No brainbox

I haven’t read all the other comments on the other thread, so sorry if this is flogging a dying horse. However, as far as university admissions are concerned, there’s more to “academic potential” than some abstract concept. Surely, you have to take account of the existing structure of the university: what the other students will be like, how the course is run etc. If a student just isn’t going to “fit in”, and I don’t mean some social nonsense here, but whether they will respond well to the structure of the course, then it’s probably no good for anyone to admit them.

Now this might be an argument for having a good hard look at the overall structure of teaching at university X. But it seems a bit unfair to beat up on individual admissions tutors at X when they probably have little if any ability to change those structures.

Cox was fortunate — he was not required to hold a formal degree in either the Cantonese language nor pop singing to work in his field, but that’s not generally the case.

Why are stories like Cox’s so rare? To a great extent, I blame formal schooling — in particular, the monopoly that academic institutions have on printing parchment. It is entirely possible to become an expert, independently, as Cox did (much more possible now than ever before in human history), but it can be pointless to do so because it is not possible (sometimes not even legal) to actually use that knowledge without the degree.

I have a friend working in a field where it’s possible (though limiting) to work without a degree (software). So he went back to finish his B.S. a few years ago and, naturally, knew more than the instructors in his courses. One asked him, “What are you doing here?” and he said he came for the piece of paper. She said, “No — really”. And he said, “I’m serious — they sure as hell don’t give it to you for what you know.”

But of course they should. It would be an incredible boon for people of limited means or who became inspired late or who were not comfortable in formal classroom settings (people like Cox). But the chances of it happening are low — if it comes to it, the ‘academic-industrial complex’ will defend its monopoly and its turf tenaciously.

My daughter is a freshman at university now. She’s in the process of spending a couple thousand dollars having lecturers spoon feed her Mankiw’s introductory micro and macro principles texts. Why? Someone like Cox could certainly master the same knowledge in less time and far less expense. But she will (and he wouldn’t) have those credentials printed on a transcript, and unfortunately that’s what matters.

But then, when we sit as selectors for university places, we switch into a mind-set where only a few have a mysterious intrinsic quality called “academic potential” that it is our job to discern and then to develop.

Do universities really select people based on some mysterious intrinsic quality called “academic potential”?

I would have thought it would make much more sense to select people based on demonstrated prior knowledge. For example, if someone has managed to learn enough maths and physics to survive an engineering degree they clearly must have some “academic potential”. If someone doesn’t know maths and physics, but has “academic potential” aren’t you creating a really messy problem for the lecturers who are going to have to teach them the pre-requisities?

Obviously there are problems of measuring demonstrated achievement, exam results may not perfectly correlate with the requirements of the profession, but, well, it strikes me as far harder to measure innate “academic potential”.

Answer to ray: no, its not. But it is the fault of universities if they collude with governments to require, say, law degrees in order for someone to be a qualified lawyer. Or medical degrees to be a certified doctor. Surely passing a very elaborate battery of tests should suffice?

Harry-
I’m not totally sure I’d want to just have a set of tests to decide of someone is fit to practice a profession unless the tests were quite a bit different than they are now. As someone who recently passed the New York state Bar Exam I can say that the most important thing for doing that was a very dull summer spent taking a bar review course. I’d suspect that many smart people who devoted even more of their summer to taking a bar review course than I did could also pass the bar, especially in states where it is easier than in New York. But, I would not think that that would make them competent to be even a basic lawyer- it takes longer than that for the information and style of reasoning to sink in. Now, for a long time people didn’t mostly become lawyers by going to law school but rather by being apprentices. This is still possible in New York- you may study law by working at a law office and qualify to take the bar exam that way. But this is largely just another way to get what law school is supposed to get you. Maybe this just shows the bar exam isn’t a good enough sorting device? That may be, but there would also be very serious draw-backs to making up a even more rigourous test, drawing them out, and so on. Given that I’m not so sure the system we have is bad. (I’d not mind if the apprentice path was more common, really, but do see it as primarily another way of doing what law school is supposed to do, and for it you also must study a certain number of years.)

I would rather doctors have a medical degree than that they just have to pass a test, and I think that’s an odd example, to be honest.

The examples of economics degrees and computer science degrees that slocum brought up are rather different. How is the job market for economists limited by legislation? How are universities colluding with government to make sure that nobody gets a job writing software without a degree? (And in what parallel world do universities have a monopoly on accrediting computer skills?)

It’d be great if everyone would consider a slightly different angle on the subject. What’s wrong with British academics and British graduates?

Now that varies from field to field, but no-one I think would say all is perfect. Some of those imperfections will reflect the biases involved in the selection system. In one field I’m connected with, there’s a clear sense (especially from the Oxbridge lot) that they have some great facility with an argument, but they are a lot shakier on the evidentiary side of the discipline.

All the same, if I think about the people I know who got into study in those fields at Oxbridge, they all had a great facility with argument and next to no training in evidence (reflected in the kind of A-levels preferred by the colleges) and you have to suspect that the interviews were biased that way too.

Following on from that, it’s probably connected that British private schools concentrate so hard on surface polish and superficial rhetoric skills rather than insight and analytical thinking.

2 (in CB #19) is an understatement, no? I remember hearing a long time ago, though, that having a large number of grade C and above in O levels was a good predictor of success in University (specifically, that it was a predictor of getting a 1st or upper second), but that getting A’s did no more predictive work, and that A-levels, beyond their gatekeeping work, had no predictive value. This was before O levels were abolished, naturally.

Tracy, for what it’s worth, things like high school level physics and calculus aren’t something you can rely on freshmen having a decent grasp of. So you end up teaching it basically all again. It’s true that if your fundamentals are hopeless you’ll be in trouble, but we’re talking about understanding 8th year sorts of topics (basic algebra, fractions, polynomials) not 11th or 12th year. A student with decent fundamentals who has never seen calculus but really wants to learn engineering, say, will probably do much better than an indifferent student who did ok in their intro calculus etc. As far as topics go, you can throw out most of the high school curriculum in math & sciences. It’s inconsistently taught, so you mostly have to redo it (at a faster rate, sure, but for many students it isnt’ review).

“I have a friend working in a field where it’s possible (though limiting) to work without a degree (software). So he went back to finish his B.S. a few years ago and, naturally, knew more than the instructors in his courses. One asked him, “What are you doing here?” and he said he came for the piece of paper. She said, “No—really”. And he said, “I’m serious—they sure as hell don’t give it to you for what you know.””

As someone with too many degrees, I’m constantly amazed by two things:

1. That people are impressed by the degrees I have without seeing any other demonstration of quality. (Don’t make me glare at you by making rude comments about that, please).

2. That many people I meet who are obviously very intelligent seem to believe that they aren’t as smart as similarly situated people with college degrees.

I have a number of friends who not only are hampered by their lack of a college degree, but who seem truly convinced (and to my mind obviously wrong) that they just aren’t as smart as lots of people with degrees.

In my mind this is a perfect storm of ugly social factors:

1. The intelligence/hard work thing talked about by Scientific American article. Innate ‘intelligence’ may separate the tip-top superstar who works hard from the near superstar who works hard, but it isn’t the difference between the top 20% and the top 50%. A moderately intelligent person with a good work ethic will very often outperform the more intelligent person with a poor work ethic.

2. Universities have an incentive to overvalue papered education and undervalue hands-on training. This one should be obvious.

3. People who want to easily measure things find it easier to rely on a paper than to investigate people individually. This is NOT primarily a private/public split. It is a lazy and/or timid HR/functionary thing whether in government or in the private world. It is easy to screen people out based on paper qualifications because you can’t get in much trouble for hiring the papered person who doesn’t work out, but you can get in trouble for taking a risk that doesn’t work out for the non-papered person.

All three things reinforce each other. I’m not sure how to break the not-so-virtuous feedback loop.

@17

what a load of rubbish.

Matt, I’m not even sure why we need a bar exam. Let the market decide (for lawyers, not surgeons)…. But, more seriously (not that that was entirely unserious), there’s a lot to be said for returning to an apprentice model. The barriers to entry are pretty high as things stand.

slocum’s point is that there’s a lot of rent seeking by universities. Agreed. There’s also a lot of rent seeking within them (breadth requirements are a mostly generated by rent-seeking by departments that couldn’t pay their way. I don’t see what the educational value could be, eg, of requiring that 18-22 year olds whom one can pretty much guarantee will never learn the language in question have to take 3 semesters of a foreign language). The demand for high levels of HE participation comes out of a conspiracy between employers (who want to offload the costs of identifying talent and, to a lesser extent, training workers) and middle and upper middle class parents who want to assure social closure for their kids and are caught up in a game in which the best way to do that seems to be getting them into college, and in which they can call for that while seeming (and perhaps believing themselves) to care about everyone getting an important good — access to the life of the mind.

That’s what I think on cynical days, anyway.

I don’t recall my university tending to “overvalue papered education and undervalue hands-on training”, as Slocum and Sebastian suggest. I spent 9 hours a week doing physics labs, another 3 doing computer simulations, and probably a good 20 – 30 hours a week solving problems and getting explanations from trained mathematicians. I recall the engineers thought my hands-on load was low, and of course the doctors were off doing slave labour in the hospitals during the holidays.

When people talk about doctors, engineers, physicists or statisticians having to merely “pass a battery of tests” I think they are forgetting the 3-7 years of hands-on training those people received at university that are very difficult to receive anywhere else. Software is rather unique in this regard – it is quite difficult to get access to cadavers, but rather easy to get access to Visual Basic compilers.

While we are kicking around the inadequacy of conventional academic measures of competance and how poorly they serve some who come off as “less able”, this article in the New York Times on the surprising over-representation of dyslexics among successful small business owners bears consideration. The numbers are significant if you accept them: 10% of the general population suffering some degree of dyslexia but as much as 1/3 of small business founders claiming they have the “disorder”/

Also, see if you can puzzle out why US figures differ from UK figures and differ so much between entrepreneurs and middle management in larger corporations…the author’s stab at it comes to no clear conclusions.

I tentatively disagree with Watson Aname vis a vis math preparation. I’m not sure exactly what tranche of people, what sort of science and math programs, etc., he has in mind, but… what you are saying sounds slightly crazy and illogical. So if a first-year who took BC calculus takes advanced physics, they need to remind him what a Taylor series is; if he takes theoretical algebra class, they may need to remind him of the definition of a derivative, or whatever; but the fact that there will certainly be *some* remedial math in any of these courses doesn’t mean that anyone with an 8th grade math background would do fine in them…

S.E:

I’ve wondered if dyslexia causes as much trouble with chinese characters.

I am not in education, let alone special ed so the question never occurred to me but it sounds like a very useful one to investigate.

Watson – I think this is an American situation. If I understand the US college system, entrance to uni is based on a combination of grades in high school classes, results on SAT exams (which started off trying to measure innate academic potential rather than teaching), and a grab-bag of other stuff.

In the UK, university entrance is based at least in part on results from nationwide exams that are aimed at testing what students know, called A-levels. In the NZ system when I went through, the equivalent exams were called Bursary. We started studying calculus in 5th form (age 15) as it was part of the School Certificate maths exam. Then it was extended in 6th form, so anyone who managed to get a good mark on Bursary Maths with Calculus (age 17) had been doing calculus for three years running and as far as I know we all knew the basics of calculus by that point. (I did so well in the Bursary exams as to be able to skip the first year of university, and my problems with university were caused by a lack of practice with studying, not a lack of basic knowledge of calculus).

I think the difference is that with calculus knowledge being formally and externally assessed twice over the last three years of high school, schools in NZ had a significant incentive to teach it thoroughly. And the repetition drummed it into our heads.

The American system, which appears determined to try to catch the poor kid with bad teaching but innate academic potential, doesn’t strike me as having the same incentives to make calculus stick.

However, on thinking about it, I am prepared to be convinced that high school English teaches students nothing useful for university. After all, I dropped it the moment I could at high school based on reasoning that I wasn’t learning anything, so I’m badly placed to argue with university lecturers on this point.

40: I think you are quite correct that the French system can become very classed-based. The irony here , in my opinion, is that it is easier for Brits to prevent class-based systems because the existence of class and its effects on careers is widely accepted ( perhaps even more than is really jusitfied).

On the other hand, perhaps the Brits are more aware of class effects because those really are stronger and clearer than in France. Even though the french top universities are populated with mainly richer middle class children, there is, as far as I know, nothing so strong and clear as the large fraction of Oxbridge students from elite private schools.

So, the mild obsession of the Brits with fairness in education and careers might be the healthy result of efforts to make society as little class-based as possible. or it is a symptom of a society where class is important, and everything is needed to keep it in check. It is hard to say.

What’s English for ‘swot’? :)