Having lived in the North East US, and having a cousin who does groundwater testing for New Jersey, I can shed some light on that state:
It's a polluted hellhole in many places. Due to poorly regulated (a half-century ago, and due to the mafia in places) gas stations, the soil and aquifers are badly polluted.
One attempt to fix the pollution problem was to increase regulation and inspection, but with a high population density (of morons) it was decided that trained personnel would be the best way to immediately reduce the amount of pollution due to gas stations.
This has worked out very well for New Jersey. Their pollution levels due to gasoline have gone dramatically downhill.
And for those of us in surrounding states, ours go up every time some idiot from New Jersey comes to our state, and squirts gasoline all over the pump, ground, side of their car, etc. I can't tell you how many times I've seen someone who has only ever watched gasoline be pumped fuck it up. It's ridiculous. And invariably, it's someone under 30 driving a car they could never afford. Mom and Dad send them to college out of the city, or they come out our direction to attempt to ski or watch pretty leaves, or sink boats in our lakes.
The rest of the US, save Oregon, from what another poster said, pumps its own gas. The sanity level is higher in most of them as well.
Your points are spot on, and it makes me wonder what the cost differential is between MS licensing Blu-Ray and building it into the next Xbox (license + hardware + engineering, etc..) and eating some of the costs of a usb stick for every game? It seems that you'd have to do very little redesigning (ok, none) to ship games on USB sticks, while it'd take a lot of effort to get Blu-Ray in the next version.
The cost of Blu-Ray media and USB sticks are around an order of magnitude apart, so it'd come down to how expensive the licensing, engineering, media duplication, and hardware was.
Quite possibly not. If I'm only lightly active on Facebook, and someone mentions something about it, I may not realize that they've been communicating with an impostor. If I don't use Facebook at all, and someone mentions friending me on it, I can tell them right away that that's an impostor.
Someone isn't likely to dig me up without having a mutual friend on Facebook. If they see their friend friend me, and they know I'm not on facebook, or have never seen me there before, they're more likely to figure out it's a scam.
I think limiting your presence (this is crime/intelligence stuff we're talking about here, after all...) to official channels only, and letting everyone know that is probably the safest way. Of course, human nature being what it is...
I think the Twitter hate is because you are hanging around the demographic that's largely filled its quota for "new shit that I have to keep track of". Add in our games, RSS feeds, slashdot, comics, etc., and we've filled our time on the internet. We either have to start purging old methods of communication and old pastimes, or we can't start new ones.
Right now, there's a large number of us who have thriving communities in enough places that we're not interested in another. It's not just Twitter - that's just the one that we're being pushed the hardest to adopt. And for a lot of us, Twitter doesn't hold a draw. I'm sure you've found some reasons to adopt it. But I don't have time for it. I'm full up.
Yet here you are, blathering on about how you use Twitter for so many things, how useful it is, blah blah blah.
Does it make any more sense now why the Twitter hate? We don't care already. Shut up about it. Some of us aren't about to give up something else for Twitter, and we'd need to in order to pay attention to it.
Our information bandwidth has been exceeded.
The sooner you and everyone else stops rambling on about The Next Big Thing On The Internet, the sooner we'll stop hating it.
(For the record, I came here to find technical details about the XSS, for although I don't care about Twitter, the details are important in the grand context of the internet. I just figured since you hadn't figured it out yet, I'd stop and point out why a lot of us hate Twitter. And your post which had nothing to do with the details of this attack is a prime example. We get it. You want to make passionate love to Twitter and have its babies. Yet you come to an article about a hack job, and instead of posting anything interesting about the technical aspects, you post a totally unrelated bit of flamebait about "Twitter Hate". That's why we hate Twitter. People doing what you just did. So if it bothers you that we hate your exciting new lover, stop posting shit about your love for Twitter when it's entirely inappropriate.)
I dunno, I can see the sense in it. UPS and FedEX have pretty set routes. They're driving the bulk of them every day, no matter the package load. Adding one more package only adds marginally more energy expenditure as opposed to you driving any distance to the store to get what you need and back again. If you're causing UPS to have to drive far off their normal route, it might be bad.
In the US, we have a pretty consistent backbone of "(air)port->warehouse->distribution center". Even if goods come into your (air)port, then get sent to Walmart's main warehouse on one coast, they still either have to travel to you or the nearest store. Like I said above, it's likely that UPS or FedEX already come very near your house - they have good coverage. If you're dragging them 20 miles out some dirt road they don't normally go out, it's probably a lot more fuel. If they're already going by, it's probably not much more costly from an energy standpoint. (Of course, this me as US centric rambling - the authors noted that the UK was a far different story.)
As a useless anecdote, I used to live about 80 miles from the nearest Best Buy or other electronics store. However, there were a couple of businesses in town that used UPS multiple times a week. Shipping from NewEgg was far less energy intensive than driving to Best Buy and back. All the UPS trucks and planes were already doing those routes. I'd have added 160 miles of single-occupant car driving to get stuff. I can't believe that Best Buy's shipping train was so much more efficient than NewEgg + UPS that it would still win after adding 160 miles of me driving to get stuff.
That's because you text slowly, and use proper english. Have you seen what counts as a text?
:sup :nthn :cm hre :k :c u soon :k
That's 3 texts each. If that took them more than 30 seconds, I'd be shocked. I've seen kids text (taught HS for 5 years) - they burst absolute, single-character dribbe for a minute, then quit for half an hour. (I probably used too many letters up there, actually. )
They aren't texting anything you might think of as written word - leet-speak has much more in common with writing than teen texting does. They're almost using a symbolic rather than algebraic language.
Nope. I grudgingly entered the text scene, and use about as many as you do. On my (cheap-ass, pay-as-you-go) cell plan, they're cheaper than a phone call. They also can be used as broadcasts, which is my prime use for them. One message, a half-dozen people on the address list, and bam, our get-together is organized no matter where they all are. And that takes far less time than calling them all individually, having conversations, and leaving messages as needed. And the absent-minded ones forgetting what time or where, since they have it in writing.
I'm curious to see if teens grow out of texting. I mean, the family members older than I am don't text, but they have smartphones and facebook and email all the time. (The techie ones, of course.) A number in their 40s post from their phones all the time. Will the teens turn to that as they grow up? Or will they text for their entire lives?
You got a lot of replies, but they missed one major point:
Broadcast
Sitting on a plane at the gate, I can type a message saying 'On the plane, about to take off, see you soon.' dump several names to my address list, and when we get the notice to turn off our electronics, I can hit them all before shutting it down. When I get in, I can text a 'on the ground, got my luggage' and get it to my girlfriend back home, the sister who's getting married, and the friend waiting with a car outside to pick me up.
SMS allows you to queue a message and broadcast it when needed. That's huge.
Like the example of snowboarders with spotty reception, I've used it to get groups assemble from the far corners of festivals, and from around town on a night out. SMS broadcasts are fantastic.
There's a difference between going abroad, and choosing to live in another country for years. That's what baffles me - you choose to live in another country for years, yet choose not to experience the language, culture, etc. If you didn't want the experience, why did you go? Just to get a US University Diploma then move back home?
Then why would you voluntarily fly half-way around the world to study for a few years? That you'd go through the effort to do all the paperwork and logistics to go, then not experience it is what boggles the mind. If you don't want to mix outside your ethnic group, STAY IN YOUR COUNTRY!!! It's really not that hard to do...
I'd argue that we do. For example, I was just trying to integrate something along the lines of x^2*e^(-2*x^2). If you don't know about gamma functions, it's neigh unsolvable, even with WA. (Somewhat ironically, the second google link for the gamma function is WA, although the actual engine doesn't seem to use it.) If you do, you can approximate the solution in 2 minutes or less.
There isn't a reason to require wrote memory of a thousand things. There is a reason to require the knowledge of techniques and approximations, even if you can't spit them out at any given instance. I've run into things multiple times that required a Taylor expansion to solve. If I hadn't taken a math class which dealt with them, I'd never be able to solve those problems. Sometimes WA will do that for you. Sometimes it won't.
I would argue that with a tool like that, we don't need math classes exactly as they've been taught for decades. We still have a need, however. Knowing that something exists is often all that's required. But not knowing it exists means you're doomed to failure.
Nor are they "real-world way(s) to learn and demonstrate knowledge" as the OP stated. As I pointed out in regards to the other tests, these are also gatekeepers to some small percent of real-world jobs.
To be frank, I think these two tests are the reason we have all the rest of the standardized tests in the world. If Harvard wants to produce Doctors and Lawyers, they need to make sure their students can pass these exams. Thus, it's wise to recruit students who pass standardized tests well. Thus you want rigid GRE exams. This trickles down to SAT exams, etc.
I've seen a fair bit of research that shows that SAT/ACT exams don't do anything for colleges. Senior year of high school is an order of magnitude better predictor of student success in college than SAT/ACT scores. Yet plenty of colleges still use them.
If we got rid of our med and law boards, I wonder how long it would be before schools stopped with the rest of these worthless tests?
Yep. That pretty much sums up all formal testing. I don't trust anything more fine grained than a 25% box when it comes to knowledge. You and the 95? If your homeworks and projects were both pretty good, I'd call you both a 75%. If your homework and projects were perfect? 100%.
Anything more fine grained doesn't tell anyone anything at all.
1) A friend who's willing to do the test for them. 2) Wolfram Alpha
If you let people be networked, they can, with a little information/practice, answer any question fairly quickly and efficiently. Quick - integrate x*e^(2*x^2). Graph it. Differentiate it. Do Taylor expansion to approximate it. If you can't find it on the internet, a case of beer will likely get you someone who already took the course, had the notes and the books, willing to text you back during it with the answers.
What you suggest will catch the dumbasses who look on the paper of the person next to them. It does nothing to solve the problem here, which is that networked devices can make cheating really easy and effective.
See the problem now? If you can't pass calculus with a tool like that, you're not ever going to pass any math class. Between the ability to do each part of the integral separately, and the ability to google "integration by parts", if you are connected to the internet, you pass everything.
As a student 10 years ago, I can shed light on that: We stuck all the information we'd ever need in obfuscated programs in our graphing calculators. I imagine the foreign students did the same. Back then, the professors were starting to realize that devices with storage capacity were a security issue when trying to test. Today, our ever evolving progress means that the battle has shifted to real-time connections to people outside the classroom.
Still, it's the same problem as before - how do you make a level playing field to test students? This is complicated when the students come from vastly different backgrounds. As a former HS teacher, I struggled with kids who had accommodations to take tests outside my classroom. Some got the tests read to them. Some got extra time. Some had a scribe. But when they were outside the classroom, when a student spotted a typo, and I corrected it on the board for all to see, they didn't get it. When a student pointed out a question that wasn't overly clear and I clarified it for the entire class, they missed that clarification.
What I realized after a few years is that there is limited value in trying to quantify knowledge beyond "100%, 75%, 50%, 25%, 0%". On any given day, a student's test will vary by 10% or so. To put much weight on a test is pretty silly. For my Master's degree, I looked into the standardized testing my state did to meet the NCLB requirements. Some of the score categories they placed students into were smaller than the error bars on the tests!
Back to the point, the success of students with limited English skills is determinant on the format of their humanities classes. If they are project, essay, and perhaps even presentation driven, they may do ok. Being able to practice something many times, have the tutors (all colleges have extensive, free tutoring programs, ESPECIALLY for non-English speakers) go over it a dozen times, etc., may allow them to pass. Asking them to read and parse English in a short time period may give them too little time to actually complete the test.
That said, I get infuriated by the foreign students who come to the US, and spend all their time hanging with their countrymen, speaking their native language. Every country I've visited, even if only for a week, I tried to learn some of the language. I hung out with the locals, listened to them talk, ate their food, drank their drink, and tried to appreciate what makes their country unique. Yet again and again I see students come here, and cloister themselves from the language, culture, food, etc. It baffles me. When I get to go somewhere new, the best part is reveling in the newness.
The GRE and MCAT aren't in the professional world. While your point is well taken, it's a bit misdirected as those are just gatekeepers to parts of the professional world. Their widespread use doesn't make them good or useful gatekeepers either. They're a way for lazy people to do a half-assed job to cheaply and poorly assess a lot of people in the least amount of time. Nothing more.
Kudos for a well written, thoughtful post. I was a HS teacher for 5 years, and I ran my classes (as much as I was allowed to - NCLB pressures forced my district to start pressuring teachers to test in the state test format) in much the same way. You get a much better understanding of a student's grasp of the material if they have to apply it instead of just regurgitate it.
However, as awesome as your post was, it didn't address the problem at all.
Having been in the same situation before, (Can I use my iPhone - it has a calculator on it, and you said a calculator was ok...) my suggestion would be to hit the dollar store and get a pile of cheap-ass scientific calculators. Then, do an exercise in class a few times before the first exam that requires their use. That way, you can outlaw all the networked devices, but people aren't using a foreign device for the first time under the pressure of a test. No, it won't be as familiar as their everyday tools. But at $1 each, you can even encourage people to take them home and practice on them if concerned. The ones I bought for my classes lasted a few years easily, but again, for the price, I wasn't too worried about them.
You don't need a $80 graphing calculator for most things. Unless you've built your curriculum around the use of one, you should be able to test adequately with a $1 calculator as the main computational tool.
Yes, but the iPad is already bigger than my netbook. Adding an external keyboard makes it even bigger!
Why wouldn't you just get a small laptop instead? If it's supposed to be portable, I think an iPad + keyboard is going to be the LARGEST option of the three!
It's all dependent on this idea that a computer, even an Apple computer is "too much for the masses to deal with".
I wonder if that's a bad thing? Replace 20% of the Dells spamming the world with Apple's walled garden...I really don't see that as bad at all. I'm not interested in being tied to a very limited platform, but it would be godsend for a lot of people. All Apple needs to do is allow good integration for cameras and printers, and they might have a really big niche to fill.
A real keyboard is the difference. Even with my tiny, 7" EEE PC, I can type at a reasonable speed on the cramped little keyboard. I've never found a tablet that I could type at any reasonable speed on. Sure, you can use an iPad for surfing the (non-flash) web, but when you need to bang out a couple of paragraphs, it falls short. If I'm touch-typing, I can watch the output for mistakes. Without a physical keyboard, I have to watch the keys, and I can't then easily watch the output.
If I wanted something to watch a movie on curled up in an easy chair, the iPad might be a good fit. If I wanted something to display a recipe while cooking, a waterproof iPad might be a good fit. But when I want something tiny and portable that I can also type at a reasonable speed on, a netbook is the only thing that fills that niche.
I don't know what you're talking about...I'm in a college of 40k+ students. 85% are US born. 10k of those are in the "College of Letters and Science". Even if every single foreign student was in some sort of science, it'd still be over 50% US citizens.
Believe it or not, I couldn't find a single qualified US citizen or resident alien, and we did not have a mystery requirement.
I don't believe it. Either you're not looking/advertising in the right places, or you've got some requirement, stigma, or location that's utterly unappetizing to US citizens.
Go to an engineering or science program at mid level to elite university, and not many citizens are in the programs.
My PhD program is 80% or more US citizens. It's one of the top five research universities in the US. We're research upstairs, and engineering downstairs. I can't imagine that my university exists in some crazy, alternate universe from all the rest.
You apparently don't lack access to the internet. I bet you could find some information there.
If that's not the case for some other person, they could actually go to a store that has someone who knows about wine and, you know, ask them.
If you aren't continually educating yourself about wine, you're not a connoisseur, and this isn't going to affect you. If you are continually educating yourself about wine, you go by vineyard and region, and will understand what's going on here.
If you're just buying your wine randomly based on grapes on the label at a some grocery store or convenience store, you probably just buy and hope it's good. That or you have your one brand and that's what you stick to. You make this sound like a way bigger issue than it is
Thank you. That made me laugh, in part because it struck so close to home. I came to post the same, albeit less funny message.
As a physicist, I think string theory represents a lot of interesting math, but no interesting science. I have some pretty serious doubts that it will ever amount to anything useful.
Slashdot Mirror
He's not going to be happy to get in there, I'm sure of it.
Having lived in the North East US, and having a cousin who does groundwater testing for New Jersey, I can shed some light on that state:
It's a polluted hellhole in many places. Due to poorly regulated (a half-century ago, and due to the mafia in places) gas stations, the soil and aquifers are badly polluted.
One attempt to fix the pollution problem was to increase regulation and inspection, but with a high population density (of morons) it was decided that trained personnel would be the best way to immediately reduce the amount of pollution due to gas stations.
This has worked out very well for New Jersey. Their pollution levels due to gasoline have gone dramatically downhill.
And for those of us in surrounding states, ours go up every time some idiot from New Jersey comes to our state, and squirts gasoline all over the pump, ground, side of their car, etc. I can't tell you how many times I've seen someone who has only ever watched gasoline be pumped fuck it up. It's ridiculous. And invariably, it's someone under 30 driving a car they could never afford. Mom and Dad send them to college out of the city, or they come out our direction to attempt to ski or watch pretty leaves, or sink boats in our lakes.
The rest of the US, save Oregon, from what another poster said, pumps its own gas. The sanity level is higher in most of them as well.
Your points are spot on, and it makes me wonder what the cost differential is between MS licensing Blu-Ray and building it into the next Xbox (license + hardware + engineering, etc..) and eating some of the costs of a usb stick for every game? It seems that you'd have to do very little redesigning (ok, none) to ship games on USB sticks, while it'd take a lot of effort to get Blu-Ray in the next version.
The cost of Blu-Ray media and USB sticks are around an order of magnitude apart, so it'd come down to how expensive the licensing, engineering, media duplication, and hardware was.
Quite possibly not. If I'm only lightly active on Facebook, and someone mentions something about it, I may not realize that they've been communicating with an impostor. If I don't use Facebook at all, and someone mentions friending me on it, I can tell them right away that that's an impostor.
Someone isn't likely to dig me up without having a mutual friend on Facebook. If they see their friend friend me, and they know I'm not on facebook, or have never seen me there before, they're more likely to figure out it's a scam.
I think limiting your presence (this is crime/intelligence stuff we're talking about here, after all...) to official channels only, and letting everyone know that is probably the safest way. Of course, human nature being what it is...
I had this discussion over some beers with some like-minded friends recently. What we settled on was, "When does it stop?"
BBS, finger, chat, IRC, email, IMs of 90 flavors, pagers, forums, MySpace, texting, LiveJournal, Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIN, etc...
I think the Twitter hate is because you are hanging around the demographic that's largely filled its quota for "new shit that I have to keep track of". Add in our games, RSS feeds, slashdot, comics, etc., and we've filled our time on the internet. We either have to start purging old methods of communication and old pastimes, or we can't start new ones.
Right now, there's a large number of us who have thriving communities in enough places that we're not interested in another. It's not just Twitter - that's just the one that we're being pushed the hardest to adopt. And for a lot of us, Twitter doesn't hold a draw. I'm sure you've found some reasons to adopt it. But I don't have time for it. I'm full up.
Yet here you are, blathering on about how you use Twitter for so many things, how useful it is, blah blah blah.
Does it make any more sense now why the Twitter hate? We don't care already. Shut up about it. Some of us aren't about to give up something else for Twitter, and we'd need to in order to pay attention to it.
Our information bandwidth has been exceeded.
The sooner you and everyone else stops rambling on about The Next Big Thing On The Internet, the sooner we'll stop hating it.
(For the record, I came here to find technical details about the XSS, for although I don't care about Twitter, the details are important in the grand context of the internet. I just figured since you hadn't figured it out yet, I'd stop and point out why a lot of us hate Twitter. And your post which had nothing to do with the details of this attack is a prime example. We get it. You want to make passionate love to Twitter and have its babies. Yet you come to an article about a hack job, and instead of posting anything interesting about the technical aspects, you post a totally unrelated bit of flamebait about "Twitter Hate". That's why we hate Twitter. People doing what you just did. So if it bothers you that we hate your exciting new lover, stop posting shit about your love for Twitter when it's entirely inappropriate.)
I dunno, I can see the sense in it. UPS and FedEX have pretty set routes. They're driving the bulk of them every day, no matter the package load. Adding one more package only adds marginally more energy expenditure as opposed to you driving any distance to the store to get what you need and back again. If you're causing UPS to have to drive far off their normal route, it might be bad.
In the US, we have a pretty consistent backbone of "(air)port->warehouse->distribution center". Even if goods come into your (air)port, then get sent to Walmart's main warehouse on one coast, they still either have to travel to you or the nearest store. Like I said above, it's likely that UPS or FedEX already come very near your house - they have good coverage. If you're dragging them 20 miles out some dirt road they don't normally go out, it's probably a lot more fuel. If they're already going by, it's probably not much more costly from an energy standpoint. (Of course, this me as US centric rambling - the authors noted that the UK was a far different story.)
As a useless anecdote, I used to live about 80 miles from the nearest Best Buy or other electronics store. However, there were a couple of businesses in town that used UPS multiple times a week. Shipping from NewEgg was far less energy intensive than driving to Best Buy and back. All the UPS trucks and planes were already doing those routes. I'd have added 160 miles of single-occupant car driving to get stuff. I can't believe that Best Buy's shipping train was so much more efficient than NewEgg + UPS that it would still win after adding 160 miles of me driving to get stuff.
That's because you text slowly, and use proper english. Have you seen what counts as a text?
:sup
:nthn
:cm hre
:k
:c u soon
:k
That's 3 texts each. If that took them more than 30 seconds, I'd be shocked. I've seen kids text (taught HS for 5 years) - they burst absolute, single-character dribbe for a minute, then quit for half an hour. (I probably used too many letters up there, actually. )
They aren't texting anything you might think of as written word - leet-speak has much more in common with writing than teen texting does. They're almost using a symbolic rather than algebraic language.
Nope. I grudgingly entered the text scene, and use about as many as you do. On my (cheap-ass, pay-as-you-go) cell plan, they're cheaper than a phone call. They also can be used as broadcasts, which is my prime use for them. One message, a half-dozen people on the address list, and bam, our get-together is organized no matter where they all are. And that takes far less time than calling them all individually, having conversations, and leaving messages as needed. And the absent-minded ones forgetting what time or where, since they have it in writing.
I'm curious to see if teens grow out of texting. I mean, the family members older than I am don't text, but they have smartphones and facebook and email all the time. (The techie ones, of course.) A number in their 40s post from their phones all the time. Will the teens turn to that as they grow up? Or will they text for their entire lives?
You got a lot of replies, but they missed one major point:
Broadcast
Sitting on a plane at the gate, I can type a message saying 'On the plane, about to take off, see you soon.' dump several names to my address list, and when we get the notice to turn off our electronics, I can hit them all before shutting it down. When I get in, I can text a 'on the ground, got my luggage' and get it to my girlfriend back home, the sister who's getting married, and the friend waiting with a car outside to pick me up.
SMS allows you to queue a message and broadcast it when needed. That's huge.
Like the example of snowboarders with spotty reception, I've used it to get groups assemble from the far corners of festivals, and from around town on a night out. SMS broadcasts are fantastic.
There's a difference between going abroad, and choosing to live in another country for years. That's what baffles me - you choose to live in another country for years, yet choose not to experience the language, culture, etc. If you didn't want the experience, why did you go? Just to get a US University Diploma then move back home?
Then why would you voluntarily fly half-way around the world to study for a few years? That you'd go through the effort to do all the paperwork and logistics to go, then not experience it is what boggles the mind. If you don't want to mix outside your ethnic group, STAY IN YOUR COUNTRY!!! It's really not that hard to do...
I'd argue that we do. For example, I was just trying to integrate something along the lines of x^2*e^(-2*x^2). If you don't know about gamma functions, it's neigh unsolvable, even with WA. (Somewhat ironically, the second google link for the gamma function is WA, although the actual engine doesn't seem to use it.) If you do, you can approximate the solution in 2 minutes or less.
There isn't a reason to require wrote memory of a thousand things. There is a reason to require the knowledge of techniques and approximations, even if you can't spit them out at any given instance. I've run into things multiple times that required a Taylor expansion to solve. If I hadn't taken a math class which dealt with them, I'd never be able to solve those problems. Sometimes WA will do that for you. Sometimes it won't.
I would argue that with a tool like that, we don't need math classes exactly as they've been taught for decades. We still have a need, however. Knowing that something exists is often all that's required. But not knowing it exists means you're doomed to failure.
Nor are they "real-world way(s) to learn and demonstrate knowledge" as the OP stated. As I pointed out in regards to the other tests, these are also gatekeepers to some small percent of real-world jobs.
To be frank, I think these two tests are the reason we have all the rest of the standardized tests in the world. If Harvard wants to produce Doctors and Lawyers, they need to make sure their students can pass these exams. Thus, it's wise to recruit students who pass standardized tests well. Thus you want rigid GRE exams. This trickles down to SAT exams, etc.
I've seen a fair bit of research that shows that SAT/ACT exams don't do anything for colleges. Senior year of high school is an order of magnitude better predictor of student success in college than SAT/ACT scores. Yet plenty of colleges still use them.
If we got rid of our med and law boards, I wonder how long it would be before schools stopped with the rest of these worthless tests?
Yep. That pretty much sums up all formal testing. I don't trust anything more fine grained than a 25% box when it comes to knowledge. You and the 95? If your homeworks and projects were both pretty good, I'd call you both a 75%. If your homework and projects were perfect? 100%.
Anything more fine grained doesn't tell anyone anything at all.
That doesn't account for two things:
1) A friend who's willing to do the test for them.
2) Wolfram Alpha
If you let people be networked, they can, with a little information/practice, answer any question fairly quickly and efficiently. Quick - integrate x*e^(2*x^2). Graph it. Differentiate it. Do Taylor expansion to approximate it. If you can't find it on the internet, a case of beer will likely get you someone who already took the course, had the notes and the books, willing to text you back during it with the answers.
What you suggest will catch the dumbasses who look on the paper of the person next to them. It does nothing to solve the problem here, which is that networked devices can make cheating really easy and effective.
You don't know about wolfram alpha, do you? Let me educate you...
Question 4) Integrate x*sin(x), graph this curve. If you were to express this as a Taylor expansion, what would the first three terms be?
See the problem now? If you can't pass calculus with a tool like that, you're not ever going to pass any math class. Between the ability to do each part of the integral separately, and the ability to google "integration by parts", if you are connected to the internet, you pass everything.
As a student 10 years ago, I can shed light on that: We stuck all the information we'd ever need in obfuscated programs in our graphing calculators. I imagine the foreign students did the same. Back then, the professors were starting to realize that devices with storage capacity were a security issue when trying to test. Today, our ever evolving progress means that the battle has shifted to real-time connections to people outside the classroom.
Still, it's the same problem as before - how do you make a level playing field to test students? This is complicated when the students come from vastly different backgrounds. As a former HS teacher, I struggled with kids who had accommodations to take tests outside my classroom. Some got the tests read to them. Some got extra time. Some had a scribe. But when they were outside the classroom, when a student spotted a typo, and I corrected it on the board for all to see, they didn't get it. When a student pointed out a question that wasn't overly clear and I clarified it for the entire class, they missed that clarification.
What I realized after a few years is that there is limited value in trying to quantify knowledge beyond "100%, 75%, 50%, 25%, 0%". On any given day, a student's test will vary by 10% or so. To put much weight on a test is pretty silly. For my Master's degree, I looked into the standardized testing my state did to meet the NCLB requirements. Some of the score categories they placed students into were smaller than the error bars on the tests!
Back to the point, the success of students with limited English skills is determinant on the format of their humanities classes. If they are project, essay, and perhaps even presentation driven, they may do ok. Being able to practice something many times, have the tutors (all colleges have extensive, free tutoring programs, ESPECIALLY for non-English speakers) go over it a dozen times, etc., may allow them to pass. Asking them to read and parse English in a short time period may give them too little time to actually complete the test.
That said, I get infuriated by the foreign students who come to the US, and spend all their time hanging with their countrymen, speaking their native language. Every country I've visited, even if only for a week, I tried to learn some of the language. I hung out with the locals, listened to them talk, ate their food, drank their drink, and tried to appreciate what makes their country unique. Yet again and again I see students come here, and cloister themselves from the language, culture, food, etc. It baffles me. When I get to go somewhere new, the best part is reveling in the newness.
The GRE and MCAT aren't in the professional world. While your point is well taken, it's a bit misdirected as those are just gatekeepers to parts of the professional world. Their widespread use doesn't make them good or useful gatekeepers either. They're a way for lazy people to do a half-assed job to cheaply and poorly assess a lot of people in the least amount of time. Nothing more.
Kudos for a well written, thoughtful post. I was a HS teacher for 5 years, and I ran my classes (as much as I was allowed to - NCLB pressures forced my district to start pressuring teachers to test in the state test format) in much the same way. You get a much better understanding of a student's grasp of the material if they have to apply it instead of just regurgitate it.
However, as awesome as your post was, it didn't address the problem at all.
Having been in the same situation before, (Can I use my iPhone - it has a calculator on it, and you said a calculator was ok...) my suggestion would be to hit the dollar store and get a pile of cheap-ass scientific calculators. Then, do an exercise in class a few times before the first exam that requires their use. That way, you can outlaw all the networked devices, but people aren't using a foreign device for the first time under the pressure of a test. No, it won't be as familiar as their everyday tools. But at $1 each, you can even encourage people to take them home and practice on them if concerned. The ones I bought for my classes lasted a few years easily, but again, for the price, I wasn't too worried about them.
You don't need a $80 graphing calculator for most things. Unless you've built your curriculum around the use of one, you should be able to test adequately with a $1 calculator as the main computational tool.
Yes, but the iPad is already bigger than my netbook. Adding an external keyboard makes it even bigger!
Why wouldn't you just get a small laptop instead? If it's supposed to be portable, I think an iPad + keyboard is going to be the LARGEST option of the three!
It's all dependent on this idea that a computer, even an Apple computer is "too much for the masses to deal with".
I wonder if that's a bad thing? Replace 20% of the Dells spamming the world with Apple's walled garden...I really don't see that as bad at all. I'm not interested in being tied to a very limited platform, but it would be godsend for a lot of people. All Apple needs to do is allow good integration for cameras and printers, and they might have a really big niche to fill.
A real keyboard is the difference. Even with my tiny, 7" EEE PC, I can type at a reasonable speed on the cramped little keyboard. I've never found a tablet that I could type at any reasonable speed on. Sure, you can use an iPad for surfing the (non-flash) web, but when you need to bang out a couple of paragraphs, it falls short. If I'm touch-typing, I can watch the output for mistakes. Without a physical keyboard, I have to watch the keys, and I can't then easily watch the output.
If I wanted something to watch a movie on curled up in an easy chair, the iPad might be a good fit. If I wanted something to display a recipe while cooking, a waterproof iPad might be a good fit. But when I want something tiny and portable that I can also type at a reasonable speed on, a netbook is the only thing that fills that niche.
Believe it or not, I couldn't find a single qualified US citizen or resident alien, and we did not have a mystery requirement.
I don't believe it. Either you're not looking/advertising in the right places, or you've got some requirement, stigma, or location that's utterly unappetizing to US citizens.
Go to an engineering or science program at mid level to elite university, and not many citizens are in the programs.
My PhD program is 80% or more US citizens. It's one of the top five research universities in the US. We're research upstairs, and engineering downstairs. I can't imagine that my university exists in some crazy, alternate universe from all the rest.
You apparently don't lack access to the internet. I bet you could find some information there.
If that's not the case for some other person, they could actually go to a store that has someone who knows about wine and, you know, ask them.
If you aren't continually educating yourself about wine, you're not a connoisseur, and this isn't going to affect you. If you are continually educating yourself about wine, you go by vineyard and region, and will understand what's going on here.
If you're just buying your wine randomly based on grapes on the label at a some grocery store or convenience store, you probably just buy and hope it's good. That or you have your one brand and that's what you stick to. You make this sound like a way bigger issue than it is
Thank you. That made me laugh, in part because it struck so close to home. I came to post the same, albeit less funny message.
As a physicist, I think string theory represents a lot of interesting math, but no interesting science. I have some pretty serious doubts that it will ever amount to anything useful.