Hacker News Reader

Comment by behnamoh | Hacker News Reader

Denmark is a very small country and what works there doesn’t necessarily work at the scale of the US or China.

Would it work in Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Carolina, Alabama, Louisiana, Kentucky, Oregon, Oklahoma, Connecticut, Utah, Nevada, Iowa, Puerto Rico, Arkensas, Kansas, Mississippi, New Mexico, Idaho, Nebraska, West Virginia, Hawaii, New Hampshire, Maine, Montana, Rhode Island, Delaware, South Dakota, North Dakota, Alaska, DC, Vermont or Wyoming?

They all have a lower population than Denmark.

All but six states (CA, TX, FL, NY, PA, IL) have less than double the population of Denmark.

Top US universities actually have higher teacher/student ratios than top EU schools, and I wouldn't be surprised if this pattern holds in general, so it would be easier to do in the US than it is here.

This is about Danish high school exams.

Oh, in that case it is actually flipped.

Piling on. Why? Are class sizes that different? US and China have many more professors too, is it not proportional?

The US consists of many small parts too, and it may work in each of those small parts.

The important variable is the staff/student ratio, not the size of the country. With few students per class, or many teachers, this scales fine. I'm running similar exams for my (UK) Masters modules, but colleagues are reluctant to do it for the enormous compulsory survey courses as there are several hundred students in them (vs up to about 50 in the MA ones).

For a large compulsory survey course, a well written multiple choice test should suffice. If the test is well constructed, teaching to the test should cover exactly the required material and be no impediment.

Why not? This is such a thought terminating statement. No actual reason.

Tell me you're not a programmer w/o telling me. What works at scale can be fundamentally different than what works in a small startup (Denmark).

Could you point out a reason why education, which can be standardized at least to a state scale¹, cannot be standardized to the state scale utilizing oral defenses? Also, can be ≠ is. Not everything is a startup lol

¹https://www.doe.mass.edu/frameworks/

You said it can be fundamentally different, and of course it can. But “it doesn’t scale” isn’t an argument by itself. In many areas, scale actually creates efficiencies. You’d need to explain what specifically about the larger scale makes the Danish approach unworkable in the U.S

If in person exams are seemingly impossible in US due to scale, we have to conclude that before internet US had no education?

For parallelizable workloads it scales just fine, and giving exams is perfectly parallelizable. Any good programmer would know that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com