mijopaalmc
Philosopher
- Joined
- Mar 10, 2007
- Messages
- 7,172
The latter is much the worst!!!
Which makes the stated concer that students who score poorly get rewarded even more trivial.
The latter is much the worst!!!
Personally, I don't believe being passed, when you do not know the material, into a class/grade where you will continue to not know the material isn't a reward.
The problem with blanket statements against "grading on a curve" is that the usual definition of that term means not grading according to a strict, and fixed, percentage scale. Why should >90% always equal an A, and below always be less than an A. Is it possible to write a test that is fair, and is a good test of comprehension, and on which a very good score is 68%?
Where did I say that?
Where did I say that?
I am neither serious nor facetious until you demonstrate that I said what you claim I said.
So why is the focus just on the bad students being rewarded when the grade distribution is right skewed?
See above for what I said when you asked me if I was being serious.
You are mistaking an argument about emphasis for an argument about existence.
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.
The problem with blanket statements against "grading on a curve" is that the usual definition of that term means not grading according to a strict, and fixed, percentage scale. Why should >90% always equal an A, and below always be less than an A. Is it possible to write a test that is fair, and is a good test of comprehension, and on which a very good score is 68%?
Frankly, that was very nonsensical and illogical question...
Not really, no.
I took an Organic Chem class in which one of the tests (the first for the semester) had an average score of 31%, and the highest score was about 65%. Nobody in that class ever got more than about 85% on any of the tests. Yet, a handful of students got 'A's in the class - the tests were routinely far above the level of what was taught or assigned.
I don't know why the tests were so far above the level of what he was teaching. I certainly learned the subject. If the Profs all had a perfect understanding of what to teach/assign, how much of it to teach/assign, and how to teach it, your post would be true.
In the real world, Profs often have a hard time designing tests to match what they teach, and some of them are brilliant scientists with no teaching skills.
ETA: This was at Colorado State, which is by no means an elite Uni, but has a solid reputation for STEM fields. My Bachelor's from CSU has repeatedly landed me jobs in which I was competing against applicants with Master's Degrees (and the occasional Ph. D.) from less regarded institutions)
If problem is with teacher and their design of test (as it appears to be case here) then complaint to appropriate authority is in order. (Test doesn't' reflect content of classes and/or relevant literature) - aka feedback that something is wrong.
Complaints were made - quite a lot of them. We were told not to worry, because it was graded on a curve.It was not a full curve, as really only a handful of the 100+ students in the class pulled an A.
You might be comparing Deutsch Apfels to American Oranges. That said, I really, really want my kids to attend college in Germany for at least a year.
There were rumors that the tests were deliberately made above subject level to identify students to be recruited into that major, complete with help in finding scholarships. That's a bit of a CT, really, but seemed conceivable at the time.
I remember an incident in college some years ago where the Dean's Office was swamped with angry parents. Apparently an engineering professor doled out final grades by taking the top 20% and giving them an A, the next 20% got a B, and so on so the bottom 20% failed. Problem was, it was a smart class and students whose final scores were 80%-90% had failed the class. I think the college convinced him to use a different grading scheme from then on.
It's a common syndrome in math & science & engineering. I always figured it was part of their constant efforts to maintain a mystique about their subjects being the hardest (and themselves thus necessarily being the smartest people around because they're the ones who can get through it).I took an Organic Chem class in which one of the tests (the first for the semester) had an average score of 31%, and the highest score was about 65%. Nobody in that class ever got more than about 85% on any of the tests. Yet, a handful of students got 'A's in the class - the tests were routinely far above the level of what was taught or assigned.
I don't know why the tests were so far above the level of what he was teaching. I certainly learned the subject. If the Profs all had a perfect understanding of what to teach/assign, how much of it to teach/assign, and how to teach it, your post would be true.
It's a common syndrome in math & science & engineering. I always figured it was part of their constant efforts to maintain a mystique about their subjects being the hardest (and themselves thus necessarily being the smartest people around because they're the ones who can get through it).
Of course they would.
The hardest class of my college career was Optimal Control Systems. Should the bottom 20% of the class end up with an F on their report cards? I hope not. I'll bet I was in that bottom 20%. I'm sure I was in the bottom third, and I got an A. And I deserved it.
All right. I totally flubbed the question on the final about applying Nash optimality (you might recognize the name Nash if you watched "A Beautiful Mind") to velocity control, but I think they would have done a disservice to future employers if the University had placed a D in my grade point average for that.
And when it came to tests, the professor liked to use the tests to see if people
could go beyond the material in class, extending the application of the material from beyond the sort of problem that was on the homework to really grasping the material to the point of applying it in unfamiliar situations. I think I got about 50% on the mid term, which was near class average, but I think I got something like 20% on the final, whereas the class average was about 33%.
This idea that there is a strict grading scale that ought to be applied to all tests in all classes is ridiculous.
Thank you for demonstration of my points.
No wonder USA has to import so much brains from elsewhere, when you have such broken mess of education system...
Hmmm....let's think about this.
John Nash won a Nobel Prize for some work. My professor was teaching how to apply that mathematics to velocity control. I wasn't very good at it, but I did do pretty well at minimum time and minimum fuel problems. After I graduated, I applied that knowledge working on satellite systems for tracking ballistic missiles, developing and analyzing the algorithms for targeting. In more recent years, I've used that knowledge to control arc welders.
But among the 25 people in that class, 20 of them were probably better at it than I was.....and our educational system is a "broken mess" because I got an A.
That's messed up.
ETA: And I might add that among those 25 people, not one was female. Maybe if we had had more active learning it wouldn't have been so messed up.
I wonder if that has changed in recent years. I would like to think it has, but I'm not so sure. I took a MOOC class last year on optimal control. It shadowed a class at MIT, and used videotaped lectures from the actual class. The camera only rarely caught the audience, but I don't recall seeing any females when it did.
When you get A for 50% and 20%, that's messed up. in most cases that 20% would be near automatic failure and in those few exceptions you'd need quite more then 50% to pass. Not needing even half of topic to pass? Crazy. Garde A? WTF right there.
Your post just demonstrated one of reasons why education in USA is in bad state.
When you get A for 50% and 20%, that's messed up. in most cases that 20% would be near automatic failure and in those few exceptions you'd need quite more then 50% to pass. Not needing even half of topic to pass? Crazy. Garde A? WTF right there.
Your post just demonstrated one of reasons why education in USA is in bad state.
On the thread topic: From the paper under discussion:
"...promoted the male-biased STEM institution by reinforcing views of
knowledge as static and unchanging, as it is traditionally considered to be in science, which is a masculine concept of knowledge (Mayberry & Rose, 1999). Syllabi promote the positivist view of knowledge by suggesting that there are correct conclusions that can be drawn with the right tools"
I am unable to see any other way to describe what science does, that is, to draw (provisionally) correct conclusions by using the (presumably) right tools, and I confess I do not see how this is gender biased. (I am male) There is a current knowledge base which introductory courses attempt to impart to beginning students so that the students will be "up to speed" and able to participate in ongoing knowledge acquisition. I don't see why female and male student should not be equally able to participate. Please help me to see where my implicit bias is blinding me.
"This corpus of syllabi made some accommodations for knowledge as constructed, but not for the possibility that scientific knowledge is subjective"
Again, the body of acquired knowledge is not subjective. Is it?
"For example, we see in the lower level math course description what
seems to be a nod to critical thinking and even the idea that knowledge is not static
"The ability to think and reason effectively is essential in most endeavors, a critical thinker considers all available evidence with an open mind and uses appropriate techniques to analyze that evidence and reach a conclusion. In this class you will be given the opportunity to learn some of those techniques, to recognize situations that call for their use, and to use them effectively in a variety of settings."
At first, the course purpose statement presents a view of knowledge as constructed by suggesting that there is a possibility that different conclusions can be drawn from the evidence by the choice to use “a” instead of “the” conclusion. However, the second sentence indicates that the techniques to analyze the evidence, once learned, are to be used instead of applied. This indicates that the knowledge of the tools, as well as the tools themselves, are facts, and students will learn how to use the tools to find correct answers instead of becoming independent constructors of knowledge"
This seems to me an amazing stretch to find fault with what appears (again, to me) to be an unbiased description of the attempt to teach critical thinking skills. To be "used" instead of "applied"? Is that really a significant gender bias? Please help me understand...
Thanks for further info. I always maintained that there are multiple critical failure. You added important info about grants and how they affect selection of teachers. (Didn't know about that effect)Possibly one very minor reason.
The big, overshadowing all others, reason is the horrible injustices in public school funding. The lower income families are relegated to lower income districts which are unable to support their local schools which are therefore underfunded, un-maintained, under-supplied because they are in low income areas, and of course that's where the children of lower income families must go for their education, creating a cycle of under achievement. Its a horrible waste of human resources.
There is no problem with US education if you are in the upper class.
Education in the USA is in a very bad state because the PhD level courses and 7th grade courses don't use the same testing methods and grading scales?
Oh, well. The folks who ran that class have an awful lot of people fooled. The institution where I took it was, and is, rated in the top 20 schools in the world. In my department, I think it is probably in the top 10.
ETA: Not in the top 10. Barely in the top 20 according to the QS world rankings (whatever that is, but it comes up if you type "best electrical engineering schools in the world" into google.)
On the thread topic: From the paper under discussion:
"...promoted the male-biased STEM institution by reinforcing views of
knowledge as static and unchanging, as it is traditionally considered to be in science, which is a masculine concept of knowledge (Mayberry & Rose, 1999). Syllabi promote the positivist view of knowledge by suggesting that there are correct conclusions that can be drawn with the right tools"
I am unable to see any other way to describe what science does, that is, to draw (provisionally) correct conclusions by using the (presumably) right tools, and I confess I do not see how this is gender biased. (I am male) There is a current knowledge base which introductory courses attempt to impart to beginning students so that the students will be "up to speed" and able to participate in ongoing knowledge acquisition. I don't see why female and male student should not be equally able to participate. Please help me to see where my implicit bias is blinding me.
"This corpus of syllabi made some accommodations for knowledge as constructed, but not for the possibility that scientific knowledge is subjective"
Again, the body of acquired knowledge is not subjective. Is it?
"For example, we see in the lower level math course description what
seems to be a nod to critical thinking and even the idea that knowledge is not static
"The ability to think and reason effectively is essential in most endeavors, a critical thinker considers all available evidence with an open mind and uses appropriate techniques to analyze that evidence and reach a conclusion. In this class you will be given the opportunity to learn some of those techniques, to recognize situations that call for their use, and to use them effectively in a variety of settings."At first, the course purpose statement presents a view of knowledge as constructed by suggesting that there is a possibility that different conclusions can be drawn from the evidence by the choice to use “a” instead of “the” conclusion. However, the second sentence indicates that the techniques to analyze the evidence, once learned, are to be used instead of applied. This indicates that the knowledge of the tools, as well as the tools themselves, are facts, and students will learn how to use the tools to find correct answers instead of becoming independent constructors of knowledge"
This seems to me an amazing stretch to find fault with what appears (again, to me) to be an unbiased description of the attempt to teach critical thinking skills. To be "used" instead of "applied"? Is that really a significant gender bias? Please help me understand...
MuDPhuD;11555266Possibly one very minor reason. The big said:I have a new term for this: anarcho-knowledge. Another name: epistemic relativism.
Fine: if she wants to defy the established notion of how we obtain knowledge, she'd better start debating the basic epistemic principles that underlie the scientific method, instead of drawing conclusions based on the premise that the scientific method is autoritative and therefore sexist, without questioning where the authority comes from.
Too much to ask I guess.
When you get A for 50% and 20%, that's messed up. in most cases that 20% would be near automatic failure and in those few exceptions you'd need quite more then 50% to pass. Not needing even half of topic to pass? Crazy. Garde A? WTF right there.
Take a test where a 90% should be an A and add some very difficult problems that most students won't be able to solve but which some students will be able to solve some part of. This will allow the teacher to encourage high performing students to study outside of the material and to assess their ability to apply what they've learned in class to new situations.
He, clearly, should still give an A to those students who scored 90% on the first part of that test. But their overall score might be 60% or even 40% depending upon how much of the test is comprised by this sort of difficult problem.
Why should the teacher not add that difficult material to the test? Is it necessarily useless to assess student's ability to apply the class material to new situations in which they will usually fail but sometimes succeed? Might it be a teaching tool for the next section of the class to be confronted by that sort of problem and forced to attempt to solve it?
Take a test where a 90% should be an A and add some very difficult problems that most students won't be able to solve but which some students will be able to solve some part of. This will allow the teacher to encourage high performing students to study outside of the material and to assess their ability to apply what they've learned in class to new situations.
Take a test where a 90% should be an A and add some very difficult problems that most students won't be able to solve but which some students will be able to solve some part of. This will allow the teacher to encourage high performing students to study outside of the material and to assess their ability to apply what they've learned in class to new situations.
He, clearly, should still give an A to those students who scored 90% on the first part of that test. But their overall score might be 60% or even 40% depending upon how much of the test is comprised by this sort of difficult problem.
Why should the teacher not add that difficult material to the test? Is it necessarily useless to assess student's ability to apply the class material to new situations in which they will usually fail but sometimes succeed? Might it be a teaching tool for the next section of the class to be confronted by that sort of problem and forced to attempt to solve it?
Right. If 90% is an A, the test is too easy. 55% is a good average, and what most of my undergrad EE profs aimed for. With a 55% average, you still had students getting 95s and 100s, and these were all top students to start with (3.2 freshman/sophomore GPA to get into the program). If the same test has a 75% average, those top students have no incentive to excel. Testing is about more than "knowing the material", it is being able to apply your knowledge, in ways ranging from the simple to the very difficult, and hopefully in unexpected and creative ways.
But that of course can be achieved without a curve, by carefully crafting the questions over a period of years. The trouble is, professors rarely have that luxury. With a new prof and/or new material, you take your shot at the first exam. Maybe the average is 40%- and maybe it's 80%. Maybe the score distribution is highly bimodal instead of close to normal. You can fudge somewhat with the amount of partial credit on incorrect answers, but that only goes so far. For fairness, you're going to have to curve. The next time, you adjust the questions and possibly teaching methods accordingly. Over the years, if the material itself is not rapidly changing with the times, you may be able to specify grade ranges before giving the exam.
That EE undergrad program prepared me very well for grad school (at a different school in a different program where the grading methods were generally not so enlightened - exams were too easy and exam scores too high). It also prepared me very well for an engineering career.
Not really. What I’m interested in is telling the story of the insights. Of how it came to me, what was the thought process. Abstraction, I believe, is patriarchal. It means dissociation, fragmentation, separation, and it doesn’t make sense to life. The concept of abstraction was invented so men could pretend that what they were saying was more true, universal and objective, so their ideology and political, destructive agenda could be hidden, so experience grounded in reality (and truth) could be discredited and so this erasure could appear legitimate. Intellectualism and abstraction is also meant to make us feel stupid. They invent a jargon and “concepts” so they can exclude the oppressed from the decisions they’re taking, so they make sure they’re understood only by the elite rulers. But when you say what they say in simple words, and untie the layers of reversals, you realise that the supposed intellectualism also masked the fact that what they were saying was totally stupid and insane. Or it makes sense only if you see their destructiveness and stupidity as intentional. Intellectualism is also a political tool of oppression in that by valorising abstract “rational” thought over emotions and feelings
A writer in that blog takes a dim view of medical science too.Just found, thanks to thePrestige a long blog post entitled "On writing and creativity", this paragraph says it all:
https://witchwind.wordpress.com/on-writing-and-creativity/
A writer in that blog takes a dim view of medical science too.I’m not afraid of death like I’m supposed to be but I’m TERRIFIED of hospitals, because men run and orgNize them! and have power there. Men have turned them into houses of horror willingly. A labouring woman is statistically more likeLu to die in hospital than during a home birth. There is a horror movie out called “The Hospital” with picture of a woman on the front cover.People are statistically more likely to die in hospital than at home I suppose. Now we know why. Sadistic necrophilia.
What if dying meant having the old healer woman come over to make your room smell nice, to give you special tea and to have a chat with your friends about your favorite memories.
What patriarchy has done is terrify people. It’s sadistic necrophilia.
The study analyzed nearly 80,000 pregnancies in Oregon, and found that when women had planned out-of-hospital deliveries, the probability of the baby dying during the birth process or in the first month after — though slight — was 2.4 times as likely as women who had planned hospital deliveries.
Out-of-hospital births also carried greater risk of neonatal seizures, and increased the chances that newborn babies would need ventilators or mothers would need blood transfusions.
On the other hand, out-of-hospital births were far less likely to involve cesarean sections — 5.3 percent compared with 24.7 percent in a hospital. They also involved fewer interventions to augment labor, and mothers had fewer lacerations.
Just found, thanks to thePrestige a long blog post entitled "On writing and creativity", this paragraph says it all:
https://witchwind.wordpress.com/on-writing-and-creativity/
The above is crap - the same kind of crap used by certain critics/university persons who use words like dialectic to discuss film. I have read a lot of it in several of my volumes for research so I come by that belief honestly!!!!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!
That's what I found, as well, almost.
I think there is more than one point that is ridiculous, or at least wrong.
The author seems to elevate one learning mode over another. She criticizes the "bank" model, in which teachers impart knowledge to students, who store it and withdraw it at test time. This, she believes, is superior to an educational experience where students cooperate to discover knowledge. She notes that women tend to do better in the cooperative model.
I seriously doubt that's true, in a couple of different ways. First, I think there are certain subjects, especially mathematics but others as well, where the "bank" model really is what works best. If you get a bunch of students together to try and discover how to solve a system of linear equations, you aren't going to stumble on Gaussian elimination. Sometimes, the teacher really does know best, and the best way is to have him present the material, as a right answer, and make himself available for questioning if there are portions of the material not understood.
I strongly suspect that in the cooperative model, females really did do better in comparison to males, but I'll bet that for the "bank" model, the average student just learned better.
Reading through this paper, though, I wondered just how influential this mode of thought has been. I suspect very. One thing I noticed as my son grew up was the extreme emphasis on "group work" in lots of classes, all the way into high school. Instead of traditional learning methods, the class would be split into groups, and each would give a presentation after a day or two of work.
I found it hideous. It resulted in a lot of what I ended up calling "art project assignments". Whether in literature, or science, or language classes, they were graded on their ability to make a presentation. These kinds of projects were especially prevalent in 5th through 8th grade, and it seemed that the whole teaching method was not very effective, and was very biased against boys. They just didn't have the social skills to do well in the groups, but the girls' work, which was better than the boys, was still mediocre. I never thought anyone left those classes actually understanding science.
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?
Personally, I don't believe being passed, when you do not know the material, into a class/grade where you will continue to not know the material isn't a reward.