• Due to ongoing issues caused by Search, it has been temporarily disabled
  • Please excuse the mess, we're moving the furniture and restructuring the forum categories
  • You may need to edit your signatures.

    When we moved to Xenfora some of the signature options didn't come over. In the old software signatures were limited by a character limit, on Xenfora there are more options and there is a character number and number of lines limit. I've set maximum number of lines to 4 and unlimited characters.

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

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.

I get the feeling that some people think that anything unearned is a reward.
 
Last edited:
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%?
 
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%?

Especially if the test is written in such a way that the answers to preceding questions change the answers to succeeding questions.
 
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.

Ok, after another reread I think I see where I misread your question. Although how did that question pertain to my post, si not clear. As far as I am concerned entire concept of grading on curve is wrong and among other things it rewards bad students.

Sorry for misunderstanding your post.

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.

How awesome would be? heh, in Europe grading on curve doesn't exist as far as I am aware. (Definitely not in my country) So your post missed point by a galaxy. What we are talking is NOT theoretical ideal, but practical reality for a lot of people. Too bad it is not in USA...

Curve grading just massacres fairness and value of education and abuses terminally badly statical distributions.
 
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%?

Question itself is invalid. If test is fair and comprehensive then top grade should denote you know vast majority of said subject. If not where would you put rest of grades and what that would mean when you consider 68% as good enough for top grade???

Top grade should mean you know vast majority of topic and thus 90%.

Frankly, that was very nonsensical and illogical question...
 
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.
 
Last edited:
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.

If test contains expected and thought material and still nobody gets about 65% then though luck. Work harder.

Note: in my country at least high schools and universities define grading and only small deviations are generally possible. Thus your scenario would result in 90+% of grades E.

Note: Nomenclature and grading loosely translated to USA-based system as both are quite different. Ours is derivation of German system.
 
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.
 
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.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaa... (That's wrong on whole new level)

Just little correction: Czech Jabka to American/USAnian Oranges. ;)
It's interesting that nobody ever tried to get grading on curve. not even communists. (Who otherwise tried quite few "experiments)"

BTW: Excellent teaching can be found in Czech universities (obviously English version for foreign students)

Anyway, they'll need to be properly prepared as we have higher requirements on students. (typical USA high school will very likely not be enough and by lot)
 
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.
 
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.

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.
 
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).
 
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).

Or maybe it's because there's just so much information to learn in those types of introductory classes. And the professor wants to test what the truly excellent students know while acknowledging that average students may only retain about 50% of what is taught.
 
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...
 
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.
 
Last edited:
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.
 
I realize grading on a curve is not the topic of the thread, but would like to put in my two cents on the topic. I am USA educated, with 12 years of post high school education, and 8 years of college level teaching experience in US institutions of higher learning. Virtually all of the courses I have taken or taught were "graded on a curve". Yes there are problems with this practice:

http://ii.library.jhu.edu/tag/norm-referenced-grading/

notably a highly competitive atmosphere, for which premed, and medical schools are well known. There are reasons it is done, and in my experience the most common is that the instructor is a poor test maker. From the link above:
"Designing effective assessments is another important skill for instructors to learn,
and one that can eliminate the need to use curving to adjust grades
on a poorly conceived test".​
(highlight mine)

In the USA professors in institutions of higher learning are hired to maintain an active research program which attracts federal funding in the form of research grants. The institution benefits greatly from these grants in the form of "indirect costs" which are meant to cover institutional overhead (including the professor's salary). Such costs amount to a substantial percentage of the total grant award.

The point is that professors (in USA) are NOT hired to teach, and are NOT very well trained to teach, and gain NO BENEFIT from wasting their time teaching "silly undergraduates". I have seen several excellent TEACHERS in medical schools (arguably the best in the faculty) FIRED for failing to attract federal research grant dollars, while a well funded lab guarantees advancement regardless of how pathetic the instruction. Grading on the curve becomes necessary because the examinations are poorly designed.

Personally, I tried very hard to design exams where grading on the curve was not necessary, where performance on the exam as a whole reflected a student's knowledge base of the topic covered. That is the ideal, but requires a great deal of effort and some acquired skill on the part of the test maker, but this is not an effort or skill which is very highly valued in the institutions I have been involved with.

I guess the topic struck a nerve
 
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...
 
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.

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.
 
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.

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.)
 
Last edited:
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...

I tried to give the paper the benefit of the doubt, but the passages you selected were the ones that I just couldn't fathom. It seems like she is hostile to the very idea of objective reality.

I can see how more interactive teaching methods other than the classic lecture and note-taking could be better, and could possibly also be better for women. I can see how less competitive atmospheres might be better, at least in some circumstances, and how the emphasis on competition might be biased against women. However, I can't see how science can exist without objective reality, and while I can't imagine how that is sexist, if it is, too bad. If that be sexist, then let's make the most of it. I want people to graduate being able to build better robots, not to construct their own realities based on more equitable foundations.

I also can't help but note an irony that I have observed in many contexts related to examining sexism in society. It is often asserted that certain aspects of our society, such as STEM syllabi, are inherently sexist in the way they are created. However, if that is the case, it must imply that there are inherent differences between men and women, an assertion that is anathema to a lot of people who place a high priority on gender equality.
 
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.
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)

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.)

Is it so hard to actually read my post? I said and always have said "one of reasons". To translate it and make it clear just for you, that means I don't claim it is sole cause of critical failure of USA education system.

Your example of class is completely different from your "7th grade versus PhD". How is it related to your example of grading in a particular class in previous post I was responding to, is beyond me.

Again: I don't have problem with different grading between different levels. (7th grade versus 9th grade versus high school versus university) I have problem with grading on curve itself. (Either type, doesn't mater)
 
For some reason I can't quote you directly, but it's from the same page:

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.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
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.

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?

That is exactly what my professor did in that class. The final exam had five problems on it. The first part of every problem, worth 1/5 of the points, was basically something that was explicitly covered in the class. The remaining portions of the problem asked students to go beyond what was taught, applying and combining aspects of various lessons in novel ways. It was very hard, and most people couldn't do it. I know I couldn't, but I was able to do the problems that were similar to the ones in class.

So I got an A. And I deserved it. Most of the people in the class got As, and since we were managing to keep up, more or less, in one of the most difficult course offerings at the school, we deserved it.

In terms of mistakes made in my life, one of the biggest was not appreciating the environment I was in at the time. Even though I got an A in the course, I felt like I was just totally insignificant and barely able to function in that class. That class "felt like" every other class since high school. You go to class. You do some homework. You take a test. You get a grade. It wasn't until many years later that I realized just how advanced that material was, and just how few people even studied it. Yeah, ok. I wasn't very good at that class, but I was surrounded by people who were beyond brilliant. And my professor? True genius.

So now imagine how I would have felt if I had gotten a D, or C in that class?

And, returning to the topic of the paper, I can see how that atmosphere would have made most women feel even worse than I did. I felt like I was struggling, and competing, and losing. I felt like I was being judged when the homework assignment that was so easy to many was so difficult to me. I do think the average woman, whether due to nature or nurture, is even more sensitive to those pressures.

On the other hand, the solution is not to say that somehow we should have "invented knowledge" instead of accepting some "static" knowledge from our teacher. No, there were right answers to those questions. The answers were not debatable, nor a matter of opinion, and you could use whatever method you wanted to get to the right answer, but it turns out that there really was only one method that worked or, at least, you weren't going to discover a new one on your own during the course of the class.

Besides, it occurs to me that the entire premise of a PhD dissertation was that you could, in fact, invent new knowledge. You just didn't do it in a classroom. You took the material that you had learned in class and in outside reading, and if you wanted that PhD, you had to add to it. Your classroom instruction, with those gender biased syllabi, was what prepared you to be able to do that.

And if that was just a bit beyond your ability level, you could still get a pretty good job with it, like I did, because what you learned was still useful.

I wonder if the same will be true for the dissertation writer who is the subject of this thread. She can use words, but can she say anything worth reading?
 
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.

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.
 
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?

Ehm, I never argued against difficult problems just badly done tests that require grading on curve and similar bad band-aids.. I don't argue against extra stuff. Expectations should be stated ahead and students should have access to them. (Aka no surprises)

I don't think we disagree there...

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.

Fairness and grading on curve don't belong into same positive sentence. we all had to deal with same problems in my country. We all have learned to deal with new teachers and various changes to exams. Only once idiots tried to propose grading on curve ("type 1" - forced fitting to distribution) for school leaving exam. (Don't think there is something similar in British-American system) It got terminated with extreme prejudice. (Missed that one attempt)

Although I must say most don't really care about grades (students and employers)...
 
In the UK, the grading on a curve schemes mentioned don't happen, as far as I'm aware, but there are some similarities to moderation, which is very common.

Essentially, a test will be independently evaluated and compared to previous years, random samples of tests will be taken to ensure that marking is evenhanded, and if faults are found the grades of students can be adjusted. The moderators might find, for example, that a particular test has been more difficult than intended and therefore students that narrowly got a B could be bumped up to an A. Or they might find that a few markers had been much more strict (typically in subjects like English with less clear marking guidelines) and adjust the marks received from them.

This seemed to work well enough for GCSE and A-level with the caveat that those test may have had tens of thousands of students taking them and so getting reliable samples was more readily done. The major problem, from memory, was that the moderators themselves were a rather opaque system. Precisely why they'd made whatever decisions they'd made was usually unknown to us lowly kids for whom it actually might matter.

At my university there was still some degree of moderation but I'm not sure if it was external or not. I do remember a particularly awful comparative politics module in which the test involved the question "Which of the following was the first to give women the right to vote:". I don't remember the countries listed, but none of them were the first, or even second. They'd expected us to remember the order of the first half dozen countries in spite of no indication that this was at all important. Something like 62% of the year failed, and after first berating us for being the worst group ever, they decided to allow us all to resit without the usual penalty of being limited to a pass only mark.
 
Just found, thanks to thePrestige a long blog post entitled "On writing and creativity", this paragraph says it all:

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

https://witchwind.wordpress.com/on-writing-and-creativity/
 
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.
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.​
People are statistically more likely to die in hospital than at home I suppose. Now we know why. Sadistic necrophilia.
 
What actually scares me is the fact I don't know just how far the attitude in the blog stretches in the wider community.
 
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.
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.​
People are statistically more likely to die in hospital than at home I suppose. Now we know why. Sadistic necrophilia.

I don't know whether that claim is true, but I would imagine that in cases where a planned home birth runs into complications, an ambulance would be called and the woman would be taken to the hospital. High risk pregnancies are probably also more likely to be hospital births. What we do know is that for the infants, the rate of death is higher for home deliveries:

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/31/...n-us-a-new-study-examines-the-risks.html?_r=0

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/

I think a chimpanzee throwing feces would've gotten that point across more succinctly, and, by virtue of not uttering any words, without the risk of being incoherent.

By throwing feces, a chimpanzee would present a more powerful, persuasive and direct critique of the use of abstract concepts or intellectualism.
 
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!
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!!!!
 
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.

But it helps the students learn to work cooperatively to take a project from initiation to completion so they find out how corporation think works!!!!! (I was a teacher, they liked doing this, nobody discovered/developed anything Nobel worthy, but it was fun and looked like learning - until tests occurred generally. Except for the students who remembered the results on their own project. OK, I am a grouch on constant changing WITH NO EVIDENCE OF HEAVY DUTY PROOF OF EXPERIMENTAL USE UNDER LOTS OF CONTROL AND HEAVY MONITORING OF THE NEW METHOD TO VERIFY THE IMPROVEMENT IS WELL SHOWN TO BE CLEARLY EVIDENCED FOR THE TEACHERS/STUDENTS USING THE NEW METHOD.

Never happens to any real level of confidence. Based on over 20 years of teaching multiple sciences and more!!!!
 
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?

Many places, people do not want their system graded that way. Keeps teachers from teaching that white is better than other colors and that jeebus can beat the **** out of any other (non-existant anyway) religious figure!!!!!!!
 
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.

What it is, in Florida at a minimum, is how it is done - which is why a good percent of students in middle or high school cannot graduate because they cannot read well enough to learn the material and do math - yet they are in classes they cannot pass without being able to do those.
 
Back
Top Bottom