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Comment by kenjackson | Hacker News Reader

One problem is there is no incentive on the part of the college to teach much. I've long advocated that we need output measures for colleges. Colleges are rated on their input measures -- how competitive is it to get into the school. But no measure of how effective they are at teaching.

As of today no one can really say where (on average) you'll learn more/better -- at Harvard or Ohio State. All we know is that Harvard is more difficult to get into. I find that crazy that this is still the state of higher ed.

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Colleges help you get out of them what you put into them.

Harvard has more smart students and professors, so you can get more out of them. But any college will provide a sufficient environment for you to learn, study and think critically, if you so choose.

But they won't make you do these things. You are an adult, after all.

I agree that there is a huge responsibility placed on the shoulders of students, as there should be, but there is a deeper problem here. Colleges should motivate students to inquire, to learn, and to challenge themselves. While this motivation could definitely be indirect, it should still be one of the primary goals of educational institutions (not only universities, but schools of all shapes and sizes).

One of the best ways colleges could motivate students is by making sure the curriculum and corresponding coursework is up-to-date. Now, it may have just been my department (enterprise systems engineering UIUC), but 99% of the material covered during my college career was extremely dated. The 8th edition textbooks were almost identical to their 1st edition counterparts published 30+ years ago. The homework assignments were re-used year after year (which made the acquiring the solutions ridiculously easy). You have no idea how disheartening it is to walk into class every day or sit down to do homework knowing that you will never, ever in a million years use anything you are "learning". It's not motivating. It's not encouraging. It's not challenging.

The 3.5 years I spent in college were, without a doubt, the worst years of my life. I just graduated (early, thank god) and I feel like my brain clicked on for the first time since 2007. Don't get me wrong - I am a huge fan of learning and critical-thinking (taught myself Ruby on Rails over the past few months with no prior programming experience), but it's pretty damn hard when you can get through one of the most prestigious engineering programs in the world on auto-pilot.

You went to a technical school and got a technical degree. That's very different from going to university and studying the liberal arts.

I have no idea why we consider them the same in America, but in most places, even though UIUC is a fantastic technical school, a degree in something called "Enterprise Systems Engineering" should not be considered a university degree. You simply didn't have that experience. And, yes, I'm sure it was horrible.

In my Anthro and other liberal arts classes, my homework was to read a famous literary work, study a movement, a people, a culture or an event and then be prepared to discuss it critically with my peers, often in classes with 5-8 students.

PS -- I need to add that there are definitely students of engineering who treat the curriculum as the science and discipline and art that it is. These students relish understanding the provenance of the discipline and the state of the art and spend all their time in it trying to master the art. It's just more obvious how to do that in the liberal arts because they groom you to do that. I think you have to be more self-aware and self-motivated in the engineering side of things.

I completely agree. I've long said that we should separate academic pursuits from technical or vocational training.

Arts and Sciences => Academic

Engineering, Medicine, Law, Pharmacy, Business, and everything else => Vocational

I think we need to recognize that there are two classes of people who go to college:

Academic: those who wish to learn

Vocational: those who wish to qualify for jobs

>Colleges help you get out of them what you put into them.

This is the most important point in this entire discussion. I had a pages long post about the wonderful years I spent at Cal, and the not so wonderful ones. But I think in the end, this comment sums it up much better.

I think 80% of modern college value-added is signalling. Employers should really just accept SAT scores directly, although I'm not sure if that's legal. It would certainly be cheaper.

Why isn't it legal, out of curiosity? I get to see quite a few CVs that include the rank the applicant got in the IIT-JEE exam (for most purposes, I find that to be a rather useless metric.)

Griggs vs. Duke Power Company

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.#Judgme...

Since the SAT[1] is a glorified IQ test[2] the rankings from high to low by population group go Ashkenazi Jews >> East Asians >> Caucasian >> Blacks.

The Disparate Impact legal doctrine[3] means that unless you can show business necessity any test that reliably discriminates between protected classes[4] is automatically illegal.

The strength of this argument is weakened by the fact that TTBOMK no equivalent law exists in the rest of the Anglosphere.

[1]And the LSAT, MSAT, GRE, GMAT etc.

[2]This isn't completely accurate for those tests that measure concrete knowledge like the MCAT, but the correlation is still pretty high

[3]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disparate_Impact

[4]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_class

Thanks for the detailed reply. It's funny that you can't use a test to select people for a job, while you can use the same test to select people for college (though perhaps I'm extrapolating, since the wikipedia article only mentions that you can't use the test for internal transfers and promotions.)

Since the SAT[1] is a glorified IQ test[2]

The SAT is a wonderful test for memorization. Also how much time you spent studying, almost as if its a... scholastic test.

It it's relationship to IQ is extremely vague.

http://pss.sagepub.com/content/15/6/373.abstract

This research established the relationship between SAT and g, as well as the appropriateness of the SAT as a measure of g, and examined the SAT as a premorbid measure of intelligence.

In Study 1, we used the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979. Measures of g were extracted from the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery and correlated with SAT scores of 917 participants. The resulting correlation was .82 (.86 corrected for nonlinearity).

Study 2 investigated the correlation between revised and recentered SAT scores and scores on the Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices among 104 undergraduates. The resulting correlation was .483 (.72 corrected for restricted range). These studies indicate that the SAT is mainly a test of g.

We provide equations for converting SAT scores to estimated IQs; such conversion could be useful for estimating premorbid IQ or conducting individual difference research with college students.

I still recall a very brief and elegant point my pedagogy professor made by giving all of his students an IQ test.

The test just happened to test on material none of had ever studied, for example how to clean offal. This was a real test which people with the correct experience had scored highly on. Us college students on the other hand, were deemed barely functional by the same test.

The IQ test is not contrived but it does rely on learned knowledge to be able to test. So the IQ test itself is not a very good test of intelligence, especially in the case where the tool (lets say language) it's using to test IQ is lacking in say non-native speakers.

But to get back to the SAT test, my East Asian immigrant high-school friends with decent English - bad SAT scores. Two years later with greatly improved English, same people - great SAT scores. And I am talking about all of the SAT, including the math part.

It's legal.

IQ != EQ

I work in academia, and have also worked in private industry. One of the largest problems with academia is that there is no easily quantifiable metric of success. In the private world a good indicator that you're doing something right is that you're making money. In state schools this is complicated further because budgets are based on something entirely independent of performance. For example the state school I work at has the highest enrollment ever, and our 6 year graduation rate is up, but this is going to be the worst year yet for budgets in a while. There simply exists no reward/punishment system that encourages good behavior and discourages bad. Even tenure works the opposite of its intended effect: the value of life long job security is inversely proportional to how valuable you think your skills are to other people (if you're top in the world any org you work for should be begging to keep you, if you think you're the bottom of the barrel you'll fight tooth and nail to earn virtually permanent employment). The only exception to this is research, where grants can serve as a good reward system, unfortunately this only creates a further imbalance in that research is rewarded but teaching is not.

In short incentives in higher ed are random, if not flat out reversed. The only motivator for good educators is personal passion.

Out of curiosity, do you attend Ohio State? I'm currently enrolled as an undergrad and am always keeping an eye out for HNers at school.

No, just picked it because its probably the most recognizable state school I could think of. Never even been to Ohio, but if so I gotta go to a football or basketball game.

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