In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
Rich Ulrich <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>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.
Was that educationally sound? But also back then bright
children skipped grades and many did not advance. The
educationists were right that most of those not advancing
were not getting any benefit from their attendance at
school, but their solution greatly reduced the benefit
for the others.
It is core courses which got hit the most. These were
the courses where one does not just do memorization and
routine, but had to think. Now, most of them have become
memorization and routine. The important part of learning
is not being able to spout facts and plug into formulas,
but knowing what it means.
>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.
You probably went to school after the decline was well
under way. For those who do not know, it started in the
elementary schools in the 30s, but WWII delayed it in the
high schools until after the war. Those returning GIs
who did not have the background for college kept it up
for a while.
>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?
It is hard to tell what this means, as IQ tests are being
continually renormed by the educational psychologists.
Most recent scales are produced by converting the scores
on the reference group to normal with mean 100 and standard
deviation 15.
>I was impressed more recently when I learned that many
>universities now teach courses in econometrics to
>*undergraduates*.
One can teach a course in anything, but what does it mean?
A good course in econometrics requires quite a bit of
mathematics and statistics. Undergraduates may possibly
get that much mathematics, but few decent statistics. A
statistical methods course at a pre-calculus level does
not qualify, and not many at the calculus level do well.
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.
The immediate post-war period saw basic mathematics moved
to the undergraduate level, instead of time spent on
computation. The courses are still there, but they have
been lowered to the point that they are unrecognizable.
Instead, the calculus course, which supposedly has the
same or more content, has deemphasized concepts to the
point that they cannot be on the final exams. The rest
has gone along with that. In a probability course with
the full calculus prerequisite, I had 21 prospective high
school teachers, only 5 of whom could use calculus, as
was done in the exercises, on a TAKE-HOME part of the final.
They could use the formulas, but did not understand what
they were doing, and could not set up the easy problems.
--
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
.
.
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