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Standardised testing. 14

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IRstuff: I didn't say genetically stupid, just inherently. The study suggests poverty leads to stupidity - the two are inseperable.

B.E.: We never even got a whiff of the 11+ in the late 70's, although I believe it was still in operation in nearby Plymouth and is still today. Some kids freeze at exams and I understand this was quite a biggie for an 11-year-old.

- Steve
 
I took the 11+ in 70 or 71, in Kent. I think a couple of years they went fully comprehensive, but by then we'd moved to Avon which had been fully comp for years. So I ended up doing 2 years of (publicly system) Grammar and then served the rest of the sentence at a private school.

Cheers

Greg Locock


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I think the bar is set pretty low in US high schools. My boys get decent grades but they never do homework at home; they somehow manage to do it all at school! It's interesting to note that most high school teachers believe their students are well-prepared for college. Most college educators, however, don't think that incoming students are ready for college-level work.


Tunalover
 
The poverty effect is not permanent. Once the stressor is removed, performance improves, much like teflon cold flow, unless stress beyond yield limit.

The bar is low in SOME schools. At the schools I described, students are expected to do extremely well in college. But, parental expectations are equally high; these parents expect to have their students competitive into HYP, MIT, Caltech, etc. While much blame has been heaped onto the schools, the fault for failures is similar to engineering failures in that there's invariably more to the story. Parents are critical to the process; while we are not "tiger" dad and mom, we have high expectations of our kids, and B's are only barely tolerable. We expect to know when our children are struggling and we apply resources to deal with it. If the class is too easy, we demand additional homework, or we apply our own homework.

T, what are you doing about the lackadaisical teaching at your school? I'm a bit perturbed that you seem to accepting the status quo as if this was something you have no control over. It seems to me that harder classes ought to be available, or harder schools, or just give them more to do. If you, or any other parent, aren't going to look after your kids' future, who will? If the school (or an employee) fails, is that not a management problem, and are the parents not part of the management?

I have no doubt that some schools have low bars, but there are those that don't:

TTFN
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7ofakss

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Whan I studied a 'B' was good grade and an 'A' was outstaing. Only a few got an 'A' grade. Today a 'B' is slightly better than failure and everyone gets an 'A'. The brighter ones get an 'A*'. The kids with 'A*' aren't as smart as the ones who got an 'A' when I studied, and that ripples through the whole education system. Grades are higher, but any given grade is easier to achieve and worth less than 30 years ago.

I had a rant about this in another thread a month or two ago and a few folks missed a key point: it's not the kids fault, because they are trying their best to succeed in a system which is broken. The problem is the system itself.

It's an interesting speech, and he's clearly above-average smart.

 
"Today a 'B' is slightly better than failure and everyone gets an 'A"

which specific school is that? Certainly, not my son's; his Alg 2 class had 5 A's out of a class of 30, and that was with a strict 90% threshold for an A.

TTFN
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7ofakss

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Which specific school?

Here in the UK every year's results are "better" than the previous. Grade inflation is a fact across the board. But grades only have a very short shelf life, so their inflation is only really a problem if you don't use them quickly. The problem is when everyone gets an A in everything (there is no "11" on the amplifier, no 110% effort). Our universities are making noises about reintroducing their own entrance exams.

- Steve
 
... I'm wrong. There is an 11 now. A* is after my time but it is the same. So much for my weak Spinal Tap joke. Interesting figures for the last 20 or so years are here: A Levels 1993-2013.

- Steve
 
Well, there's an 11 in the US, but it represents the level of difficulty associated with AP and honors classes, so they have a 0-5 GPA scale, while regular classes have a 0-4 GPA scale. I can't speak to all the schools in the US, but the ones I've personally seen seem to still take grading very seriously, as do the College Board, Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate, and SATs.

Admittedly, the US is still the home of "Johnny Can't Read," hence NCLB and Common Core.



TTFN
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7ofakss

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Which specific school country? The UK.

When the old GCE ('O'-level) and CSE exams were abandoned in the mid 1980s and replaced by the GCSE (general collapse of secondary education) the GCSE 'C' was notionally equivalent to an 'O'-level pass. As the requirements to achieve any given grade have dropped over the last 30 years, a 'B' is barely an 'O'-level pass.

I agree Steve - the A* grade is the new A-grade. It is now so easy to get an A-grade that it is impossible for the truly gifted kids to distinguish themselves from the mass. I don't see any purpose in an exam in which everyone scores top grades - the whole purpose of the exam is to pick out the the areas where some are strong and some are weak, to allow the kids to make choices based on what they can succeed at, and to allow employers and universities to select those who have the best skills fit for the course or job they are recruiting for.
 
Berkshire,
Thank you for posting the video, I enjoyed listening to that intelligent young man express his opinions.


STF
 
Sparweb,
Thank you for that, I posted it here, because I though the young man had a better handle on his education than his teachers did.
I may be wrong, the teachers he had, may have managed to do a good job, in spite of the restrictions thrown at them, not because of them.
B.E.

You are judged not by what you know, but by what you can do.
 
My son finishes grade 7 this month. The teachers that surround him have such a tremendous impact on his attitude toward school, and I think everyone appreciates that fact. While some teachers are pretty useless, most know that the curriculum is a mixture of valuable knowledge and political BS. I'm not interested in the political debate that's been incited with your thread, though it's a good thing people are willing to talk about it. I just don't live in the US so none of the acronyms being bandied about make sense. I think that young man is showing himself to be a leader already, and I'm glad he's getting recognition for it.


STF
 
Kid seems to have a good head on his shoulders and a will to think with the brain he was given. I hope his next handful of formative years sculpts him with the tools to get wherever he wants. Teenage spirit with a challenging attitude backed up with enough brains to establish support for his anti-authority arguments. I like it :)

He has many good points. I'm a result of a family that thought "You have to have a degree to win in the world" but was lucky enough to not be of a recent age where degrees can actually drown you before you learn to swim in the world, sometimes becoming an anchor rather than a life-preserver.

There is a whole lot wrong with the academic world in the USA. It's become more and more of an uphill struggle for the most vulnerable and formative times in our (as people) young lives. Core curriculum fades as general-education requirements rise. Prices rise dramatically. The universities and colleges are becoming a predatory institution rather than a next-level greenhouse for growing specimen.

Our culture still maintains the attitude that "vocations" and "technical fields" are a lesser-class industry. It isn't until people are in their mid 20s to 30s, I find, that people start to notice how NOT inferior those in the technical and vocational fields are. Younger engineers who got into the field for money/status inhumanly shun plumbers and electricians are finding that with 5 years experience that the man who just snaked their toilet and plumbed a new half-bath made more money per hour than their equivalent salary.

In high school "vocational school" and alternate programs for welding/machining/automotive-tech/carpentry/plumbing/electricity are all treated like "special ed" or at least the "not smart enough for 'real' classes" students.

I hope it's changed, there there is confirmation-bias in my view that makes me blind to the change, but I still perceive this as being the truth. I hope it's changed.

When no one wants to be a plumber/electrician, we'll all sit in a hot, dark summer house, with a toilet that won't flush.

Our schools are not tailored toward the real world and are not tailored toward serving the people they are cultivating. Our culture does not support the change required. Some people are speaking/lobbying for these changes and I hope they come soon.

Most of all, relevant to this crowd, I would love to see a bachelor's degree be worth more than it currently is. I'd like to see less "general education" requirements and more core-curriculum classes. I appreciate the education of people on politics, geography, history, literature, etc, but to /require/ it at great expense in order to get a career-required degree is almost extortion. More importantly, it waters down our degree programs which have a limitation on credit-hour requirements to get a Bachelor or Master degree.

_________________________________________
Engineer, Precision Manufacturing Job Shop
Tool & Die, Aerospace, Defense, Medical, Agricultural, Firearms

NX8.0, Solidworks 2014, AutoCAD LT, Autocad Plant 3D 2013, Enovia DMUv5
 
JNieman, your last paragraph is similar to how it's set up in the UK (or at least was in the late 90's) for engineering & most subjects. Some on this forum though regard a focused technical degree without the well rounding as being effectively a trade school education.

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If the objective were to crank out work drones, then yes, a focussed education might make sense. However, I don't think that high school age students can generally appreciate something like Art History, albeit, it's arguable that I was able to appreciate it when I took it sophomore year.

I think the education goals are correct, it's just that the price tag has gotten out of whack with the starting salaries. When I graduated from college, my private college tuition cost was 20% of my starting salary. The current tuition at the same school would cost about 50% of a similar starting salary today.

Income inequality, blah, blah, etc.; the bottom line is that the ratio of tuition cost to starting salary has nearly tripled in 35 yr. If starting salaries kept up with tuition increases, they would be on the order of $189k today, which obviously means I'm not keeping up with this inflation, either.

TTFN
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7ofakss

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So IRstuff, grads from many other educations systems around the world are work drones?

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Possibly, I don't really have a good frame of reference. I have heard/read that some countries are supposedly less creative than the US, specifically because of their educational philosophies.

TTFN
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7ofakss

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Fair enough, I guess Oxford & Cambridge amongst others may have to drop 'university' from their name then.

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"... I'm wrong. There is an 11 now. A* is after my time but it is the same. So much for my weak Spinal Tap joke. Interesting figures for the last 20 or so years are here: A Levels 1993-2013. "

Hey, at least the trend isn't inflationary for Welsh! :D

...out of the whole 3 years listed...
 
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