Math, Science Popular Until Students Realize They’re Hard | Hacker News Reader

Math, Science Popular Until Students Realize They’re Hard

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195 pointspatmcguire243 comments

Title could almost be from The Onion.

But it's true. It is hard, but that's okay. The whole point of the grading system was to acknowledge subtlety; that it's okay if you don't have an A, because it doesn't mean you haven't learnt anything, it just means you haven't learnt everything [in that course]. But somehow many students seem to take it as the end of the world not to achieve that A, when really that isn't the important thing at all.

This is my own bias talking, but I think that tests were people routinely get above ~80% are badly designed tests, because set up the wrong expectations in students. If students expect 90-100% scores are possible, and then they start a subject where all of a sudden that's not true, then they're not going to deal with that well. Whereas if everyone's getting results in the 60-80% range, it sets up an attitude that "this is hard, but that's okay -- it's meant to be, and there's no shame in realising that there's a lot left to learn." Which I think is altogether more helpful...

>But somehow many students seem to take it as the end of the world not to achieve that A, when really that isn't the important thing at all.

They are, quite rightly, taking cues from the rest of the world. There is a difference in how we treat straight a students and everyone else.

This kind of discussion fascinates me; along with regularly participating in online "tests" that flat out claim you've mastered something after demonstrating minimal proficiency, I've also been contemplating depth of understanding, provoked by reading such things as "How to Read a Book".

Should test scores be curved? Or does that defeat the whole point of tests (ie, to verify proficiency)? What even denotes proficiency? Getting the answer right once? Ten times in a row? 100 times separated by other different questions?

I guess it ultimately comes down to measuring what you care about, but I think that tests and teaching in general could use a lot more discussion and analysis, and at least to me it's fascinating, from many angles (eg, as you mention, student attitudes and the best way to motivate people to truly learn).

> I think that tests and teaching in general could use a lot more discussion and analysis

You're right, but so many times when this is brought up, the result is one of those "express your feelings on this topic" type assignments. A few of those bad apples ruin it for everyone.

I think it is entirely possible to use a curve, or even a scale to adjust a percentage score to a numerical grade. You can establish a minimum acceptable proficiency... say 55%, less than that, you fail. over that, you can have a curve that adjusts against each student and other students in that class (or even prior classes) on the same level/exam for a final grade... accepting 10% will get a D, and 10% will get an A, with the rest spread evenly with a B and C.

Curriculum design and assessment design is not a new field, it is just an oft ignored field. The first step is to make very explicit goals. The downside of explicit goals is failure of the institution itself is potentially measurable. "Coverage" is a conveniently wishy-washy standard that makes it easy to pass the buck to the individual students -- "we covered that" has the convenient ring of authority.

Curving the grades is an awful idea, but how it is usually applied it is rarely harmful. Professors mostly use it defensively in favor of the student, to fudge the grades up when the test turns out to be harder on the students than the professor anticipated. I am sure an occasional professor does the opposite, but one can never be truly safe from terrible instructors (other than avoid them).

The idea of getting 80%+ in college would be absurd in the UK. While we don't have a precise GPA (and there are many issues with the British secondary, tertiary and quaternary education systems, so this is definitely not a UK>US post), typically in undergrad people get in the 50-80% range, which, in my opinion, allows for

1) Much more challenging exams

2) The realization that "getting everything right" is not really how any part of the real world works.

For what it's worth, the curve at Cambridge, for Natural Sciences, was set such that 67% or thereabouts is a First.

70% in Engineering. People did get more than 80% though so it's clearly not absurd. I got 100% in a couple of exams.

I think it may be a percent or so higher now, depending on subject. That said, I find it interesting that even though Cambridge still has damn hard exams, they still haven't escaped some grade inflation: I remember seeing a graph showing how the percentage of Firsts, 2:1s etc. has increased steadily over the last few decades. What's unclear to me is whether that's because they're awarding them more liberally now, or if students are just under a lot more pressure to succeed on paper than they used to be.

Definitely have, and it's deliberate; instead of Cambridge acting only with reference to itself (and generally grade harsher than other universities), they now apparently aim to make a Cambridge 1st or 2:1 equivalent to the same grades at the other Russell Group universities.

So there we go.

> The idea of getting 80%+ in college would be absurd in the UK.

Indeed; that's the bias I was referring to in my comment above (I'm from the UK and I think, in this particular aspect at least, our system works better).

What I don't like about the UK system is that even though in theory marks can range from 0 to 100 percent, it seems that for practically all students, the marks are garunteed to fall in the 55 to 75 percent range. I don't mean averages, I mean for each price of work.

To me, this completely negates the point of having 100 marks to choose from.

Often the grades will follow a gaussian (normal) distribution. In that case, the wider, less used range, is important in capturing and quantifying the outliers. It would be an effective grading system if it saturated at the high or low end because it would no longer have the power to differentiate at the saturated end.

It is completely arbitrary in the US too. Most parents will berate their children for getting a B- or C in grade school, even if that translates into 77 - 82% of some complicated problems done correctly. There were some courses I had in college where showing up and doing the homework guaranteed a 90% and the last 10% was just test grades. They might have been low 100 level courses, but someone gaming the college system can get a 4.0 GPA taking all low level courses except the bare minimums to get their choice degree, have less knowledge than someone with a 3.5, but get hired easier because the GPA is high.

College classes vary widely too in the US. I took classes where 100% was basically the expected grade, and I took classes where I got a 40%, which was among the highest grades in the course.

I think this variance is fine, depending on the course. It is reasonable for a foreign language course to expect a 100% on an exam, if they are testing and teaching to some particular guideline, for instance. It is also reasonable to push the limits in something like a physics course, to test both "can you regurgitate", "did you understand", and "no, really, did you really really understand"?

Except, is it? People aren't going to college to get educated - you can learn almost everything you would in school on your own, since most classes end up just using a text book anyway. Only the high level stuff where you are actually interacting with phds in some field do you get value for your absurd tuition.

Most people are there for credentials, and one of those key credentials is the GPA. If taking a certain course set at one school gets you a degree considered equivalent at another, but the other school has a department head who likes "50% is average" then you end up with one student with a 3.5 and one with a 4.0 when both are equally qualified.

The one who went to the stringent school doesn't get the job. And there is very little information on what classes what what schools (and in particular, what professors) are going to give you A's for effort or D's for genius.

A small over-generalization, don't you think ? Most people go to college to BOTH learn and get a credential. You can learn almost everything on your own, but it is usually easier to do it in an organized setting (curriculum, peers, teachers help)

Grading on a curve can influence things radically. At least in the case of larger classes, an experienced professor has enough different exams and papers to grade so he can get a good statistical distribution, determine who earned what grade, and assign based on some predetermined center and max/min.

So, for example, a 98-100% might mean "top student in the class that year", a 55% might mean "lowest scoring student who deserved to pass the class", and 75% might mean "right on the average that year". (YMMV, these numbers are illustrative and different colleges and programs will have their own conventions).

The "actual" or unadjusted scores might be quite different with no curve - for example, in the freshman calculus class I took, correctly answering 4 problems out of 10 on the exam was enough to earn a grade among the top few students of the year and a curved grade in the 90s, even if the "raw" score might be something like 35-37%.

>2) The realization that "getting everything right" is not really how any part of the real world works.

If I'm out to be a doctor or an astronaut or an engineer, I'm likely going to question my ability to accomplish these if I'm made to feel that I've missed a bunch of knowledge on the tests. Those, and many others, are careers that ought to get everything right because of the consequences (they don't, of course, but why is college teaching this lesson?). Perhaps it's an American thing, but the fear of failure made me double check and re-study things for the better. I might've been more lazy if I had grown up with the rationale that "oh well, you can't get everything right", but perhaps there's more culture that plays into that.

When I get 90% or above on a test, I like the validation that I'm successfully learning near to the pace and complexity challenges set out by the instructor. I really don't like the idea of someone aiming to keep those results lower for exclusivity or other reasons.

I'd also be curious where the increased challenge comes from.

- Are the questions longer and require more steps?

- Do they require a leap in logic to 'discover' something while you're contemplating the question?

- Is it a huge amount of recollection?

- Any combination of the above?

For me at least it was more a time constraint than anything (well, you had to really know the material - there would be areas I knew I didn't know well enough going into the exam). I think the difficulty is set such that only the very best would ever run out of things to do in the exam, most people finish having solved the questions that they were best suited to properly, and not really attempted some of them.

I think in any line of work if you go around thinking that you know everything about a subject because you got 100% in some academic test then you would be an accident waiting to happen.

Having an understanding that you don't know everything is a pretty important thing to learn.

> If I'm out to be a doctor or an astronaut or an engineer, I'm likely going to question my ability to accomplish these if I'm made to feel that I've missed a bunch of knowledge on the tests.

And that's the best thing you can do, and learn to do!

> Those, and many others, are careers that ought to get everything right because of the consequences

You don't get everything right by believing that you "ought to" and rigging the game so that it looks like you do. You get everything right by always assuming the worst, double-checking everything and analyzing mistakes with the goal of making them impossible in the future, rather than finding someone to blame.

> (they don't, of course, but why is college teaching this lesson?)

Because it cannot be taught too early.

One other issue with math and science courses is that they constantly build on previous material. You get these long chains of courses in calculus and differential equations and who knows what else where if you didn't master the first one, you're going to have trouble with everything after it.

Getting a D in "British Civil Wars and Revolutions, 1639-1651" won't haunt you for the rest of college. A mastery of lower level European history courses might help you do well in that class, but you aren't in a position where forgetting old material means you don't even know how to start a single exam question.

I question the value of memory-based education. Application of historical theory is a lot like coding, and requires some memory retention, but classes that test on historical detail seem to me to have missed the point.

I agree. If a student with an eidetic memory could ace the class without trying, the class is set up wrong. Unfortunately, many of my university classes were set up exactly to favor memory instruction.

I wouldn't go so far as writing off all of history as rote memorization. Being able to write an intelligent analysis of the political climate leading up to WWI is a very different thing from knowing what year Ferdinand was assassinated.

And yet having that level of understanding won't do you much good in a class about the American civil rights movement. But if you can't remember the product rule or how to do integration by parts, it'll keep coming back to screw you for years.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, there are frequently science and engineering tests where the expected average is around 30-50%! I'd argue those tests are more poorly designed, as they're either the wrong format or the professor isn't communicating information effectively at all.

Just because something is hard doesn't make it any easier on you, as a student, to have to remember and reconcile that a failing grade on an exam is expected and is more likely to cause serious panic about a curve.

EDIT: To be clear, the fact that below a 70% generally means "forced to retake" due to how GPA is handled in the US really isn't helping matters.

Well, in most science and engineering classes the final grades are curved, so it's still possible to get an A in the class even if you do worse than 80% on the exams.

"But it's true. It is hard, but that's okay. The whole point of the grading system was to acknowledge subtlety; that it's okay if you don't have an A, because it doesn't mean you haven't learnt anything, it just means you haven't learnt everything [in that course]. But somehow many students seem to take it as the end of the world not to achieve that A, when really that isn't the important thing at all."

That's what I believed at first. Then I realized how concerned authorities are with grades. If you're looking to do work with some research group, people want to know your grades. If you want to get into certain graduate schools, you'll most likely end up competing with people with high grades. Grades aren't a super important determining factor but, of course, they are considered and they can be treated as a negative indicator if poor.

Nobody really cares that you decided to challenge yourself. If you don't at least try to optimize for grades, you're basically shooting yourself in the foot. If you don't optimize for grades, you'll be competing with people who do.

That's only true in the absence of other signals. If you look at it as instead a problem of "how do I convince X that I am the person they're looking for?", you can consider all possible strategies, and additional signals that you could provide to demonstrate your worth. Grades are a very imperfect signal, but often times it's the only signal provided by the applicant.

Of course. But do you realize that some groups/schools filter by GPA? You don't even get considered unless you're above a certain threshold. How do send other signals then?

Are you going to try to talk with the professors personally? How and when are you going to do that?

edit: furthermore, how do you know the professor can single-handedly have any impact on who gets admitted into the program?

> Are you going to try to talk with the professors personally?

Sure, that's a pretty good idea.

> How and when are you going to do that?

Figure it out. If you want a cookbook solution, the answer is probably to just play the GPA game.

That was sort of a trap. It's considered bad practice in academia to bypass the committees and speak with the professors directly. Professors usually say in their home pages something to the effect of 'if you want to do research with me, apply to the school, do not contact me directly, I will ignore you'.

Really? I know someone who got a PhD position by doing just that. Talking to a professor directly seems like a great idea as long you're sure you're not wasting their time (i.e. that you're a suitable candidate).

Even if you don't get the position, there's still a lot of value to be had from a conversation (for both parties).

Off the top of my head I can come up with 3 professors at my school who say that on their home page.

My perspective may be too cynical though.

Or not cynical enough. They no doubt say that because it's expected, and/or because they don't want to be contacted by thousands of hopefuls. It doesn't mean it's true.

I've never seen such a note, and I've known several people who got into a department by talking directly with the professors there. I'm sure there is a difference between asking idle questions or trying to ingratiate yourself and posing specific informed, research-oriented questions because you're honestly interested, though.

I have seen such notes, but you have to take them with a grain of salt. When a department posts a note like that it's sort of the corporate equivalent of "Don't talk to our managers: submit your resume on this web form right here." So you should still talk to professors (but don't waste their time).

When a professor writes that on his/her personal/research website, it means "I already have grad students coming out of my ears, and I don't have enough grant money to support even half of them." This is useful information, because you (should) pick a grad school based on who you want to work with. You need to look elsewhere if all the professors you want to work with at a particular school are over-subscribed. Some professors also become jaded by the sheer number of unqualified candidates who can't hack it: None of the string theory groups in my school will talk to you until after you've been admitted, gotten good grades for a couple semesters and the passed department's second-year screening exam with a good score.

Let me part with this: I got into grad school (probably) mostly because I sent an email to the professor who ended up being my research advisor. I described what I did in the past (which was sorta-kinda tangentially in the same field), omitted any mention of my (not very good) grades, and asked a non-time-waste-y question about the research group. The thing about grad school (at least in the hard sciences) is that one of the criteria for admission is "doesn't anybody want this candidate in his/her research group??" When you have someone pulling for you on the inside, getting in is a whole lot easier.

Odd, talking directly with my professor is what got me into my graduation thesis. I have never heard of this as "bad practice." Then again, I've not heard of a lot of people looking at peoples grades as big factor for hiring, yet a lot of people here seem to think this is the case. So maybe I'm just lucky.

>>That's only true in the absence of other signals.

The problem is that the vast majority of HR departments do not have the time to look at those other signals. Resumes are filtered based on GPA and other measurable numbers first.

I don't even put my GPA on my resume anymore.

And likely, if it's a large zombie-automated HR department, I wouldn't want to work there anyways.

And you should not, unless your GPA tells something outstanding about you.

I do put it, because I can say that with that score (not GPA, but 94/100 score) I was the best of my class/generation.

The Resume is an advertisement, you don't see Coca-Cola advertising that their sugary drinks can make people fat.

> If you're looking to do work with some research group, people want to know your grades. If you want to get into certain graduate schools, you'll most likely end up competing with people with high grades.

As a counter-point to this, to anyone reading who might be discouraged, the research groups I personally know mostly care about sufficient grades (i.e. that you're smart, hard-working, not stupid). The ability to get outstanding grades doesn't correlate that well with research ability; it just correlates well with your ability to do exams.

Given sufficient grades, it's infinitely more important that, say, an addition to your research group is able to work well with the other people in it than what specific grades they got, and the people making the hiring choices are keenly aware of this.

And when you get beyond your PhD, it's your publication record that people are really going to care about anyway. If you get good papers into good journals, no one gives a crap about your grades.

I go to a large school. My impression is that GPA is a convenient measure to use to select candidates. At my school, you get lots of applications submitted for certain academic positions. If you're the one trying to pick the students, how do you pick the most qualified?

> Grades aren't a super important determining factor

i would disagree with this. they are THE determining factor in 9 out of 10 things you want to do post-college, and grades follow you for LIFE.

the reason i started a company is because i didn't have the grades to do anything else except be a bottom-rung coder (not even at a "good" company), which I did for a few years after school. i graduated a very good UC with a 2.01 C average (i BARELY graduated, i was put on academic probation 3x, and took an entire quarter off at one point). i'm not kidding around when i say "i'm a terrible student" like some people do - i actually had D's and F's and plenty of W's on my transcript.

even with 5+ years of owning a successful business, if i were to apply to b-school or masters/phd program, they'd probably reject my ass. when was the last time you heard of a C student getting into a worthwhile grad school?

I don't know what kind of companies you're interviewing with, but I assure you that my present employers, my previous employers, and the ones before that had no idea what my GPA was. While grades do follow you for a while, it's a gross overreaction to suggest that they follow you "for life" in a business setting.

i was just saying they follow you for life if you want to do anything that requires grades. the "other stuff" you do doesn't always make up for the fact that you got shitty marks.

Huh? I'm telling you how top graduate schools consider applicants. They usually weight research and letters the highest, then grades, then GRE scores.

yeah, and i'm telling you how i was utterly unqualified for any of that, because of my grades.

I've found college grades to matter for only two things:

1. Your first professional job after graduation 2. Your grad school application

Nobody else cares.

And #1 definitely isn't always true in my experience. I'd guess that smaller companies are less likely to care about grades.

GPA is maybe a useful indicator of work ethic, but there are so many factors it's hard to be sure of that.

i think my point is that your first job, and/or grad school studies, have extremely far-reaching effects on your life trajectory.

for example, if i had good grades, i'd probably have gone to work for a google-esque company, or gone to grad school, and i would NOT have started a tech business.

my life would have been completely different if i had good grades.

I also found that your second professional job depends heavily on your first professional job, which in turn depends on your GPA.

I wouldn't discount the importance of your GPA.

Even big ones don't necessarily care. I worked for Sun Micro right out of grad school, and nobody ever asked to look at my transcript. I've heard intel did.

They matter a lot for grad school, though.

As a counterexample, I had terrible grades and dropped out of university in my second semester. I've never once had anyone ask me about grades or about my schooling in a professional context, and I've worked at some pretty fantastic companies. I can't speak about grad school, as I know nothing about academia, but a significant proportion of the best technical professionals I've worked with didn't graduate university; I've even worked with a few that didn't graduate high school, but still work for top tech companies.

A referral from an employee who knows that you are competent and reliable is worth more in the hiring process than anything you could list on your CV.

Where I'm from, practically only students that aspire to be doctors get "straight A's" in high school. If you get "straight A's" in elementary school, well you'd better not be too shy because you might end up on regional or national television.

Grade inflation has gone too far when kids that get straight C's are hardly trying, and getting "straight A's" is only a minor achievement in moderately ambitious circles. You could have the most brilliant person - given she also had no problem utilizing that brilliance in a typical school setting - go through the entire system and on paper she would be indistinguishable from an average kid with solid work ethic.

Personally I went to university and studied computer science courses as well as more soft courses, and I have better grades than I did in high school. Of course a part of that is because I enjoy at least parts of all the courses I've had to take.

>>But somehow many students seem to take it as the end of the world not to achieve that A, when really that isn't the important thing at all.

It IS the end of the world because it directly affects your job prospects after graduation. That's what it really comes down to. Most HR departments put a disproportionate amount of emphasis on GPA. When looking at two candidates from two equally popular schools, the candidate whose exams were easier will be preferred because, with the same amount/level of knowledge, he/she got higher grades.

It doesn't end there. The success of graduates in the job market ties directly back to the popularity of the school, which in turn determines how much funding the school can ask for in the state budget.

Does anybody care about GPA after the first job?

AFAIC, the way to do it is to go to a school that lets you get at least one internship/co-op under your belt, then use that to never tell anybody your GPA (if it is shit anyway, no harm telling people your GPA if it is good). Works best if you can get the people you interned with to make an offer to hire you straight out of school. After that first job I don't see GPA mattering much one way or the other, your last employer should carry far more weight.

My entire school career I never broke a 3.0 (for general courses) for more than a year, but everything has turned out pretty swell for me. I mean, I did get lucky getting accepted to the college that I did with my high-school GPA, but after that it was fairly merit-based I like to think.

Looking back, I don't have regrets. I didn't give myself a heart attack or turn myself into a nervous wreck but I still learned what I wanted from school and enjoyed the process.

> Does anybody care about GPA after the first job?

If you're trying to get into medical school, that's not really a fair question. Your college GPA directly affects your med school prospects, which greatly affects your residency prospects, and in turn your lifetime career earnings. If you're getting B's in level 1 & 2 physics and chemistry, you're not getting into Harvard.

Ah, well yes. Any sort of grad/medical school is absolutely going to require you to to pay close attention to your GPA. I don't think most students are looking to go that route though; I certainly wasn't.

I wouldn't call missing those things "the end of the world" unless you are really dead set on that route.

Most undergrads have no idea where they will end up in life. I certainly could not have predicted the graduate programs I considered - none of them having anything to do with my EECS major.

Getting poor (or even average) grades closes many doors, especially in these days of grade inflation (at many, but not all schools).

Fair point. I had a plan and thought I roughly knew the requirements. I can see how students who are more exploratory would need to be more careful.

This isn't necessarily true. I had a 2.9ish GPA as an undergrad history major but I still got into a respectable engineering masters program (NC State) based on career merits. Granted, that was 10 years after I entered the workforce as a technical professional, but even so, there are many ways to reach any given end state, via hard work, excellent communication skills, and [hopefully] a strong network.

With excellent communication skills, and hard work, AND a strong network, you could get very far anyway.

Matter of fact those are 3 skills that are always in demand because anyone who possesses them can avoid truly coming to grips with the question in this thread: The necessity of good grades in determining your career.

It applies if you want to switch schools. We used to call it "failing in".

While true for the aggregate, there are always exceptions. I know someone who had a GPA <= 2.3 from a mediocre state school that went to medical school in the Caribbean.

The person did so well on Step 2 that s/he was invited to transfer back to the US at a fist tier medical school, and is now the director of cardiology at a prestigious hospital.

I don't think you can bundle medical sciences and something like math/physics/engineering. To be a good doctor you need a good amount of analytical skills and intuition built on experience. But the most important of all is really, you need to have a lot of memory storing capacity.

Bulk of medicine is how much you can remember. There is nothing like, let me work this out on a paper or fire up a REPL, in fact in their case- Something like putting a patient on pause while you refer a book is totally unacceptable. So remembering stuff all around.

I realized this pretty early and decided not to be a doctor. I just can't imagine my self memorizing things at such detail.

I was only responding to the "GPA matters for nobody after a few years" comment, by demonstrating that for a select subset of university students (pre-med) it's simply not true.

For federal engineering / IT / Software jobs, they often specify that you have to have a 3.0 or higher in the credits relevant to your field. They probably hire people with low GPAs that meet their other requirements, but that's what they advertise.

Also, it used to be repeated quite often that most of the bigger tech companies (IBM, Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, etc) were extremely difficult to get into if you didn't have a 3.7+ from a well known school. I don't know how true this was, but when I first started school, I was worried that if I didn't perform well enough, that it could potentially affect my chances of finding interesting work.

I personally don't give a shit about someone's GPA. When I was going through my technical training in the military, we had people who barely passed the written exams, who would then proceed to complete the practical exercises faster and more accurately than anyone else. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses.

Hmm, I didn't go the federal/contractor route, I went the "bigger tech company" route but I suppose I may have bypassed the GPA bar by getting hired fulltime while an intern. Had I not done that, my plan was to start with smaller startups.

shrug, maybe I was luckier than I give myself credit for.

A high GPA from a well known school will definitely help someone right out of college get a job if they don't have any other qualifications, but it's not a strict requirement.

Google is one well-known example that used to require a minimum GPA, even for people with years of experience:

http://jobs.aol.com/articles/2011/03/27/i-interviewed-at-goo...

http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2010/09/how-t...

That's why the recent announcement that they've found zero correlation between GPA and job success was such a big deal: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-b...

Doesn't that mean "zero correlation between job success and GPA above Google's minimum requirement" ?

Their data is restricted to a set of people that all got a minimum GPA of 3.5. There could still be a correlation if the range of GPAs were greater.

> Google is one well-known example that used to require a minimum GPA, even for people with years of experience:

Google asked me for my grades when I was fresh out of school; after that, they never have.

>>after that, they never have.

How many times did you quit and rejoin Google?

They asked for mine, rather early in the interview process I might add, in 2008 or so. I politely declined.

If I might ask, how did you go about declining, and what was their response?

Hard to say, I ended up finding funding for a project while I was in the process with them. We never really finished.

Would they expect your grades to change?

A good point; I never joined Google the first time around. I simply assumed that that data would have been discarded. It is quite possible, they have all that data in their system every time they call me for interviews or whatever.

> Google is one well-known example that used to require a minimum GPA, even for people with years of experience:

Guess I have a reason not to work for Google after all.

FYI: In 2007 was hired as a new-grad software engineer at Google with a college GPA of 2.66

So Google didn't have any minimum GPA requirement. I certainly was asked about the low GPA during my interviews, but it clearly didn't stop them from hiring me.

Out of curiosity, how did you explain the low GPA?

> Google is one well-known example that used to require a minimum GPA, even for people with years of experience:

Google made the headlines of a fairly popular article (I think it was featured recently) with dropping that after empirically convincing themselves it was useless.

Also, take the advice of someone who's seen that crap work: never work for any company where HR can have the decisive call in hiring someone or not -- or any serious call in the hiring process of anyone who won't work in HR, for that matter.

I've been asked about GPA after my first job. Only once thus far though.

> Does anybody care about GPA after the first job?

No but they care about the job you had before that job, which happens to depend on GPA and so on.

Not saying it is right, just it is not as simple.

Its much more common outside of engineering. In legal services, and I believe management consulting, its a major factor 5-7 years into your career. Heck, every legal employer still asks for my undergraduate transcripts, and I'm six years and three jobs and grad school distanced from those!

A woman I know of, in her early 50s, with an MBA, was asked about her undergraduate GPA, and if I recall correctly her SATs when applying for a job a couple of years ago. This made me wonder about the common sense of the employer; her too, maybe, for she is not working for them.

Stealth ageism. There's a local printing company near where I live famous for being the only large employer in the area demanding high school transcripts LOL. Legal or not, its a signal of old people need not apply.

I'm old enough, and grade inflation has been going on long enough, that my "pretty good" HS GPA at the time makes me look like I merely showed up for attendance compared to the recent grads. Now if they wanted a percentile instead of a GPA, then I'd have an excellent chance. But they very intentionally want a younger workforce by whatever borderline legal method necessary, so they ask for GPA...

The solution to this is standardized Z-scores for every subject, so everyone is on a normal distribution and it's the same no matter which major you take.

Sometimes.

I graduated with a 2.8 and an Art degree from a state school (albeit a good one). I thought most of my assignments were bullshit and didn't do some of them - who wants to design another fucking brochure for a fake client. I spent my senior year learning how to program and launching an app (Red Cup on the App Store for those interested).

Not doing the schoolwork and instead focusing on actual career development got me a job when I graduated. I've never put my GPA on my résumé, and I never will. It doesn't matter for the things I want to do in life.

so basically you have confirmation that the degree was useless (in the sense that you didn't use the stuff learnt ibn the degree in your professinoal life). Therefore, your GPA in that degree is meaningless.

Imagine you didn't do this, but instead got a job that did utilise the degree…would your gpa matter then?

You act like I don't use my Art degree. Not only did I program my apps, I designed them too. I think a lot of the work was useless and antiquated, and didn't prepare any of my classmates and I for a life in the age where software is everywhere. I noticed that every one of them would have the same degree as I, and with a better GPA, so I learned a new skill as well.

I use Adobe Illustrator/Photoshop just as much as I use Xcode in my professional life - and that's quite a bit.

Huh? I have never known someone whose employer demanded to see a transcript. Not saying it doesn't happen, just that I don't believe it is as common as you seem to imply. Graduate schools want transcripts, yes, but they are generally more concerned with GRE scores than GPAs.

Google asked for a transcript when I interviewed (late 2008, about 3 years out of school). I told them I could get them one, but it would take 2 weeks and my other offer was getting antsy. That was the last I heard of it. My offer letter arrived about a week later.

Very often, things that are hard & fast requirements aren't actually. According to the media, Google was in a hiring freeze when I was hired and wasn't hiring anyone. According to the blogosphere, they only hire people with 3.7+ GPAs, yet I had a 3.0.

Never wrote my GPA and got a job offer from 2 top tier tech companies. One asked before issuing the offer. Software programmers have it easy because at age 20 half our CV is experience, while an industrial engineer is lucky if they set foot on a factory floor.

And that doesn't even consider pre-university studies, where having less than an A/B average certainly does make you unattractive to all decent universities!

Our entire educational system is geared around "Produce excellence or die trying, there is no place for mediocrity." Predictably, this causes students to look for ways to easy apparent excellence.

The fact that actual excellence comes from a philosophy that's more like "Do the impossible, see the invisible" than "successfully regurgitate 100% of what you were told" doesn't even show up in the educational system until the grad-school level.

I totally agree with this. I recently had a job interview at a great company (I have a friend who works there so I know all the details) and was interviewed by three engineers who loved me. I got an email from someone in HR saying the engineers thought I would be a great fit and they wanted to hire me as long as I had at least a 3.0 GPA. Turns out I was about 0.1 point short and that killed my chance to work there. GPA plays too big of a role in most HR departments.

The truth is in most college courses that grades reflect how well you did relative to the rest of the class. Not how well you know the material.

I don't really think that's the issue. I have a science degree, but getting it was to a certain extent an exercise in masochism.

Highlights of my college experience (probably 1/3 of the science courses I took might have had some kind of issue like these):

1. Exams filled with complex and abstract trick problems that differed substantially from assigned homework.

2. Professor who, when asked a minor question about something spent 30 minutes lecturing the class on 'RTFT,' as derived from 'RTFM.' Ironically, the confused student was likely the only one who had actually RTFT'd.

3. Lots of confusing, poorly described assignments. Sometimes assignments were so bad even the TAs had no idea what was going on.

4. Horrible textbooks, often written by departments to raise money rather than for quality or readability.

There's really a lot of room for improved instructional quality in my opinion.

Of course this was often compounded by the relatively poor quality of pre-college math and science education in K-12 public schools.

Students being overconfident and unprepared for anything but 'success' and mental transitions from 70-80-90/A-B-C traditional grading to schemes that are based on std deviations or content mastery can be uncomfortable, but I don't think that they're the root of most student's problems, though I do think some professors use such schemes to try and cover for their poor teaching.

Most academics don't want to be teachers. They became academics so that they could do research. Many see teaching as a nuisance that "pays the rent", so to speak, and do the absolute minimum in order to scrape by.

Some professors love to teach and everyone remembers them fondly. I had one professor who'd taught about 2/3rds of the courses at my university over the years. You could always tell he'd taught a course in the past because subsequent professors always retained the assignments he'd created -- they were just too good to replace.

I was lucky to have him as my honours supervisor.

It's interesting seeing the toll on the love-to-teach ones. My course in the mid-90s had a fantastic lecturer, my favourite by far, who loved teaching and researching. He'd be there 12 hours a day by default.

I went to see him again in the late noughties and he was haggard (not surprising, given he was around approaching 60 and always working heavily). He said he'd lost his spark to teach, and that current day students just weren't interested in doing the work - it's hard to be passionate when you're teaching uninterested people.

He said that my group's era was a great one for teaching. I accused him of blowing smoke up my arse and how bad could it be? These things are hard to make metrics of, but he gave the example - out of a course of 60 people in my final year, there were two applications for 'special consideration', one of whom was an eight-month-pregnant woman who didn't want to risk disturbing exams in case she went into labour. 'special consideration' was used for serious issues - close relative died, that kind of thing. By comparison, the current year had around half the students asking for special consideration.

He had other stories of change as well. I started a PhD under him (quit it early when I realised I would be relegated to academia) and we were treated as cattle by the department, mere cash-cows to bring in money. He mentioned that when he did his PhD in the 70s, doctoral students were considered gold and pretty much equivalent to a member of faculty. Now (late 90s) they're packed into an uncomfortable broom closet and their resources are, quite literally, commandeered by admin. As a literal example, we saw one doctoral student have her work stalled because the number crunching machine she had incoming was redirected to an admin temp.

There doesn't seem to be a good answer for this problem. The original model that the modern university emulates is that a nucleus of scholars in a location have drawn students to them, willing to learn.

These days it doesn't quite work like that; lots of kids are there to punch their ticket. Ticket-punchers aren't motivated to do any more than the minimum. So yes, perhaps I've overlooked the other half of the equation.

A friend of mine is a teacher and I moonlight as an Olympic-style weightlifting coach. I once enthused to him that I could see the allure of teaching. He sighed heavily, then pointed out that my trainees want to learn. Of course I enjoyed it.

Most academics don't want to be teachers.

Many of my coworkers (in higher ed) would rather be teaching. But it just doesn't pay.

YMMV

What does the T stand for in RTFT?

Probably "textbook."

Sounds exactly like my EE degree.

I left knowing absolutely fuck all other than how to pass a test through cramming yet got a 1st. I didn't deserve it.

I spent 5 years the moment I hit industry relearning everything and fudging what I could with my then HP48 calculator which had a solver and equation library. It basically saved my arse.

My first job was to design and construct a prototype design for an instrumentation amplifier but we'd never even been taught how to lay shit out on a PCB.

Now I know what I'm doing but have bailed out into software as there is more demand, but I get the feeling my story is quite common.

Beyond all the other factors, this is the problem:

"My first job was to design and construct a prototype design for an instrumentation amplifier but we'd never even been taught how to lay shit out on a PCB."

University is mostly a pissing context between "PhD" that couldn't survive in the real world. And the tests are to assert their dominance (mostly)

I have an EE degree. The hobbyist magazine has taught me more about how to build a simple radio than said degree.

Not to mention mathematical models for some things are, let's say, weird.

I'm reminded of my physics professor, who after giving a test where the class average was 82%, stated that 'either this class is incredibly smart, or my test was incredibly easy'. The next exam, we were humbled with a class average of ~40%.

Apparently we weren't incredibly smart.

This reminds me of one of my first year university maths classes.

With two weeks to go, the class was getting a bit restless and a few people where mucking up throwing paper air planes.

Unfortunately one stray plane smashed into the blackboard nearly hit the prof in the back of the head.

The lecture theatre went deadly silent. The prof turned around, collected his notes, wished us all good luck in the upcoming end of year exam and walk out of the lecture.

He also went M.I.A. for the remaining four lectures in the two weeks that followed.

But he got his revenge, by setting one of the hardest first year maths exams, which ended up having an average mark well below 50%.

So many people failed the faculty had to lower the pass mark.

Never understood why lecturers/professors take so much offense. Well if people are throwing paper air planes in the air you should be convinced that either everyone in the class is totally disinterested in math(which is impossible) or something is wrong in the way you teach.

Thinking back on those lectures, they were a bit on the dry side and as there was a lot of restlessness during the lectures.

Also the paper planes had started to appear in earlier lectures and the prof did pretty much ignore them.

I think it in this instance it was the plane crashing into the blackboard (and making a pretty loud thud) only inches from his left ear that finally made him snap.

I think its a politeness thing really - 9 times out of 10 the lecturer does not want to be there, rehashing the same boring old material again and again, and would much rather be working on their latest project. But they have to be there - you as the young student don't. If you are uninterested, leave. If you find the presentation boring, empathise.

IF YOU ARE UNINTERESTED, LEAVE!

- your professor

These wrong expectations have been carefully cultivated for over a decade in students who get to good colleges. For over a decade, they've been getting good scores and they've been made to feel that a good score is the inevitable and deserved outcome of "trying". (The kids for whom this is not true mostly don't end up at good colleges.) "If students expect 90-100% scores are possible, and then they start a subject where all of a sudden that's not true, then they're not going to deal with that well." And they're evaluating you, the professor.

As the professor, you've either got tenure and you don't need to care toooo much about those evaluations, or you are pre-tenure at a research U and you've got to keep 'em reasonable while you crank out papers, or you're pre-tenure at a teaching college and you've got to keep them GOOD. Those evaluations have got to stay above a certain level, though, especially in this job climate. Why go to the trouble of resetting students' expectations by broaching those subjects students will struggle with? So keep things easy.

But then you're to a point in math or physics at which you can't continue avoiding the topics that are taxing intellectually. So you go into it and your students are sophomores with 13 years of straight As behind them and your star student starts to have a slightly tough time with multivariable Taylor series and she gets a 78% on the second midterm. She's totally mortified and gets her grade back up to an A- or B+, but at the end of the semester visits you in your office to apologize and tell you she's changing her major to sociology. She realizes that a B+ tells her that she just can't succeed in mathematics even though she likes it.

And maybe your end-of-semester evaluations for that class are overall pretty good, recovering from the mid-term evaluations that were so stressed out, and you've dealt with the seven requests to take the final late to accommodate vacation or extra study time. Pretty good means you can breathe a sigh of relief in that respect... but you keep thinking about that student who left math because she got one 78% on a midterm. You tell her you got a year of straight Cs in real analysis and still got into graduate school and maybe she wavers for a moment.

Only a moment. "But you're different. You're good at math."

Students conclude they "don't have a talent" for math/science. They don't understand that "talent" is bullshit. Stubbornness, on the other hand, means something.

Believe it or not, the title actually is from the Onion.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/national-science-foundation...

First of all, I don't think math/science is harder than history or art. I consider both Newton and Shakespeare to be geniuses; same with Bach and Leibniz. I think it's an established empirical fact (maybe not -- see NYT article) that to become an expert at anything, it will take you upwards of 10,000 hours -- be it playing violin, studying history, or doing number theory. So I don't think the effort is any differentiating factor.

But I do think that in math/engineering classes there is a disproportional amount of trickery. There are numerous memes that exemplify this: http://www.thefunnyblog.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/funny...

You'd be surprised how often this happens. In my calculus classes it was virtually rampant. We'd get some material that was non-trivial to figure out on an exam. That's just bad teaching. Sure, some people will argue that it separates those a better grasp of the material from those with a worse one (maybe it does), but to me it seems unfair. Say I'm not a bright student but I understand the homework very well; the exam, however, uses a non-trivial combination of the elements found in the homework. I personally think that's bullshit. Why not go over the most mind-numbingly difficult problems in class? Often times, there are only a limited number of tricks that can trip you up; if professors would go over these, everyone would pass. But I guess we don't want that (why not?).

Consider an analogy: I decide to prepare for a running competition. My trainer shows me how to keep my heart-rate up, how to jog briskly, etc. All this is done on a treadmill on the low setting. Come competition day, it turns out that it's a 25k through the Australian outback. I'm not sure how anyone in their right mind would think the trainer did a good job if he knew exactly what I was getting into.

On a tangent:

>to become an expert at anything, it will take you upwards of 10,000 hours

Wrong. 10,000 hours will make a unskilled person moderately skilled, but if they lack the innate talent or intellectual capacity, it won't make them an expert. This sort of meritocracy where people just need to try harder is completely wrong, and dangerous to encourage.

[1] http://healthland.time.com/2013/05/20/10000-hours-may-not-ma...

I agree with your overall point though.

I'm not sure how the article supports your argument. Looking at its conclusion, it looks like the "10,000-hour hypothesis" is an open question (at the very least).

That Time article leads with a mischaracterization of the debate. I haven't read Outliers, but I did read a bit of K. Anders Ericsson's original work. Ericsson qualified the 10,000 hours saying that it had to be a certain type of deliberative practice, and that there was a limit of about 4 hours per day which could be spent on it.

In other words, it has never been the case that 10,000 hours is all that's needed, only that that is a minimum number.

However, you reject here Ericsson's entire thesis, that being summarized in the Time article as "Ericsson doesn’t deny that genetic limitations, such as those on height and body size, can constrain expert performance in areas like athletics — and his research has shown this. However, he believes there is no good evidence so far that proves that genetic factors related to intelligence or other brain attributes matter when it comes to less physically driven pursuits."

You made a claim that "innate talent or intellectual capacity" is essential to being an expert. This is a widely held belief, first articulated (I'm told) in Vasari's "The Lives of the Artist" (1568). The debate is - where is the evidence which justifies this widely held belief?

You see a danger in promoting this "meritocracy" ideal. I have two objections to that. First, I think you are using the term incorrectly. Suppose we only have innate talents as part of our genetic nature. Under a meritocracy, those who are naturally smarter, etc. will get a better job or higher position than those who aren't. It doesn't make a difference if it was achieved through deliberative practice or innate nature. Instead, I think the better word is 'egalitarianism.'

Second, it reminds me too much of various view of "noble blood" and rusty arguments that women by nature can't do X, that black people by nature can't do Y, and that Swedes are by nature dumb squareheads. There's any number of these stereotypes once fervently held to be true, but which haven't stood up to the test of time.

Also, there shouldn't be a good argument that "people just need to try harder." Ericsson's view is that "deliberate practice requires effort and does not lead to immediate reward" (quoting from a summary by David Zach Hambrick). There are many good reasons to not become an expert on a topic, including: 1) the person could be interested in becoming an expert in another topic, 2) it can be hard to find the 10,000 hours needed for practice, especially if that time is spent making money needed for rent and food, and 3) other requirements may be missing; it's hard to be an expert surfer if one lives in Colorado, or downhill skier in Miami.

The path towards being an expert in anything is chaotic. I am one of the world experts in writing software for a certain subset of biochemistry. But had I gotten a different job just out of college, I would probably be in a completely different field. It's really hard for me to believe that I was born with this talent, given how much education and job-related experience I had through to get to this point.

Bravo for responding so clearly and accurately to such a pervasive and wrong belief. The best overview/summary I have read is The Genius in All of Us by David Shenk[1]. It would probably not add much to your understanding, but to anyone who hasn't looked extensively into these ideas, read this book.

Seriously, if you're reading right now, stop what you are doing, and read this book. It will change your understand of what you are capable of.

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307387305?ie=UTF8&tag=dshe...

Your praise made me happy. Thank you.

There are plenty of people that spent 10,000 hours studying math but due to mental limitations are far from experts. However, most people don't spend anywhere near that amount of time studying math unless there reasonably intelegent in the first place which suggests that the only validity to that number is the less gifted generally give up before wasting that much time.

What really makes math stand out is there are people who became recognized experts well before that magic 10,000 hour number. EX: Srinivasa Ramanujan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan

> unless there reasonably intelegent

Oh? He had almost no formal training, but that doesn't mean he didn't put a lot of work into it. How many hours do you think it took before he was a "recognized expert", or since this is Ramanujan, before he developed new theorems which would later be recognized as being that of an expert?

Quoting from the Wikipedia link: Ramanujan's introduction to formal mathematics began at age 10. He demonstrated a natural ability, and was given books on advanced trigonometry written by S. L. Loney that he mastered by the age of 12; he even discovered theorems of his own, and re-discovered Euler's identity independently. He demonstrated unusual mathematical skills at school, winning accolades and awards. By 17, Ramanujan had conducted his own mathematical research on Bernoulli numbers and the Euler–Mascheroni constant.

7 years at 4 hours per day = 10,000 hours.

Do you think he averaged less than two hours per day on math as a teenager? Based on what little I know about him, I don't think that's the case.

Also, your terminology is the core of the debate here. You say "the less gifted," but the debate is that there may be no "gift", but instead the dominate factor is the willingness of the person to go through a difficult learning method with delayed rewards, in order to become an expert.

I studied math, physics, and computer science as an undergraduate. I spent a lot of extra time learning and practicing software development, while I rarely did math and physics beyond what was needed for coursework. I believe most of my 'deliberate practice' went into CS. I'm now an expert in software development, especially as it relates to biomolecular structures. I firmly believe it is my interest in the topic and the lack of competition (meaning that it pays well) which led me here, and not some intrinsic gift.

When you look at what many great accomplishments, you often find a person that had a drive to succeed in his field that bordered on an obsession. When you are truly so passionate about something that it becomes your entire life, I believe it is possible to appear as if you are a genius, or maybe to even become one. In fact, I think that true genius can be attributed more to hard work than anything else.

Look at people like Bobby Fischer, he spent an unhealthy amount of time playing / studying chess (supposedly like 18 hours a day), and it destroyed every other relationship in his life. I'm sure he was intelligent, but without developing an obsession with chess, he probably wouldn't have been much of a player.

There was also a kid whose father forced him to study every waking moment, according to an IQ test, he was a super-genius (I think it was over 200), but in reality he was just a poor kid with a fucked-up, abusive father. I remember reading about it in the news, but I can't seem to find the article.

in re: the last kid

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norbert_Wiener

"he spoke several languages but could make himself understood in none"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_James_Sidis

Those were interesting articles, but there was a much more recent example. The kid in question was interviewed on talk shows and stuff. His mom divorced his father over the insane treatment of their child, and she gained custody.

It depends on how high you set the bar for 'expert'. If you mean 'doyen', then yes, 10k isn't going to do it. If you mean 'has a solid grasp of the ins and outs, avoids common pitfalls, and can carry an informed, intelligent conversation on the topic', then 10k will do it.

Exams like that are where the teaching function of school collides headlong with the (more important) sorting function of school. I found the phenomenon frustrating in engineering school, and even more frustrating in law school. They both prominently featured exams that looked nothing like what was taught in class. They both favor the kind of cynical person who ignores the larger ideas taught in class to focus on day 1 on the final exam, and also the socially competent who can get previous exams and the like from social networks. They also, completely incidentally, identify the few people who are so beyond the curve they could answer anything the professor might ask without studying, which lends them an air of legitimacy that perpetuates their existence.

You see it less in the humanities because the sorting function of school is so much less important than the teaching function. No lucrative jobs are riding on getting a 3.7 in art history versus a 3.4. (Everyone will be unemployed anyway...)

As an aside, I'm convinced grades are just an awful aspect of "education." They don't serve any purpose other than making it easier for employers to figure out who to hire, which I don't think is a legitimate function of school.

The irony here is that most R&D/engineering jobs do their own training. My mom, for example, works as a chem engineer/researcher -- every time they hire someone, they also train them. I think it's ironic that people bust their asses in school to get a 3.5+ and end up being trained like little robots anyway once they find their "dream job." Anyone with some elementary knowledge of chemistry could pass these training courses and get to work in a couple of weeks.

It just goes to show how disconnected academia is from real life.

Well it's the employers who claim they need fresh workers with all that academic training!

> They don't serve any purpose other than making it easier for employers to figure out who to hire, which I don't think is a legitimate function of school.

Interesting point. At the same time it justifies the existence of schools since a lot of people go to school to get a better job.

> "the socially competent who can get previous exams and the like from social networks"

side note: at Cambridge, every past exam in every subject[1] is in the college library[2], and it's assumed that you'll photocopy them and work through the last 5 years or so for practice. This doesn't help much, of course, because you get a new crazily difficult exam every year[3].

[1] probably not going all the way back to 1209... [2] i.e. 50-odd small libraries near the students' accommodation, mine was accessible 24 hours a day. [3] unless it's Terentjev in TP1 (Theoretical Physics 1), who just set us a bunch of previous years questions, which I hadn't bothered to finish solving because they never reused questions. I'm not bitter, I promise...

"We'd get some material that was non-trivial to figure out on an exam. That's just bad teaching."

You should reconsider what you just said. I tend to think that most 'good' universities do that.

The quoted part is admittedly a bit awkward to read -- I exemplified exactly what I meant in my analogy. It's true that most good universities "sort" rather than "teach." My argument is that sorting is not what schools were invented for. We have Olympiads for that.

"My argument is that sorting is not what schools were invented for"

Hmmm, are you sure about that?

Being a student and learning are not the same thing. To be successful in school, you have to excel at the former.

Plato's academy (and most of the ancient academies) were not built to "find out who was the best" at X or Y. They were built to a) teach current ideas and b) develop new ones.

The problem with post-scholastic (and I would argue even scholastic) thought is that we've mixed up the two roles. Grading (as we know it now) is a relatively new invention... probably invented around the late 18th century at Cambridge.

And yet these non-sorting educational institutions still produced Newton, Galileo, Augustine, and so many others.

As a teacher, I take strong issue with dvt's comment: "We'd get some material that was non-trivial to figure out on an exam. That's just bad teaching."

Exams are supposed to be non-trivial, if they are to test your understanding of the material. When I teach freshman calculus, I invariably get this kind of comments from students who aced math in high school because they had basically memorized all possible question patterns from the textbook. But did they understand it? More often than not, they hadn't, really. And when they get a question that doesn't fit a pattern they've seen before, they call it a "trick", when it's anything but.

I work hard at getting my students to understand that math is not about memorizing stuff but about understanding stuff. You have to know the basic concepts and techniques by heart, of course, same as any subject, but anything more is just icing (unless your brain works in such a way that memorizing patterns helps you understand general principles, in which case memorize away, but don't mistake the means for the end.

Many students tell me they don't understand why they got a failing mark on an exam because they did all the homework and/or put in tens of hours of study. They seem to think that these actions should somehow guarantee them a passing grade, and if it didn't, it's obviously because the exam was unfair.

Now let me be perfectly clear: I don't give hard exams. In fact, most of the questions I ask are downright easy, provided you understand the material. Here's an example: "Sketch the graph of a twice-differentiable function f(x) whose domain is the real numbers and which satisfies the following two conditions: f'(x) is negative for all x, and f''(x) always has the same sign as x." This was in fact a question in my calc 1 midterm last year.

Out of 60 students, 10 did not write anything. 10 drew something that was not the graph of a function. 10 drew a function that did not satisfy any of the requirements. 10 drew a decreasing function but got the concavity wrong somehow. 20 gave a correct answer. (This is all approximate, of course.) The average mark for this question was probably around 2/5.

Was this exam question harder than my homework problem sets? Absolutely not! It's just different. Here's an example of a homework question relating to the same material in a similar way: "A differentiable function f(x) is such that f'(x) never changes sign. What can be said about the number of zeros of f?" This is more difficult than the exam question because the step linking the sign of f' to the number of zeros of f (drawing a graph) is not explicitly suggested, and because the answer is "f has at most one zero" and not "f has exactly one zero".

Consider f(x) = 0. f'(x) = 0, so never changes sign. f has infinitely many zeros.

You cleverly avoid my analogy. I'll give another.

You teach someone how to do X, lets assume this goes something like: Step 1, Step 2, Step 3, Step 4, done. You then teach someone how to do Y, this goes like: Step 5, Step 6, done. On the exam you ask someone to do Z. This follows from a nontrivial combination of Step 1, Step 3, Step 6, done. If anyone gets it right, don't flatter yourself. You didn't teach them how to do Z.

Either they have a sort of a priori intuition of the material (this is how I get by most of the time), they got lucky, or they had someone else teach them. Mathematicians (and other academics) feel the need to make their subjects so obtuse they seem insurmountable. Math is not hard - some guy saw an interesting behavior of a function and wanted to see what happens when he tries to differentiate it. Programming is not hard - some girl thought she could make her life easier by writing a program that writes other programs. This pretty much exemplifies all of human understanding. It's not much more than that.

Of course I'm not suggesting that complex analysis or the Dragon Book are trivial, all I'm saying is that they are not hard. But academics themselves often discourage people from pursuing science and math (numerous examples in this thread alone). We can blame the government, elementary schools, and parents all we want, but it's blatantly obvious that universities are broken. The fact that students are tested on material not covered in class (or nontrivial combinations of material covered in class) is inane.

  > You didn't teach them how to do Z

That's called problem soloving. You see the problem, see that it is a combination of smaller problems, you solve them. Lots of problem solving at school was teaching exactly that: how to transform a problem into the ones you can solve with step-by-step approach. This was true not only for math, but for physics and chemistry too.

I'm not sure how making nontrivial cognitive leaps is called problem solving. It seems like black magic.

Winning at chess or poker seems more like problem solving to me.

Yes, but I would agree with dvt that there are professors who consider themselves "clever" for putting material on the exam that looks nothing like what showed up in lecture or in the homework.

Kinds of problems that can justify being on an exam are surely important enough to be in lecture or on the homework. Putting a special kind of problem on the exam that must be deconstructed before it can be transformed in a problem that showed up in the homework is a "trick".

What you think is inane is the part of testing that actually tests math skills.

People keep dodging my analogies, I've given two thus far. I guess one more won't hurt. This one isn't very good, but I hope you'll get the gist of it. You take an art class and you're taught the basics of painting -- color, contrast, texture, shading, etc. Your final exam is to reproduce the Mona Lisa (or pick any equally-daunting piece of art).

Of course da Vinci used the same principles of color and shading to paint the Mona Lisa, but the final exam does not seem to test the skills you were taught -- rather, it tests your innate ability to be a great painter. Undoubtedly, some people will get A's, some will get A-'s, and some will get B's. But if person X has some sort of innate talent that person Y does not have, X has a clear and distinct advantage on the exam -- an advantage that has nothing to do with the class and nothing to do with the teacher.

Consider another example: if a friend of mine asked me to "teach him how to program" I wouldn't give him the building blocks without the caveats -- one of the first things I'd do is tell him that off-by-one errors, for example, are a very common caveat in for loops.

And yet, I've taken programming courses in which this kind of trickery (CS professors love to fuck with you by giving retarded off-by-one puzzles) borders on immoral. I've had friends in said classes that had no experience with programming (unlike me) that received unsatisfactory grades because of this kind of incessant trickery. Thankfully, CS books are written magnitudes better than math books.

> f'(x) is negative for all x, and f''(x) always has the same sign as x.

Say, let f'(x) = -e^{-x^{2}}, and f''(x) = 2xe^{-x^{2}}; f(x) = \Int{f'(x)dx} = -0.5sqrt(pi)erf(x) + C, where erf is the error function(, OK, I cheated with Wolfram Alpha, and never worked out the integral part myself).

f(x) = e^(-x) works too :)

But the point is to draw a function with these properties. You just have to have a smooth curve that approaches 0 asymptotically and is concave up. No worries about graphing any particular function!

Either you got the description wrong or I'm especially rusty - in that case, f''(x) = e^(-x), which is positive even when x is negative, so it doesn't always have the same sign.

Oh, crap, you're right. I read that as f''(x) must have the same sign as f(x).

Even easier: f(x) = - arctan(x). We have f'(x) = -1/(1+x^2) < 0 for all x, and f''(x) = 2*x/((1+x^2)^2) which has the same sign as x.

e^(-x) right? Concave up(positive), negative deriavative.

It's not obvious to me that the example you give is "downright easy, provided you understand the material". Now, I understand the material, and I find the example easy. But I can see that it involves a few little cognitive leaps which it may not be reasonable to expect a student to make. The straightforward solution, I think, involves considering x < 0 and x > 0 separately. How is a student supposed to know that that's a reasonable option? Is "when a question uses the phrase 'the same sign as x', try considering each sign separately" in the textbook? Are students supposed to figure that out somehow?

The question is whether exam material should seem substantially different from the course material.

Looking at your first question, I am hemming and hawing whether it is correct to say zero is positive or negative or both. I would say both, thus f''(x)=0 leads us towards a legitimate solution. Having not attended your course, it is possible the issue came up multiple times and this would cause no confusion. But it might confuse someone who has an otherwise excellent command of calculus.

But given the homework problem shown later, it is rather likely that those paying attention found your exam question perfectly fair.

"Was this exam question harder than my homework problem sets? Absolutely not! It's just different." The kind of differences matter. I do not see why the exam questions need to seem different in any non-trivial way. (I speak of a general principle. I do not hold an opinion about your particular questions.)

Sports scientists have pointed out[1] that people who are innately good at a thing will do more of it, with less resistance to training, than people who aren't.

The 10,000 hours are done by people who enjoy a subject or activity enough to do it almost constantly. And that usually comes about because of early successes.

This is sometimes called "talent".

[1] http://www.sportsscientists.com/2011/08/talent-training-and-...

There are geniuses in every field, therefore every field is just as difficult intellectually? I don't follow your reasoning here. What sort of evidence would convince you that math/science are in fact harder for humans than history or art? (Edit: A somewhat different perspective I have is expressed by Feynman here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWjV0bNBPY4 The good men and women of a field are more important than the field, and you can probably find good men and women in every field if you look hard enough.)

It is important to note the sample set of the survey: "The researchers surveyed 655 students entering Berea College, a private liberal arts college located in Kentucky, in the falls of 2000 and 2001."

I have a feeling that the results of the survey would be different at a public university with strong science and engineering programs.

My personal experience has been that many people will change their intended degrees, but rarely have I seen someone completely withdraw from science or engineering programs

Agreed. A few hundred kids at one atypical college does not a full pattern make.

Also, does it bug nobody else that this "news" is from research done a dozen years ago?

Yeah, this study is a joke-- Berea is really atypical, I've visited. The town is charming with a serious mountain artistic vibe. The school has a religious mission and outreach to non-traditional students in Appalachia.

Hah, I like the part how students have a hard time accepting that even if they work hard, they won't do well.

Where I went to school, the classes were curved to a B-. So generally speaking, if you consider say a A- or above to be doing "well", most people were not doing well by a large margin. The truth is though that it's when you are sitting just below average, but not so far below that you're genuinely lost, but still genuinely struggling that you are probably at your optimal challenge level.

Indeed. This seems to be the main problem. One running joke around my family / friends is that a hardworking B/C student does best in Engineering majors, because they work hard and are used to getting poor grades anyway. They've already come across that problem in their life.

On the other hand, students who got straight A's throughout high school become surprised at the difficulty, get their first B in their lifetime, and feel bad about themselves... possibly even switching majors.

I suppose I was fortunate that the time that I started my Mechanical Engineering degree had coincided with a transition to a general "idgaf" attitude about my grades.

Lol, ditto, except with Computer Engineering.

I managed to get an "F" in High School History, which was a low point for me frankly, but the C's that came later in Engineering were no big sweat :-).

Focusing on learning, instead of getting decent grades, seems to have been a good thing... definitely contributed to my sanity through college IMO.

Similar. I was wired to take hard courses for the challenge, and just didn't care about the grades. But a lot of people are coddled and fear failure.

The first time I came to India, I sucked at their grading system and it broke my bubble of being a precious snowflake who always did well. I think that was a good thing really; it got me used to the idea that grades could go fuck themselves. Much later, when I changed careers and started doing more math here in the U.S., it helped a lot because the whole idea of getting a B+ didn't matter so much. I knew a lot who were in my math classes who were probably smarter than me but dropped out because they couldn't handle the idea of struggling.

To this day I cherish the C's and B's I got at RPI and high school a whole heck of a lot more than any A. Struggling/pressure is a good thing.

> So generally speaking, if you consider say a A- or above to be doing "well",

This is so silly. With this scheme, only A- or above is good, while all of E, D, C, B and their various variations are just shades of suckiness, I guess. My university courses have seemed to be curved towards C (looking at the distribution of the grades), and for a good reason - it is right in the middle of the collection of passing grades.

Thought I'd share my experience initially majoring in Physics (I ended up going with the "easier" (for me) computer science).

I wanted to be a physicist really bad. However, I did not have any advanced placement credit in math. I started college taking Calculus I along with the basic intro physics courses. The first year was fine. The second year was largely devoted to quantum mechanics, which is where the trouble started. Semester 1 of my sophomore year, I was taking Calculus III and Differential Equations. Unfortunately, a few weeks into the curriculum, we started using partial differential equations everywhere -- I barely even knew how to solve basic differential equations! Even more unfortunate was the fact that every other student in the dwindling Physics class had advanced placement credit and already had the prerequisite math.

It totally killed the joy I initially found in Physics. I found that I just couldn't make up the lost ground myself, and ended up dropping out of Physics.

Sounds like a badly designed curriculum if the prereqs weren't required before they were needed.

I'm not entirely sure how knowing a standard undergrad PDE course would help in understanding the various physicist-specific techniques that go into solving the Schroedinger equation. I don't really understand why OP thought they needed to grok ODEs before being able to solve PDEs; the two fields have relatively small intersection.

Physics has more than just the Schrödinger equation. My undergrad PDE course helped immensely in my graduate level physics qualifying example. One question was on the heat equation and the other an E&M problem, both in a rectilinear coordinate system.

With a solid foundation in second-order PDEs, it's a matter of setting up the boundary conditions and solving for the Fourier series. The boundary conditions were superimposeable combinations of simpler forms, so it was mostly a matter of determining the correct Fourier series for those forms, then simplifying.

The OP probably didn't understand the distinction between ODEs and PDEs because of a lack of experience.

> Physics has more than just the Schrödinger equation.

It was a course in Quantum Mechanics, specifically.

> With a solid foundation in second-order PDEs, it's a matter of setting up the boundary conditions and solving for the Fourier series. The boundary conditions were superimposeable combinations of simpler forms, so it was mostly a matter of determining the correct Fourier series for those forms, then simplifying.

In a usual undergrad course on QM, e.g., following Griffiths, one only solves SE with particular choices of potential -- usually only infinite well and QHO, and maybe a double well to illustrate tunneling. Neither really requires a background in Fourier series.

Ahh, I see. I left the train of discussion, and reinterpreted "physics" in the broad sense, rather than actual topic of "physics for an undergraduate quantum course."

My apologies, and thanks for the clarification.

Yea sounds like it, I took the standard math track at my college and never had any problem with my upper level physics courses but most of my fellow students constantly complained their lack of math understanding was severely hurting their physics education.

I wonder if most physics curriculum's underestimate the amount of time it takes to truly become competent with calculus/DE tools. I may of only escaped because I loved math and did a lot of self study out of pleasure.

I think they are well aware of how few hours they have to teach physics. The debate is more, which classes can be dropped and replaced with a math course, in order that the students can have a deeper understanding of the underlying math?

More specifically, which of thermodynamics, optics, particle/nuclear physics, solid state, lab courses, E&M, classical mechanics, or quantum mechanics do you think should be dropped from the physics requirement, and which math course should replace it?

Or should the liberal arts requirements be reduced? Or should physics become a 5 year program?

As far as I can tell, I was drawn to Physics out of sheer masochism. In highschool I excelled in history and English without putting any effort in, but had to work on my math and physics to do well. This trend only intensified in university. I found quantum mechanics to be the most challenging sub-field of physics (except, perhaps, solid state), and guess what I wound up doing in grad school!

Maybe there just aren't enough masochists willing to embrace the pain out there.

I'm currently doing a double major in Philosophy and Mathematics part-time while working a full-time job and caring for a house and 5-month old daughter with my wife. I think one of the things that initially drew me to those subjects and keeps me plugging away is that I find both of them confounding, infuriating, confusing, and hard as shit. I have a couple tech-related college diplomas that I really didn't have too work too hard to get, but in 8 to 10 years when I'm being presented with my degree, I'm going to really feel like I accomplished something.

It seems like a strange methodology to get at what's an obvious truism. Berea college (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berea_College) is very atypical. It's a small school, with a mission of helping poor Appalachian students get an education. 100% of the students are on scholarship. 100% have paid jobs while in school.

It's hard to extrapolate from this to a national poll. It would be better to include Penn State, Michigan and University of Texas to understand national trends.

That said, this is a truism. The fields pay well because they are hard enough to scare away many students, and they have good jobs. Other fields are difficult too (say Philosophy?) but they don't have good jobs on the other side so people are less tempted.

Science and math are taught extremely poorly in K-12 public school, almost criminally so. Most education focuses on rote memorization of often questionably useful facts and eschews the more abstract concepts that are at the core of the subject.

Science and math are fascinating subjects, and kids often have a natural interest in them, but that interest gets squashed by the punishingly boring way the subjects get taught. Most kids end up thinking that math and science are just a lot of boring routine, like intellectual factory work. Who would blame them for avoiding what seems to be a dismal waste of time?

This may have changed post "no child left behind" and the wave of standardization, but I think the quality of science and math education in K-12 public schools varies greatly.

My school district was pretty awesome for science, while the one down the street would latter make national news by getting their pants sued off for teaching creationism in science classrooms.

That's simply because memorization is about the only technique that can be taught reliably across a wide range of learning styles. Anything that involves deep though has to be individually tailored to each student.

Case in point -- one of my step kids did real well in math in grade school, until the teacher started mixing in art to make it more fun (one project was to make a "math cube", and decorated it -- he failed that project). The other kid was out the week that fractions were taught. She heard from her friends how hard it was, and was terrified of going back to school. So her mom taught it to her (known her learning style), and she aced the test when she got back. All other students in the class failed miserably. (And the teacher was extremely upset -- how dare a parent actually teach their kid -- that's the teachers job).

<em>Science and math are fascinating subjects, and kids often have a natural interest in them, but that interest gets squashed by the punishingly boring way the subjects get taught.</em>

Yes, absolutely true, but not just of science and math. This applies to all subjects. In the spirit of hoping for a better life for my son than I had, I hope I can help him to hold off that interest-squashing better than I could.

I grew up in the American public school system (and a decent one at that). One thing I could never understand was the purpose of summer break. I understand that to many kids, summer break was a sacred multi-month period but to me, the opportunity cost seems significant. In those summers, I learned geometry, physics, biology, multivariable calculus, and read tons of books while other kids had "traditional" vacations that did nothing to reinforce what they had learned the year before.

I know that rest and relaxation are also important to fostering a child's creativity and independence, but there is certainly a tradeoff, and I am wondering if we are nowhere near the correct balance.

Studying should not be the most important part of childhood, and knowing how to enjoy time off is a life skill that a lot of "high achievers" are sorely missing.

Oh I completely agree. This is still something that I struggle with 20-25 years after elementary school. Again, I'm questioning the balance. There probably is something to be said for more frequent but shorter breaks too, which I am taking a liking towards.

The system isn't particularly designed with focus on kids learning things.

If I could hazard a guess, I think the popularity of abolishing the summer break started around the time when the sunbelt started to see a huge migration influx. Energy costs skyrocket for large buildings (like public schools) during the summer months, plus outdoor sports are untenable because of the extreme heat, so it would be a huge obstacle for many organized sports.

Just a guess. I agree otherwise. Public schools could have a more rigorous curriculum while being much more relaxed if the semesters weren't condensed into 4-5 months.

Summer break is older than air conditioning. It was design to accomodate the farming lifestyle, where kids needed to work the farms when crops were cropping up.

Yep, but the sunbelt migration coincided with A/C proliferation.

Live does not revolve around "school", and there should be time (and lots of it!) to learn outside of it. Therefore, summer vacation.

In my observation, you're correct. School teaches a narrow subset of what must be learned, and emphasizes a passive attitude toward learning. It's better to let kids learn on their own. Some of them will grow up to be socially powerful, or athletic, or even self-starters like hackers, and for them, this "free time" is more important than school.

The average student does not give a flying fuck about what they study. That 4 month break is the only thing that keeps them going. It sucks, but I see it as beneficiary to people who are interested in their subjects. It's a good balance.

it's easy: life is not about reading books and attending school. or working, for that matter.

I grew up in Russia and attended school there until 9th grade and when I went to American HS it buffled me that regular school day is so much longer but the quality of education in STEM is so much poorer. If I had to stay through out the summer studying then I probably would end up with ritalin for 'ADD'. I did not enjoy HS in US at all, it was like one big kindergarten for teenagers, so dreadful. It did not prepare me for college, but it's ok because my freshmen year was nearly identical in difficulty.

With STEM in the US unfortunately, you will find that the quality varies heavily depending on the socioeconomic status of the school district's inhabitants.

Some of summer break can be explained by farming... but...

Summer is to learn all the other stuff like playing and working and socializing. Summer is the time to do what you want and figure out who you are. Summer is the opportunity to experience programs and activities that schools just cannot do.

The break is important and school isn't the only teacher. The idea of 12 month schools so students "won't forget what they learned" tells me the aren't really learning it anyway.

> "Math, Science Popular Until Students Realize They’re Hard"

Well, if that's not "begging the question" then I don't know what is.

If math & science is so hard, the real question should be: why the hell is everything else so 'easy'?

I think the problem is skill related. Most U.S students just don't have the proper foundation in math to do well in physics, engineering, or even bio and chemistry.

I don't think majors like philosophy or english are implicitly any easier (I went to a school where they were seemingly pretty difficult majors), but they're much easier in comparison to subjects where you many students lack years of fundamental work.

I have spent time in educational systems outside the U.S., I don't think it is a U.S. centric problem. Math and the sciences are extremely cumulative, this means that you have to keep at it. That in turn either requires passion or a system much like exists in China/India where you have an entire nation designed to put as much pressure on kids to make sure they get good grades on one silly exam or the other.

This shit is hard, which is why not a lot of people survive at it. I don't see how America can move to the Asian system of training without a lot of people here rebelling against that. Maybe an alternative would be to expose kids to the idea that life is actually hard in the real world sooner.

In my experience, it was quite easy to take and even do well in upper-division humanities classes (specifically philosophy) without any lower-division work in the major. Jumping from high school to upper-division STEM classes would be tough.

> If math & science is so hard, the real question should be: why the hell is everything else so 'easy'?

Look at usage.

I majored in CS, minored in Mathematics, yet as a programmer, I do more communicating in English than anything resembling math, and about an even amount communicating ideas and coding.

Growing up, everyday we speak, talk, write. We live history all around us, we see TV specials about WW2, parents and grandparents tell stories about their childhoods.

When is math truly used? On occasion, sure, it serves its purpose quite well. But in day to day life? One does not go around taking the derivative of arbitrary objects, but one may very well be called upon to present a persuasive argument or find a moment to whisper poetry in a loved one's ear.

It may very well be a case that our daily living does more to reinforce materials learned aside from the math and sciences.

Real research mathematics, that which can't be reduced to mental calculation, requires a command of verbal reasoning well beyond what it takes to win at analogies on the SAT (as does theoretical physics).

It can also add to your ability to express yourself.

I very concisely was able to get my feelings about Mitt Romney across to my math major roommate when I stated that Romney's ilk believed the well ordering principle could proven to apply to people and not just integers.

Another less esoteric example is this James Fallows article about the Carter administration

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1979/05/the-pass... (ctrl-F cube root)

This was particularly chuckleworthy because I had just encountered a bug in the TI calculator system (I used to work for a TI subcontractor) where to make the cube root of -1 just be -1 (ie always taking the principal branch for the unwashed masses of eighth graders who knew nothing of complex numbers), TI decided to have negative rational numbers with an odd denominator have odd roots go to -1, and even denominators numerically evaluate. (Try graphing the cube root function on your TI and see the function go all over the place for negative values, this is why) When we complained that it was screwing up the numerics we were trying to code, we were told "it's a bug, not a feature". I referred to it as "circumcising the cube root" in a drunken email to said math major.

or find a moment to whisper poetry in a loved one's ear.

You mean people actually do that? I thought we all just whispered ridiculous jokes and stupid memes to our loved ones and then pretended to the outside world it was fine poetry.

I work with people who mostly grew up and did their schooling (including college) in the US. Apparently even engineering students here are supposed to take a couple of language/other liberal arts style classes.

This being the case, I'm not sure why the grammar, sentence construction, and spelling of a lot of people in the States is really bad. I'd definitely be for the theory that English (and possibly other liberal arts subjects) is not taught in even a slightly rigorous way here.

> I'd definitely be for the theory that English ... is not taught in even a slightly rigorous way here.

It isn't. Public schools are haphazard, it is rarely taught well there. It isn't generally included in the sort of language/liberal arts classes that engineering students might be required to take (those are going to be more along the line of literature or creative writing classes).

It is probably taught well in catholic schools, if anywhere.

This is likely an unpopular opinion, but: Math and Science are hard because most people simply aren't wired for high level abstract logical thinking. Teaching Shakespear or physics to a monkey are equally as hard. Teaching Shakespear to a human is much easier because we are wired for that type of reasoning. Most people are not wired for scientific thinking.

We have a large media industry focused on indoctrinating people to be entertained by drama, yet fooled for profit thus critical thinking is looked down upon. Any surprise it turns out that way?

>"If more science graduates are desired, the findings suggest the importance of policies at younger ages that lead students to enter college better prepared to study science,” the researchers write in the paper.

Ironic to find this in the wsj. As a college instructor who has spent a lot of his productive time working in fundamental science research, I can say this:

If more science graduates are desired, pay them more.

Many people you see in engineering and science, although they are making a living, and some may even be well off, could make a lot more money applying their critical thinking skills in other fields. I can't even count the number of former colleagues and classmates who are doing much better financially than their former peers after leaving the sciences and joining another field, like finance.

Money is only one aspect of lifestyle. I doubt there are many jobs in finance that let you maintain a "west-coast tech company" lifestyle.

Not all of us are cut out to be quants anyway.

How is the West Coast tech-company lifestyle that different from the East Coast financial-company lifestyle, other than the difference between flip-flops and a suit? Both seem to involve working hideously long hours in an unstable job in an expensive city.

I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted. Research scientists are woefully underpaid, for the type of expertise they have and the contribution they make to society.

This article seemed to point out a problem with perception of "the value of a letter grade" rather than a lack of motivation to do hard work.

It indicated to me that grades, rather than the outcome from learning, are dangerously overvalued in our education and employment systems.

" One of the things we’ve seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless — no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there’s a slight correlation. Google famously used to ask everyone for a transcript and G.P.A.’s and test scores, but we don’t anymore, unless you’re just a few years out of school. We found that they don’t predict anything. "

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-b...

This is so true. Not many students who are used to getting straight 'A's are okay with getting that 'B-' in organic chemistry after working their asses off studying. Its just a fact. Learning basic science takes dedication and discipline. The inspiring words of Michio Kaku do not make free-body diagrams any less mind numbing.

One of the other issues is lack of adequate high school preparation. One of the factors I saw in college (15 years ago) as a Physics major was that a lot of students that wanted to study physics (or other sciences) just didnt have adequate foundational knowledge coming out of HS. If a year of remedial courses is required just to get to the point where you can take freshman level classes, it becomes very difficult to complete the coursework required for the major, because many of the courses have to be taken sequentially. You can't just load up on a bunch and take classes in parallel to catch up. If you start a year (or more behind) or try to switch into the major late, you can't finish in four years.

Humanities major fields seemed more tolerant of lack of preparation - one could switch into them late or do some remedial work before diving in deep and still get the required coursework done because courses did not depend as much on one another and could be taken in parallel.

It's very upsetting, though, to be told you can't study or have a career in the subject you're interested in because you lived in the wrong district when you were 13 years old. I don't know if this is a problem with high schools, colleges, or both, but it was a large factor in choosing my own major.

Something I noticed as an undergrad Comp Sci major was the disparity in the grade curves for my classes and those of my friends in other majors (cough business school cough). If you look at the business classes' historical grade distributions, they would look something like: a few Fs and Ds, and then a sharp upward linear curve from C to A. The computer science, math, engineering classes always had a more classic bell curve with most of the grades in the C range.

Unless you're really interested in the subject matter, who would want to take the classes where they'll have to work harder, and generally get a lower GPA? I lost one of my partial scholarships because it required I keep a 3.5 GPA, regardless of my major. Want to take bets on whether I would have kept that scholarship had I been a finance major?

I think the bigger problem lies in how they are taught. They can be extremely 'hard' when taught in an unintuitive, abstract way. There are some people who are drawn to the sort of raw problem sets that typify science and engineering courses - But I believe there is a much larger set of people fully capable of success in those courses, but dissuaded by lack of engaging content and clear path to a future impact on the world (i.e. applicability)

When learning something new, it's important to help the learner see progress and applicability of what they're learning - two things I believe are sadly absent in most entry-level STEM courses... too much focus on theory, too early on.

Is it true in general? A small case study (Berea College, 655 students) absolutely does not represent the whole case. It'd be better to look at a school that has strong science/math/engineering programs. The university I'm at now, the University of ___ has all of it's 15 odd programs rated in the top 25 programs. Berea College doesn't even make the list[1], that I can find (for math, but I would guess it's true in general).

[1]:http://graduate-school.phds.org/rankings/mathematics/rank/ba...

Hard? Hell in the public university system in many countries lots of courses are downright impossible to nail; even a passing grade is worthy of honor (and we're not talking about first-year filter courses, just solid, important subjects).

Degrees would be much more valuable if they required more than mere competence to pass. I'm not claiming this should be the modus operandum, but it's certainly something to ponder about, instead of believing that a difference of a few hundredths of points in a test have any real-life meaning.

I think what feynman says in this kind of matter is very important. Understanding is more important than just knowing information. Once you understand things, it's not hard. You just need to invest time. For example, if you can't explain relativity to a 3rd grader you don't really understand it either. I really recommend watching "What do you care what other people think" series on youtube (side note: he does talk a bit about his love life but things that are said there have their meaning). He explains that for example our languages like english is just a human convention. This really hit me. Math notations are used so extensively (I understand the importance of them) but when you want an understanding, you have to interpret it in your own way. If you know the formal definition of derivative but cannot understand why and how it's applicable (for example to derive equations you once had to remember in high school!) then it's not very useful.

The one who has an open mind to think of all the posibilities of why things are the way they are (by eliminating the wrong choices) is the one who masters the topic and possibly even discover new things. [Twist: Everything we know is just an approximation, they're not accurate; But that's for another day, also by Feynman btw].

Oddly I don't see any mention in the article or linked paper of financial aid as a contributing factor to these decisions.

I recall my college social circle being intently aware of GPA requirements for continued merit based financial aid. Planning course schedules to try to keep quarterly grades above our individual cutoffs was a common practice. That same pressure influenced willingness to pursue minors, preparation for masters programs, or double majors. Students in danger of losing their financing absolutely considered which related majors they might transfer into which might offer better odds of a successful degree.

Sadly I think this lead to several students who literally could not afford to risk pursuing their preferred subjects.

Damn right! When I was in college everyone knew that despite Commonwealth College (the honors program) offering merit scholarships, you didn't want to join if you were in STEM.

Why? Because they imposed a minimum GPA requirement (which started at 3.2/4.0 and went up over the years), also additional coursework requirements (you had to take a certain number of "honors courses") and a thesis requirement.

Now, maintaining good grades and doing an undergrad thesis isn't that bad. Maintaining good grades and doing an undergrad thesis while also filling your honors coursework when your department's cooperation with the honors program is in its infancy and the honors college thinks only humanities subjects should count for the Special Honors Sequence, THAT was the problem. Please note that yes, you had to do a Special Honors Sequence and an Honors Gen Ed.

The result was predictable: people would try to "dodge out" by doing the easiest Honors courses they could get, because Honors courses usually had nothing to do with your actual degree focus.

Thus, I have been through a seminar about a neurologist working on African baboons, and another one about Judaic bioethics. My honors thesis had to be classified as an Independent Study, along with much of the undergrad research work I did, and without that stuff I would never have filled my honors requirements without screwing over my Computer Science requirements.

The "merit aid" bureaucrats are often not only complete idiots, but operating on a basic assumption that Merit Means Humanities.

It's not so much that the liberal arts are easier that the sciences, it's that you can be lousy at them without realizing it. It's very hard to be bad at math and not know it.

I wonder how much of this is a consequence of attempting to sell science as something cool, rather than trying to sell the interesting puzzles.

We've spent all this money trying to get more people to take science without any concern for the fact that very few people have been raised and encouraged in the actual learning process. I'd frankly be rather surprised if something like this didn't happen.

> The researchers surveyed 655 students entering Berea College, a private liberal arts college located in Kentucky, in the falls of 2000 and 2001.

/closes tab

To those that heard kids say they want to make video games. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-cWkkWjZtU6Q/UMBEhVxINRI/A...

Yes, Math, Science is hard. It's not for everyone. People it's not suited to leave.

So?

More the issue is smart people who do other degrees(Or no degrees) that contribute less to society. We need them to do more Maths, Science. (From a herd point of view)

In my experience, it's less that STEM is difficult and more that many other majors are increasingly easy. Seriously... do you even have to go to class to graduate in 3 years with a polisci degree?

Might explain some other things as well.

Which is why the UK system of specializing in 3/4 areas in your last 2 years at school as prep for Uni works better.

If you have A leves in Maths and the sciences your probably have worked out if you want to do a STEM degree.

This is an old debate. Is it better to focus early on a specialization or to provide a "well-rounded" person with a broader but less deep understanding? In either case, university education is not the end of learning, so which is most helpful for the future?

I remember in my 20s visiting the UK from the US and talking with other researchers there my age. I was surprised that I knew more about European history than actual Europeans. This is solely due to taking a European history course my last year of high school, while they specialized early in science.

I took a course in psychology, and college one in sociology. These have helped inform my understanding of group dynamics in software project teams.

If you believe that people can and even should change careers in their life, then a diverse education may make more sense. (In the US parlance, "reinventing yourself.") If you think people should stay in the same field, then focused, specialized training may make more sense.

Personally, I prefer a diversified education more than a focused one, but as someone raised in the US system, that's perhaps to be expected.

Finally, and only to highlight the humorousness, it's "A levels" instead of "A leves" and "you" instead of "your." A STEM course of course doesn't focus as much on writing as, say, a history or literature course. ;)

You expect me to take your argument seriously when your dissing me because of my dyslexia?

And whohoo psychology and sociology the soft and easy choice for schools gaming the OFSTEAD system.

What I know about you is only what you have written. In my experience, most people who misspell are not dyslexic, so no, I was not dissing you because of your dyslexia.

I know nothing about your country's internal politics and cannot comment about the last. I was talking about 'school as prep for Uni works better.' It appears that you want a different discussion than what I can provide.

So increase the in school value of taking those classes - more free periods, special lunches, non uniform days

Basically incentivise

And in other news: water is wet, and there is a large yellow-orange ball in the sky that heats up the land.

I love this. Finally, someone said it! I'm proud of barely passing my classes for theoretical math!

The question is, how much do exams reflect real world work scenarios?

Hard, or just detail-oriented?

...at Berea College.

What surprised me after coming from India to the US for grad school in Engineering, was the mad emphasis put on grades here. Back home, I either cared enough to do coursework extremely well, or give up on it (the consequences were usually harmless career wise). Here though, its an entirely different ball game (I was surprised how anxious students here are about assignments and exams).

Then again, I did get I into a very good grad school despite having awful grades; so fret not. I guess employers in India care far more about which college one graduated from more than one's grades.

Is this is because movies and media such as "popular science" magazine sex them up? They sound so cool, then reality hits. Probably kids are a lot lazier now days also...

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