further reading on getting dramatically underqualified students to graduate anyway: http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/blackelite.htm
At some point, you wonder: what if we gave the same level of support to the qualified students?
At some point, you wonder: what if we gave the same level of support to the qualified students?
And again, as they say, it was only 45 minutes, and it didn't "do" a lot. It did however, change how the students interpreted bad events in the future, and reduced the chance of the student feeling that, say, because they failed a test, they don't belong in college at all.
house them together, encourage them to form study groups, provide them with mentors and tutors, meet with them regularly to stress the importance of academic achievement, monitor their progress closely, involve them in research, take away their scholarships if they fail to make a "B" average, they will perform better than students deprived of these benefits.
And before anyone gets hung up on the "scholarship" part: I know plenty of students who had parents pay for at least some of their college, but knew they had to perform or their parents would stop paying. That expectation of performance is the same.
Well, yes.
So the idea here is to take a bunch of underperforming students and invest money and effort into them in the hopes of raising their performance.
Suppose we invested similar amounts in students who were already not failing. We might see an increase in their performance too. Would that be valuable? More or less so than this?
Once you know how to study and want to learn, there's a whole internet full of knowledge. Before, things like access to a fancy library, or labs would definitely boost productivity for a successful student. At least for the more theoretical subjects, we have far more resources available to learn from than 100 years ago.
What definition of valuable were you thinking of?
I'll also make the assumption that your lifetime earnings are a multiple of your entry-level salary, just to have an anchor for the numbers. Equivalently, assume that whenever you get a raise, it's defined as a percentage of your current salary.
With that assumption and the GDP definition of value-to-society, we can immediately see that it's 50% better to, by intervention, raise someone's starting salary from $50K to $80K than to raise a different person's starting salary from $10K to $30K. But it might be cheaper and easier to produce a 60% improvement in the $50K guy than a 200% improvement in the $10K guy.
Some headlines from the homepage:
> Crime and the Hispanic Effect
> Diversity and Excellence: Are They Compatible?
> The Color of Death Row
> Affirmative Action: The Robin Hood Effect.
Edit, also: http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive/Rec/rec.music.classi...
"I had never before heard of La Griffe du Lion. His article was so full of egregiously bad methodology and other mistakes that I at first assumed it was a satire of racist pseudoscience, the sort of thing that might be written for the Annals of Improbable Research or (if you're Alan Sokal) Social Text."
I don't trust that site's analysis, and I don't trust them to accurately report the underlying data without cherry-picking or selecting dubious studies.
Given your comment history, you seem like somebody with an ideological axe to grind on the subject of racial and gender diversity, and I don't believe you selected this article from such an obscure source solely for its topicality.
> If you compare college students with the same standardized-test scores who come from different family backgrounds, you find that their educational outcomes reflect their parents’ income, not their test scores.
According to http://www.parchment.com/c/college/college-1572-University-o... , the 25th percentile student at UT Austin (entering in 2011, I think) scored 540 verbal and 580 math on the SAT (annoyingly, this doesn't mean that the 25th percentile student scored 1120 overall, but it's the closest thing I could find). The girl in the article scored the ACT equivalent of 90 points lower. But she's not dramatically underqualified?
update: for reference:
UT Austin 25th-75th percentile SAT math scores: 590 - 710
Cal Tech 25th-75th percentile SAT math scores: 770 - 800
How significant do you think it is that a quarter of Cal Tech students are below the 25th percentile? How far below do you think they range?
>How significant do you think it is that a quarter of Cal Tech students are below the 25th percentile? How far below do you think they range?
I don't know.
It would help if your figures didn't cut out at the bottom-quarter mark, i.e. if you gave some figures on the lowest SAT math score (and what about verbal?) admitted to these institutions, or some other indication rather than asking what we 'like to think' about the range or having me guess :)
I'm not saying you're wrong, but the way you expressed it, "despite being below the 25th percentile for students at that school" and "It specifically calls them out as being in the bottom quartile" in your original comment is probably not a great way to show your case. Your range comment is much better, but stops short of indicating what the full range is or where this student falls.
Basically, I am directly saying that being in the bottom quartile is not itself an indication of sub-standard performance - at any school. Because nearly a quarter of students will be below the bottom quartile - at every school.
And I provide exact numbers for the girl under discussion. Someone else was nice enough to point out that the ACT average for students at UT Austin is 28 (91st percentile nationwide), and the 25th percentile is 25 (80th). This girl got 22 (62nd). Compared to the average student at her school, that's abysmally low.
From memory, the range for verbal scores at caltech was 720-800, and the range at UT Austin was 120 points. The "true top end" at caltech probably isn't that far above 800, since the writing range was 720-790, so UT Austin is displaying much much more variation (120 points compared to 80). In contrast, there's going to be a lot more variation in math ability at caltech than the 30-point math range implies, due to the very low ceiling on the SAT-math. That makes it impossible to say how much variation there really is by looking at SAT scores.
On the other other hand, caltech being a technical school, you might suspect that they're targeting math ability, and the range should be narrower than it is for verbal. ;p
> Because nearly a quarter of students will be below the bottom quartile - at every school.
You could change this to exactly a quarter and you wouldn't be wrong (except in cases like, as we've seen, caltech and other high-end schools, where well over a quarter of the students are in the top 25th percentile by math SAT score). But the sentence preceding it is obviously false. Yes, a quarter of the group will always be in the bottom 25%. Does that mean they're not performing as well as the rest of the group? Of course it does. That's how we measured them.
If your top students and your worst students are very close in ability because of restriction in range, you can sensibly put them in the same classes. If, as at UT Austin, they're very far apart, you can't. I went to a large public university myself, and the course catalog was full of classes covering the same material but differentiated by "difficulty". What's wrong with describing the students who can't succeed outside of the bottom tier as "substandard"?
"What's wrong with describing the students who can't succeed outside of the bottom tier as "substandard"?"
The article tells you what's wrong with that: it keeps people who COULD succeed from doing so by undermining their confidence and their motivation. Why are you really intent on knocking down the disadvantaged at every turn? Why don't you want to help them learn how to succeed?
Because trying to lift these people up is one of the least cost-effective things we could be doing. It has knock-on negative effects all over, directly wastes tons of money, and produces very little to show for it.
You appear to be saying that while these students are in fact substandard, we shouldn't say so because it will hurt their feelings. How is admitting two (or more) tiers of students, banding them into classes by ability, and then telling them they're all in the top tier better than letting different schools admit students from narrower ability bands, so that when you tell them they're more or less as good as the other students it has the virtue of being true?
There was a scandal recently (I believe at UNC chapel hill) where the classes for football scholarship students were found to be fictional, just a bureaucratic vehicle for giving them grades so they'd qualify to keep playing for the school. Would you be willing to call those students substandard? What if it undermined their self-confidence?
I never said these students were substandard. I do believe their performance is substandard and they are at greater risk of dropping out because of all the disadvantages they had and continue to have in life. I believe good schools should admit them because their potential is equal to the non-disadvantaged students, and the results in the article prove this. The article even points out that disadvantaged students with potential do better when admitted to the better school.
Your view does not separate performance from potential, and you keep insisting on using low performance to limit admissions to good schools, and thus in a way, limit how much potential these students can develop. You are essentially arguing that the poor and uneducated (who are likely to be minorities) should stay poor and uneducated.
I believe that it is a net gain for society when all students are given a chance to meet their highest potential. This article shows that he cost of doing so is minimal, and thus the gain for society is even greater.