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Comment by mulmen | Hacker News Reader

Or you know, they could take the opportunity to educate those students?

Yes, in the remedial history class.

Someone who failed to learn such a basic historical fact in high school isn't ready for college. It's akin to being illiterate or unable to do basic arithmetic.

Why would a fact mentioned in high school be considered automatically more reliable than a documentary? Both are secondary or tertiary sources.

To be ready for college, it's more important to have critical thinking skills, to understand that not everything you heard in high school is true.

https://www.xkcd.com/1053/

The issue with this is that the "diet coke and mentos thing" is generally not a requirement to be taught at school, while the Holocaust is.

Not universally. We were taught in school but it was very brief, anyone that was off sick that day would not have learned about the holocaust (or several other WW2 atrocities) in school. It never featured on any tests.

Interesting. In California it appears to be part of the requirements for 10th grade history, and we had a unit on it at school.

That’s really not the point? It’s a metaphor.

Not every country (Islamic ones, for instance) actually teach kids about the Holocaust.

That's a meaningless answer. So colleges should be taking in any student regardless of test scores or grades, because clearly poor performers need the education more?

Should Michelson and Morley have been kicked out college because they didn't trust in the existence of luminiferous Ether?

http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/physics/Ether.html

False dichotomy there - luminiferous Ether wasn't backed by an overwhelming ton of evidence. It was a simple postulation, not really even a rigorous hypothesis.

In fact Michelson and Morley were amongst the first successful experiments around it - and fundamentally disproving it of course.

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