Hacker News Reader

Comment by cryoshon | Hacker News Reader

"Students are afraid to fail; they do not take risks; they need to be certain about things. For many of them, failure is seen as catastrophic and unacceptable. External measures of success are more important than learning and autonomous development."

This is in part a consequence of test-based education. Students have been told for a very long time that failing important tests like the SAT/ACT will have irrevocable consequences that are negative. Most of their learning has occurred in the light of this danger, and so, failure is a big deal. Actual learning or autonomous development are pieces to spruce up the resume after the good scores are in the bag.

View on HN

Exactly.

We've set up a system that punishes failure to the point of exclusion. Whereas, creativity and learning can only really flourish in an environment that allows (and hopefully encourages) one to try things which aren't necessarily guaranteed to succeed.

Let's also be sure not to conflate this fact with an anecdotal story about a student who was afraid of a mouse, which is rather silly.

Right. I'm surprised the author of this piece is surprised. As someone as apparently knowledgeable about education as he is, you'd think this would be top of the list. All the grit in the world doesn't matter if the places you apply to want a degree, the right kind of degree, the right schools, with the right grades, and most importantly, that the filters keep getting tighter and the requirements made more ridiculous (since the numbers of people who apply to any given job increases and you need a way to keep that pile of resumes manageable.)

I don't think the "irrevocable" part is the main problem of test-based education. You need the test to know where you are. If you prepare well, most important tests in life can be managed. What is really the problem is the systematic punishment of failure. /This/ indeed can have irrevocable consequences for certain personality types. I grew up in France and this "punishment of failure" teaching system is a major problem of France's education system.

Really, it sounds to me as though the main problem might be that these kids are coddled before they reach university and maybe have unrealistic expectations of themselves.

I think they may not have a fair assessment of their own abilities because of prior hand holding.

I haven't seen the emotional catastrophe element that this article talks about. But, I did witness the abuse of the faculty.

I saw the entitlement my generation is often accused of first hand. Many students were hostile, rude and lazy. I gained a reputation for sticking up for professors and calling my fellow students out on their behavior. In part I do blame the staff. Though maybe they couldn't gain control because their hands were tied by policy.

> Really, it sounds to me as though the main problem might be that these kids are coddled before they reach university and maybe have unrealistic expectations of themselves.

This is a problem I observed and experienced myself. Many kids (especially at elite schools) have been carefully honed to excel in high school and on tests so that they can get into good colleges. They start to think that they are massively intelligent and can do anything as long as they apply the same techniques.

Then they arrive at college, where all of a sudden a massive proportion of the population is at least as smart as them, if not smarter or harder working. Just as they are dealing with a bunch of emotionally roiling events such as living alone and having to make new friends, kaboom, their goes their overinflated sense of self esteem.

Sometimes I wonder whether the problem isn't actually over preparation for testing - because that's where the stress is.

When I was at prep school exams were just a special week at the end of each term (maybe year, it was a while ago) - but not much significant effort was made to prepare in any way. They were simply a measure of how much had been gleaned from lessons.

A couple of weeks later we'd get a special "exam form orders" describing our results in relation to our peers (which happened every fortnight regardless - it's just this one was based on exams). Some people cared more than others, but I don't remember anyone being distraught before or after.

I'm also not sold on the fact that the kind of revision typically practised leads to long term retention - but that's just my humble opinion.

Speak for yourself; I saw quite a bit of overt hostility from the faculty at my schools. Things like berating and humiliating students in front of the class, refusing to meet with students or sign necessary paperwork for them to proceed, and a frequent attitude that teaching classes and dealing with students was the absolute worst part of their day, an unnecessary burden that they didn't have the time for. Quite frankly if I should end up having kids of my own, I'm doubtful whether I will even want them to attend college if it's still the same environment by then. Worse yet, I'm afraid all these articles about millennial entitlement just work to reinforce and justify these attitudes among teachers and faculty.

Yeh, I know my case is anecdotal. I would have loved it if the situation was reversed. A student shouldn't have to stick up for faculty.

For me this wasn't just one class this was many classes and many students. So I think that the entitlement speak is of valid concern.

I do have to say that I did get into a bit of a war with the head of the CS department. He told me to cheat on a group project in order to make him and the department look good by doing all the work myself. I did give him some choice words and yes it was that much harder for me to graduate(this was my senior project). That was the only time I ever saw the lack of morality/respect first hand among faculty.

Out of curiosity, where did you go to school? I've never seen anything as dramatic as you describe.

Ohio State University, Middle Tennessee State University, and Tennessee Tech University. The experiences described were spread across all three. Oddly enough the school where I (mostly) didn't experience those kinds of problems was the local community college I attended for an associates (a better way to get gen ed requirements out of the way, imo).

Yup. In fact I'm currently studying for a GMAT for a finance masters' entrance exam (don't ask me why) and in my first day I already lost count of how many times I've read or heard in study material/videos that 'it doesn't matter if you understand the question or know the answer, if you can strategically derive what the multiple choice answer should be'.

Why is this even a thing? Because the tests are done under quite a bit of time pressure and not answering a question doesn't count for 0, it actually penalises your score.

So here I am, in my early 20s with a bachelors, decent education, co-founded and ran a profitable startup for a few years, and I'm studying for a test by learning how to game the test, rather than learning the knowledge that's supposed to be tested.

In fact, a quick anecdote, I literally just read the introduction to the official gmat review which in the very first pages talks about a chunk of the book that'll be on 'guessing technique', and states 'What differentiates good test takers from great test takers is the ability to guess in such a way as to maximize the chances for a correct answer.' just to give you an idea about what top universities expect me to spend my time on in order for them to decide whether to accept me or not. Isn't that insane? It then follows 'With some practice and some insight into how ACT writes its wrong answers, you can increase your odds of guessing correctly from the 20 percent of a completely random guess to 50 percent or higher.' Note that this guessing aspect can make all the difference between scoring just well vs sufficiently for entry somewhere.

If I fail the test, I can't get into the school. The school that offers courses that I've already taken a few years back which were never certified, to learn things that I've already applied in the workspace, just so I can land a job that I can demonstrably already do, in part because the company doesn't want to take the risk of hiring me without this degree (unless I have exceptional work experience, something you generally only get recognised for sans a diploma after your 30s), and in part because the government in my country is pushing finance guys to be certified.

So do I want to take a risk? No not really, not in this environment. Do I really care for this test? Absolutely not. The degree? Nope. But I'm expected to care to actually land a job, and if I don't land that job, I can only get ahead on a combination of extreme grit, reinventing the wheel and a fair bit of luck by pushing out on my own. But that doesn't mean I see this GMAT or this Master's as a 'measure of success', it's a pointless exercise I'd rather do without, but failing it disqualifies me from many opportunities and puts me on a path of most resistance. I feel some decades ago there was still a sense of career mobility, now a master's degree is becoming a default requirement that often isn't anywhere near enough. With all these formal and strict requirements, there's not a lot of room for a focus autonomous learning, only on the periphery, as it's usually not certified/accredited and thereby not recognised and thereby not of value when applying for a job. Software engineering (portfolio) experience feels like a rare exception to this rule.

If you think about it, this is often the case in the working world too. It often matters less whether you know something than whether you know how to strategically derive something. This involves an element of risk.

In tests specifically, you can usually knock out a couple obvious wrong answers. Then, if you are still not sure, you are supposed to decide which is the best answer. You take a risk with that decision.

To give an analogy from programming, say you are not sure of which algorithm applies best to a situation. You are stuck between two solutions which both look good. You can either stay stuck all day meticulously deciding which is best, or you can actually get work done and take a risk on which one you feel works best in the situation.

If you take your time on deciding which works best, surprise, a competitor took a hunch on a solution, got to market first, and put your company out of business. It doesn't even matter if your solution was better in the long run. (See: Windows vs Mac OS in the 90s)

It's not just blind guesses. It's deciding which guess gives you the best chance of getting it right. This is what 'guessing technique' is about. Of course, you don't go in to a test not knowing anything at all, then you will end up at the 20% of a completely random guess. You go in with a solid foundation, giving you the ability to answer the "easy questions", and giving you the tools you need to get "50% of higher" on the other questions.

"So do I want to take a risk?" Absolutely, you do. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. The alternative is extreme grit and reinventing the wheel, which (for the vast majority of people) leads to quick burnout and psychological issues.

Nah. Today I reached the chapter and it talks about for example, if you have 4 multiple choice questions, choose the one which has the most similarities to other questions. Why? Because questions are designed to have misleading options for answers, such that the answers will have some elements of the right answer in them to mislead you, making it quite unlikely that an answer which is radically different from all the others is the right answer, and making it more likely than average (randomly guessing, 1/4) that an answer which is similar to others is the right answer.

So if one answer is x^2+y/sqr(z) and another is 15y/sqr(z) and a third is 15/xy/sqr(z), then they suggest c because you have the most elements in common with the other answers, 15, x, y/sqr(z). This is literally in a McGraw-Hill (one of the 3 big billion-dollar education publishers) book on the GMAT.

It has nothing to do with any real world, practical application, and it's completely different from what you describe which are completely sensible approximation techniques. These aren't approximation techniques, they're guessing techniques and it's total bs. It's not teaching you a strategy to learning, to approaching problems to find meaningful solutions, or to approximate answers to questions, it's teaching you purely to game a test and the real world doesn't work like that.

Hmm, what I describe is what I learned when taking the SAT years ago. Never took the GMAT though, not sure how different it would be. The suggestion does sound ridiculous, although they are telling you how they design the test.

I would hope in later chapters they talk about good approximation techniques, and leave the similarities technique as an absolute last resort.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com