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Comment by howtofly | Hacker News Reader

In the era of wiki/scihub/libgen, the whole tutoring industry is worthless. They are just making easy money taking advantage of information asymmetry. Generally, easy money will not be allowed in China.

Edited: I'm talking specifically about Chinese tutoring industry. One comment below gives a very detailed description, which perfectly explains why I think it's worthless. We are all in the process of a revolution initiated by wiki/scihub/libgen. Whether agree with me or not, you are welcome.

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Only if you don't understand what the "tutoring" industry in China truly does. They are all test prep, not general teaching or education but cram schools for scoring better on a specific test.

For example they are not allowed to teach calculus, despite calculus making the tests easier, for the exact reason public schools do not introduce it in the standard curriculum. Instead the schools are places to drill test taking and memorize tricks to be used on said single exam.

It is an entire industry geared to a single once per year test. Every dollar spent targeting said test is an economic loss. It is the exact sort of economic loss one should expect from perverse incentives. Banning this industry papers over the symptoms of a broken system, it is an obvious move but not a brilliant one.

Because such calculus what?

Why don't they teach calculus, i'm genuinely interested, you've left us hanging!

Edit: thinking on it a little, I'm guessing the missing sentence is 'because such calculus is not on the test'.

Something doesn’t add up. It’s not like there is a shortage of challenging material to learn and test on. I don’t know why tests are easy and then the people who can’t ace the watered down tests compete amongst themselves for the less less able titles. why don’t they just put some general relativity, quantum field theory, regular expressions, group theory, Elliptic curves, taxes, sec regulations, emacs, vim, options pricing, portfolio risk management, reinforcement learning, go, chess etc on the test…

> I don’t know why tests are easy and then the people who can’t ace the watered down tests compete amongst themselves for the less less able titles

The tests are not easy, and the "passing score" is set by the sum of competition. The techniques allowed to be taught, and which get tested are obtuse. Instead of allowing brilliant students to progress into more difficult subjects the tests funnel the entire country into the same testing flow. It would be like trying to score everyone based on arithmetic.

Yes arithmetic is easy, but given enough volume of overly complex questions even easy skills can be tortured to create a grading curve.

That’s my point. Why not test the brilliant students (and optionally allow everyone) on the more difficult subjects to begin with ?

Ah. The specific Chinese reason is that the Government says no.

but why should the government want to lower the educational standard for everyone ? It doesn’t make any sense. The rich and poor benefit when everyone is better educated.

China is going trough huge education reform.

Shanghai was leading the way. They gave individual teachers more freedom that allows move away from rote learning (taking lessons from Nordic countries). They also increased teachers’ pay. The results have been amazing. Shanghai ranked first in OECD PISA 2009 and 2012 assessments.

In the latest 2018 assessments Bejing-Shanghai-Jiangsu-Zhejiang areas ranked first. Rest of the China is still behind.

https://www.oecd.org/pisa/PISA-results_ENGLISH.png

This generalized pronouncement may be a bit premature. A lot of people do not work well doing self study. A lot of people need to ask specific, difficult to anticipate questions before understanding a topic. A lot of people lack the self discipline to study without the accountability of another person. There are a lot of reasons to hire a personal tutor beyond using them as a living breathing codex.

If that were true then the entire education industry globally is a scam which i simply can't believe.

Have you never had a great lecturer who can deliver information in a way which makes more sense to you then just reading it off a website?

Online Education industry is a scam in India - high fees ($500-$1500 range) along with low wage mediocre teachers!

That makes it a high margin business, not a scam.

I have, but the chance of getting that when you pay for an education is low enough for it to be an anomaly in my experience.

That's not what teachers and tutors are for. The personal human interaction motivates you to do work that you wouldn't bother to otherwise. Some schools even call them "facilitators" or some other word to remind you they're not just a firehose of facts.

Why would I want an education in something I’m not motivated to do past, say, high school?

If wikis were enough, the information asymmetry would not exist unless these people were unaware of wikis and other sources of information like textbooks, which I find unlikely.

Wikis are enough. They are just not enough to ace testing. The goal of testing here is not to check if a person knows/can do a thing. It's a gatekeeping mechanism to filter out people from entering a course/university.

Eventually this is a lazy mechanism to select prospective students to a course. The purpose of the course is to prepare people to build an air plane or be a good doctor, historian, architect, journalist or whatever. Not be good at exams and interviews.

When you make testing all about gatekeeping, wikis don't help, because the questions are not about test of knowledge of skill.

If you have a pervasive cram school culture in your country, eventually you have to import/buy from other people because your people are considered on-paper geniuses but are not good at any thing apart from acing testing.

I guess for where China stands now. Making chips, airplanes and space stations needs the real engineers not just the ones who can score well in exams.

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