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Comment by duckMuppet | Hacker News Reader

Anyone can study the SAT prep books for free at a bookstore a few hours at a time daily.

If your offended by that, what about professors or HS teachers who teach certain sections of the textbook because it's going to be on the exam.

One can self-study the SAT prep book or self-study their biology book and in both cases can potentially be more knowledgeable than those who attended a formal university class or prep workshop. Most students aren't driven to do that though.

This goes to the fundamental problem, that our university system at present is really just a credentialing and signaling system.

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> If your offended by that, what about professors or HS teachers who teach certain sections of the textbook because it's going to be on the exam.

Yes, this another big problem caused by (too much emphasis on) standardised testing. I learnt the most in classes that didn't do this. But people do better on tests when they do do this. Standardised tests are destroying our education system.

Goodhart's law in action!

Surely the standardization matters?

Teaching to an aptitude test is clearly counterproductive (and ditto tricks for hacking the test--like just testing each multiple choice answer instead of solving an equation).

On the other hand. the AP classes I took in high school (admittedly, a long time ago) seemed pretty reasonable. Perhaps you could quibble with how the syllabus weighted various subjects, or the (mercifully few) classes on how structure exam answers. Overall though, I felt like I got a decent education in Spanish/History/Physics/etc from those courses.

Diversity in knowledge across the working population would seem preferable to homogeneity to me.

Sure you want some core things, like all engineers being able to solve 2nd order DEs, but outside that you want diversity if you're looking for innovation and application to diverse fields.

In general, sure, but how much diversity you can reasonably expect for say, high school calculus? It’s not as though schools abandoned their infinitesimal-based curricula to match the AP syllabus better.

The AP US History curriculum also kind of anticipates your critique: “As has been the case for all prior versions of the AP U.S. History course, this AP U.S. History course framework includes a minimal number of individual names: the founders, several presidents and party leaders, and other individuals who are almost universally taught in college-level U.S. history courses. As history teachers know well, the material in this framework cannot be taught without careful attention to the individuals, events, and documents of American history; however, to ensure teachers have flexibility to teach specific content that is valued locally and individually, the course avoids prescribing details that would require all teachers to teach the same historical examples. Each teacher is responsible for selecting specific individuals, events, and documents for student investigation of the material in the course framework.”

https://apstudents.collegeboard.org/ap/pdf/ap-us-history-cou... (Page 11/15)

I would argue that it’s possible to have a good yet flexible standardized system; it’s just hard.

I think it's the testing that's the problem, more so than the standardization (although standardization can definitely be taken too far to the point that it's unhelpful). You can of course have a standardized curriculum without any testing at all. Countries like Finland put far less emphasis on test results, and a lot more emphasis on teacher's assessment of their pupils. It seems like a much healthier system to me.

I'd buy that, especially when the tests are optimized for "objective" automatic grading rather than written responses.

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