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Comment by paul_f | Hacker News Reader

Other things you probably never did in High School: Science

Yes, a lot of high school subjects focus on the results rather then the process. Community colleges are also guilty. It's not just contained to math and science but even the arts and philosophy.

It's a part of the prevailing attitude "Everyone should go to college." High schools focus on rote learning instead of critical thinking to improve their chances of admission to a good college. Then those same colleges frown on those mechanical methods. The worst part is we're training people to be spoonfed knowledge rather then seek it.

The problem is of course in SAT and other admission tests that expect the rote learning

Ha, this problem is nowhere near as bad as it is in China, where your admissions are nearly (outside of connections) solely based on your college admission test results.

At least in the US, the most selective universities look at other aspects of your application.

That's not to say there aren't other problems in the States, such as negative discrimination / racial quotas.

I've been talking to a few chinese college students. I'd heard that the gaokao was everything in college admissions, and I'm prepared to believe it plays a strong role, but I was a little disoriented by the results of asking four students how they got into their particular college:

复旦 student #1: My gaokao score wasn't high enough for 北大, but it was high enough for 复旦, so I came here.

复旦 student #2: My high school recommended me to 复旦, they gave me an interview, and then they offered me a place in the school of social science. Because of the offer, I didn't need a very high gaokao score.

财大 student #1: I took 财大's own entrance exam and qualified for admission, so I didn't put in any effort on the gaokao and got a low score. That meant my gaokao score wouldn't get me in to any other universities, so I came to 财大.

财大 student #2: I took the gaokao and my score was high enough for 财大, but not for 复旦, so now I'm at 财大.

So half of everyone I've asked fits the mold, but that seems like a low figure to me. The sample size here is only four; have I stumbled upon a wildly unrepresentative group?

In the case of the second student, I feel there's some missing context there. My guess is it was an alumni recommendation, which would explain the circumstances.

For student #3 - I'm unaware of how popular the practice of having a test per university is (or how practical it is to take them as a prospective applicant). Maybe this is restricted to certain universities or majors, or works similarly to EA or ED in the US?

One thing I never understood about standardized testing is why do they create them in a predictable way that makes them easy to prepare for (and thus game)?

Why not create totally different tests each year with all kinds of difficult problems and then grade the whole thing on a curve? The only way to succeed is to actually understand what you're doing better than your peers.

"We are so cool here, that we exclude kids from our campus who achieved less than X score"

That PR message becomes a puzzle when X becomes a randomly distributed number from year to year. So is 1580 a great number this year while 1400 was a great number last year?

The greatest danger would be an "emperor has not clothes" moment when random test results randomly categorize random students into random schools. That might make the test irrelevant in the future, thus not taken. And the test providers income stream disappears.

The scores would be more like 99th percentile or 80th percentile etc. So the message would be "We are so cool, we only accept the top 1%" which works fine and is more meaningful than 1580 or w/e.

That would assume the cream rises to the top, rather than random testing smoothly distributing them into some kind of spread spectrum signal across the test results.

Or it creates a lotto effect. In some ways this is honest and respectable; if we accept that most people are where they are solely because of whom their parents are, providing a lotto to decide who gets the best deal is in some ways fair and honest. "I was lucky to be born to certain parents" rhymes well with "I was lucky to attend certain schools"

Because it's "standardized" testing, that's the whole point. If the nature of the test changes drastically yearly, how can you compare results from year to year?

It's "standardized" as in everyone gets the same test in a given year. Absolute results on something like a college admissions exam are pretty meaningless since getting into college is a zero-sum game for all but the worst schools. All that matters is doing better than X% of the population.

Seems to me like incentivizing deep learning over memorization outweighs losing the ability to compare absolute results from one year to the next.

Speaking of training, the article is a reasonably good long form analogy between music and math WRT training vs education.

If you want an education in math, you don't memorize multiplication tables, just use a calculator. If you want training in math, you don't talk about applications and word problems and proofs, you memorize certain symbolic manipulations.

If people learned programming like they were taught math, they would be forbidden from knowing the concept of a quicksort exists until they successfully memorized and recited a 3SAT proof, "just because". It would be interesting to ace an automata theory class before writing your first line of code. Probably not required, and probably not a good idea, but it would be interesting.

You can educate a kid about what a derivative is in grade school as soon as they can slap a ruler up against a graph, what maybe 2nd grade or so? But you can't train them what a derivative is until mid to late high school, at least post-geometry and post-algebra (and some aspects of 1st year calc require a post-trig background, but not all)

This is aside from the meta issue that math is usually weaponized into a tool of filtration, because anyone can master it given enough innate skill or sweaty effort, so it seems "fair" to use for filtration. If you eliminate its usefulness as a filtration system, that doesn't mean as a culture we're not going to filter, it just means we're going to torture undergrad aged kids by filtering them on a new criteria, perhaps how well they've memorized historical names and dates, or how well they've memorized geographic maps, or how well they've memorized the bones of the human body or the electron configurations of the periodic table.

I'd have to disagree at least in my case. We did a good amount of reasonable real science experiments in our normal classes.

We did as well, although it seemed to be kind of slipped in rather than purposely designed into the curriculum. What the school was judged on formally was mostly how well kids did at the standardized exams, both the state exams for regular classes, and the AP exams for advanced classes. Preparing to do well on those didn't really involve doing any science.

The main factor that I think led to some science happening anyway was that a "good" middle-class suburban school felt it had to own some fancy technology to come across as modern and well equipped. So we had computer labs decked out with Macs, and pretty decent chemistry equipment. But once you spent some money on some fancy stuff, you need to put it into the school day somehow.

The computers were mainly used as quasi-free-time, where you had some self-directed time to play on the Macs, as long as you were doing it in one of the "edutainment" applications. Some of those were designed by educators with a constructivist approach to free-form, experimentation-based education, which produces a kind of virtual-science environment (other applications, of course, were badly designed and not useful for learning anything). And then the chemistry lab had to be used for something too; that one was a bit more directed, generally going through some standard experiments.

I found both parts to be pretty disconnected from what we were tested on, which was maybe precisely why they were interesting and educational...

My chemistry class had experiments. We had to formulate a hypothesis and report how the results compared to it. Isn't that in keeping with the spirit of the scientific method? Granted I did not go to school in the US.

You really never did anything worth caring about in high school, academically, at least. Math was a series of formulas to memorize and various sequential combinations of said formulas to memorize. English and writing classes were focused on forced structure (Intro has 4 sentences, ends in thesis, each body paragraph's topic sentence must relate back to thesis, if discussing multiple stories - Intro-ABAB-Conc. structure is preferred, 3 pages long, must integrate quotes from narrative, etc.) using forced literary techniques (rhetorical devices, and general "proposals" that tell you how to write and what to write) as a (forced) lens to study ancient works of narrative that no student cares about. Then the essay is assessed on how well it fits each forced mechanism, instead of well, being assessed on whether it's good writing or not. History was a series of events and dates to memorize and recall. Natural sciences varied : HS physics was a lot like HS math, HS biology a lot like HS history, HS chemistry some mixture (zing!) of both, mostly the latter. You might notice a pattern (pattern-finding being a very valuable trait NOT taught in HS courses, because who needs patterns when you can just memorize each individual event in the textbook?) : a focus on memorization over analysis, a focus on pre-set structure over creativity.

At least Computer Science was all right. But that's only because I was lucky enough that my school's CS department was large enough to afford to be taught by some seriously smart people truly dedicated to both the study of computer science and the art of pedagogy, but small enough such that the principal let the CS dept operate as it wants without interfering with the College Board's awful way of treating every subject. Part of a course (AP Comp Sci A) absolutely required you to at least dip your toes into the College Board's bullshit, and skimming over the Barron's book/taking the actual test, it seemed like the College Board had planned a lot of tedious stuff like Java/Java's standard library details, manual loop evaluations, and that infuriating GridWorld bullshit (a complicated, but still incredibly awful simulation program; the test assesses your knowledge of GridWorld's actor types and which Bug goes which way rather than assessing ... computer science, which is honestly what I fucking signed up for). The stuff in my school's course that really intrigued me and got my mind jogging (working through sorting algorithms, data structures, and big O analysis on your own after you've been taught the absolute basics) was the stuff they cut out of the AP Computer Science AB program, which was an earlier program that was deemed too difficult, I guess. As if the College Board was intentionally avoiding stuff that required analysis or actual thought.

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