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Obdicut posted:There's not going to be enough of those kids to make up a whole class at most schools. You go to a bad school if there aren't enough people taking Algebra I in 9th grade to make up a whole class. At the school I went to during 9th grade (before I moved back to Canada), the solid students were in Geometry in 9th grade, the really good ones were in Algebra II, and there were a handful of people in Pre-Calculus and Calculus AB as freshman. This was a solid school in an upper middle-class area, but not a magnet school or anything like that. Algebra I is by no means an 'honors'-level class for a freshman. Making it impossible for freshmen to take Algebra I basically will make it impossible for them to get into any high-quality school as a STEM major.
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Sep 11, 2015 07:07
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moebius2778 posted:Edit: After looking at Algebra I, I take that back. If I'm reading it right, they're doing linear programming in that class. I think I hit that ... second year in college or something. Graphing two or three linear inequalities is not exactly rocket science. It's not as if they are learning the simplex method.
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Sep 11, 2015 08:42
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Obdicut posted:Let's see if your claim holds true. You don't have the slightest idea what you're talking about. As that link shows, Chicago requires a three-quarter honors analysis sequence for math majors; this is basically calculus on steroids. Princeton and MIT (and Harvard, and Stanford) have similar requirements; most incoming math majors have already taken or are familiar with the content of Calculus I-III, and take rigorous, proof-oriented courses instead like analysis, linear algebra, and abstract algebra in place of them. In particular, it is definitely not possible to complete a BS in Mathematics from Chicago while never going beyond Calculus II. computer parts posted:The topic is specifically about having Algebra I in 9th grade though? Yes. My point is that presenting Algebra I in 9th grade as something that is only relevant to the top echelon of students is absolutely wrong. If you are taking a math course lower than this in 9th grade, your likelihood of going to a high-quality postsecondary institution is not high (and I'm not talking about Harvard/Stanford/MIT/etc, I'm talking about University of {state name}).
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Sep 12, 2015 00:18
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Obdicut posted:Okay, I'm not sure you understand the argument that we're having. University of Chicago clearly says " The normal procedure is to take calculus in the first year, analysis in the second, and algebra in the third. " No, regardless of whether you attended the University of Chicago or not, you have no idea what you're talking about. It is not possible to get a math degree from any reasonably highly-ranked school without taking anything beyond Calculus II. The fact that you would assert this makes it abundantly clear that you have no relevant knowledge in this area, save for what you can Google and (apparently) misinterpret.
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Sep 12, 2015 07:13
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Obdicut posted:An very, very small number of people get a 5 on the BC test. And again, the statistics don't reveal what influence taking the class in high school has on the chance of passing calc 2 in college vs. being the kind of person to take calc in high school. It may be that the self-selected group that takes calc in high school are the ones who would be likely to succeed at calc 2 in college even if they hadn't taken calc in high school. This is not super essential, but 40-50% of Calculus BC test takers get a 5 on the exam, which was true when I was in high school > 10 years ago, and is still true now. So if your real argument is that not many people take Calculus BC then you should probably say that, but getting a 5 is actually, by a wide margin, the most common score. Ytlaya posted:Um, I think you might be confused about something, based on several of your posts in this thread (I don't mean this in a condescending way; it seems like you genuinely just misread the OP or something). Yeah, I did mess that up Thanks. In retrospect I don't think that makes my posts completely irrelevant (a very large number of students at the high school I went to would still have been affected by a similar policy). Obdicut posted:Yeah, I don't really care about that though. It's irrelevant to what we're talking about. What Solkanar was claiming was that not having Calc I under your belt (and probably more than that) when going to college is crippling, either in getting admitted or getting the degree. This isn't true, except very arguably for Princeton, from what what I could glean from the course catalog. In many places, even to get a BA in math, doing Calc as a freshman is completely feasible. It is simply one semester of class, and it is not that big a deal. It will make it very difficult for you to get admitted in the first place. I know that people don't apply directly to majors in American schools, but the Common App does ask you for your intended major, and some component of your application will generally be oriented around some academic interest that you have, whether that's STEM-related, social sciences, liberal arts, etc. It will be very difficult to make a coherent argument that you are well-prepared for rigorous academic study in a STEM discipline at a top school without having taken calculus in high school, especially given how competitive admissions have become nowadays. It is very common for college students to take calculus in high school and repeat it in college, however. For many students, retaking it gives them an easy course to pad their GPA early in college. I've taught calculus at a university previously, and I happened to teach a Calculus I course that was divided between students who had taken calculus in high school and students who hadn't (so my class ostensibly had no students who had taken calculus in high school). They had slightly different grading criteria with less weight on the exams for the non-high-school-calculus students, and the non-high-school-calculus classes got additional instruction in the form of mandatory workshops. However, the exams were identical. The results were probably what you'd expect, though. Failure rates were significantly higher in the non-high-school-calculus class, and this prevented people from progressing at the expected rate in their degree program (which wasn't STEM -- this class was aimed at social sciences and business students, who had a calculus requirement in their degree programs).
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Sep 12, 2015 20:50
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Jack of Hearts posted:Alright, I'll bite. Exactly what topics would you cut from math curriculum in favor of giving high schoolers an extremely naive and non-technical understanding of differential equations and integral calculus? I mean, if you want to go down this path, there's way too much material on trigonometry (especially needlessly convoluted identities) and conic sections, and two column proofs in geometry are mostly a waste of time. I wouldn't say that calculus should be the sole recipient of the instructional time that this would free up -- additional material on probability and statistics would also be good here, as would a few other discrete math topics like e.g. modular arithmetic, and you could probably get a little bit of linear algebra in as well.
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Sep 13, 2015 02:58
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e: nm
blah_blah fucked around with this message at 10:52 on Sep 13, 2015 |
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Sep 13, 2015 09:35
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Higsian posted:I reiterate: gifted students don't need help to get even further ahead, they get plenty just being who they are. The main value of gifted programs isn't in improving the graduation rates of their participants. It's that the students in them are substantially more likely to be successful across most reasonable metrics, and to make disproportionate contributions to society, the economy, technology, and so on. Consequently it makes sense to actively invest in their future rather than treat them as an afterthought. You could make a similar argument to this for e.g. university students -- pretty much anyone attending a 4-year university directly out of high school is in the top 50% or so of their age cohort in terms of life outcomes, so why do they 'need help to get even further ahead' (by state-level public funding, federally-subsidized loans, etc)? The answer here, as before, is that society turns out to benefit a lot from having a robust postsecondary education system.
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Sep 13, 2015 22:47
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Obdicut posted:Again, to make this claim in a scientific way, you'd have to track students in gifted programs vs. control groups of students not identified as gifted, but given the same resources, and students identified as gifted but not put into gifted programs. That people identified as smart and given more resources to succeed succeed more than those who don't is hardly a surprising outcome. I don't think it follows that gifted programs are 'extra resources', but rather academic curricula appropriate to a student's demonstrated skill. They are functionally no different than remedial courses for low-performing students. While there are certainly issues with e.g. the perceived 'best' teachers at a school only teaching honors courses, the lowest achieving students in a school eat up a much larger chunk of resources than the highest performing ones do. I mean, you've advocated in this very thread that high performing students should be using their free time after coasting through the material to help their lower-performing peers. That represents a massive shift in resources towards low performing students! It's also pretty rich of you to go [citation needed] any time someone states something that you feel is unsubstantiated, but your first post in this thread was Obdicut posted:Having smart kids tutor and teach other kids is demonstrably super-good for them. They're not going to be seriously delayed by not learning Algebra I in favor of having a much more concrete and thorough knowledge of math. There's not going to be enough of those kids to make up a whole class at most schools. if there are, sure, make a special math class for them, but I'd bet the kids who stick with the norm and help the other kids will, later on, outperform the kids who get a 1 year jump on algebra I. which is probably the most [citation needed] thing that anyone has written in this thread to date (and, by the way, is contradicted by numerous papers indicating that tracking has a positive impact on academic achievement for high-performing students). There also are natural experiments that have assessed the impact of gifted and talented magnet programs on students near the cutoff for admission into magnet schools (see this NBER paper). Turns out that if you are near the bottom of your class, you get very little benefit from having superior peers and teachers, which basically answers your question about what happens if you give low-performing students access to the same quality of instruction and peers as their higher-performing counterparts. Obdicut posted:What isn't known, though, is how much we're losing by not educating that other 50% more. Obviously, a great secondary school system is awesome, but what if it were capturing only 25% of the population, or 10%, or 5%? The vastly increased access to college that the GI bill allowed was a huge boon for the country--your argument could have been used against it, to instead put those resources towards students already in college. We also have a huge dropout problem in college--does this represent kids who 'shouldn't' be going to college or are they people who with more help could achieve a lot more? None of these questions are easy; resource allocation is an incredibly difficult problem. It is not a problem that is helped by people like OP freaking out when the system is changed. Sure, I'm not asserting that the 50% proportion is somehow a canonical one. I'm just arguing that at the postsecondary level we already have made a conscious decision to subsidize people who are already doing well, and there is almost certainly inefficiency there if we aren't doing the same at the primary and secondary levels. It is also well-documented that public funding for universities produces tremendous economic benefit (see e.g. here).
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Sep 14, 2015 00:36
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Main Paineframe posted:The underrepresentation of minorities in gifted programs nationwide is a well-known and well-documented problem and has been for decades, despite the fact that many districts refuse to provide statistics for it; I'm not just talking anecdotally there. Gifted lobbies even have their own special terms for the racial disparity; NAGS calls it the "excellence gap", for instance. This article goes into the reality of gifted programs in the US, as well as their history, origins, and the problems they face in defining the undefined. Certain minorities are significantly overrepresented in gifted programs. In your NYT article above, for example, it's easy to compute that over 75% of Asian students are in gifted classes (compared with around 55% of white students). The issue there happens to be that Asians only represent 6% of the overall proportion of the school -- you'd see a substantially different demographic distribution in gifted classes elsewhere. As far as white, upper-class families are concerned, I think that private schools cause significantly more pernicious effects than public gifted programs.
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Sep 17, 2015 21:58
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Noam Chomsky posted:pretty sure the "gifted" kids are the ones with higher earning not-poo poo parents Yeah, there's huge correlation between the above and the designation of 'giftedness', and it's not because of some pure meritocracy where rich people have superior genetics and pass these down to their children. And this is a Bad Thing and should be addressed. But the fact that economic and social differences accumulate and cause substantial differences in achievement by the time students are e.g. in high school makes a case for differentiating education according to the varying needs of students, not the opposite. Attempting to reverse broader systems of inequality or achieve 'social justice' through forcing unprepared and over-prepared students through an identical curriculum which is ill-suited for both is not a sensible use of resources, and produces predictably poor outcomes. Effectronica posted:Gifted programs reinforce structural inequality, Sure, but so does e.g. postsecondary education, and you could argue that the advent of the computer and other similar technological advances have done the same. So that alone isn't a particularly compelling argument. I mean, forcing rich students to have the same mean childhood exposure to lead as their poorer counterparts would probably reduce structural inequality.
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Sep 18, 2015 00:24
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Ytlaya posted:Non-gifted (for lack of a better term) students benefit greatly from being placed in classes with more gifted students and suffer from being relegated to inferior classes. This is not substantiated by the NBER paper I referred to earlier (which I just realized that I failed to link to correctly -- see here). Students who just make it over the cutoff for admission to magnet schools do not outperform their peers who are just below the cutoff, despite the fact that they have access to better peers and teachers (and likely a more sophisticated, challenging curriculum as well).
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Sep 18, 2015 03:15
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Ytlaya posted:Thanks, that paper is interesting. There are a couple questions I have about its results though. The first is that, when discussing the poor performance of students near the cutoff, it states "this result is consistent with an invidious comparison model of peer effects, whereby students are demoralized or garner fewer teacher resources by being placed lower in the achievement distribution of their class." This makes me think that the results might be at least partially due to a problem in the way education is administered in the magnet schools in question; ideally students near the bottom shouldn't be receiving fewer teacher resources, for example. Note that the 'invidious comparison model' that they refer to is purely a hypothesis; they have no data supporting or refuting it. The argument may also run in reverse to some extent; the students who don't make it into the magnet school get the positive feedback/attention associated with being the strongest students at their school. Ytlaya posted:The second is that I was wondering how the paper deals with the fact that the students in the magnet schools would presumably be taking more advanced courses when measuring achievement. It seems that they maybe used a standardized test? It seems that, if testing the same material, that it's true there wouldn't be much of a difference between children in the magnet schools and those just below the cutoff, but that the children in the magnet schools would still have learned more information that doesn't show up on the standardized tests by virtue of taking the more advanced courses. I'm pretty sure the paper addresses this, but I'm kind of tired and would appreciate it if someone else could explain that aspect of the results. Their main assessment is the Stanford Achievement Test (not the 'SAT', though). But yeah, this is a very legitimate criticism that is ignored or hand-waved away to some degree in the econometric literature. For example, a handful of top magnet schools score amazingly well on math and science contests, which test material at a far greater degree of sophistication than the SAT or even AP exams (even though the material is more 'elementary', the problem solving difficulty is order of magnitudes higher). But things like this are a lot harder to quantify due to selection bias. Ytlaya posted:In my post I had in mind some study involving students from a poor, majority black school being sent to a wealthier, more diverse school and performing better as a result. I forget what the specific study was, though. AFAIK there is also a body of evidence that poor/minority students receive the largest comparative benefit in terms of standardized test scores/life outcomes from attending high-quality schools at both the secondary and postsecondary level. These aren't necessarily inconsistent results if these schools have admissions processes such that all students, whether poor/minority or not, qualify through test-taking or similar mechanisms.
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Sep 18, 2015 06:04
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Miss-Bomarc posted:For purposes of equality-in-education discussions, Asians count as white people. Maybe according to some lazy, reductive view of the world they do, but Asians also face discrimination relative to white students in various ways. It's arguably even silly to lump Jews in with whites given the historical discrimination they've faced in the academic system (as is well-known, the broad-based admissions criteria that have now become standard at top universities were originally instituted to keep Jews out). Saying that minorities are not represented in gifted education is patently ridiculous when Asians make up about three-quarters of elite public magnet programs like Stuyvesant. In particular, there's a moral argument hinted at in a lot of posts here, that gifted students (i.e., the children of rich whites who have set up society and the economy in such a way that they and their children reap unwarranted benefits now and in perpetuity) should not be entitled to continue benefitting at the expense of historically discrminated-against minorities. In actuality, children from many ethnic groups are participating (even poor children), and it's not even clear that whites are benefitting the most.
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Sep 20, 2015 02:30
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PT6A posted:I took calculus in high school, but not as part of AP as it wasn't offered at my high school, and I would agree with this entirely. The coverage of the same material at the university level was sufficiently more in-depth that I couldn't, for example, simply skip class and expect to still do well. Trying to replace university-level courses with high school approximations seems like a very counter-productive idea, although I understand why it's so popular with tuitions being right out of control in the US. The continuum of difficulty is something like: non-AP calculus class << community college calculus class < AP calculus = calculus class at low-quality public school < non-science/engineering calculus class at flagship public school or private school < science/engineering class at flagship public school or private school < honors calculus class at flagship public school or private school. In particular non-AP/IB calculus courses in Canada tend to be very low level.
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Sep 22, 2015 21:09
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