No brainbox

by Chris Bertram on December 7, 2007

In the thread to Harry’s “post”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/12/05/what-are-snubbing-and-shunning/ on academies and Oxbridge, some of us got into a little exchange about “widening participation” and spotting “academic potential” (sorry for the scare quotes, Stuart). Now in the Telegraph there’s “the story of Barry Cox, the world’s only Scouse Cantopop star”:http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/foreign/richardspencer/dec07/cantopop.htm . Having left school with a bunch of poor to mediocre GCSEs and finding himself in a succession of unrewarding jobs, Cox decided, somewhat idiosyncratically, that the road to self-improvement lay via learning Cantonese with the proprietors of his local chippie. He managed in two years and is now a successful singer in Macau. Richard Spencer, author of the Telegraph article asks:

bq. someone, somewhere in Liverpool, particularly in Barry’s old school, should be asking themselves some questions about his achievement. How come a kid can master a truly difficult language, enough to forge a career in a highly competitive place like Hong Kong/Macau, but come out of the school as a “no brainbox, me” holder of five GCSEs just a couple of years before?

Good question. Lots of us have been signed up at some time in our lives to the idea that most people have a lot of unactualized potential and that the social structure of our societies (and institutional components like the education system) hold them back, undermine their sense of the possibilities, depress their confidence, tell them what is for “the likes of them” and so on. 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. As for the rest, they must do as they do.

Relatedly (via Loren King) there’s a “Scientific American article”:http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-secret-to-raising-smart-kids&print=true about how damaging it is when parents push a model of achievement according to which you’ve either got “it” or you haven’t. On this view some (how many?) kids acquire a belief about whether they are, or are not, (in Cox’s parlance) “brainboxes”. Children (and other people) with the theory that being a “brainbox” is an instrinsic property react to failure by drawing the conclusion that further study is not for them and that things are hopeless. Fortunately for him, it looks as if Barry Cox didn’t have that damaging mind-set, despite his “no brainbox” comment.

[Thanks to “Blood and Treasure”:http://bloodandtreasure.typepad.com/blood_treasure/2007/12/a-journey-of-10.html , where there’s more on Cox’s idiosyncratic choice of language/dialect.]

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1

Kevin Donoghue 12.07.07 at 10:18 am

Although the Christian Brothers who taught me had a well-deserved reputation for brutality, one thing I will say for them: they were already committed to (their own version of) the approach advocated by Professor Dweck long before she was born. Failure was always attributed to laziness, never to stupidity – a moral lapse to be punished, not a genetically-transmitted handicap to be compensated for. Their brand of bigotry certainly had nothing to do with softness or low expectations. When I follow the American debate about IQ (it seems to be an almost exclusively American thing these days, the British snob version is apparently dead) it amazes me that the CBS/Dweck viewpoint hardly gets mentioned.

2

Doormat 12.07.07 at 11:25 am

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.

3

magistra 12.07.07 at 1:23 pm

There are two obvious issues in the specific case you mention. One is that learning to speak a language well may require slightly different skills from academic study (even academic study of a language). Specifically for tonal languages (and Cantonese has a lot of tones) you need a very good ear. Also, I think I’m right in saying that Chinese languages generally have rather less grammar (tenses etc) to learn than many European languages, so if you find that aspect of language difficult, it would be a better choice. (Learning the vocabulary and characters is still an impressive achievement).

But the other issue is motivation; Barry Cox obviously really wanted to learn the language. Yes, a good teacher can increase their pupils’ motivation, but I’d be surpised if they can make someone who really doesn’t see the point of learning X learn it well.

4

Slocum 12.07.07 at 1:48 pm

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.

5

Rory 12.07.07 at 2:17 pm

In the UK and Australia, at least, a short-cut for someone like slocum’s software friend would be to apply for admission to a one-year coursework masters on the basis of relevant experience equivalent to a good honours degree. It sounds as if he could demonstrate that experience, and he would have a postgraduate degree at the end of it.

6

Tracy W 12.07.07 at 2:24 pm

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”.

7

magistra 12.07.07 at 2:32 pm

It’s misleading to blame the emphasis on credentials on the power of academic institutions: at least in the UK, the most powerful sector of academia has been very resistant to the idea of running any courses that were professionally useful (with the exception of law and medicine, sanctioned by the fact that they’d been useful since the Middle Ages). Oxford and Cambridge, for example, have only recently got management schools. The tendency to credentials has come either from government regulation (via the gradual widening of the principle that it would be useful to have an easy way of knowing that your doctor/engineer/accountant is likely to be minimally competent) or from industry bodies themselves wanting not to be seen as cowboys.

For mature students at least who go onto college Accreditation for Prior Learning is now quite normal. In fact I would say the problem in the UK is the opposite of credentialism: the media is always keen to stress how people can get to the top without any qualifications and that all you need is to follow your dream. Unfortunately, in nine out of ten cases, the Barry Coxes of this world would be better off in terms of a career going to an FE college and getting qualifications as a mechanic or other skilled trade.

8

Chris Bertram 12.07.07 at 2:38 pm

Tracy: up to a point. An issue that the other thread was grappling with was unequal access to universities. If you rely on demonstrated prior knowledge alone, then you advantage the people who benefited from good teaching (or teaching that effectively generates high A-level scores, anyway) at an earlier stage and disadvantage those who didn’t.

9

Ray 12.07.07 at 3:00 pm

To a great extent, I blame formal schooling—in particular, the monopoly that academic institutions have on printing parchment.

The problem is not with supply, but with demand. It is not the fault of the universities if a company is more impressed by parchment than by experience, is it?

10

harry b 12.07.07 at 3:17 pm

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?

11

Slocum 12.07.07 at 3:55 pm

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?

Yes, exactly. It’s not that there should be no certification, but rather that accredited institutions should not have a monopoly on certification.

Charging thousands of dollars to teach standard introductory economics out of a standard text (in a lecture format where students often, quite rationally, neglect to attend because there’s no need or benefit) — that’s an example of rent seeking in rather a pure form (but somehow I’m betting that particular example isn’t included in the course).

12

Matt 12.07.07 at 3:58 pm

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.)

13

GreatZamfir 12.07.07 at 4:11 pm

Some time ago I worked for a company in England that also was based in France and Germany, with headquarters in France.

A colleague had very serious problems with the apparently French procedure to base career decisions on the university one had gone to. Not so much that the people from better known universities were promoted more easily, but for many jobs the French simply required a certain university to even apply, let alone be selected.

He feared they would push this system on the company parts in other countries. He, and the English in general, were strong proponents of a ‘registered profession’ system, where you can get a certificate from a professional organization that states that altough you do not have a degree, your work experience shows that your skills are of comparable level to a degree.

I got the impression that this difference in opinion between the English and the French had, like many things in Britain, a class background. My colleague came from a working-class family and had only accidentily been to a university that the French considered ‘good’. He assumed, probably with good reason, that a strictly degree-based system would make it hard for working-class people to get good jobs.

The French on the other hand assumed, rightly or not, a much more egalitarian education system, where everyone with enough skills could in principle have obtained the necessary degrees.

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Ray 12.07.07 at 4:17 pm

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?)

15

lemuel pitkin 12.07.07 at 4:19 pm

The French on the other hand assumed, rightly or not, a much more egalitarian education system, where everyone with enough skills could in principle have obtained the necessary degrees

But of course that’s impossible, simply because there are a limited number of places at those schools.

This brings up a larger point, which applies both to universities and jobs: We should worry not just about who gets the good spots, but about making sure all spots are good spots.

16

Meh 12.07.07 at 4:53 pm

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.

17

Tracy W 12.07.07 at 5:11 pm

Tracy: up to a point. An issue that the other thread was grappling with was unequal access to universities. If you rely on demonstrated prior knowledge alone, then you advantage the people who benefited from good teaching (or teaching that effectively generates high A-level scores, anyway) at an earlier stage and disadvantage those who didn’t.

Well doesn’t this have something to do with those kids who benefited from good teaching actually being better prepared for university?

I have every sympathy for a student who, due to a sucky school, didn’t learn anything in high school. But I don’t think a university can fix that just by letting in unprepared kids. How can a student who doesn’t know basic calculus function in an engineeering class? How does a student who can’t write an essay function in a university-level English course?

I am aware that there are some differences between “passing an exam with the right name” and actually knowing the right material. But, well, the reasons we have teachers is to teach us stuff. Us humans are genuinely advantaged by good teaching, and disadvantaged by bad teaching. It’s sad that some people through no fault of their own fail to get good teaching, but I can’t see how university admission policies can fix that.

18

Chris Bertram 12.07.07 at 5:17 pm

Tracy:

1. The relevant contrast isn’t between people who know the stuff and people who don’t know anything.

2. You ignored my bit in parentheses. Not all of the teaching that reliably generates high A-level scores also prepares people effectively for university.

19

midori 12.07.07 at 5:19 pm

I think what’s being overlooked regarding testing leading to a certificate versus university leading to a certificate, is that they are quite similar.
Attending university is merely a very long, involved test that measures some things deemed necessary for a profession. Admittance does seem to be strongly biased by class and prior opportunities, but neither will automatically produce perseverance enough to finish. Attending university may, in some cases, instill values, perspectives, and beliefs that are useful to the target profession. This is a definite improvement over a single high stakes test who’s validity can easily be defeated through a single application of deception.

20

harry b 12.07.07 at 5:22 pm

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.

21

Matt 12.07.07 at 5:26 pm

_How does a student who can’t write an essay function in a university-level English course?_

If you spend much time with students (at least US students- I can’t comment on others) outside of the top universities you’ll find that this question has to be answered every semester. The answer is through painful and slow remedial work, mostly. Ideally this is done by people trained to apply it in special classes. Usually it is done by people poorly trained to do this on top of whatever else they are trying to teach.

22

Watson Aname 12.07.07 at 5:41 pm

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).

23

Watson Aname 12.07.07 at 5:43 pm

I should note 23 is based on North American schools … I have a much less clear picture of what is the case elsewhere. It seem to pretty much even out by grad school, regardless.

24

Sebastian Holsclaw 12.07.07 at 6:09 pm

“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.

25

novakant 12.07.07 at 8:43 pm

How does a student who can’t write an essay function in a university-level English course?

What Matt said. From my experience there are always quite a few bright and well-read students who have huge problems writing essays and often students who are less thoughtful, who simply don’t worry so much if what they’re saying can withstand scrutiny or amounts to much and approach such tasks in a more pragmatic fashion fare better in an academic environment. So yeah, talking about untapped potential, this is one of the things that should be taught at the very beginning and in a serious, not a painting by numbers, way.

26

bleh 12.07.07 at 8:55 pm

@17

what a load of rubbish.

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Tracy W 12.07.07 at 8:56 pm

1. The relevant contrast isn’t between people who know the stuff and people who don’t know anything.

No one said it was. But I do think that if you are going to do well at university a good base of academic knowledge is rather useful.

At least in maths-based subjects, each gap in what you do know makes life harder and harder, because maths is so cumulative. Ditto calculus and chemistry. I also found in history at high school that the more history I’d learnt the more I got out of the new bits I was learning. For example, once I’d studed Tudor and Jacobean England, a lot more about the structure of the 19th century NZ parliament made sense.

2. You ignored my bit in parentheses. Not all of the teaching that reliably generates high A-level scores also prepares people effectively for university.

I didn’t ignore it. I’d already addressed it in my comment 6, and saw no point in repeating myself. Clearly I was wrong. So, I’ll go into more depth. The relevant question is “do students who were never taught well enough to get good A-levels, or whatever the relevant entrance exam was, do well at uni anyway?”

After all, how can you think critically without a good base of things to think about?

Matt – how many of the students who must do the remedial classes eventually do well at uni? Remedial teaching is a hard job. Research in the US is that of those who have to take remedial maths classes, only 27% will eventually obtain a bachelors’ degree, compared to 58% of students who didn’t need remedial classes. http://www.ed.gov/about/bdscomm/list/mathpanel/4th-meeting/transcript1105.pdf. Now there are probably a lot of differences between students who need remedial maths and those who don’t, and a lot of things that cause students to drop out apart from academic preparation, but given the high cost of university, not just in fees but in opportunity cost for each year, letting in inadquately prepared students is expensive.

Watson – a highly-motivated student who knows no calculus may do better once they’ve taken their calculus class than an indifferent student who had an okay pass in calculus. But should they be doing their first calculus course at a rather expensive university or take a year, do the course somewhere cheaper that specialises in remedial education and perhaps work part-time?

Of course if Cambridge and Oxford staff have a comparative advantage in remedial education then no worries at all.

28

harry b 12.07.07 at 10:50 pm

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.

29

Watson Aname 12.07.07 at 11:11 pm

Tracy W: I think you overestimate the preparedness of all but the very best prepared high school students (a tiny number). They pretty much all need to redo calculus from the beginning, regardless what they nominally did in high school; thus it is a standard first year course. What I’m saying is that a motivated student who had no calculus before first year (but decent fundamentals) will typically do better than the one who has a high school course in it. It’s much the same with physics.

So your comment about doing it elsewhere (`remedial calculus’) is a valid question, but applies to the vast majority of all entering students. Really it comes down to who teaches service courses like this, and how.
Personally, I’d like to see the grade & high school curriculum throw out things like calculus and do a better job of fundamentals, but that seems to be unlikely at this point.

30

SG 12.08.07 at 3:41 am

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.

31

Matt 12.08.07 at 4:44 am

I’m not opposed to the apprentice model for legal training at all, Harry. I’d be happy to see it become more wide-spread. I do think that minimal competency requirements, such as the bar in some form or other, are necessary, though. Without even that the law would quickly, I think, degenerate even more into a market for lemons.

32

greensmile 12.08.07 at 2:11 pm

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.

33

s.e. 12.08.07 at 5:36 pm

“Why are stories like Cox’s so rare?”
Perhaps because most people in his situation don’t end up in the newspapers.

A friend of mine was a high school dropout who began learning mandarin working as a busboy in a chinese restaurant. By 23 he was managing a nightclub for party functionaries in the PRC and at 25 he owned a bar in Taipei. This was in the early 80’s.
Now he’s an importer, and I make some of my income working with him. He’s also very dyslexic. I’ve wondered if dyslexia causes as much trouble with chinese characters.
Education is about patience and the ability to sit on your ass. It’s about planning. It’s also about following order and kissing ass. Most of the time its not about picking up an instrument and using it.
Education and intelligence have less to do with one another than the educated want to believe.

34

klaj 12.08.07 at 8:11 pm

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…

35

Watson Aname 12.08.07 at 10:10 pm

35: No, what I’m saying is something different, but apparently not very clearly.

a) high schools teach calculus (and for that matter high school physics) but …

b) we can’t rely on the curriculum or the standards so …

c) we essentially reteach all this material anyway. There isn’t `some remedial calculus’. They mostly need calculus taught from the beginning, period.

There is some allowance made for `advanced placement’ courses, but often these aren’t as good as what they are supposed to replace. IB students are in better shape. Some schools & programs can get away with jumping over it, but that’s not usual

I’m certainly not saying you can take an 8th grader and throw them at this stuff and expect they will be find. The point about the 8th (to 10th or so, really) grade stuff is that this is what (and only what) it is assumed incoming college students *actually* know, and this mostly what gives people trouble as freshmen. I’ll agree that there is probably a strong correlation between those who have done well in a 11th or 12th year calculus course and those who have decent fundamental algebra etc. However, a motivated student with decent fundamentals will do just fine with the intro calculus stream (which is more ambitious what the high schools do, not that this is saying much), even though she is sitting in a class with people who have nominally `done’ calculus.

It’s much the same with intro physics. Nobody relies on the material in high school being mastered, it’s all covered again. Part of this is because physics typically repeats topics anyway (with better tools each time).

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greensmile 12.09.07 at 2:07 am

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.

37

SG 12.09.07 at 2:19 am

Google says they do

I feel dyslexic all the time in this country (Japan). I can see how it could easily be confused for a lack of effort – which is precisely the reason I am always mangling my characters.

38

Tracy W 12.10.07 at 9:48 am

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.

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Pete 12.10.07 at 11:37 am

Formalised anti-discrimination law forces employers to use paper-based systems rather than judgement-based systems. This is a good thing for discriminees and a bad thing for autodidacts.

The French system always strikes me as being more class-based than the British one, or at least with fewer prospects for changing your class as an adult as it’s so heavily determined by university.

I really wish it were possible to have a discussion on how to improve the British education system without getting bogged down in class trench warfare.

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GreatZamfir 12.10.07 at 12:34 pm

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.

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Pete 12.10.07 at 2:48 pm

While we’re on the subject, what’s French for “swot”?

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GreatZamfir 12.11.07 at 12:21 pm

What’s English for ‘swot’? :)

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