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Science is sexist because it is objective, is this for real?

It is critically important to identify whether this is an inherent and immutable quality of maleness or a result of socialization.

It would be nice to be able to make that determination. The problem is in how to run the experiment.

My opinion is that it is an inherent quality of maleness, specifically of 10-13 year old maleness, but I have no scientific proof of that, nor do I know how I would determine any.
 
There is also this comment by a two-time guest on the League of Nerds podcast. The commentary which covers both of the articles I linked and the original paper is about 20 minutes in.

I will note that the person in the video is self-medicating for toothache with vodka and that he does swear.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aj-bY9qTcVA
 
Regularity, cause and effect, and a one-way timeline are indeed oppressive, laying down fact after fact, without bothering to ask anyone for permission. The universe is your typical cold, silent type. Male. OMG.
 
It would be nice to be able to make that determination. The problem is in how to run the experiment.

My opinion is that it is an inherent quality of maleness, specifically of 10-13 year old maleness, but I have no scientific proof of that, nor do I know how I would determine any.

How very scientific of you. Why the need to avoid your bias? You could, I don't know, make presuppositions, because after all knowledge is sketchy and therefore we can build models based on what seems obvious to us instead of empirical data, which besides tends to be very authoritative and male oriented, especially when someone teaches stuff as if they "knew".

I hate it when people make experiments. Who do they think they are? Cognitively imperfect human beings? Why gather data when you have conclusions?
 
Now seriously:

I believe the need for cognitive closure and our epistemic limitations about the nature vs nurture question are the perfect recipe for pseudoscience to flourish, and that's especially true when gender is the central theme.
 
That seems like a valid point to me. A person's grade should be based on how well they learn and understand the material, and not necessarily in comparison to how well their classmates learn it.

It also seems like a rather minor point.

If you mean how well they do relative to one class of 30 students that they happen to be in, I would tend to agree. However, take SAT scores as an example. To the extent that top colleges use SAT scores as one metric, and they have more applicants than they can accept, it seems to me that the fairest way is to give priority to the student with the higher SAT score, other things being equal.
 
what the author is saying is that women don't seem to like the competition. We go to classes, at least partly, in order to learn, not necessarily to be compared to everyone else and judged against them. Women, in particular, don't seem to like the competitive aspect, regardless of whether they are winning or losing.
And, of course, not liking something equals having it rigged against you.

Feminism is an attempt to get women to act like Trump. (And notice right in this thread the claims about women being better at cooperation than men; the Trumpish baseless bragging for women has already sunk in pretty well in some areas!)
 
That seems like a valid point to me. A person's grade should be based on how well they learn and understand the material, and not necessarily in comparison to how well their classmates learn it.

It also seems like a rather minor point.

i would rather say that a teacher should be graded (and paid) according to how well and how much their students have learned, not necessarily the end grade.

But the students themselves must be graded on a nationwide comparable scale, how else can an employer make an informed decision about who to hire?
 
That seems like a valid point to me. A person's grade should be based on how well they learn and understand the material, and not necessarily in comparison to how well their classmates learn it.

It also seems like a rather minor point.

Yeah but who are you going to hire? The person who learned it really well, or the person who got a passing grade?

Of course it's a competition.
 
Yeah but who are you going to hire? The person who learned it really well, or the person who got a passing grade?

Of course it's a competition.
If you have to pick, you pick the student who received the A and not the C.

I said they might have a point about grading on a curve, not that grading shouldn't be done at all.
 
If you have to pick, you pick the student who received the A and not the C.

I said they might have a point about grading on a curve, not that grading shouldn't be done at all.

I don't think there are many countries where they grade on curve.
 
Here's a passage which really shows how badly the author missed the point:

the paper this thread is about said:
Students, in this model, are passive recipients, and their job is to learn the knowledge. The traditional teaching method is lectures
and assessments are primarily quizzes, midterms, and exams. In contrast, a more dynamic view or subjective of knowledge views knowledge as something that students need to engage with to learn, which may be reflected in more progressive or critical pedagogies (Elias & Merriam, 2005). This is reflected in syllabi through collaborative and active learning, and advanced cognitive skills like application and analysis.

Somehow, the author seems to have gotten the ridiculous idea that STEM students, participating in the traditional lecture/quiz/exam methods do not "engage with" the material.

I am sure that several people reading this thread have gone through a STEM education, like myself, and find it ludicrous to suggest that we didn't engage with the material, and that we didn't do "active learning", or that somehow we didn't use "advanced cognitive skills" like analysis and application. Her paragraph is laughably stupid on this point.

While in graduate school, I took a Linguistics class. There were two engineering students, myself and one other guy, in the class of about 13 students. We were amazed at the lengthy discussions of material that we thought could have been covered in about 10 minutes. Apparently, this was "active learning", and the author of this paper would find it superior to what he and I did, which was often called "reading the book and doing the homework". As a result, he and I got very high test scores, despite the fact that he almost never came to class, and I participated occasionally in class discussions, but never with the enthusiasm that our Liberal Arts colleagues did.

I'm pretty sure I learned at least as much about linguistics as those "active learners" did, and, moreover, I'm pretty sure that my reading of the book and doing the exercises assigned actually constituted an active engagement with the material.

I'm going to guess that the author of this thesis spent somewhat less time doing homework on her way to a Women's Studies degree than I did on my way to an Electrical Engineering degree.
 
That seems like a valid point to me. A person's grade should be based on how well they learn and understand the material, and not necessarily in comparison to how well their classmates learn it.

It also seems like a rather minor point.

Ideally yes but the problem in the real world is how to minimise extraneous factors. E.g. crap teacher for the next group of kids, the fire alarm that went off during one of the lectures that a key question in an exam was then based on, questions harder than last years and so on.

The "on a curve" tries to account for that by assuming all the cohart of students "statistically" were subject to the same pluses and minuses during their course so we can compare them against themselves to control for the extraneous factors. If we award As to the top 10% of students every year someone considering a student's results later on will know that they were in the top ten percent of their cohort. If you don't use a curve one year you may get 30% with an A and another year 10% with an A.
 
Ideally yes but the problem in the real world is how to minimise extraneous factors. E.g. crap teacher for the next group of kids, the fire alarm that went off during one of the lectures that a key question in an exam was then based on, questions harder than last years and so on.

The "on a curve" tries to account for that by assuming all the cohart of students "statistically" were subject to the same pluses and minuses during their course so we can compare them against themselves to control for the extraneous factors. If we award As to the top 10% of students every year someone considering a student's results later on will know that they were in the top ten percent of their cohort. If you don't use a curve one year you may get 30% with an A and another year 10% with an A.

Aka case where "cure" is worse problem. While fixing some comparative stuff it kills everything else. It creates nice number of disincentives and penalizations (doesn't account for large number of good or great students in pool/classes) and trying to fit something into statistical distribution which doesn't belong there. Aka complete nonsense in the end.

Reminder: Each class or set of classes is not random unbiased selection from population and as such statistical distributions (aka curve) cannot apply as basic assumptions are already violated. Thus such attempt will always produce bad results.

Question: Does this thing (grading on curve) exist in G. Britain too?
 
What do you mean by the highlighted? (English is not my first language)

There are various ways of doing it, but not grading on a curve means that a student's grade is determined by how they learns the material and nothing else. Grading on a curve means that other student's performances are factored in.

For example, where you may have a test with a possible score of 100, you may determine that 92+ gets an A, 84-91 gets a B and so on.

If that test is graded on a curve, you may decide instead that the top 10% of the students taking that test get an A. Or you may decide (if the test is particularly hard and nobody is expected to score perfectly) that the score of the top student becomes the 100% that everyone else is judged by.
 
There are various ways of doing it, but not grading on a curve means that a student's grade is determined by how they learns the material and nothing else. Grading on a curve means that other student's performances are factored in.

Ok thanks for the explanation. :)
 
Aka case where "cure" is worse problem. While fixing some comparative stuff it kills everything else. It creates nice number of disincentives and penalizations (doesn't account for large number of good or great students in pool/classes) and trying to fit something into statistical distribution which doesn't belong there. Aka complete nonsense in the end.

Reminder: Each class or set of classes is not random unbiased selection from population and as such statistical distributions (aka curve) cannot apply as basic assumptions are already violated. Thus such attempt will always produce bad results.
Seriously - any pointers to studies/reports etc. about this and how bad it is compared to grade on a curve alternative?

Question: Does this thing (grading on curve) exist in G. Britain too?

Comes into and out of fashion.
 
Are we talking about comparing kids to only their classmates or to the whole set of students of their age group?
 
Seriously - any pointers to studies/reports etc. about this and how bad it is compared to grade on a curve alternative?



Comes into and out of fashion.

How about entire country: Czech Republic (and previous incarnations). To my knowledge there is no such thing as grading on curve on any of tiers.

ETA: I'll take a look at some databases, but just idea of grading on curve is nonsensical as it violates multiple requirements of abused statistical distributions.
Second: I asked several teachers who have experience from various tiers of education system.
 
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Are we talking about comparing kids to only their classmates or to the whole set of students of their age group?


It is to their classmates. Theoretically, this ensures that the learning conditions do not affect how relatively well the students learn the material. For example, if class "A" has a fantastic teacher, a clean and comfortable learning environment, and adequate resources, grade-wise they will not have an unfair advantage over class "B" with a terrible teacher, a poor learning environment, and a complete and utter lack of resources.

Because they shouldn't be punished for circumstances outside of their control. Yeah, grading on a curve doesn't necessarily indicate students actually know the material, just that they know it better than their cohorts.
 
It is to their classmates. Theoretically, this ensures that the learning conditions do not affect how relatively well the students learn the material. For example, if class "A" has a fantastic teacher, a clean and comfortable learning environment, and adequate resources, grade-wise they will not have an unfair advantage over class "B" with a terrible teacher, a poor learning environment, and a complete and utter lack of resources.

Because they shouldn't be punished for circumstances outside of their control. Yeah, grading on a curve doesn't necessarily indicate students actually know the material, just that they know it better than their cohorts.


That seems just mental.

(ETA - thanks for your answer :))
 
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I am sure that several people reading this thread have gone through a STEM education, like myself, and find it ludicrous to suggest that we didn't engage with the material, and that we didn't do "active learning", or that somehow we didn't use "advanced cognitive skills" like analysis and application. Her paragraph is laughably stupid on this point.
Just wanted to interject and distance active learning, which is a real thing, from anything in this paper, which isn't.

Active learning is an educational philosophy that's a decade or so old, resulting from neuroscience research findings which showed that it's the act of recalling knowledge in different contexts that most aided learning. So, rather than the traditional lecture and exam, active learning incorporates lots of little mini-quizzes and group huddles and such to bring as much recall as possible into the classroom (thus "active" as in activity-driven), where mistakes in understanding can be corrected quickly.

In a very real sense this is something we've always known - homework, especially quickly graded and returned homework, being called on in class, and little tests of knowledge have long been part of what we think good education should be. Active learning is just a formalization of those standards.

It has nothing to do with any kind of gender, except for being a dichotomy (when compared to traditional "passive" learning) that's familiar to the kind of people who are desperate to shoehorn gender roles into every dichotomy they run across in order to make their pretentious insecurities seem that much more relevant.
 
Aka case where "cure" is worse problem. While fixing some comparative stuff it kills everything else. It creates nice number of disincentives and penalizations (doesn't account for large number of good or great students in pool/classes) and trying to fit something into statistical distribution which doesn't belong there. Aka complete nonsense in the end.

I agree with this. I went through the education system in Continental Europe in the 80s and 90s and grading on a curve did not exist then (and I don't think it does now). I am no expert in education, but it seems wrong to me to measure relative performance against peers when, in my opinion, grades should measure actual, absolute performance of learning. That anybody could think this is a good idea is stunning to me.

Much in life is competition, especially in business and the job market, and education should prepare young people for this fact. But this system just seems to create competition where there is no need for it at all. I could understand how people would complain about the education system beeing to "competitive", where competition is artificial and unnecessary.

Wouldn't such a system also, for example, punish students that try and help their peers learn? :confused: How could this possibly be a good idea?
 
It's not based competition. It's based on the idea that some of the flaws in the students' test performance were not the students' fault but a result of something about the teaching or the curriculum or the books or such, so the student who did the best represents the best a student could have done. So that becomes the new "100%" score and everybody else's scores are a percentage of that, which means it can only stretch scores up, not punish anybody.
 
It's not based competition. It's based on the idea that some of the flaws in the students' test performance were not the students' fault but a result of something about the teaching or the curriculum or the books or such, so the student who did the best represents the best a student could have done. So that becomes the new "100%" score and everybody else's scores are a percentage of that, which means it can only stretch scores up, not punish anybody.

The origin of the phrase "on a curve" was that scores would be artificially adjusted to fit a normal distribution, i.e. a "bell curve", so in some cases, it could force people either up or down.

However, in my own extensive experience as a student, I've never seen any teacher/professor adjust scored downward.


RE: "Active learning". It seems to me that most of my math classes, and the applied math classes that we called engineering, were all "active learning". They just didn't involve a whole lot of class discussion during lecture time. The "active" part was homework.

I note that the whole concept of "lecture time" is being questioned these days, precisely because they aren't as "active" as they could be, and you can watch the material on an easily distributed video now. This is leading to "flipped" classes, in which the presentation is done at home, and class time is used for working assignment, interacting with the teacher and fellow students. It seems like a good way of doing things, although I don't know how the experiments in doing things that way have turned out.

I would be very surprised to learn that there was a significant gender correlation in success with the two types of instruction.
 
The origin of the phrase "on a curve" was that scores would be artificially adjusted to fit a normal distribution, i.e. a "bell curve", so in some cases, it could force people either up or down.

I'm not quite sure what you mean here. As far as I understand heading on a curve, the raw scores are not adjusted in order to assign grades; the bins into which the raw scores are put in order to assign grades are determined by the normal distribution (see: 68–95–99.7 rule).

Sometimes educators will refer to adding a fixed amount of points a class's raw scores as "curving".This is slightly different than the previously mentioned method–which is what I have most often referred to as "grading on a curve" rather than simply "curving"–as it does not channels the shape of the distribution, just its location.

Whether it is a "good" method of grading depends on what one thinks the object of heading should be. For instance, grading on a curve seems to increase competition among student and discourage students trying because trying hard and getting a high raw score is not reflected in the grade that the student receives. The disconnect among effort, achievement, and reward causes students who try hard and achieve well to stop trying hard to preserve their sense of self-worth.
 
It's not based competition. It's based on the idea that some of the flaws in the students' test performance were not the students' fault but a result of something about the teaching or the curriculum or the books or such, so the student who did the best represents the best a student could have done. So that becomes the new "100%" score and everybody else's scores are a percentage of that, which means it can only stretch scores up, not punish anybody.

I understood supposed rationale. It's just that it is idiotic fix for unproven problem.

And if it is done in such way that it doesn't punish, it still unfairly helps bad students, who would fail otherwise devaluing work of good students. Makes me glad for our system...

Still bad system.
 
I understood supposed rationale. It's just that it is idiotic fix for unproven problem.

And if it is done in such way that it doesn't punish, it still unfairly helps bad students, who would fail otherwise devaluing work of good students. Makes me glad for our system...

Still bad system.

Why is everyone so concerned about unfairly helping bad students and how that makes a grading scheme bad?
 
Why is everyone so concerned about unfairly helping bad students and how that makes a grading scheme bad?

Wait, you think it is good to reward insufficient knowledge and skills??? Reward being "less bad" then some other bad students????????????????????????????????????????
(Yeah, hat's how insane and unbelievable whole thing is!)
Seriously???

Not only they are getting false feedback that they are good, it is devaluing achievement of good students (you don't have to be good)

I hope this is just a bad joke...

ETA: And I thought I couldn't hear more insane thing about USA education system.
 
Wait, you think it is good to reward insufficient knowledge and skills???

Where did I say that?

Reward being "less bad" then some other bad students????????????????????????????????????????

Where did I say that?

Seriously???

I am neither serious nor facetious until you demonstrate that I said what you claim I said.

Not only they are getting false feedback that they are good, it is devaluing achievement of good students (you don't have to be good)

So why is the focus just on the bad students being rewarded when the grade distribution is right skewed?

I hope this is just a bad joke...

See above for what I said when you asked me if I was being serious.

ETA: And I thought I couldn't hear more insane thing about USA education system.

You are mistaking an argument about emphasis for an argument about existence.
 
Why is everyone so concerned about unfairly helping bad students and how that makes a grading scheme bad?


It means that the bad students will never get the help they need to become good students, and the truly bad students will be "passed" through the educational system. This just avoids the problem, rather than either fixing it, or clearly identifying the uneducable.
 
It means that the bad students will never get the help they need to become good students, and the truly bad students will be "passed" through the educational system. This just avoids the problem, rather than either fixing it, or clearly identifying the uneducable.

It seems that some people are more concerned about telling students just how bad they arev and assuming that failure is primarily the student's fault, rather than helping get better.
 
I think grading on a curve is a exceptionally poor grading scheme, but I think the least of the problems with the grading scheme is that it rewards students who score on the low end of the scale.
 
Why is everyone so concerned about unfairly helping bad students and how that makes a grading scheme bad?
Because it's cathartic to gripe about a poorly run world and imagine how awesome the world would be if only everyone recognized your genius and did things the way you wanted them.

No curve changed that the students who scored high got the best grades and the low scoring kids got the bad grades.
 
If you want to go straight to the source and judge for yourself, here it is:

http://nsuworks.nova.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2467&context=tqr

My first problem with it is the impenetrable language it uses. One might almost say it is "hostile" to people who don't understand words like "interdiscursivity"



Bleh!

I don't have the patience for this sort of stuff. Plain English for me please!

It is made up language for silly people desperate to have their own language for purposes of confusion and uncertainty in their conceptual lives. Waste of time and effort, but makes them feel better!!!
 
Because it's cathartic to gripe about a poorly run world and imagine how awesome the world would be if only everyone recognized your genius and did things the way you wanted them.

No curve changed that the students who scored high got the best grades and the low scoring kids got the bad grades.

And thus, the capable and able to master the material do better than the incapable and unable to master it. Which is and always should be the way the world works!!!!

Though, by the time graduate school is the level we are at, there should be no incapable students in the programs/classes/labs.
 
Because it's cathartic to gripe about a poorly run world and imagine how awesome the world would be if only everyone recognized your genius and did things the way you wanted them.

No curve changed that the students who scored high got the best grades and the low scoring kids got the bad grades.

To be fair though, if the score distribution is is heavily right skewed, grading on a curve does increase the final adjusted score of students who scored on the low end of the scale. However, if the distribution score distribution is left skewed, the opposite phenomenon occurs students at the who scored at the higher end of the scale are disadvantaged.
 
To be fair though, if the score distribution is is heavily right skewed, grading on a curve does increase the final adjusted score of students who scored on the low end of the scale. However, if the distribution score distribution is left skewed, the opposite phenomenon occurs students at the who scored at the higher end of the scale are disadvantaged.

The latter is much the worst!!!
 
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