Math, Science Popular Until Students Realize They’re Hard

http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2013/07/08/math-science-popular-until-students-realize-theyre-hard/

by patmcguire • 13 years ago

195 243 13 years ago

blogs.wsj.com

This is so true. Not many students who are used to getting straight 'A's are okay with getting that 'B-' in organic chemistry after working their asses off studying. Its just a fact. Learning basic science takes dedication and discipline. The inspiring words of Michio Kaku do not make free-body diagrams any less mind numbing.

gfodor• 13 years ago

Hah, I like the part how students have a hard time accepting that even if they work hard, they won't do well.

Where I went to school, the classes were curved to a B-. So generally speaking, if you consider say a A- or above to be doing "well", most people were not doing well by a large margin. The truth is though that it's when you are sitting just below average, but not so far below that you're genuinely lost, but still genuinely struggling that you are probably at your optimal challenge level.

dragontamer2• 13 years ago

Indeed. This seems to be the main problem. One running joke around my family / friends is that a hardworking B/C student does best in Engineering majors, because they work hard and are used to getting poor grades anyway. They've already come across that problem in their life.

On the other hand, students who got straight A's throughout high school become surprised at the difficulty, get their first B in their lifetime, and feel bad about themselves... possibly even switching majors.

nrivadeneira• 13 years ago

I suppose I was fortunate that the time that I started my Mechanical Engineering degree had coincided with a transition to a general "idgaf" attitude about my grades.

mathattack2• 13 years ago

Similar. I was wired to take hard courses for the challenge, and just didn't care about the grades. But a lot of people are coddled and fear failure.

eshvk4• 13 years ago

The first time I came to India, I sucked at their grading system and it broke my bubble of being a precious snowflake who always did well. I think that was a good thing really; it got me used to the idea that grades could go fuck themselves. Much later, when I changed careers and started doing more math here in the U.S., it helped a lot because the whole idea of getting a B+ didn't matter so much. I knew a lot who were in my math classes who were probably smarter than me but dropped out because they couldn't handle the idea of struggling.

djKianoosh• 13 years ago

To this day I cherish the C's and B's I got at RPI and high school a whole heck of a lot more than any A. Struggling/pressure is a good thing.

Dewie2• 13 years ago

So generally speaking, if you consider say a A- or above to be doing "well",

This is so silly. With this scheme, only A- or above is good, while all of E, D, C, B and their various variations are just shades of suckiness, I guess. My university courses have seemed to be curved towards C (looking at the distribution of the grades), and for a good reason - it is right in the middle of the collection of passing grades.

Osmium5• 13 years ago

Title could almost be from The Onion.

But it's true. It is hard, but that's okay. The whole point of the grading system was to acknowledge subtlety; that it's okay if you don't have an A, because it doesn't mean you haven't learnt anything, it just means you haven't learnt everything [in that course]. But somehow many students seem to take it as the end of the world not to achieve that A, when really that isn't the important thing at all.

This is my own bias talking, but I think that tests were people routinely get above ~80% are badly designed tests, because set up the wrong expectations in students. If students expect 90-100% scores are possible, and then they start a subject where all of a sudden that's not true, then they're not going to deal with that well. Whereas if everyone's getting results in the 60-80% range, it sets up an attitude that "this is hard, but that's okay -- it's meant to be, and there's no shame in realising that there's a lot left to learn." Which I think is altogether more helpful...

WalterSear• 13 years ago

But somehow many students seem to take it as the end of the world not to achieve that A, when really that isn't the important thing at all.

They are, quite rightly, taking cues from the rest of the world. There is a difference in how we treat straight a students and everyone else.

npsimons• 13 years ago

This kind of discussion fascinates me; along with regularly participating in online "tests" that flat out claim you've mastered something after demonstrating minimal proficiency, I've also been contemplating depth of understanding, provoked by reading such things as "How to Read a Book".

Should test scores be curved? Or does that defeat the whole point of tests (ie, to verify proficiency)? What even denotes proficiency? Getting the answer right once? Ten times in a row? 100 times separated by other different questions?

I guess it ultimately comes down to measuring what you care about, but I think that tests and teaching in general could use a lot more discussion and analysis, and at least to me it's fascinating, from many angles (eg, as you mention, student attitudes and the best way to motivate people to truly learn).

antitrust5• 13 years ago

I think that tests and teaching in general could use a lot more discussion and analysis

You're right, but so many times when this is brought up, the result is one of those "express your feelings on this topic" type assignments. A few of those bad apples ruin it for everyone.

tracker1• 13 years ago

I think it is entirely possible to use a curve, or even a scale to adjust a percentage score to a numerical grade. You can establish a minimum acceptable proficiency... say 55%, less than that, you fail. over that, you can have a curve that adjusts against each student and other students in that class (or even prior classes) on the same level/exam for a final grade... accepting 10% will get a D, and 10% will get an A, with the rest spread evenly with a B and C.

comrade_ogilvy3• 13 years ago

Curriculum design and assessment design is not a new field, it is just an oft ignored field. The first step is to make very explicit goals. The downside of explicit goals is failure of the institution itself is potentially measurable. "Coverage" is a conveniently wishy-washy standard that makes it easy to pass the buck to the individual students -- "we covered that" has the convenient ring of authority.

Curving the grades is an awful idea, but how it is usually applied it is rarely harmful. Professors mostly use it defensively in favor of the student, to fudge the grades up when the test turns out to be harder on the students than the professor anticipated. I am sure an occasional professor does the opposite, but one can never be truly safe from terrible instructors (other than avoid them).

alexholehouse• 13 years ago

The idea of getting 80%+ in college would be absurd in the UK. While we don't have a precise GPA (and there are many issues with the British secondary, tertiary and quaternary education systems, so this is definitely not a UK>US post), typically in undergrad people get in the 50-80% range, which, in my opinion, allows for

1) Much more challenging exams

2) The realization that "getting everything right" is not really how any part of the real world works.

adw2• 13 years ago

For what it's worth, the curve at Cambridge, for Natural Sciences, was set such that 67% or thereabouts is a First.

Osmium5• 13 years ago

The idea of getting 80%+ in college would be absurd in the UK.

Indeed; that's the bias I was referring to in my comment above (I'm from the UK and I think, in this particular aspect at least, our system works better).

fractalsea• 13 years ago

What I don't like about the UK system is that even though in theory marks can range from 0 to 100 percent, it seems that for practically all students, the marks are garunteed to fall in the 55 to 75 percent range. I don't mean averages, I mean for each price of work.

To me, this completely negates the point of having 100 marks to choose from.

jerf• 13 years ago

College classes vary widely too in the US. I took classes where 100% was basically the expected grade, and I took classes where I got a 40%, which was among the highest grades in the course.

I think this variance is fine, depending on the course. It is reasonable for a foreign language course to expect a 100% on an exam, if they are testing and teaching to some particular guideline, for instance. It is also reasonable to push the limits in something like a physics course, to test both "can you regurgitate", "did you understand", and "no, really, did you really really understand"?

theorique• 13 years ago

Grading on a curve can influence things radically. At least in the case of larger classes, an experienced professor has enough different exams and papers to grade so he can get a good statistical distribution, determine who earned what grade, and assign based on some predetermined center and max/min.

So, for example, a 98-100% might mean "top student in the class that year", a 55% might mean "lowest scoring student who deserved to pass the class", and 75% might mean "right on the average that year". (YMMV, these numbers are illustrative and different colleges and programs will have their own conventions).

The "actual" or unadjusted scores might be quite different with no curve - for example, in the freshman calculus class I took, correctly answering 4 problems out of 10 on the exam was enough to earn a grade among the top few students of the year and a curved grade in the 90s, even if the "raw" score might be something like 35-37%.

FLUX-YOU• 13 years ago

2) The realization that "getting everything right" is not really how any part of the real world works.

If I'm out to be a doctor or an astronaut or an engineer, I'm likely going to question my ability to accomplish these if I'm made to feel that I've missed a bunch of knowledge on the tests. Those, and many others, are careers that ought to get everything right because of the consequences (they don't, of course, but why is college teaching this lesson?). Perhaps it's an American thing, but the fear of failure made me double check and re-study things for the better. I might've been more lazy if I had grown up with the rationale that "oh well, you can't get everything right", but perhaps there's more culture that plays into that.

When I get 90% or above on a test, I like the validation that I'm successfully learning near to the pace and complexity challenges set out by the instructor. I really don't like the idea of someone aiming to keep those results lower for exclusivity or other reasons.

I'd also be curious where the increased challenge comes from.

- Are the questions longer and require more steps?

- Do they require a leap in logic to 'discover' something while you're contemplating the question?

- Is it a huge amount of recollection?

- Any combination of the above?

wlesieutre2• 13 years ago

One other issue with math and science courses is that they constantly build on previous material. You get these long chains of courses in calculus and differential equations and who knows what else where if you didn't master the first one, you're going to have trouble with everything after it.

Getting a D in "British Civil Wars and Revolutions, 1639-1651" won't haunt you for the rest of college. A mastery of lower level European history courses might help you do well in that class, but you aren't in a position where forgetting old material means you don't even know how to start a single exam question.

antitrust5• 13 years ago

I question the value of memory-based education. Application of historical theory is a lot like coding, and requires some memory retention, but classes that test on historical detail seem to me to have missed the point.

fournm• 13 years ago

On the opposite end of the spectrum, there are frequently science and engineering tests where the expected average is around 30-50%! I'd argue those tests are more poorly designed, as they're either the wrong format or the professor isn't communicating information effectively at all.

Just because something is hard doesn't make it any easier on you, as a student, to have to remember and reconcile that a failing grade on an exam is expected and is more likely to cause serious panic about a curve.

EDIT: To be clear, the fact that below a 70% generally means "forced to retake" due to how GPA is handled in the US really isn't helping matters.

zhemao• 13 years ago

Well, in most science and engineering classes the final grades are curved, so it's still possible to get an A in the class even if you do worse than 80% on the exams.

gems7• 13 years ago

"But it's true. It is hard, but that's okay. The whole point of the grading system was to acknowledge subtlety; that it's okay if you don't have an A, because it doesn't mean you haven't learnt anything, it just means you haven't learnt everything [in that course]. But somehow many students seem to take it as the end of the world not to achieve that A, when really that isn't the important thing at all."

That's what I believed at first. Then I realized how concerned authorities are with grades. If you're looking to do work with some research group, people want to know your grades. If you want to get into certain graduate schools, you'll most likely end up competing with people with high grades. Grades aren't a super important determining factor but, of course, they are considered and they can be treated as a negative indicator if poor.

Nobody really cares that you decided to challenge yourself. If you don't at least try to optimize for grades, you're basically shooting yourself in the foot. If you don't optimize for grades, you'll be competing with people who do.

jey2• 13 years ago

That's only true in the absence of other signals. If you look at it as instead a problem of "how do I convince X that I am the person they're looking for?", you can consider all possible strategies, and additional signals that you could provide to demonstrate your worth. Grades are a very imperfect signal, but often times it's the only signal provided by the applicant.

Osmium5• 13 years ago

If you're looking to do work with some research group, people want to know your grades. If you want to get into certain graduate schools, you'll most likely end up competing with people with high grades.

As a counter-point to this, to anyone reading who might be discouraged, the research groups I personally know mostly care about sufficient grades (i.e. that you're smart, hard-working, not stupid). The ability to get outstanding grades doesn't correlate that well with research ability; it just correlates well with your ability to do exams.

Given sufficient grades, it's infinitely more important that, say, an addition to your research group is able to work well with the other people in it than what specific grades they got, and the people making the hiring choices are keenly aware of this.

And when you get beyond your PhD, it's your publication record that people are really going to care about anyway. If you get good papers into good journals, no one gives a crap about your grades.

beachstartup4• 13 years ago

Grades aren't a super important determining factor

i would disagree with this. they are THE determining factor in 9 out of 10 things you want to do post-college, and grades follow you for LIFE.

the reason i started a company is because i didn't have the grades to do anything else except be a bottom-rung coder (not even at a "good" company), which I did for a few years after school. i graduated a very good UC with a 2.01 C average (i BARELY graduated, i was put on academic probation 3x, and took an entire quarter off at one point). i'm not kidding around when i say "i'm a terrible student" like some people do - i actually had D's and F's and plenty of W's on my transcript.

even with 5+ years of owning a successful business, if i were to apply to b-school or masters/phd program, they'd probably reject my ass. when was the last time you heard of a C student getting into a worthwhile grad school?

Dewie2• 13 years ago

Where I'm from, practically only students that aspire to be doctors get "straight A's" in high school. If you get "straight A's" in elementary school, well you'd better not be too shy because you might end up on regional or national television.

Grade inflation has gone too far when kids that get straight C's are hardly trying, and getting "straight A's" is only a minor achievement in moderately ambitious circles. You could have the most brilliant person - given she also had no problem utilizing that brilliance in a typical school setting - go through the entire system and on paper she would be indistinguishable from an average kid with solid work ethic.

Personally I went to university and studied computer science courses as well as more soft courses, and I have better grades than I did in high school. Of course a part of that is because I enjoy at least parts of all the courses I've had to take.

enraged_camel2• 13 years ago

>But somehow many students seem to take it as the end of the world not to achieve that A, when really that isn't the important thing at all.

It IS the end of the world because it directly affects your job prospects after graduation. That's what it really comes down to. Most HR departments put a disproportionate amount of emphasis on GPA. When looking at two candidates from two equally popular schools, the candidate whose exams were easier will be preferred because, with the same amount/level of knowledge, he/she got higher grades.

It doesn't end there. The success of graduates in the job market ties directly back to the popularity of the school, which in turn determines how much funding the school can ask for in the state budget.

jlgreco7• 13 years ago

Does anybody care about GPA after the first job?

AFAIC, the way to do it is to go to a school that lets you get at least one internship/co-op under your belt, then use that to never tell anybody your GPA (if it is shit anyway, no harm telling people your GPA if it is good). Works best if you can get the people you interned with to make an offer to hire you straight out of school. After that first job I don't see GPA mattering much one way or the other, your last employer should carry far more weight.

My entire school career I never broke a 3.0 (for general courses) for more than a year, but everything has turned out pretty swell for me. I mean, I did get lucky getting accepted to the college that I did with my high-school GPA, but after that it was fairly merit-based I like to think.

Looking back, I don't have regrets. I didn't give myself a heart attack or turn myself into a nervous wreck but I still learned what I wanted from school and enjoyed the process.

technotony• 13 years ago

The solution to this is standardized Z-scores for every subject, so everyone is on a normal distribution and it's the same no matter which major you take.

bennyg2• 13 years ago

Sometimes.

I graduated with a 2.8 and an Art degree from a state school (albeit a good one). I thought most of my assignments were bullshit and didn't do some of them - who wants to design another fucking brochure for a fake client. I spent my senior year learning how to program and launching an app (Red Cup on the App Store for those interested).

Not doing the schoolwork and instead focusing on actual career development got me a job when I graduated. I've never put my GPA on my résumé, and I never will. It doesn't matter for the things I want to do in life.

glesica• 13 years ago

Huh? I have never known someone whose employer demanded to see a transcript. Not saying it doesn't happen, just that I don't believe it is as common as you seem to imply. Graduate schools want transcripts, yes, but they are generally more concerned with GRE scores than GPAs.

frozenport• 13 years ago

Never wrote my GPA and got a job offer from 2 top tier tech companies. One asked before issuing the offer. Software programmers have it easy because at age 20 half our CV is experience, while an industrial engineer is lucky if they set foot on a factory floor.

eli_gottlieb5• 13 years ago

And that doesn't even consider pre-university studies, where having less than an A/B average certainly does make you unattractive to all decent universities!

Our entire educational system is geared around "Produce excellence or die trying, there is no place for mediocrity." Predictably, this causes students to look for ways to easy apparent excellence.

The fact that actual excellence comes from a philosophy that's more like "Do the impossible, see the invisible" than "successfully regurgitate 100% of what you were told" doesn't even show up in the educational system until the grad-school level.

BillyMaize• 13 years ago

I totally agree with this. I recently had a job interview at a great company (I have a friend who works there so I know all the details) and was interviewed by three engineers who loved me. I got an email from someone in HR saying the engineers thought I would be a great fit and they wanted to hire me as long as I had at least a 3.0 GPA. Turns out I was about 0.1 point short and that killed my chance to work there. GPA plays too big of a role in most HR departments.

porter• 13 years ago

The truth is in most college courses that grades reflect how well you did relative to the rest of the class. Not how well you know the material.

Glyptodon• 13 years ago

I don't really think that's the issue. I have a science degree, but getting it was to a certain extent an exercise in masochism.

Highlights of my college experience (probably 1/3 of the science courses I took might have had some kind of issue like these):

1. Exams filled with complex and abstract trick problems that differed substantially from assigned homework.

2. Professor who, when asked a minor question about something spent 30 minutes lecturing the class on 'RTFT,' as derived from 'RTFM.' Ironically, the confused student was likely the only one who had actually RTFT'd.

3. Lots of confusing, poorly described assignments. Sometimes assignments were so bad even the TAs had no idea what was going on.

4. Horrible textbooks, often written by departments to raise money rather than for quality or readability.

There's really a lot of room for improved instructional quality in my opinion.

Of course this was often compounded by the relatively poor quality of pre-college math and science education in K-12 public schools.

Students being overconfident and unprepared for anything but 'success' and mental transitions from 70-80-90/A-B-C traditional grading to schemes that are based on std deviations or content mastery can be uncomfortable, but I don't think that they're the root of most student's problems, though I do think some professors use such schemes to try and cover for their poor teaching.

jacques_chester3• 13 years ago

Most academics don't want to be teachers. They became academics so that they could do research. Many see teaching as a nuisance that "pays the rent", so to speak, and do the absolute minimum in order to scrape by.

Some professors love to teach and everyone remembers them fondly. I had one professor who'd taught about 2/3rds of the courses at my university over the years. You could always tell he'd taught a course in the past because subsequent professors always retained the assignments he'd created -- they were just too good to replace.

I was lucky to have him as my honours supervisor.

chris_j• 13 years ago

What does the T stand for in RTFT?

kryten• 13 years ago

Sounds exactly like my EE degree.

I left knowing absolutely fuck all other than how to pass a test through cramming yet got a 1st. I didn't deserve it.

I spent 5 years the moment I hit industry relearning everything and fudging what I could with my then HP48 calculator which had a solver and equation library. It basically saved my arse.

My first job was to design and construct a prototype design for an instrumentation amplifier but we'd never even been taught how to lay shit out on a PCB.

Now I know what I'm doing but have bailed out into software as there is more demand, but I get the feeling my story is quite common.

DevX101• 13 years ago

I'm reminded of my physics professor, who after giving a test where the class average was 82%, stated that 'either this class is incredibly smart, or my test was incredibly easy'. The next exam, we were humbled with a class average of ~40%.

Apparently we weren't incredibly smart.

jussij2• 13 years ago

This reminds me of one of my first year university maths classes.

With two weeks to go, the class was getting a bit restless and a few people where mucking up throwing paper air planes.

Unfortunately one stray plane smashed into the blackboard nearly hit the prof in the back of the head.

The lecture theatre went deadly silent. The prof turned around, collected his notes, wished us all good luck in the upcoming end of year exam and walk out of the lecture.

He also went M.I.A. for the remaining four lectures in the two weeks that followed.

But he got his revenge, by setting one of the hardest first year maths exams, which ended up having an average mark well below 50%.

So many people failed the faculty had to lower the pass mark.

kaitai2• 13 years ago

These wrong expectations have been carefully cultivated for over a decade in students who get to good colleges. For over a decade, they've been getting good scores and they've been made to feel that a good score is the inevitable and deserved outcome of "trying". (The kids for whom this is not true mostly don't end up at good colleges.) "If students expect 90-100% scores are possible, and then they start a subject where all of a sudden that's not true, then they're not going to deal with that well." And they're evaluating you, the professor.

As the professor, you've either got tenure and you don't need to care toooo much about those evaluations, or you are pre-tenure at a research U and you've got to keep 'em reasonable while you crank out papers, or you're pre-tenure at a teaching college and you've got to keep them GOOD. Those evaluations have got to stay above a certain level, though, especially in this job climate. Why go to the trouble of resetting students' expectations by broaching those subjects students will struggle with? So keep things easy.

But then you're to a point in math or physics at which you can't continue avoiding the topics that are taxing intellectually. So you go into it and your students are sophomores with 13 years of straight As behind them and your star student starts to have a slightly tough time with multivariable Taylor series and she gets a 78% on the second midterm. She's totally mortified and gets her grade back up to an A- or B+, but at the end of the semester visits you in your office to apologize and tell you she's changing her major to sociology. She realizes that a B+ tells her that she just can't succeed in mathematics even though she likes it.

And maybe your end-of-semester evaluations for that class are overall pretty good, recovering from the mid-term evaluations that were so stressed out, and you've dealt with the seven requests to take the final late to accommodate vacation or extra study time. Pretty good means you can breathe a sigh of relief in that respect... but you keep thinking about that student who left math because she got one 78% on a midterm. You tell her you got a year of straight Cs in real analysis and still got into graduate school and maybe she wavers for a moment.

Only a moment. "But you're different. You're good at math."

Students conclude they "don't have a talent" for math/science. They don't understand that "talent" is bullshit. Stubbornness, on the other hand, means something.

geebee2• 13 years ago

Believe it or not, the title actually is from the Onion.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/national-science-foundation...

feverishaaron• 13 years ago

This article seemed to point out a problem with perception of "the value of a letter grade" rather than a lack of motivation to do hard work.

It indicated to me that grades, rather than the outcome from learning, are dangerously overvalued in our education and employment systems.

antitrust5• 13 years ago

" One of the things we’ve seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless — no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there’s a slight correlation. Google famously used to ask everyone for a transcript and G.P.A.’s and test scores, but we don’t anymore, unless you’re just a few years out of school. We found that they don’t predict anything. "

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-b...

banachtarski3• 13 years ago

I grew up in the American public school system (and a decent one at that). One thing I could never understand was the purpose of summer break. I understand that to many kids, summer break was a sacred multi-month period but to me, the opportunity cost seems significant. In those summers, I learned geometry, physics, biology, multivariable calculus, and read tons of books while other kids had "traditional" vacations that did nothing to reinforce what they had learned the year before.

I know that rest and relaxation are also important to fostering a child's creativity and independence, but there is certainly a tradeoff, and I am wondering if we are nowhere near the correct balance.

Daishiman2• 13 years ago

Studying should not be the most important part of childhood, and knowing how to enjoy time off is a life skill that a lot of "high achievers" are sorely missing.

banachtarski3• 13 years ago

Oh I completely agree. This is still something that I struggle with 20-25 years after elementary school. Again, I'm questioning the balance. There probably is something to be said for more frequent but shorter breaks too, which I am taking a liking towards.

xyzzyz• 13 years ago

The system isn't particularly designed with focus on kids learning things.

psbp3• 13 years ago

If I could hazard a guess, I think the popularity of abolishing the summer break started around the time when the sunbelt started to see a huge migration influx. Energy costs skyrocket for large buildings (like public schools) during the summer months, plus outdoor sports are untenable because of the extreme heat, so it would be a huge obstacle for many organized sports.

Just a guess. I agree otherwise. Public schools could have a more rigorous curriculum while being much more relaxed if the semesters weren't condensed into 4-5 months.

gohrt• 13 years ago

Summer break is older than air conditioning. It was design to accomodate the farming lifestyle, where kids needed to work the farms when crops were cropping up.

etioyuahgdhjdkg• 13 years ago

Live does not revolve around "school", and there should be time (and lots of it!) to learn outside of it. Therefore, summer vacation.

antitrust5• 13 years ago

In my observation, you're correct. School teaches a narrow subset of what must be learned, and emphasizes a passive attitude toward learning. It's better to let kids learn on their own. Some of them will grow up to be socially powerful, or athletic, or even self-starters like hackers, and for them, this "free time" is more important than school.

rfnslyr• 13 years ago

The average student does not give a flying fuck about what they study. That 4 month break is the only thing that keeps them going. It sucks, but I see it as beneficiary to people who are interested in their subjects. It's a good balance.

baq• 13 years ago

it's easy: life is not about reading books and attending school. or working, for that matter.

fierycatnet• 13 years ago

I grew up in Russia and attended school there until 9th grade and when I went to American HS it buffled me that regular school day is so much longer but the quality of education in STEM is so much poorer. If I had to stay through out the summer studying then I probably would end up with ritalin for 'ADD'. I did not enjoy HS in US at all, it was like one big kindergarten for teenagers, so dreadful. It did not prepare me for college, but it's ok because my freshmen year was nearly identical in difficulty.

banachtarski3• 13 years ago

With STEM in the US unfortunately, you will find that the quality varies heavily depending on the socioeconomic status of the school district's inhabitants.

protomyth• 13 years ago

Some of summer break can be explained by farming... but...

Summer is to learn all the other stuff like playing and working and socializing. Summer is the time to do what you want and figure out who you are. Summer is the opportunity to experience programs and activities that schools just cannot do.

The break is important and school isn't the only teacher. The idea of 12 month schools so students "won't forget what they learned" tells me the aren't really learning it anyway.

polemic• 13 years ago

"Math, Science Popular Until Students Realize They’re Hard"

Well, if that's not "begging the question" then I don't know what is.

If math & science is so hard, the real question should be: why the hell is everything else so 'easy'?

psbp3• 13 years ago

I think the problem is skill related. Most U.S students just don't have the proper foundation in math to do well in physics, engineering, or even bio and chemistry.

I don't think majors like philosophy or english are implicitly any easier (I went to a school where they were seemingly pretty difficult majors), but they're much easier in comparison to subjects where you many students lack years of fundamental work.

eshvk4• 13 years ago

I have spent time in educational systems outside the U.S., I don't think it is a U.S. centric problem. Math and the sciences are extremely cumulative, this means that you have to keep at it. That in turn either requires passion or a system much like exists in China/India where you have an entire nation designed to put as much pressure on kids to make sure they get good grades on one silly exam or the other.

This shit is hard, which is why not a lot of people survive at it. I don't see how America can move to the Asian system of training without a lot of people here rebelling against that. Maybe an alternative would be to expose kids to the idea that life is actually hard in the real world sooner.

auctiontheory2• 13 years ago

In my experience, it was quite easy to take and even do well in upper-division humanities classes (specifically philosophy) without any lower-division work in the major. Jumping from high school to upper-division STEM classes would be tough.

com2kid• 13 years ago

If math & science is so hard, the real question should be: why the hell is everything else so 'easy'?

Look at usage.

I majored in CS, minored in Mathematics, yet as a programmer, I do more communicating in English than anything resembling math, and about an even amount communicating ideas and coding.

Growing up, everyday we speak, talk, write. We live history all around us, we see TV specials about WW2, parents and grandparents tell stories about their childhoods.

When is math truly used? On occasion, sure, it serves its purpose quite well. But in day to day life? One does not go around taking the derivative of arbitrary objects, but one may very well be called upon to present a persuasive argument or find a moment to whisper poetry in a loved one's ear.

It may very well be a case that our daily living does more to reinforce materials learned aside from the math and sciences.

selimthegrim2• 13 years ago

Real research mathematics, that which can't be reduced to mental calculation, requires a command of verbal reasoning well beyond what it takes to win at analogies on the SAT (as does theoretical physics).

It can also add to your ability to express yourself.

I very concisely was able to get my feelings about Mitt Romney across to my math major roommate when I stated that Romney's ilk believed the well ordering principle could proven to apply to people and not just integers.

Another less esoteric example is this James Fallows article about the Carter administration

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1979/05/the-pass... (ctrl-F cube root)

This was particularly chuckleworthy because I had just encountered a bug in the TI calculator system (I used to work for a TI subcontractor) where to make the cube root of -1 just be -1 (ie always taking the principal branch for the unwashed masses of eighth graders who knew nothing of complex numbers), TI decided to have negative rational numbers with an odd denominator have odd roots go to -1, and even denominators numerically evaluate. (Try graphing the cube root function on your TI and see the function go all over the place for negative values, this is why) When we complained that it was screwing up the numerics we were trying to code, we were told "it's a bug, not a feature". I referred to it as "circumcising the cube root" in a drunken email to said math major.

eli_gottlieb5• 13 years ago

or find a moment to whisper poetry in a loved one's ear.

You mean people actually do that? I thought we all just whispered ridiculous jokes and stupid memes to our loved ones and then pretended to the outside world it was fine poetry.

parennoob• 13 years ago

I work with people who mostly grew up and did their schooling (including college) in the US. Apparently even engineering students here are supposed to take a couple of language/other liberal arts style classes.

This being the case, I'm not sure why the grammar, sentence construction, and spelling of a lot of people in the States is really bad. I'd definitely be for the theory that English (and possibly other liberal arts subjects) is not taught in even a slightly rigorous way here.

jlgreco7• 13 years ago

I'd definitely be for the theory that English ... is not taught in even a slightly rigorous way here.

It isn't. Public schools are haphazard, it is rarely taught well there. It isn't generally included in the sort of language/liberal arts classes that engineering students might be required to take (those are going to be more along the line of literature or creative writing classes).

It is probably taught well in catholic schools, if anywhere.

hackinthebochs• 13 years ago

This is likely an unpopular opinion, but: Math and Science are hard because most people simply aren't wired for high level abstract logical thinking. Teaching Shakespear or physics to a monkey are equally as hard. Teaching Shakespear to a human is much easier because we are wired for that type of reasoning. Most people are not wired for scientific thinking.

VLM2• 13 years ago

We have a large media industry focused on indoctrinating people to be entertained by drama, yet fooled for profit thus critical thinking is looked down upon. Any surprise it turns out that way?

yid• 13 years ago

Thought I'd share my experience initially majoring in Physics (I ended up going with the "easier" (for me) computer science).

I wanted to be a physicist really bad. However, I did not have any advanced placement credit in math. I started college taking Calculus I along with the basic intro physics courses. The first year was fine. The second year was largely devoted to quantum mechanics, which is where the trouble started. Semester 1 of my sophomore year, I was taking Calculus III and Differential Equations. Unfortunately, a few weeks into the curriculum, we started using partial differential equations everywhere -- I barely even knew how to solve basic differential equations! Even more unfortunate was the fact that every other student in the dwindling Physics class had advanced placement credit and already had the prerequisite math.

It totally killed the joy I initially found in Physics. I found that I just couldn't make up the lost ground myself, and ended up dropping out of Physics.

guelo• 13 years ago

Sounds like a badly designed curriculum if the prereqs weren't required before they were needed.

thebooktocome2• 13 years ago

I'm not entirely sure how knowing a standard undergrad PDE course would help in understanding the various physicist-specific techniques that go into solving the Schroedinger equation. I don't really understand why OP thought they needed to grok ODEs before being able to solve PDEs; the two fields have relatively small intersection.

azmenthe• 13 years ago

Yea sounds like it, I took the standard math track at my college and never had any problem with my upper level physics courses but most of my fellow students constantly complained their lack of math understanding was severely hurting their physics education.

I wonder if most physics curriculum's underestimate the amount of time it takes to truly become competent with calculus/DE tools. I may of only escaped because I loved math and did a lot of self study out of pleasure.

antitrust5• 13 years ago

Hard, or just detail-oriented?

pge• 13 years ago

One of the other issues is lack of adequate high school preparation. One of the factors I saw in college (15 years ago) as a Physics major was that a lot of students that wanted to study physics (or other sciences) just didnt have adequate foundational knowledge coming out of HS. If a year of remedial courses is required just to get to the point where you can take freshman level classes, it becomes very difficult to complete the coursework required for the major, because many of the courses have to be taken sequentially. You can't just load up on a bunch and take classes in parallel to catch up. If you start a year (or more behind) or try to switch into the major late, you can't finish in four years.

Humanities major fields seemed more tolerant of lack of preparation - one could switch into them late or do some remedial work before diving in deep and still get the required coursework done because courses did not depend as much on one another and could be taken in parallel.

lmartel2• 13 years ago

It's very upsetting, though, to be told you can't study or have a career in the subject you're interested in because you lived in the wrong district when you were 13 years old. I don't know if this is a problem with high schools, colleges, or both, but it was a large factor in choosing my own major.

Daishiman2• 13 years ago

Hard? Hell in the public university system in many countries lots of courses are downright impossible to nail; even a passing grade is worthy of honor (and we're not talking about first-year filter courses, just solid, important subjects).

Degrees would be much more valuable if they required more than mere competence to pass. I'm not claiming this should be the modus operandum, but it's certainly something to ponder about, instead of believing that a difference of a few hundredths of points in a test have any real-life meaning.

dropdownmenu• 13 years ago

It is important to note the sample set of the survey: "The researchers surveyed 655 students entering Berea College, a private liberal arts college located in Kentucky, in the falls of 2000 and 2001."

I have a feeling that the results of the survey would be different at a public university with strong science and engineering programs.

My personal experience has been that many people will change their intended degrees, but rarely have I seen someone completely withdraw from science or engineering programs

BrandonMarc• 13 years ago

Agreed. A few hundred kids at one atypical college does not a full pattern make.

Also, does it bug nobody else that this "news" is from research done a dozen years ago?

newbie12• 13 years ago

Yeah, this study is a joke-- Berea is really atypical, I've visited. The town is charming with a serious mountain artistic vibe. The school has a religious mission and outreach to non-traditional students in Appalachia.

mathattack2• 13 years ago

It seems like a strange methodology to get at what's an obvious truism. Berea college (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berea_College) is very atypical. It's a small school, with a mission of helping poor Appalachian students get an education. 100% of the students are on scholarship. 100% have paid jobs while in school.

It's hard to extrapolate from this to a national poll. It would be better to include Penn State, Michigan and University of Texas to understand national trends.

That said, this is a truism. The fields pay well because they are hard enough to scare away many students, and they have good jobs. Other fields are difficult too (say Philosophy?) but they don't have good jobs on the other side so people are less tempted.

dvt8• 13 years ago

First of all, I don't think math/science is harder than history or art. I consider both Newton and Shakespeare to be geniuses; same with Bach and Leibniz. I think it's an established empirical fact (maybe not -- see NYT article) that to become an expert at anything, it will take you upwards of 10,000 hours -- be it playing violin, studying history, or doing number theory. So I don't think the effort is any differentiating factor.

But I do think that in math/engineering classes there is a disproportional amount of trickery. There are numerous memes that exemplify this: http://www.thefunnyblog.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/funny...

You'd be surprised how often this happens. In my calculus classes it was virtually rampant. We'd get some material that was non-trivial to figure out on an exam. That's just bad teaching. Sure, some people will argue that it separates those a better grasp of the material from those with a worse one (maybe it does), but to me it seems unfair. Say I'm not a bright student but I understand the homework very well; the exam, however, uses a non-trivial combination of the elements found in the homework. I personally think that's bullshit. Why not go over the most mind-numbingly difficult problems in class? Often times, there are only a limited number of tricks that can trip you up; if professors would go over these, everyone would pass. But I guess we don't want that (why not?).

Consider an analogy: I decide to prepare for a running competition. My trainer shows me how to keep my heart-rate up, how to jog briskly, etc. All this is done on a treadmill on the low setting. Come competition day, it turns out that it's a 25k through the Australian outback. I'm not sure how anyone in their right mind would think the trainer did a good job if he knew exactly what I was getting into.

Afforess2• 13 years ago

On a tangent:

to become an expert at anything, it will take you upwards of 10,000 hours

Wrong. 10,000 hours will make a unskilled person moderately skilled, but if they lack the innate talent or intellectual capacity, it won't make them an expert. This sort of meritocracy where people just need to try harder is completely wrong, and dangerous to encourage.

[1] http://healthland.time.com/2013/05/20/10000-hours-may-not-ma...

I agree with your overall point though.

dvt8• 13 years ago

I'm not sure how the article supports your argument. Looking at its conclusion, it looks like the "10,000-hour hypothesis" is an open question (at the very least).

dalke8• 13 years ago

That Time article leads with a mischaracterization of the debate. I haven't read Outliers, but I did read a bit of K. Anders Ericsson's original work. Ericsson qualified the 10,000 hours saying that it had to be a certain type of deliberative practice, and that there was a limit of about 4 hours per day which could be spent on it.

In other words, it has never been the case that 10,000 hours is all that's needed, only that that is a minimum number.

However, you reject here Ericsson's entire thesis, that being summarized in the Time article as "Ericsson doesn’t deny that genetic limitations, such as those on height and body size, can constrain expert performance in areas like athletics — and his research has shown this. However, he believes there is no good evidence so far that proves that genetic factors related to intelligence or other brain attributes matter when it comes to less physically driven pursuits."

You made a claim that "innate talent or intellectual capacity" is essential to being an expert. This is a widely held belief, first articulated (I'm told) in Vasari's "The Lives of the Artist" (1568). The debate is - where is the evidence which justifies this widely held belief?

You see a danger in promoting this "meritocracy" ideal. I have two objections to that. First, I think you are using the term incorrectly. Suppose we only have innate talents as part of our genetic nature. Under a meritocracy, those who are naturally smarter, etc. will get a better job or higher position than those who aren't. It doesn't make a difference if it was achieved through deliberative practice or innate nature. Instead, I think the better word is 'egalitarianism.'

Second, it reminds me too much of various view of "noble blood" and rusty arguments that women by nature can't do X, that black people by nature can't do Y, and that Swedes are by nature dumb squareheads. There's any number of these stereotypes once fervently held to be true, but which haven't stood up to the test of time.

Also, there shouldn't be a good argument that "people just need to try harder." Ericsson's view is that "deliberate practice requires effort and does not lead to immediate reward" (quoting from a summary by David Zach Hambrick). There are many good reasons to not become an expert on a topic, including: 1) the person could be interested in becoming an expert in another topic, 2) it can be hard to find the 10,000 hours needed for practice, especially if that time is spent making money needed for rent and food, and 3) other requirements may be missing; it's hard to be an expert surfer if one lives in Colorado, or downhill skier in Miami.

The path towards being an expert in anything is chaotic. I am one of the world experts in writing software for a certain subset of biochemistry. But had I gotten a different job just out of college, I would probably be in a completely different field. It's really hard for me to believe that I was born with this talent, given how much education and job-related experience I had through to get to this point.

phaus3• 13 years ago

When you look at what many great accomplishments, you often find a person that had a drive to succeed in his field that bordered on an obsession. When you are truly so passionate about something that it becomes your entire life, I believe it is possible to appear as if you are a genius, or maybe to even become one. In fact, I think that true genius can be attributed more to hard work than anything else.

Look at people like Bobby Fischer, he spent an unhealthy amount of time playing / studying chess (supposedly like 18 hours a day), and it destroyed every other relationship in his life. I'm sure he was intelligent, but without developing an obsession with chess, he probably wouldn't have been much of a player.

There was also a kid whose father forced him to study every waking moment, according to an IQ test, he was a super-genius (I think it was over 200), but in reality he was just a poor kid with a fucked-up, abusive father. I remember reading about it in the news, but I can't seem to find the article.

vacri2• 13 years ago

It depends on how high you set the bar for 'expert'. If you mean 'doyen', then yes, 10k isn't going to do it. If you mean 'has a solid grasp of the ins and outs, avoids common pitfalls, and can carry an informed, intelligent conversation on the topic', then 10k will do it.

rayiner2• 13 years ago

Exams like that are where the teaching function of school collides headlong with the (more important) sorting function of school. I found the phenomenon frustrating in engineering school, and even more frustrating in law school. They both prominently featured exams that looked nothing like what was taught in class. They both favor the kind of cynical person who ignores the larger ideas taught in class to focus on day 1 on the final exam, and also the socially competent who can get previous exams and the like from social networks. They also, completely incidentally, identify the few people who are so beyond the curve they could answer anything the professor might ask without studying, which lends them an air of legitimacy that perpetuates their existence.

You see it less in the humanities because the sorting function of school is so much less important than the teaching function. No lucrative jobs are riding on getting a 3.7 in art history versus a 3.4. (Everyone will be unemployed anyway...)

As an aside, I'm convinced grades are just an awful aspect of "education." They don't serve any purpose other than making it easier for employers to figure out who to hire, which I don't think is a legitimate function of school.

dvt8• 13 years ago

The irony here is that most R&D/engineering jobs do their own training. My mom, for example, works as a chem engineer/researcher -- every time they hire someone, they also train them. I think it's ironic that people bust their asses in school to get a 3.5+ and end up being trained like little robots anyway once they find their "dream job." Anyone with some elementary knowledge of chemistry could pass these training courses and get to work in a couple of weeks.

It just goes to show how disconnected academia is from real life.

huherto• 13 years ago

They don't serve any purpose other than making it easier for employers to figure out who to hire, which I don't think is a legitimate function of school.

Interesting point. At the same time it justifies the existence of schools since a lot of people go to school to get a better job.

tehwalrus• 13 years ago

"the socially competent who can get previous exams and the like from social networks"

side note: at Cambridge, every past exam in every subject[1] is in the college library[2], and it's assumed that you'll photocopy them and work through the last 5 years or so for practice. This doesn't help much, of course, because you get a new crazily difficult exam every year[3].

[1] probably not going all the way back to 1209... [2] i.e. 50-odd small libraries near the students' accommodation, mine was accessible 24 hours a day. [3] unless it's Terentjev in TP1 (Theoretical Physics 1), who just set us a bunch of previous years questions, which I hadn't bothered to finish solving because they never reused questions. I'm not bitter, I promise...

gems7• 13 years ago

"We'd get some material that was non-trivial to figure out on an exam. That's just bad teaching."

You should reconsider what you just said. I tend to think that most 'good' universities do that.

dvt8• 13 years ago

The quoted part is admittedly a bit awkward to read -- I exemplified exactly what I meant in my analogy. It's true that most good universities "sort" rather than "teach." My argument is that sorting is not what schools were invented for. We have Olympiads for that.

model-m• 13 years ago

As a teacher, I take strong issue with dvt's comment: "We'd get some material that was non-trivial to figure out on an exam. That's just bad teaching."

Exams are supposed to be non-trivial, if they are to test your understanding of the material. When I teach freshman calculus, I invariably get this kind of comments from students who aced math in high school because they had basically memorized all possible question patterns from the textbook. But did they understand it? More often than not, they hadn't, really. And when they get a question that doesn't fit a pattern they've seen before, they call it a "trick", when it's anything but.

I work hard at getting my students to understand that math is not about memorizing stuff but about understanding stuff. You have to know the basic concepts and techniques by heart, of course, same as any subject, but anything more is just icing (unless your brain works in such a way that memorizing patterns helps you understand general principles, in which case memorize away, but don't mistake the means for the end.

Many students tell me they don't understand why they got a failing mark on an exam because they did all the homework and/or put in tens of hours of study. They seem to think that these actions should somehow guarantee them a passing grade, and if it didn't, it's obviously because the exam was unfair.

Now let me be perfectly clear: I don't give hard exams. In fact, most of the questions I ask are downright easy, provided you understand the material. Here's an example: "Sketch the graph of a twice-differentiable function f(x) whose domain is the real numbers and which satisfies the following two conditions: f'(x) is negative for all x, and f''(x) always has the same sign as x." This was in fact a question in my calc 1 midterm last year.

Out of 60 students, 10 did not write anything. 10 drew something that was not the graph of a function. 10 drew a function that did not satisfy any of the requirements. 10 drew a decreasing function but got the concavity wrong somehow. 20 gave a correct answer. (This is all approximate, of course.) The average mark for this question was probably around 2/5.

Was this exam question harder than my homework problem sets? Absolutely not! It's just different. Here's an example of a homework question relating to the same material in a similar way: "A differentiable function f(x) is such that f'(x) never changes sign. What can be said about the number of zeros of f?" This is more difficult than the exam question because the step linking the sign of f' to the number of zeros of f (drawing a graph) is not explicitly suggested, and because the answer is "f has at most one zero" and not "f has exactly one zero".

erehweb• 13 years ago

Consider f(x) = 0. f'(x) = 0, so never changes sign. f has infinitely many zeros.

dvt8• 13 years ago

You cleverly avoid my analogy. I'll give another.

You teach someone how to do X, lets assume this goes something like: Step 1, Step 2, Step 3, Step 4, done. You then teach someone how to do Y, this goes like: Step 5, Step 6, done. On the exam you ask someone to do Z. This follows from a nontrivial combination of Step 1, Step 3, Step 6, done. If anyone gets it right, don't flatter yourself. You didn't teach them how to do Z.

Either they have a sort of a priori intuition of the material (this is how I get by most of the time), they got lucky, or they had someone else teach them. Mathematicians (and other academics) feel the need to make their subjects so obtuse they seem insurmountable. Math is not hard - some guy saw an interesting behavior of a function and wanted to see what happens when he tries to differentiate it. Programming is not hard - some girl thought she could make her life easier by writing a program that writes other programs. This pretty much exemplifies all of human understanding. It's not much more than that.

Of course I'm not suggesting that complex analysis or the Dragon Book are trivial, all I'm saying is that they are not hard. But academics themselves often discourage people from pursuing science and math (numerous examples in this thread alone). We can blame the government, elementary schools, and parents all we want, but it's blatantly obvious that universities are broken. The fact that students are tested on material not covered in class (or nontrivial combinations of material covered in class) is inane.

ttflee• 13 years ago

f'(x) is negative for all x, and f''(x) always has the same sign as x.

Say, let f'(x) = -e^{-x^{2}}, and f''(x) = 2xe^{-x^{2}}; f(x) = \Int{f'(x)dx} = -0.5sqrt(pi)erf(x) + C, where erf is the error function(, OK, I cheated with Wolfram Alpha, and never worked out the integral part myself).

WesternStar• 13 years ago

e^(-x) right? Concave up(positive), negative deriavative.

tannerswett• 13 years ago

It's not obvious to me that the example you give is "downright easy, provided you understand the material". Now, I understand the material, and I find the example easy. But I can see that it involves a few little cognitive leaps which it may not be reasonable to expect a student to make. The straightforward solution, I think, involves considering x < 0 and x > 0 separately. How is a student supposed to know that that's a reasonable option? Is "when a question uses the phrase 'the same sign as x', try considering each sign separately" in the textbook? Are students supposed to figure that out somehow?

comrade_ogilvy3• 13 years ago

The question is whether exam material should seem substantially different from the course material.

Looking at your first question, I am hemming and hawing whether it is correct to say zero is positive or negative or both. I would say both, thus f''(x)=0 leads us towards a legitimate solution. Having not attended your course, it is possible the issue came up multiple times and this would cause no confusion. But it might confuse someone who has an otherwise excellent command of calculus.

But given the homework problem shown later, it is rather likely that those paying attention found your exam question perfectly fair.

"Was this exam question harder than my homework problem sets? Absolutely not! It's just different." The kind of differences matter. I do not see why the exam questions need to seem different in any non-trivial way. (I speak of a general principle. I do not hold an opinion about your particular questions.)

jacques_chester3• 13 years ago

Sports scientists have pointed out[1] that people who are innately good at a thing will do more of it, with less resistance to training, than people who aren't.

The 10,000 hours are done by people who enjoy a subject or activity enough to do it almost constantly. And that usually comes about because of early successes.

This is sometimes called "talent".

[1] http://www.sportsscientists.com/2011/08/talent-training-and-...

Jach• 13 years ago

There are geniuses in every field, therefore every field is just as difficult intellectually? I don't follow your reasoning here. What sort of evidence would convince you that math/science are in fact harder for humans than history or art? (Edit: A somewhat different perspective I have is expressed by Feynman here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWjV0bNBPY4 The good men and women of a field are more important than the field, and you can probably find good men and women in every field if you look hard enough.)

zalambar• 13 years ago

Oddly I don't see any mention in the article or linked paper of financial aid as a contributing factor to these decisions.

I recall my college social circle being intently aware of GPA requirements for continued merit based financial aid. Planning course schedules to try to keep quarterly grades above our individual cutoffs was a common practice. That same pressure influenced willingness to pursue minors, preparation for masters programs, or double majors. Students in danger of losing their financing absolutely considered which related majors they might transfer into which might offer better odds of a successful degree.

Sadly I think this lead to several students who literally could not afford to risk pursuing their preferred subjects.

eli_gottlieb5• 13 years ago

Damn right! When I was in college everyone knew that despite Commonwealth College (the honors program) offering merit scholarships, you didn't want to join if you were in STEM.

Why? Because they imposed a minimum GPA requirement (which started at 3.2/4.0 and went up over the years), also additional coursework requirements (you had to take a certain number of "honors courses") and a thesis requirement.

Now, maintaining good grades and doing an undergrad thesis isn't that bad. Maintaining good grades and doing an undergrad thesis while also filling your honors coursework when your department's cooperation with the honors program is in its infancy and the honors college thinks only humanities subjects should count for the Special Honors Sequence, THAT was the problem. Please note that yes, you had to do a Special Honors Sequence and an Honors Gen Ed.

The result was predictable: people would try to "dodge out" by doing the easiest Honors courses they could get, because Honors courses usually had nothing to do with your actual degree focus.

Thus, I have been through a seminar about a neurologist working on African baboons, and another one about Judaic bioethics. My honors thesis had to be classified as an Independent Study, along with much of the undergrad research work I did, and without that stuff I would never have filled my honors requirements without screwing over my Computer Science requirements.

The "merit aid" bureaucrats are often not only complete idiots, but operating on a basic assumption that Merit Means Humanities.

skierscott• 13 years ago

Is it true in general? A small case study (Berea College, 655 students) absolutely does not represent the whole case. It'd be better to look at a school that has strong science/math/engineering programs. The university I'm at now, the University of ___ has all of it's 15 odd programs rated in the top 25 programs. Berea College doesn't even make the list[1], that I can find (for math, but I would guess it's true in general).

[1] http://graduate-school.phds.org/rankings/mathematics/rank/ba...

beloch• 13 years ago

As far as I can tell, I was drawn to Physics out of sheer masochism. In highschool I excelled in history and English without putting any effort in, but had to work on my math and physics to do well. This trend only intensified in university. I found quantum mechanics to be the most challenging sub-field of physics (except, perhaps, solid state), and guess what I wound up doing in grad school!

Maybe there just aren't enough masochists willing to embrace the pain out there.

mdm_• 13 years ago

I'm currently doing a double major in Philosophy and Mathematics part-time while working a full-time job and caring for a house and 5-month old daughter with my wife. I think one of the things that initially drew me to those subjects and keeps me plugging away is that I find both of them confounding, infuriating, confusing, and hard as shit. I have a couple tech-related college diplomas that I really didn't have too work too hard to get, but in 8 to 10 years when I'm being presented with my degree, I'm going to really feel like I accomplished something.

jackmaney2• 13 years ago

And in other news: water is wet, and there is a large yellow-orange ball in the sky that heats up the land.

scragg• 13 years ago

To those that heard kids say they want to make video games. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-cWkkWjZtU6Q/UMBEhVxINRI/A...

cnorgate• 13 years ago

I think the bigger problem lies in how they are taught. They can be extremely 'hard' when taught in an unintuitive, abstract way. There are some people who are drawn to the sort of raw problem sets that typify science and engineering courses - But I believe there is a much larger set of people fully capable of success in those courses, but dissuaded by lack of engaging content and clear path to a future impact on the world (i.e. applicability)

When learning something new, it's important to help the learner see progress and applicability of what they're learning - two things I believe are sadly absent in most entry-level STEM courses... too much focus on theory, too early on.

6d0debc071• 13 years ago

I wonder how much of this is a consequence of attempting to sell science as something cool, rather than trying to sell the interesting puzzles.

We've spent all this money trying to get more people to take science without any concern for the fact that very few people have been raised and encouraged in the actual learning process. I'd frankly be rather surprised if something like this didn't happen.

fnordfnordfnord• 13 years ago

"If more science graduates are desired, the findings suggest the importance of policies at younger ages that lead students to enter college better prepared to study science,” the researchers write in the paper.

Ironic to find this in the wsj. As a college instructor who has spent a lot of his productive time working in fundamental science research, I can say this:

If more science graduates are desired, pay them more.

Many people you see in engineering and science, although they are making a living, and some may even be well off, could make a lot more money applying their critical thinking skills in other fields. I can't even count the number of former colleagues and classmates who are doing much better financially than their former peers after leaving the sciences and joining another field, like finance.

jlgreco7• 13 years ago

Money is only one aspect of lifestyle. I doubt there are many jobs in finance that let you maintain a "west-coast tech company" lifestyle.

Not all of us are cut out to be quants anyway.

eli_gottlieb5• 13 years ago

How is the West Coast tech-company lifestyle that different from the East Coast financial-company lifestyle, other than the difference between flip-flops and a suit? Both seem to involve working hideously long hours in an unstable job in an expensive city.

yen2232• 13 years ago

I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted. Research scientists are woefully underpaid, for the type of expertise they have and the contribution they make to society.

fatjokes• 13 years ago

I love this. Finally, someone said it! I'm proud of barely passing my classes for theoretical math!

jwoah12• 13 years ago

Something I noticed as an undergrad Comp Sci major was the disparity in the grade curves for my classes and those of my friends in other majors (cough business school cough). If you look at the business classes' historical grade distributions, they would look something like: a few Fs and Ds, and then a sharp upward linear curve from C to A. The computer science, math, engineering classes always had a more classic bell curve with most of the grades in the C range.

Unless you're really interested in the subject matter, who would want to take the classes where they'll have to work harder, and generally get a lower GPA? I lost one of my partial scholarships because it required I keep a 3.5 GPA, regardless of my major. Want to take bets on whether I would have kept that scholarship had I been a finance major?

qntmfred• 13 years ago

The researchers surveyed 655 students entering Berea College, a private liberal arts college located in Kentucky, in the falls of 2000 and 2001.

/closes tab

hawkw• 13 years ago

...at Berea College.

InclinedPlane• 13 years ago

Science and math are taught extremely poorly in K-12 public school, almost criminally so. Most education focuses on rote memorization of often questionably useful facts and eschews the more abstract concepts that are at the core of the subject.

Science and math are fascinating subjects, and kids often have a natural interest in them, but that interest gets squashed by the punishingly boring way the subjects get taught. Most kids end up thinking that math and science are just a lot of boring routine, like intellectual factory work. Who would blame them for avoiding what seems to be a dismal waste of time?

jlgreco7• 13 years ago

This may have changed post "no child left behind" and the wave of standardization, but I think the quality of science and math education in K-12 public schools varies greatly.

My school district was pretty awesome for science, while the one down the street would latter make national news by getting their pants sued off for teaching creationism in science classrooms.

derekp7• 13 years ago

That's simply because memorization is about the only technique that can be taught reliably across a wide range of learning styles. Anything that involves deep though has to be individually tailored to each student.

Case in point -- one of my step kids did real well in math in grade school, until the teacher started mixing in art to make it more fun (one project was to make a "math cube", and decorated it -- he failed that project). The other kid was out the week that fractions were taught. She heard from her friends how hard it was, and was terrified of going back to school. So her mom taught it to her (known her learning style), and she aced the test when she got back. All other students in the class failed miserably. (And the teacher was extremely upset -- how dare a parent actually teach their kid -- that's the teachers job).

acheron• 13 years ago

<em>Science and math are fascinating subjects, and kids often have a natural interest in them, but that interest gets squashed by the punishingly boring way the subjects get taught.</em>

Yes, absolutely true, but not just of science and math. This applies to all subjects. In the spirit of hoping for a better life for my son than I had, I hope I can help him to hold off that interest-squashing better than I could.

aaron695• 13 years ago

Yes, Math, Science is hard. It's not for everyone. People it's not suited to leave.

So?

More the issue is smart people who do other degrees(Or no degrees) that contribute less to society. We need them to do more Maths, Science. (From a herd point of view)

kenster07• 13 years ago

The question is, how much do exams reflect real world work scenarios?

bicknergseng• 13 years ago

In my experience, it's less that STEM is difficult and more that many other majors are increasingly easy. Seriously... do you even have to go to class to graduate in 3 years with a polisci degree?

Might explain some other things as well.

Datsundere• 13 years ago

I think what feynman says in this kind of matter is very important. Understanding is more important than just knowing information. Once you understand things, it's not hard. You just need to invest time. For example, if you can't explain relativity to a 3rd grader you don't really understand it either. I really recommend watching "What do you care what other people think" series on youtube (side note: he does talk a bit about his love life but things that are said there have their meaning). He explains that for example our languages like english is just a human convention. This really hit me. Math notations are used so extensively (I understand the importance of them) but when you want an understanding, you have to interpret it in your own way. If you know the formal definition of derivative but cannot understand why and how it's applicable (for example to derive equations you once had to remember in high school!) then it's not very useful.

The one who has an open mind to think of all the posibilities of why things are the way they are (by eliminating the wrong choices) is the one who masters the topic and possibly even discover new things. [Twist: Everything we know is just an approximation, they're not accurate; But that's for another day, also by Feynman btw].

enupten• 13 years ago

What surprised me after coming from India to the US for grad school in Engineering, was the mad emphasis put on grades here. Back home, I either cared enough to do coursework extremely well, or give up on it (the consequences were usually harmless career wise). Here though, its an entirely different ball game (I was surprised how anxious students here are about assignments and exams).

Then again, I did get I into a very good grad school despite having awful grades; so fret not. I guess employers in India care far more about which college one graduated from more than one's grades.

goggles99• 13 years ago

Is this is because movies and media such as "popular science" magazine sex them up? They sound so cool, then reality hits. Probably kids are a lot lazier now days also...

aphelion• 13 years ago

It's not so much that the liberal arts are easier that the sciences, it's that you can be lousy at them without realizing it. It's very hard to be bad at math and not know it.

lifeisstillgood• 13 years ago

So increase the in school value of taking those classes - more free periods, special lunches, non uniform days

Basically incentivise

walshemj2• 13 years ago

Which is why the UK system of specializing in 3/4 areas in your last 2 years at school as prep for Uni works better.

If you have A leves in Maths and the sciences your probably have worked out if you want to do a STEM degree.

dalke8• 13 years ago

This is an old debate. Is it better to focus early on a specialization or to provide a "well-rounded" person with a broader but less deep understanding? In either case, university education is not the end of learning, so which is most helpful for the future?

I remember in my 20s visiting the UK from the US and talking with other researchers there my age. I was surprised that I knew more about European history than actual Europeans. This is solely due to taking a European history course my last year of high school, while they specialized early in science.

I took a course in psychology, and college one in sociology. These have helped inform my understanding of group dynamics in software project teams.

If you believe that people can and even should change careers in their life, then a diverse education may make more sense. (In the US parlance, "reinventing yourself.") If you think people should stay in the same field, then focused, specialized training may make more sense.

Personally, I prefer a diversified education more than a focused one, but as someone raised in the US system, that's perhaps to be expected.

Finally, and only to highlight the humorousness, it's "A levels" instead of "A leves" and "you" instead of "your." A STEM course of course doesn't focus as much on writing as, say, a history or literature course. ;)

walshemj2• 13 years ago

You expect me to take your argument seriously when your dissing me because of my dyslexia?

And whohoo psychology and sociology the soft and easy choice for schools gaming the OFSTEAD system.

Math, Science Popular Until Students Realize They’re Hard

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