On Tue, 25 Mar 2003 02:55:15 GMT, "Arthur J. Kendall" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> There are some things that make it hard for me to get a handle on grade > inflation. > > A larger proportion of the population goes to university/college. > MUCH larger. It is hard to look at numbers in relation to qualifications, because some of it reflects discrimination by race and ethnicity (no blacks, few Jews or Asians). And many of the most prestigious schools allowed no women until affirmative action effectively set quotas for them. (Of course, Republicans are trying to fix rules to favor the in-crowds so that kind of evolution won't happen again.) [ ...] > > Also it pays to remember that "things aren't like they used to be, and > they never were". > > Those of us who are now can retiring can remember walking to school > through waist high snow uphill both ways. Most people really don't grasp how lousy *most* schools were in the U.S., for a *majority* of their pupils, in our history. The public el-hi schools that I went to were considered "pretty good" in their time and place, and, well, they were good enough to produce me. - But I do see big flaws, some of them quite "objective": for example, I saw several young teachers in their first years of teaching; and most courses did fail to finish their textbooks by the end of the year. I've been impressed for quite a while by that mysterious increase of average IQ of populations around the civilized world, which have gone up by a few points per decade since WW II or earlier. Schools might be doing something right? I was impressed more recently when I learned that many universities now teach courses in econometrics to *undergraduates*. Then I further realized that this is not at all unique to economics. The speed-up in curriculums has gone on for some time. A book of Richard Feynman's articles has Feynman musing about, their physics students had much tougher courses since his own days -- *undergraduates* in the 1980s were being taught various mathematics (quantum mechanics, I think) that his generation had not faced until graduate school. -- Rich Ulrich, [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.pitt.edu/~wpilib/index.html . . ================================================================= Instructions for joining and leaving this list, remarks about the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES, and archives are available at: . http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/ . =================================================================
