
College, Calculus, and the Problem with the SAT - kaboro
https://www.wired.com/story/college-calculus-problem-with-the-sat/
======
jeffdavis
This is all just leading to college becoming four more years of high school.
Everyone needs to go. Everyone needs a degree to "get a job".

It all seems like a giant plan to prevent people from starting their adult
lives.

If you need to just get some generic "good job", then the answer is to learn
what you need in the first twelve years of school. I think that's enough time.

If you want to heavily specialize, research, or otherwise go deeper; then go
to university.

Our policies should encourage following these practices. To start off, we need
to fight grade inflation in high school so that it's a real signal for
employers. Moving the problem of certification to college will just move the
grade inflation problem there, not solve it. Then employers will want to see
more credentials from a masters program or something.

Don't you see? If everyone has a degree, it offers no advantage. The lower
performers just end up with more debt.

~~~
snowwrestler
I feel like an entire generation's brains got broken on the subject of
education because they were lucky enough to be young when a new industry (web
software) got off the ground that was simple and lucrative. So they saw a ton
of opportunities to apply high-school-level thinking to entrepreneurship and
make a lot of money. And they came to believe was the way the world normally
works.

It's not. The vast majority of worthwhile, well-paying jobs require
significant education and/training after high school. Not because it's a
credential game, but because society and work are complex. And it's getting
more complex, not less.

\--

I'll also risk the opinion that there is more to life than work, and higher
education has advantages for people far beyond their ability out-compete one
another for corporate jobs. And I would argue, for society as a whole.

~~~
smileysteve
> jobs require significant education and/training after high school.

To the parent's point; Many college degrees are "just a credential" at this
point; and college degree or not, training still has to happen on the job.

I see a trend of millennials (my generation) who go to school to go to school,
get good grades to get good grades, not apply the education to the future.
Then, there's no entry level jobs (because companies didn't have to train with
a recession to get experience) and they jump between unskilled jobs they could
have done with a GED or less.

We can also see this with the industry survey the other week of employers
saying colleges aren't preparing software developers.

Higher education does have advantages for people beyond jobs; but only if they
learn (not memorize) and apply it.

------
viburnum
The idea was, "hey, there are a lot of people whose lives are too hard, but
college grads seem alright, so let's make everybody college grads." But the
actual situation was that there were only so many good lives to go around, and
college just sorted out who got them. The obvious thing to do is directly
improve life for all people, not doing some kind of trick bank shot to
indirectly improve lives. Instead we have baristas with $60,000 in college
debt. We ran this giant experiment to see to what extent college was
productivity enhancing or merely a sorting mechanism. The results are in.

~~~
orbifold
Well the kind of obvious explanation for that is that success in life is
probably strongly determined by intelligence. So when ~10% of the population
went to college there was a high chance that those were also approximately the
10% smartest of a generation. If lots more people go to college now, that just
means that it ceases to be a good predictor of success.

~~~
petermcneeley
When you see people with stem Masters and PhDs working as highschool teachers
you begin to wonder if the problem is intelligence. Or when people with PhDs
in bio/Chem are working as programmers you wonder if it's a question of
talent.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
The problem is that we decided to inflate education prices while deflating
labor prices. You can't do both at the same time and get sane results, because
each individual needs to make their labor price correspond to their (former)
education price.

So you wind up with Biochem PhDs working as programmers. Neither biochemistry
nor programming is for stupid people, per se, but programming hires loads of
people at salaries _actually commensurate_ with the monetized value of the
time-investment spent getting a doctorate, while actual biochemistry, the
field of the doctorate, has emphasized cheap labor.

------
williamDafoe
These people are trying to create an American cultural revolution, like
China's, in the 1960s.

My son went to the toughest high school in California. He didn't become a
national merit commended student because "oh Californians are just simply
smarter than Iowans so we have moved the goalposts for California kids". He
scored 34 on the ACT = 1500 on the SAT because of hard work and sacrifice but
he wasn't allowed into ANY "selective" schools because "oh your ZIP code
indicates you are privileged and you must have crammed for the SAT. And hey
did you hear the news? The SAT means nothing! ". He only did 4 hours of
homework per night but was in a school district which educated kids from
arguably the #1 University in the USA so the competition was stiff. He was
embarrassed and shamed by his friends for having a B+ GPA.

He was forced to go to a state school 3000 miles away which accepts 70% of
applicants - at huge tuition cost - because it was a backwards state school
not implementing "The new cultural revolution!". He applied to 12 schools -
none "most selective", none "extremely selective", 1 "highly selective", and 9
"moderately selective" and was admitted to 2 of the lowest schools on the
"moderately selective" list. The next rank lower is "admits everyone".

Meanwhile I know parents who pulled their kids out of the toughest high school
because class rank is THE ONLY THING that universities care about. They sent
their kid to a low income school and their achievement test scores plummeted.
Their strategy was to "win by slackibg," in the new cultural revolution! This
is so they could get into Harvard and so that Harvard could feel good about
itself and assuage its white guilt.

My son's dad is self made, losing his own dad at age 13. The dad took many
financial risks and moved twice to be in better school districts, to challenge
the son. His mom came from dirt in China (daughter of a hotel maid). Their
hard work has been classified as "privileged background" by virtue of their
zip code. The parents inherited $50k total and were both self made and lived
like paupers until age 35 to advance their educations, then took high risk
unstable jobs to catch up in life...

~~~
gameswithgo
The national merit scholar thing is stupid on many axes. For one, its just a
formula on your SAT score, we already have an SAT score, why is there some
official entity awarding prizes based on a simple function of that score?
Colleges can use whatever function they want. The whole thing should go away.

~~~
samatman
Despite the name, the National Merit Scholarship program is a private entity
affiliated with Northwestern University.

It isn't official in any way; it is simply a scholarship for students with
high scores on a particular test.

The only effect that it 'going away' would have, would be to discourage
intelligent students from attending colleges they otherwise could not afford.

------
vincent-toups
My view is that everyone should study calculus more or less for the same
reason we almost all study Shakespeare or The Bill of Rights or whatever. Its
an enormous human accomplishment whose cultural impact virtually cannot be
overstated and a basic understanding of these sorts of things is the
birthright of every human being alive.

~~~
jwagenet
Sure, but calculus is even less tangible than Shakespeare and the Bill of
Rights. Good luck getting the folks who don’t care or struggled through
algebra to stay engaged.

~~~
dboreham
Scratching my head...that just isn't true. For example go throw a rock into
the sky and watch its path. Calculus. Very tangible.

~~~
whlr
I'm curious how you envision a calculus class that would make the topic more
tangible. I think we can agree that typical calculus classes are more abstract
(for lack of a better term) than typical english, history, or science classes.

~~~
inimino
Physics and calculus should be taught as a single class, it's a mistake when
they are separated.

~~~
vincent-toups
I'm a physicist and it happens to be the case for me that I didn't really
_get_ math until I understood I could do physics with it. So you'd think I'd
agree.

But after I was sensitized to it by physics, I've come to see pure mathematics
as just as interesting and worthy of being taught standalone. In fact, one
does mathematics an enormous disservice by suggesting that its tightly coupled
with physics. Roger Penrose himself points this out in The Road to Reality:
mathematics is actually substantially larger than that part of it which we
require for physics. That fact alone is fascinating.

The pitch I'd give for pure mathematics is that its really the study of
precisely what we all do on a daily basis when we "reason" about things. Our
daily experience suggests reasoning is useful and in many ways concrete, but a
detailed study of the process almost immediately produces challenges and
paradoxes and great landscapes of mystery.

~~~
inimino
I agree that mathematics is much bigger than applied mathematics. However, for
precisely this reason, pure mathematics, like philosophy, isn't for everyone.

The main argument for teaching it this way is a pedagogical one. If it took
physics to prompt the geniuses of the day to discover calculus, then following
in their footsteps is probably the easiest way for us to get there as well.

~~~
vincent-toups
I think philosophy is much more for everyone than physics or mathematics. I
can't conceive of a model of the human condition which I would want to adhere
to that said philosophy wasn't for everyone.

We _all_ think about value and about the relationship between what we think
and what happens in the world and these are the fundamental elements of
philosophy. If people feel that philosophy isn't for them, its a failure of
the teachers rather than the people.

Its my opinion, anyway, that children don't always know or appreciate what
they ought to learn and that adults do them a disservice when they fail to
teach them that which is not immediately interesting just because they don't
want to learn it.

~~~
inimino
Some amount of practical philosophy or received wisdom is necessary for
everyone, just like some amount of mathematical awareness. The formal study of
philosophy as a discipline, like that of pure mathematics, is not for
everyone. For most people it would be deeply unpleasant for almost no benefit.

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
>And over the last couple of decades, there’s been a rapid but uneven growth
of students taking AP Calculus in high school. Low-income students are much
less likely to attend schools that offer AP Calculus—and then they often end
up in freshman calculus at college sitting next to lots of well-off students
who have already taken the equivalent of freshman calculus in high school.

Complete anecdote here, but I did not take AP Calculus in high school. Many of
my Calculus I classmates had taken AP Calculus in high school. However, taking
AP Calculus in high school did not seem to provide them any advantages, in
fact it seemed to disadvantage them. The issue was that they had learned the
various formulas for derivatives, etc but had not gotten a deep appreciation
for limits. At the college level, understanding and appreciating the concept
of limits was much more important than memorizing formulas ( IIRC they
actually provided the formulas for you during the test). Many of the students
who had taken AP were frustrated when the problems were not amenable to a
blind application of formulas, and required deeper understanding of limits.

~~~
sct202
If they were in Cal 1 and had taken AP Calc, they probably didn't do
particularly well on the AP test or they would have tested out.

~~~
scarecrowbob
Not necessarily...

my son started a mechanical engineering program about 2 weeks ago, and the
recommendation from the school was to take Calc at the college even if the
student had passed the AP test.

I understand their interests in that, but I also feel like even if my son had
done better on the AP test I'd have encouraged him to follow that advice,
given how much of the following curriculum relied on that base.

~~~
logfromblammo
I got the same advice when I got to college with my heaping pile of AP and IB
test credits. In retrospect, I should have focused solely on my major,
eschewed the double minor and "honors" classes, and graduated in six semesters
of very light study.

Instead, I took some chemistry classes that I already technically had a
double-cover of test credits for.

If the kid got a 5 on the AP test, no college should ever be telling them to
take the course anyway. If they got a 4, that advice should be rare, and
confined to classes on the degree track. Maybe if they squeaked by with a 3,
and somewhat important to the major, that might be good advice, depending on
the student. Otherwise, if the institution does not have confidence in the
test, it shouldn't be granting credit for it!

~~~
scarecrowbob
" Otherwise, if the institution does not have confidence in the test, it
shouldn't be granting credit for it! "

Having taught at the expensive and prestigious institution in question, I can
say that there may be a gap between what the institution has faith in and what
the instructors experience.

I mean, yeah, if it's a class outside of your major then sure. My son (and I,
when I went) skipped freshman comp. I encourage my son to get through via
whatever means is easiest, and in his case, I believe it's getting some extra
time in the seat in a calc class.

~~~
logfromblammo
If there is a gap between "the institution" and "the instructors", that is a
problem large enough to overwhelm any problems that may exist in standardized
testing.

The motive of an instructor is presumably to ensure that, by the end of a
course, every student will be adequately prepared to meet a minimum standard
of knowledge, regardless of their preparedness prior to the beginning of the
course (subject to prerequisites). At a wider scope, the instructor, as a
member of an instructional department, is also motivated to progress students
towards possession of a total body of knowledge deemed adequate by their peers
to either practice in the field, or continue on to a more intense program of
academic study.

The institution is motivated to collect tuition, receive grants, accumulate
prestige, and pester alumni to support goals that are not necessarily academic
in nature. The only instructional goal is to produce graduates that will not
embarrass the institution.

The student is motivated primarily to get a degree that is their admission
ticket to a broad swath of jobs otherwise unavailable to anyone without a
degree. They are motivated secondarily to actually learn about subjects that
interest them personally. The student's sole reason to take SAT, ACT, AP, IB,
CLEP, &cetera is because the academic institutions reward those passing test
scores.

The principle in play is that it should not be necessary to instruct any
person that already has the knowledge. If the standardized tests are
insufficient to establish that, the instructors should then be applying the
same methods they use on students that have taken their courses, on
prospective students that have not, and only recommend taking a course that
would otherwise not be required by the institution, when it can be shown that
the standardized test signaled a false positive.

That is, a passing score on the test should not automatically grant credit,
but should allow a brief interview with a professor that teaches the relevant
course, who can then determine by any means they care to use whether or not
the student already possesses the knowledge to pass. If too many false
positives are found, the institution can then revise its treatment of the test
scores.

------
ahi
I really wish I hadn't taken AP Calculus in high school. I sort of got it, but
it wasn't intense enough to really grab me and my study habits were non-
existent. I took multi-variable calculus as a freshman and was mostly in over
my head despite my B+/A- (thanks curve!), and that was it for me and math.
Definitely contributes to my impostor syndrome when doing anything more
computer sciencey than a CRUD app.

~~~
0xffff2
I do a whole lot of stuff "more computer sciencey than a CRUD app", and I took
a whole lot of calclus thanks to my computer engineering degree. I absolutely
never use it. You need calculus to design a transistor. So far, I've yet to
run into a situation where I need calculus to write code unless the code is
literally solving a calc problem, which comes up incredible infrequently.

~~~
commandlinefan
> I've yet to run into a situation where I need calculus

Actually, gradient descent and Lagrange multipliers come up quite a bit in
machine learning. Of course, you can just apply them without understanding
them just like you can apply the graphics formulas for rotational motion
without understanding them, but when something does go wrong, it sure helps to
understand the principles behind them.

------
newsreview1
This is such an important topic. During my years in law school, I oversaw a
volunteer mentoring program that brought 5th grade kids from a local Title 1
school into the law building and paired them with law student mentors who
helped with homework for 1 hour a week. The year ended with the law students
assisting the kids in a mock trial presentation. One of the aims of the
program was to help these kids feel comfortable in a setting of Higher
Education, and to give them the opportunity to associate with/ask questions of
graduate students. Many of the kids had never been on a college campus, or
came from homes where no other family member had attended college. The law
professor who founded the program, Brett Scharffs, has written more
extensively regarding the program, and his findings are much more than simply
anecdotal regarding how programs such as these can give kids a leg up, or at
least give them a vision of what "can be". I agree whole-heartedly with Paul
Tough's statement that higher education and social mobility have become very
intertwined.

------
MarkMc
"Their high school grades had turned out to be much better predictors of their
academic ability and college potential than their SAT scores."

I have to admit I'm surprised by this, but it seems to be backed up by
research: "As SAT scores are a more consistent indicator of aptitude, one
might expect them to better predict a student’s chances of graduating college
than high school GPA. But Chingos’ research shows exactly the opposite." [0]

By the way, I enjoyed reading Paul Tough's previous book "How Children
Succeed" \- if you are curious, here is a great excerpt from that book:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5721868](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5721868)

[0]
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/prestoncooper2/2018/06/11/what-...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/prestoncooper2/2018/06/11/what-
predicts-college-completion-high-school-gpa-beats-sat-score/#cff67ba4b09f)

~~~
travisoneill1
The SAT score buckets in the analysis max out at >1100 so not very useful. The
grade buckets are also not very useful as the top range 3.67 - 4.00 probably
includes > 50% of students at most schools (thanks, grade inflation). It also
fails to adjust for college difficulty. Students in the >1100 bucket are
obviously going to more difficult schools than the <800 bucket.

------
commandlinefan
> dominated by students from wealthy families.

SAT prep might be correlated, but I suspect there’s more to it than that. I
grew up in the poor suburbs of Detroit, and nobody was talking about college
when I was a kid. I’d say 3/4 of the kids I went to primary school with didn’t
even apply to college. Now that I’m in the “wealthy” suburbs of Dallas,
though, the kids that my kids go to school (and my kids) have been talking
about college admissions since they were in elementary. If you grow up with
parents who went to college and who can probably afford to send you to one,
it’s just part of the atmosphere.

~~~
voxl
Rich kids are connected. How many poor kids get personally tutored by someone
gifted in math? Rich parents can not only afford it, but have the network to
convey the demand in the first place.

It's not just a test score thing, parents legitimately want their kids to be
better than them, to not be an embarrassment, to live a good life, take your
pick. A rich person knows this means education as much as it means test
scores.

~~~
lonelappde
Rich kids get fancy tutoring for _free_ from highly educated family and
friends.

------
opwieurposiu
Why not skip college and just have a standardized test to get a degree?

~~~
specialist
I very much support achievement based credentialing. Like earning an Eagle
Scout. With two caveats.

There still needs to be minimum hours invested. Skin in the game. Even someone
with mastery over a topic must still do something constructive, useful,
formative. Work on a project. Mentor, tutor others. Teachers assistant.
Whatever.

For undergraduate degrees, there still needs to be off topic study. Ethics,
humanities, finger painting, banging the rocks together, study abroad,
whatever. Anything to expose young minds to stuff outside of their own bubble.

~~~
travisoneill1
So you set an hour limit that is appropriate for the average person and ensure
that 50% of people are not ready and the other half are wasting their time.

~~~
specialist
Are you criticizing the current system? Or my proposal?

~~~
travisoneill1
Criticizing the part of your proposal that would require a minimum time
investment.

~~~
specialist
Because everything worth knowing is in a book or on a test? Because experience
doesn't matter?

No matter. What's your plan?

------
maehwasu
“In his new book, The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us,
Paul Tough explores this divide, and interrogates whether going to college has
become a privilege of wealth and whether it can still lift people out of
economic insecurity.”

How the hell do you “interrogate” an abstract proposition? We may as well not
even have words if we’re going to use them this thoughtlessly.

------
mreome
This article also illustrates what is _clearly_ the biggest problem with
standardized testing... those stupid tiny desks!

Does anyone in the photo from the article look remotely comfortable? How are
you supposed to focus on the material in a potentially-life-altering test when
your adult sized body is crammed into a chair arguably sized for someone in
middle-school, with your writing work-space only slightly larger (or possibly
even smaller) then your papers and shoved directly against your body?

------
ordinaryperson
> "The most selective institutions, she found, spend a lot more on each
> undergraduate than other colleges do, and they give a significant boost in
> lifetime earnings, on average, to the students they enroll."

OR rich kids tend to go to rich colleges (Harvard, Yale, Stanford) and were
predisposed to high incomes anyway -- one study showed that rich kids WITHOUT
college degrees earn more than poor kids WITH them [1].

> "It has more or less always been true that the SAT, on balance, benefits
> college applicants who already enjoy lots of financial and social
> advantages."

Here's the problem with this analysis: what's the alternative? 50 years of
education research no one's come up with a more meritocratic method than GPA +
test scores. What, you going to rely on personal essays? And you think that's
a fair, objective standard??

If not that, then what? Mandatory racial quotas like Carranza is trying to
implement in NYC high schools?

> "Their high school grades had turned out to be much better predictors of
> their academic ability and college potential than their SAT scores."

What was the sample size he interviewed? A cohort of ~3.3 mil students
graduate high school every year and ~66% apply to college, so it's a total
population of around 2.2 million students going to college every year. Did he
get a representative sample size? I doubt it.

Research has consistently shown the data with the highest correlation
coefficient of first-year GPA (FGPA) in college are standardized test scores +
GPA [2]. This should be common sense, there's obviously wildly different
standards in high schools across America, GPA by itself is a noisy signal.

> "If they lived in Michigan or Virginia or North Carolina, they would be
> unlikely to be admitted to their state’s flagship university. But in Texas,
> their hard work in high school earns them admission to the finest university
> in the state."

Yes, but how many qualified out-of-state students were excluded from admission
because of this system? If the goal was to admit a cohort of the most
academically qualified student body then this system is, by definition, unfair
and not meritocratic.

Let me say I am very much pro-diversity. But a lot of what Paul Tough is
selling here is wishful thinking -- essentially throwing out standardized
testing in favor of high school curricula, which the research shows is uneven
and not a meritocratic standard.

[1] [https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-
memos/2016/02...](https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-
memos/2016/02/19/a-college-degree-is-worth-less-if-you-are-raised-poor/)

[2] [https://facultysenate.umich.edu/wp-
content/uploads/sites/22/...](https://facultysenate.umich.edu/wp-
content/uploads/sites/22/2015/03/08-28-08_Academic-Success.pdf)

------
falcor84
The article mentions Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg as examples of people who
succeeded without college, but I find that to be absurd. Being accepted into
Harvard and then intentionally dropping out after 2 years is all the
difference in the world from never applying to college.

~~~
TrackerFF
Not to mentioned that they could afford to try and fail.

It's been discussed to death, but the sad fact of life is that a lot of elite
students from unresourceful simply can't take the chance on playing the
startup game. They don't have the money, and can't risk potentially throwing
away 5-10 years on a pipe dream (statistically speaking).

Rich kids with money and connections can afford that. They can graduate from
HYPS, try to startup route, and if all fails - no worries, they can always go
back to the traditional career route, albeit a bit delayed.

Ask a first gen HYPS student from low or lower middle-class what their plans
are; Probably not a 12-month "ideating" leisure trip to SV on their family
money.

~~~
wmp56
I'm afraid I have to disagree. The key ingredient is unusually high IQ, not
money. If I had a choice between being born with a very high IQ or in a
moderately wealthy family (10s of millions), I'd choose the 1st without
thinking. The family money rather reduce chances of striking success because
they make people lazy from childhood. A 12 month trip to SV gives exactly
nothing by itself. We could randomly select 1000 college grads, give them 100k
and send them to SV for 1 year. The success rate will be 0.0%. What really
helps on the SV path is (1) very high intelligence and (2) real industry
experience. If you have the former, you can get the latter by joining one of
the few known firms and spend there a decade. Then use your savings and
connections to try your own idea. I don't see how family money help to skip
that decade of experience or how they help to become smart.

------
quaquaqua1
In which the author, who dropped out of college, describes how Calculus is
designed to be a "gatekeeper to college success for students", says that this
is "good for student confidence", but also that he personally "wouldn't re-
enroll and finish his BA".

I graduated with a degree in history. I am now a front end developer.

STEM classed and SATs are a hazing experiment. They are a distraction from
getting a job and delivering value and enjoying life

~~~
Ancalagon
I highly doubt either of those are hazing experiments. STEM knowledge (and
indirectly, classes) are extremely relevant for many very important
professions. The SATs were supposed to be a standardized way to gauge college-
preparedness by colleges because GPAs are subject to many per-school
disturbances (inflation, etc.) I would actually the SATs are outdated, but
neither they nor STEM courses are "hazing experiments".

~~~
sampleinajar
I think the parent is maybe using hyperbolic language, but I think, at least
from my direct experience and second hand accounts, it is fair to say that,
especially entry level and foundational, courses in STEM in US universities
are used to "thin the herd". At my state school O-Chem and Physics I
contributed to high drop and repeat-take rates. These things sure feel like
"hazing" especially when you are told and then experience that the upper
division courses are nothing like that, and you are suddenly treated better,
from an intellectual standpoint.

~~~
quaquaqua1
This is exactly what I was trying to convey. Additionally, how crazy is it
that I am able to work in an analytical capacity as a Software Engineer
despite never having taken such difficult courses.

The notion that I can't ever in my life do technical work because I didn't pay
$3,000 each for a B- in Orgo or Calc I or Intro to Comp Sci? Laughable.

