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Comment by tomkat0789 | Hacker News Reader

I hated taking the SAT/ACT, but holy cow are we in the US in a better situation than Chinese students dealing with the Gaokao. A Chinese pen-pal once showed me some calculus problems from the Gaokao and the example I saw (a bunch of integrals) looked like a math test a sadist would create: long, complicated expressions just for the sake of complexity, "ugly" numbers that turned into messy fractions you have to carry around. I (a graduate engineering student at the time) couldn't identify any trick or educational point to the complexity, only the malice of the people giving the test.

EDIT: wording

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I am not sure how it compares but India suffers through the same problem. It is essentially a rat race. A lot of those problems could be trick questions, but to be able to identify it, especially on a regular basis takes longer(when the question has less than a minute dedicated to it).

Yes exactly, I remember our Physics teacher in 11-12th grade used to just solve trick questions and asked us to remember shortcuts and rote memorise formulae. I completely fucked up the physics portion of entrance exam and got a mere 7 out of 120 on a national test. I fucking hate physics now.

The Indian education system doesn't care about learning at all. It's all about scoring good grades and getting a job at the end. It's quite important as every individual needs to be able support themselves. However, it's really bad for learning. I'm a product of that. I've been struggling a lot with an online course from MIT but at least I'm enjoying learning a lot of stuff as I'm employed now. Physics and Mathematics are the most beautiful things if done right and not under stress. Good luck, man!

>The Indian education system doesn't care about learning at all.

Honestly, I think people from other countries get that impression about you guys too. I've been a part of multiple (honestly, quite racist) conversations where we just WTF over the fact that these guys have masters degrees but can't solve the most basic problem assigned to them.

Barring the racist part, I can imagine some of the situations that might have led to such conversations. My wife was working for the Covid vaccine deployment programme for one of the Australian states as a consultant from a respected company. The two guys employed by the state's government dept were utter clueless about almost everything. One was in charge of project management and the other was an architect. The architect didn't even know how to use a filter on an Excel spreadsheet! The level of incompetence was just unfathomable. Don't want to name the state as it might might lead to the two individuals!

But at the same time my wife and her team mates (A diverse team consisting of Caucasians, Indians and Filipinos (all Australians)) did deliver the project and helped the government at every step. So, I would argue that there are a lot of intelligent people that came out of the Indian education system, but the education system itself did fuck all for their success in life. There are also a lot of people with degrees, boasting very high GPAs, but with no analytical skills whatsoever! It's not only limited to Indian people in general. But the education system is indeed quite bad.

Anyway, my original point (which I didn't actually get to) was that SAT/ACT scores are quite important as they kind of give the person an idea whether they'll be able to handle the homework and academic rigour at an institution like MIT. But as the original blog posts says, it's not the end of the world if someone can't crack it. At that age I don't think anyone is mature enough to even understand the meaning or depth of scientific knowledge they'd receive at MIT. So one can always pursue it later with the prevalence of online education these days, if one were so inclined. :)

I understand that your perspective is colored by your immediate colleagues who might not have the bandwidth or horsepower to solve simple problems, but please note that Indians are a large diaspora globally. If your Indian peers cannot solve the most basic problem, how did they make it through the same interview process that you did? It’s sad to read such commentary on HN, a bastion of inclusive commentary. This is like me saying that Aussies are lazy and just want to party, based on my anecdotal experience with Aussies who are all about barbies and beer.

I agree with you on generalising based on what immediate colleagues are capable of or not. Indians in general have done quite well on the world stage. To answer your question from an Australian perspective, the interview processes here generally don't include many technical questions. Don't get me wrong. Some companies are almost like American companies and ask the candidates to even take home some tasks and come back with a solution.

But other enterprise companies generally have a look at the candidate's resume and hire them based on how they are able to answer questions related to their resume. It's sad to see such statements and also sad to see some incompetent people holding high position in many organisations. But it's not particular to Indians. I've come across such people from almost every background. I'm not very knowledgeable either. But I'm able to do my job well. :)

Edit: Having been living in Australia since several years now, I can understand AussieWog93's comment. I've also lived in India to know that such conversations are quite common in India too. It's just that Australians are willing to share it without hesitation. haha.. Don't be offended.

I’m not offended. Not one bit. My response is based on something more fundamental that the person missed: the Indian system enables kids to get jobs. At that, the Indian system is amazing. Period.

Hypothetically, if the Aussie system were better, Indians from the Indian system would never jobs in Australia that satisfied the employment criteria established by Australian firms. It would all be Australians. The truth is far from that statement.

I’ll end with this observation from 24-years in the industry. I’ve worked with many incompetent people. They come from all backgrounds. Incompetence has nothing to do with education. If your education system is without sin, i.e. doesn’t produce incompetent people, go ahead and throw the first stone.

Good observation. People are selling adhoc explanations: that Indian education system is the cause of the incompetence of colleagues. No one denies incompetence, but the explanation is adhoc. Even a product of a bad education system can learn later and shine.

So what the Indian education system lacks is making students learn how to approach a novel problem or subject on their own. From an early age it's all about getttthe right answer through the prescribed route. There is very little room given for exploration. For example in my 10th grade I was instructed to only solve a math problem in one way since another cause if I tried deriving my own method the person correcting it wouldn't understand and I would be penalized for it. This just disincentives students to only learn a bunch of tricks. In the end thinking from first principles is something they don't learn. Of course it can be corrected later but it's usually only when they are in college. Of course I'm speaking from my own experience and things have generally improved now

> There is very little room given for exploration

you literally took words out of my mouth or keystrokes out of my fingers!

> if I tried deriving my own method the person correcting it wouldn't understand and I would be penalized for it.

This has happened to me in the programming classes in the uni.

It sounds like an honest conversation. I agree with you on the first point. The Indian education system is quite good to enable kids to focus on getting a job. It's a bit too focussed on how to get good grades, which ultimately results in a rat race. Not saying that competition is bad but I never enjoyed or actually learned anything even after completing 16 years of education there include a bachelors degree in Electrical Engineering.

I haven't studied anything in Australian unis yet. I might do that in future. But I've seen some of my friend's kids studying in public schools here and am envious. I wish my school days were like that. Schools here are not focussed on exams at all, rather they encourage students to explain things that they're learning to other students. They've presentations on the concepts they learn, do practical tasks, do a variety of creative crafts and last but not the least encouraged to do sports and music as well. Now, can I blame my country of birth India for it? Of course not. India was quite poor economically and my schools barely had doors and windows, let alone desks. BWT, this was back in 1999. Teachers barely cared and most of them were abusive and beat the shit out of us. I can only wish that I had better opportunities but I can't go back in time. My MIT programme is quite hard as the home work assignments force me to think. They're never tediously long to work out. Based on the feedback I've gotten from my colleagues, Australian unis are a mixed bag. It all depends on the programme you choose. Some unis have very good engineering programmes, whereas some are more research focussed. But most of them have very good infrastructure.

Lastly, I agree with on the last point. I've been in the industry since 16 years and have met my fair share of incompetent people. To be honest I've been incompetent at some skills at every job I've worked at.

But when I talked about those incompetent people, I was talking about people who weren't even willing to learn and sometimes even pulled rank to threaten their subordinates into making poor decisions. Nobody here claimed that the Australian system or any other system for that matter is without sin! Every system has flaws and as long as we're willing to accept that, there is still scope for improvement.

>I've been struggling a lot with an online course from MIT but at least I'm enjoying learning a lot of stuff as I'm employed now.

MIT OCW is absolutely amazing, I've learned a lot from there as well.

Absolutely. They were the pioneers in open sourcing so much knowledge. I'm doing a course on EDX from MIT and there are deadlines for homework assignments. It's quite hard. But one can learn the concepts from the OCW course if they're not interested in a certificate.

I did great in Physics because I was a year ahead in math and had already taken Pre-Cal (Trigonometry). I thought it was incredibly dumb they were asking kids to calculate velocity and acceleration before they knew what an integral or differential equation is.

I have a hard time seeing US standardized testing as "better." All of my Korean peers who have studied for the CSAT or Suneung laugh at how easy the SAT/ACT math section is in comparison. K-12 education in the US is years behind at this point from many Asian countries. The fact that we are debating whether standardized testing for colleges and prestigious high schools (Lowell in SF, Stuyvesant in NYC, etc) should be banned is just laughable and only sets us further back.

I always wonder why these asian countries aren't doing laps around USA or other western countries if they were learning calculus in pre school.

Probably because high levels of math skill don’t translate to economic success. Analytical thinking is a good skill that math can teach you, but there is more than one path to that. In the context of a college education the ability to write clearly and persuasively is far more an important skill to learn.

As someone with a degree in math, I’ve always found the monomaniacal focus on how America is “behind” on math education quite baffling. Do people really thinking calculus skill is necessary to succeed?

It's not just math education. It's science as well. I'm bewildered that this is even something that people are even contesting what I wrote in 2022 on Hacker News of all places. The majority of PhDs in the STEMs are done by international students and have been for many years now. It's well known that American K-12 is woefully insufficient. But sure, I guess a-ok. But carry on with the straw man.

> The majority of PhDs in the STEMs are done by international students and have been for many years now.

Isn't this to be expected simply by virtue of the US's small population vs. the rest of the world?

A possible explanation that the US is still somehow leading despite the drop in proficiency in education (if that is indeed actually true), is that the high level of tech and investment done in the 70's and 80's are still playing out (and returning dividends). It might take one or two generations to pass before the cracks show up as real problems - like a demographic transition, you cannot patch it after the problem is discovered, but must anticipate and pre-empt the problem.

If the education in the US is in decline, then the next 2-3 decades will show a decline in innovation and tech improvements coming out of the US.

They're all too busy studying to run laps around us.

Look at where the design and manufacturing skills (especially electronics) went...

I don't know the answer to this and hence, don't know what this is trying to imply.

The USA is unique because we accept the best and the brightest from everywhere, but East Asian countries are doing laps around other “western” countries.

For one, they don't all have 11 aircraft carriers and 62 destroyers backing their money as the reserve currency in the world. For another, China certainly is.

As someone who uses to be very good at this kind of "math" in high school...it's not even real math. It's a bunch of teenagers being tested on how good they are at being poor man's computers. And I don't just mean standardized tests - almost the entirety of the high school math "education" is sad.

Yeah, a lot of tests like that are actually testing for memorization, and not problem solving ability.

I don't think the math part of the Gaokao tests memorization.

Looking at a sample paper (https://medium.com/@yujia_jo/2016-jiangsu-gaokao-national-hi...), it seems like the examination really tests for the ability to do math and problem solve under fairly heavy time pressure (150 minutes total for all questions if you are in the science stream).

I would say the questions by themselves don't test memorization but all the circumstances around the test push it towards memorization.

Given decent fundamentals you can solve all these problems from first principles but you would take way too much time (unless you are a genius, of course). To solve these problems within the allotted time would require grinding a ton of problems so you can get familiar with a part of or the full question beforehand. Don't get me wrong, practicing problems is a good way to study math and I don't have any issue with this in a vacuum.

However, this is before bringing other people into the equation. The floor is raised every year and the competition is intense. You also need to study for other subjects, not just math. All in all, "memorization" became the only strategy. It's fair to debate whether it's "rote memorization" or actually "learning the material" but with how much the students study the line between the two blurs. It feels too "overfitting" if I would borrow a statistics word.

This honestly looks perfectly reasonable to me. It's obviously far harder than the SAT math section (which isn't saying much since SAT math is a bit of a joke), but the questions look completely fair and not at all like they're trying to trick or screw the student.

Makes the comment upthread that started this come across as just more racist prejudices about China, unless the commenter has something to back up their claim.

very odd that you called my post racist

Yeah the SAT and the GRE suffer from the same problem - they’re meant to be taken by everyone, so the math is made basic and the non-STEM folks aren’t penalized when looking at total score.

Completely agree regarding the Gaokao sample. This all looks like it should be well within the means of a high school senior.

Looking at the first 10 problems, the only thing that really required memorization for me was trying to remember how to define the foci of a hyperbola and ellipse (questions 3 and 10), which I've long forgotten since high school. Everything else was pretty simple.

i mean... integrals are weird. there's a whole slew of ways of doing them and usually there's a handful of techniques that are taught for a handful of integrals of specific forms and then those show up on tests with the forms sometimes slightly hidden.

how do you know it wasn't just forms and techniques you were unfamiliar with? any math you're unfamiliar with can appear as complexity for the sake of complexity.

Part of the point is that pointless trivia is on the curriculum. Math is usually the most immune of all subjects.

yeah... my point is the whole mythology around solving "difficult" problems. "difficult" is often conflated with "not previously exposed to."

similar to the mythology of the "10xer". is it brilliance, or is it having prior exposure to the right things?

but if we're getting at the point... like the real point..

everything knowledge comes in trees. skills, abilities, talents are all the product of tradeoffs between time and choices of focus. the lazy approach is to attempt to linearize these trees when evaluating people, institutions, programs and the rest. it's this laziness, this linearization, this attempt to construct a global ordered set, that causes all the problems.

I really don't understand how many tests still allow trick questions like that when we have so much data that indicates that it's an awful metric. To me it indicates incompetence of the test creators.

sounds painful, the only thing I could think of would be to test the precision of transcribing step by step. Sounds like the surface area for loss of precision is wider when you just add the noise of messy figures into a problem. A clever student could just replace the messy figures with constant variables that are shorter to write of course and at the very end substitute everything back to evaluate what comes out in the end.

In the software development world, we simply moved it from university admissions to employment interviews.

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