Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

I have mixed feelings on this topic.

I'm sympathetic to some extent. I'm a product of a boot camp (granted I had a technical background before that) and I've worked with CS grads who I'm a bit astounded by their inability to just debug something on a basic level (form a theory, test it, make a logical next decision). On the other hand I wonder if that is a case where they should have been filtered out, or if the issue is they weren't taught / tested on the right things?

>The old academic criteria, imperfect as they were, were in fact doing a reasonable job of selecting individuals able and willing to handle the rigors of traditional college. The blunt fact is that the majority of people who scored below a 1200 on the verbal and math sections of the SAT would have found it difficult or impossible to handle a curriculum like that required to earn a state-school engineering degree or comparable certification. Today, thanks to grade inflation, such students can and do pass through top schools with top honors, especially in the liberal arts.

Do we really want to just go by the "old academic criteria"?

Are the people who just scrape by all just bad?

Would it be better if those people just be pushed out the door?

So let's say we make it "harder", is that harder testing? More work? What then?

I feel like as far as learning about how people learn that it is pretty clear that some people work well in what has become the traditional education systems, and others less so, and I"m not sure that filter really determines who will be productive or if that's all we want from education... to filter folks based on how the education system works now?

Personally I'm inclined to lean towards more / better education, less focus on making everything "harder".

I believe that the key is rigor: if grades are a reflection of whether or not a student has mastered some material, and the grading is rigorous, the only way for a student to attain a high grade is to master that material. That's the point of grades, isn't it?

To some extent I agree, although I feel like grades are often a reflection of papers (busy work that should teach you something) and to some extent what I think of as testing disguised as "trivia".

Good for folks who are good at trivia, not so sure it is the best route.

But yeah I agree grades should reflect how well the student grocks the topic.

It is, but how do you know the material is hard enough?

If I teach history and have a finale exam with one question, “who was the first president of the United States?” then the students will all get A’s, but nobody would consider that a college level history test, and even if you made an A, there is no way to know that you mastered the subject.

That’s a simplification, but in essence the issue at stake here.

doesn't your bootcamp experience support the opposite theory? less but higher quality education can ramp someone up faster than four years of university education.

I think when it comes to the future with disruption, rapid job changes, and etc boot camp like experiences (3 month education on a topic(s)) could be a valuable tool in redirecting and helping or even just expanding the skills of a workforce.

I think there is very much a thing there that could help change the way education works and maybe augment existing education (a boot camp before starting down the CS path might be a good booster / filter out folks who "hey I don't want to do this, I'll do something else").

On the other hand my experience also says that boot camps are heavily profit driven and generally do a poor job of selecting students and push through students who IMO have no business touching code. About half my class was IMO, unemployable. In that way I'm a bit aligned with the article ;)

I don't think the author is advocating for less education. The thing is that completing a university course awards you with a title which should in theory certify that you have completed some material and you understand it very well.

If that is not the case the world will automatically try to get the next best certification possible. In the world of old just being able to read was seen as a mark of excellence; once that was the norm it became having finished basic schooling. After WW2 having any kind of university degree was synonymous with intelligence, today lots of jobs start requiring a PhD in order to filter out high-level candidates.

This could go on and on forever but the only thing we are achieving is making everybody lose more and more time in school trying to get a piece of paper. This is extremely wasteful and can be simply corrected by making schools actually hard. Then the qualifications will go back to being a premium which most companies will not actually need (rather than bartenders needing a bachelor's degree).

There's also an additional disadvantage of having the bar low: you help discredit actual science by having hordes of barely-passable "experts" which say whatever they want to say. In my parent's time when somebody was a doctor or engineer people would listen very carefully; today nobody even believes global warming or vaccines because so many qualified "scientists" keep barfing random opinions out. This is a serious problem because it undermines the public's trust towards serious issues, and while there's no easy solution raising the bar in universities would certainly help.

> This is extremely wasteful and can be simply corrected by making schools actually hard.

What might actually help here is to move to a two-tiered method of grading. One is the actual grade, which is solely for the student as a personal evaluation and never made available to anyone outside the school, and the other is a pass/fail for the course.

Then if you have a D for the first half of the semester, you know you need to work harder because there is a significant risk that you don't pass the course. And mediocre students actually fail courses and either have to repeat them until they genuinely master the subject matter or have a "fail" show up on their transcript.

But the school doesn't disadvantage their students by giving out a B as the most common grade when other schools give As, and thereby doesn't deprive their students of honest performance feedback or make it impossible to fail bad students because when the 40th percentile students have an A the "bad" students have a B- when they deserve an F.

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