Hacker News Reader

Comment by giantg2 | Hacker News Reader

"the systems aim to measure whether a student knows the classroom material by the end of a term without penalties for behavior,"

Ok, let's give students a test at the beginning of the year to see if they test out. Then the same test at the end of the year to see if the people who didn't test out pass. Would work pretty well to see what improvements were made to their knowledge during the course vs what they came in with. As is mentioned in the article, there are other learning related areas this approach misses.

View on HN

I would have loved this method, my kids would not thrive with it.

I loved CLEP exams and stuff where you just study, take the test, and demonstrate mastery. I wish schools did this more, but I think they want to keep you there.

I had a year where I was really independently studying where I would check in each day to show off homework and tests and then just run around outside for the rest of the day. I would have about 15 minutes of “school” each day and then just play. Or I would do the whole month or semester in a day and then run around.

It’s hard to know how effective it is. I had fun. And I still remember fractions and George Washington and stuff covered that year. And I did well in “regular” school after that.

It’s just a big risk to run with kids so I don’t think schools want to do it at scale.

I experienced this method in a public high school I went to. It was actually an awesome model and schooldays were 4 hours. The unfortunate thing about high school is the actual materials are really low quality.

Looking back, only math is a useful class in high school (of which I only liked Geometry at the time). The other classes are too low res to be deeply engaging if you're really curious.

Traditional schooling also has a terrible model of punishing curiosity in that if you demonstrate a passion for the material it likely just ends up with more work/homework (AP classes, special credit) instead of acceleration to the next tier of education on that topic. The grade school education system does nothing to reward academic excellence, literally nothing. If you get an A then thats it. You're still locked in with everyone else, so whats the point?

heh you kind of are treating kids and education like products and KPIs. what you suggest is essentially standardized testing, and the result was artificial curricula targeted at increasing scores on known metrics like the ITBS or whatever was currently being used to determine progress and budget.

Devising a good system for evaluating actual domain knowledge in a diverse and complex cohort like a million 3rd-graders is incredibly difficult! But the more thought put into it the better because it's really important.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com