you are intelligent, it will be because you know how to obey me, and you know how to follow the rules of society.
The rules of society say "Study, get good grades, get your degree, work." Some people catch onto these rules earlier because their culture neatly fits in with these rules, while others dont learn until they are an adult, after they spent their teen years trying to rebel.
How do I come up with this hypothesis? It explains my situation, I was NOT brought up to be some kinda nerd, in fact my culture frowned upon it, it was not cool to be a nerd, I had no one in my life to explain to me how society worked, I just had MTV telling me that its cooler to be a musician.
I'm sure ALOT of kids have their culture influenced by MTV and other outlets which promote being a dumb athelete or a rockstar above being a geek. How many American kids do you know who look at Bill Gates as a hero? Bill Gates is a smart guy, hes successful, but when you ask anyone about Bill Gates hes just a dork.
Until our culture says being a dork is a good thing, and that being a nerd is cool, kids are going to rebel, intelligent kids who may have the brain power to easily get a 1600 on their SATs will be told that its more important to dress nice and talk to girls, and so they will focus their mental abilities on getting girls, they may buy a car and nice clothes, they may slack up on their studies or be the class clown on purpose because everyone likes them when they act this way.
So this is why SATs are culturally biased. Our kids will not master the SATs until we get rid of MTV and all of these negative influences, and put only academic type programming on TV.
Class is more important than SATs too, if you come from the upper class (think George Bush) it helps you even more than being a female or minority would help you.
Despite what you might think, most minorities dont get free degrees from Yale, if you want a degree from Yale, you need a 1500 on your SATs just to get in, period, it does not matter if you are a minority, this is Yale.
Affirmative Action only helps people get into state universities, these are schools which any one of these minorities would get into if they went to community college for a while, so really Affirmative Action does nothing for a person with poor SAT skills but maybe help them get into University a year earlier than they should.
Highschool should be to prepare you for the real world (ie: A job, life, maybe marriage).
NO, That is a PARENTS job.
University is there to prepare you for a lifetime of learning on a subject.
How do you expect to get into university if your highschool never prepares you? Sure you can go to community college and work your way in, but highschools should focus on getting people in.
University Education is a much needed filter, if you havent noticed, we are LOSING not GAINING jobs, if we dont increase the filters, we will suffer a depression, cant you see that when theres less jobs to choose from that you must be more qualified to get the same job which you once could get with little to no qualification? If you want to be a secretary go to school for it, if you are too dumb to go to school and get an assosiates degree, go work at McDonalds. There has to be levels so people can work their way into the middle class, for you to think that everyone can be middle class is insane.
Oh I didnt know we were in class teacher.
By the way are typos allowed? Its the middle of the night you know.
on a personal (read offtopic) note: if you go into a class knowing everything, perhaps it is better for you to skip it altogether. thus a teacher helping you skip the course (by flunking you) is really giving you what you are asking for.
You dont make any sense with this statement. Any intelligent person usually knows a bit about a class before they take it, they usually do some research on it, the reason to take a class is to get the credits and get a degree. You do understand that degrees are a requirement in this information age right?
If you skip courses on a regular basis, why do you go to school anyway? you obviously know everything, perhaps the teachers aren't flunking you because of your poor attendance, but for your poor attitude. might want to thing about that while ditching class.
To get a degree. Its not about the classes, its about getting points and getting the degree. If I wanted to learn I could do that on my own.
a teacher's primary job is to teach, not "judge [your] work". although, testing the knowledge you have gained may be a part of that task. objectivity in grading is important. this is why any student can complain to the dean of unfairness. seems to me that this has often been acceptable in eliminating unfair teachers. compare this system of checks and balances to a program that may or may not be 100% correct. every student that gets an unfair grade will still complain, and then the work will be hand checked (by the teachers that you call unfair). no non-trivial program is ever 100% correct; just like people.
A teachers job is not to teach, despite what you may think, its a students job to learn, its the teachers job to guide the student. The student needs to learn how to teach themselves using the tools, and the teacher should teach students to teach themselves, spoonfeeding students information only punishes those who are intelligent enough to learn at a faster pace.
And yet you seem to despise the role of emotion in politics.
Emotion prevents a person from making logical decisions. Computers dont have this problem.
This is why I prefer computers over people when it comes to judgements, I'd rather have a world thats 99-100% fair, than have an emotional world which is 50% fair.
You see my point? Emotions have allowed us humans to do some very stupid things, it was emotions that allowed Hitler to kill millions of Jews. Now its emotion being used by the Jews to pass certain laws.
Its emotion which we used when we decided to attack Saddam, and now its emotion being used by some politicians who just want us to pull our troops out of Iraq.
Look, decisions should be seperate from emotion, when I make a decision I try my best to avoid all emotional influence, some people do a good job ignoring their emotions when the time comes to make a tough decision, other people cannot ignore their emotion.
Want another example? Freenet, should you support it or not? Emotional people will say "Well kiddie porn could be on Freenet so I cannot support it"
But when you make a very logical decision, without any emotional influence, its clear that Freenet as a technology would improve perhaps the whole internet as we know it, as well as give Freedom to the world.
So when you make a decision like this you have to weight it, what is more valueable to the world, Freedom, or should we avoid Freedom to fight kiddie porn, racism or insert what you like.
Most people when they think logical will be for Freenet, for Filesharing, etc, its only when people think emotionally, and theres plenty of very intelligent manipulators including our government, the RIAA and others who use emotion to convince people to go along with illogical ideas.
So yes I despise emotion in politics and in decision making, I want people to make the logical decision first. Logic is always right, and it can be proven, emotion is almost always wrong but we keep using emotion as an excuse for wars, the death penalty, and many other actions which in theory are illogical and against what America is all about.
have the COMPUTER write it.
Since when could computers write Essays? I dont know about this technology. Yes you can use computers as a tool to assist YOU in writing an essay, but the computer will not write the essay for you.
The same criteria that the program would use to grade the essay could very easily be turned around and used to generate an essay that the computer will love. Having a computer written term paper given an A by a computer grader is worthy of an Ionesco play.
If the computer loves it, then its proper English.
Beyond that there is no way the computer will be able to distinguish between something truly interesting and something that just lists the facts in simple Dick and Jane language with an occasional compund sentence to keep the grammar checker happy.
We arent trying to create fantastic writers, we are just trying to teach everyone how to write. IF you want to write good stories, major in English, most scientific journals are boring and just list facts.
All it can do is check for fact1, fact2, fact3, and any interesting conclusion you draw in the paper will be completely lost. Anything more would be turing test worthy, and I heartily doubt they've achieved anything close to that.
For a scientific journal what more do you need? You just list the introduction, then you show a table of contents of sort, you explain your experiments/tests, and its conclusions and then you plug in your opinion based on these conclusions.
Really its all just mechanical in nature.
In conclusion, this idea is a pipe dream which would discourage high quality writing (i.e. the kind actual PEOPLE like to read), teach people the substandard grammatical constructs used by most grammar checking software, and create a market for software that writes term papers, thereby removing the last actual bit of work your average liberal arts major has to do. I think it's a hopelessly terrible idea. TA's already do this work; why waste time coming up with a program which will do the same thing, poorly?
Are we teaching English or are we trying to write novels? This isnt about writing stuff people like to read, its about learning English.
Take a creative writing class or major in English if you want to learn how to write stuff that others want to read. You cannot really teach a person to be good at writing you can only really teach them to write, people who want to see if they have talent can major in it and find out.
That's BS. Lets see the things you noticed--more personal attention, more personal attention, more personal attention, and oh, you can't slack off as much. How is any of that a bad thing? I don't know about you, but in my college experience I've NEVER had a teacher who singled out a student for getting bad grades because of personal dislike.
First, personal attention isnt always good. Second, a person should be able to slack off as long as they produce high quality work. IF I can produce work thats high quality, why does it matter if I get to class on time? My work is good, I passed all the exams.
Also just because in your personal limited experience you have never once had a bad teacher, it does not mean that these types of people do not exist. I have seen it, I have spoken to others who have experienced it, it happens. I know kids who failed classes for ridiculous reasons/excuses, others get bad grades because the teacher just didnt like the style of their writing even if the paper was technically correct.
Well you know--you mention being late to class and not showing--yeah, that will make a teacher pissed off.
Well too damn bad, this isnt about the teacher, the teachers job is to grade papers, its my job to submit paper work. What I do in between is none of the teachers business, as long as I do my job the teacher should do their job.
If you slack like that, it's not wonder you think a teacher doesn't like you for personal reasons.
Its not the teachers job to judge me as a person, its the teachers jobs to judge my work. This is exactly why we need machines, because certain people such as yourself want to judge the person and not the work.
"This person doesnt dress nice, this person has long hair and looks like a hippy, this person is always late, I dont like this person"
Its these feelings that can bring an A to a B or a B to a C.
You can learn so much more from a professor than from a textbook. That depends on the professor, and on the textbook. Most of the time I learn better from the textbook, mainly because I am not designed to learn in a structured environment, and because I dont learn at the pace of the class, also because rarely did I have great teachers so I'm more comfortable just looking information up myself instead of asking questions.
Really professors are coaches, I dont learn directly from them, they do sometimes make absorbing the textbook material easier when they give good lectures based on the material but most of the time, I could just read a transcript of their lecture and get the same knowledge.
If I do decide to become a teacher one of the things I will do for sure is check attendance EVERY day (in a small class environemnt).
Yes and I will drop your class if I were ever one of your students. I dont want to be judged by stupid shit that has nothing to do with my intelligence or my ability to learn. I want to be judged on my knowledge. Some people just live too far away from school, sometimes they dont have cars, other times they just overslept, either way this has absolutely nothing to do with learning and I dont see why you should have a right to punish me for my attendance if I get an A on ever paper.
That pisses me off, to get a drop in grade because I was late, or to get a drop in grade because of poor attendance, even though my work is 100% correct.
Just do your fucking job and I'll do mine.
Are you serious?
"A computer program can only work within the limits of it's design."
Same with a human. I'd rather have the predictable computer program myself.