To Keep Students in Stem Fields, Let’s Weed Out the Weed-Out Math Classes | Hacker News Reader

To Keep Students in Stem Fields, Let’s Weed Out the Weed-Out Math Classes

scientificamerican.com

Bonkers. Scientific American hits the floor and easily goes under. It is math that a/ weeds out idiots and b/ instills engineering rigor.

Calculus is not a hard math class and the idea that it "weeds out" students is pretty brain dead.

It weeds out the truly not-suited-for-stem people. Its not a feature, but a nice byproduct.

Discrete mathematics was a better "weed-out" class (N=1 so mileage may vary). Half our class dropped after spending half the semester on propositional calculus and truth tables. The rest got stuck on sets, counting, and big-O notation. I don't even know how it got that bad; we could even use a sheet for notes on the quizzes.

At least for me Discrete math was far easier than calculus. The hardest math class I took was the "statistics for science majors" class which was super application oriented and didn't justify half the things they did. Plus the textbook was this godawful online only thing that was super hard to read/search (and extremely poorly organized) and the online computer graded homework counted for half the grade (usually with math homework I just turn in the scratch paper for the practice problems I do to study it and get something around 50% but do very well on tests so that just didn't fit well at all with the way I study.)

Calculus isn’t something i use regularly as a software dev. I’ve never had to use derivatives or integrals. Even things like sin and cos are often abstracted away.

Meanwhile, discrete math is absolutely something you see in computer science. But, in my high school discrete was the course for people who didn’t like math, as an alternative to precalculus.

It would be much better if schools offered an AP Discrete math, and colleges were more lenient to students who are good the discrete math but for struggle with calculus.

IMO: If you've learned to study math well you should be good at both. That you're good at one and not the other should make you rethink the way you approach the subject.

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