In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, dennis roberts <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >At 02:20 PM 3/24/2003, Herman Rubin wrote:
>>Students give higher evaluations to those who teach ONLY >>rote memorization and routine calculation. >i am not sure there is evidence to back up this claim ... in fact, most >decent students would not rate particularly high faculty who seem to only >go by the book ... and have students ONLY memorize facts ... generally, i >think students expect more from GOOD faculty than that and those faculty >who only rely on doling out facts and having students parrot them back ... >are downwardly evaluated There were some discussions of student evaluations in _Science_ in the 70s. Probably the best study was one involving TAs in calculus; the correlation was strongly negative between the ratings and the performance of the classes. There is likely to be a positive correlation in any given class. What you claim may be true for students in strong courses for majors; few of these now exist in mathematics, and statistics has always been a graduate and service department. >>It is not grade inflation which is the big problem; the >>grades are essentially meaningless at this time. I cannot >>tell from a student's grades if the student has any >>understanding of the subject. >when did we ever really know that? just because A is supposed to mean high >achievement and therefore we presume understanding ... we can't really know >that JUST based on a grade ... One cannot even tell from grades in the same section of a course. >we have never had ANY agreement across districts, states ... as to what A >or B ... etc. means ... these are all locally determined and have always >been so >> We need to raise the level >>of the courses to where they were in the 50s, >you mean make them harder and harder? let's see how long that will last in >today's society I doubt that a state university could adopt the mathematics standards of that time. >>and to >>recognize that many, if not most, entering students have >>not had even the semblance of a decent high school education. >i think you are swooshing your broom much more widely that it is fair to >swoosh ... there are still excellent high schools with excellent teachers >who INSIST on a high level of effort and performance from their students VERY few. Their "high level" is even more forced to be relative than that of the universities, as they are required to teach the students who are advanced without knowing from the dumbed-down earlier classes. There are a few very highly elite schools. But as long as the schools are going to keep elementary school children by age, and in heterogeneous classes, and to use the educationists' methods, the bright and gifted are going to be at least damaged. >>It is not that they did not learn what was presented, but >>that not much of any real importance was presented. >how can you ... or any other person ... really know what is happening in >the thousands and thousand of high schools? My colleagues and I see the students. At meetings, we talk to those of other universities. What proportion of those graduating high school have had a real "Euclid" geometry course? The important part of such a course was learning what proofs are, and how to produce them. However, the geometry book adopted by SMSG in the 60s (they do have a Euclid book as a non-recommended one in the collection) deemphasized proofs, and went to memorizing formulas and computation. Someone who has any difficulty with proofs and constructions by induction does not understand the integers. This is the great bulk of students now attending college, and most of the mathematics departments have given up teaching this as futile. >> >And, I recently read, I believe in the Chronicle of Higher Education, >> >that grade inflation, while definitely occuring, is not a big deal. Even >> >if you are using only a 5 point grade field, the rank ordering of >> >students is still easily accomodated over the course of the several dozen >> >courses they end up taking in their career, particularly for schools on >> >quarter systems. >>I consider anyone who would make such a statement to be >>uninterested in the quality of education. Why should I, or >>anyone else, care about the rank ordering in trivial pursuit? >i agree with this -- This address is for information only. I do not claim that these views are those of the Statistics Department or of Purdue University. Herman Rubin, Deptartment of Statistics, Purdue University [EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone: (765)494-6054 FAX: (765)494-0558 . . ================================================================= Instructions for joining and leaving this list, remarks about the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES, and archives are available at: . http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/ . =================================================================
