
Universities 'dumbing down on maths' to fill places - ColinWright
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-13751233
======
jdietrich
British education is tearing apart along class lines.

Oxbridge, the Russell group and a handful of other institutions are setting
ever higher entry requirements and looking to break away from the existing
system by promoting the IB or new qualifications like the Cambridge Pre-U.
They have no qualms about stating that A-Level syllabuses are being dumbed
down. Oxford and Cambridge maintain lists of A-level subjects that they do not
recognise. Most of their prospective intake comes from independent, grammar
and wealthier comprehensive schools with the resources and confidence to guide
students towards the right qualifications (increasingly something other than
A-levels) and coach them through application and interview.

Most other universities are engaged in a mad rush to the bottom, competing to
fill the maximum number of places at the maximum fee at minimum cost. Their
main appeal is to working and lower-middle class students who may not be
confident in their ability to get a place at university, who are unlikely to
have received any useful guidance in their application and who are foolish
enough to believe that "a degree is a degree". Standards at secondary level
are falling, as are contact hours at most universities. With a strong
financial incentive to maximise intake, the results are obvious and
inevitable.

The reputation of these universities is plummeting amongst employers, who are
seeing increasing numbers of graduates and even postgraduates without basic
skills in reading and writing. This is not hyperbole - I regularly deal with
correspondence from recent graduates and often have to make follow-up phone
calls because their written English incomprehensible.

Crisis is too mild a word for the current state of HE.

~~~
cletus
I am Australian and didn't go through the UK education system but I lived in
the UK from 2001 to 2004 and I was somewhat shocked at the state of the
education system when I was there.

At the time there was a show on Channel 4 called "That'll Teach 'Em". The idea
was to put (then) current GCSE students through the old O-levels in a 1950s
boarding school environment. It was of course (like any "reality" show) done
up for TV but there were some interesting tidbits, which were news to me (as
an expat):

\- Grade inflation is rampant, so much so that they had to invent a grade
above an A (the A<asterisk>) because too many people were getting As.

In the US I _believe_ this to also be a problem but it's hidden behind scaling
of results. At least I see so many people who have 3.8+ college GPAs (which,
as I understand it, basically means 80% As and 20% Bs) that I have to wonder
where all the C students are.

In Australia--at least when I went through the education system some 15+ years
ago--it was nothing like that.

\- Students who were getting 11 GCSE As couldn't pass 4 O-levels. Granted the
curriculum structure is different (eg it once relied on more memorization) but
still...

\- Current education philosophy in the UK seems to emphasize creative
expression, which to me sounds like the educational equivalent of moral
relativism in that there is no wrong or right. The idea is to simply make
students express themselves. Nevermind actually knowing anything or being able
to critically formulate or deconstruct an argument.

\- Students who were getting As in GCSE French couldn't even conjugate the
verb "avoir" (to have). If you've never studied a language this means coming
up with the French equivalent of I have / we have / you have / he/she/it has /
they have (j'ai / nous avons / tu as / vous avez / il/elle a / ils/elles ont).
This is as basic as it gets.

In case you were wondering why there was 6 for French and 5 for English, the
second person singular in English (thou hast) has fallen into disuse.

From what I remember the exams were largely take-home translations, which in
the Internet age typically meant getting someone French to do them.

\- Maths was incredibly weak.

But the UK seems to have a similar problem to what Australia does now: a
government who has treated the number of students in university as some kind
of target. The uncomfortable truth is that not everybody belongs in university
or will get anything out of it.

~~~
enko
> what Australia does now: a government who has treated the number of students
> in university as some kind of target

I am beginning to see the first real results of these policies amongst that
group of my friends who _did not_ do technical degrees or have some other
skill. The people who did "International Studies" or "International Politics"
or any of a whole range of cool-sounding but, when it comes down to it,
basically useless qualifications. None of them can get any sort of job
commensurate with the headed-straight-for-the-UN promise of the degree title;
at best they can hope for a public service bureaucrat job. More than one are
teaching themselves programming after observing myself and others rocketing up
on trajectories unthinkable in the arts degree world.

Disillusionment doesn't really begin to cover it. The realisation that a great
number of degrees are, if not useless, then at least impractical has not yet
seemed to make it back to the year 12 students doing the choosing - but the
secret certainly seems to be getting out, in some demographics at least.

~~~
GrangalanJr
Holder of a useless non-technical degree here. Tens of thousands of dollars
spent on education, and now I work an entry-level retail job. But I do count
myself fortunate that I have no debt from my (perhaps mostly pointless)
university experience.

Using my spare time to teach myself programming and some math. :-)

------
halo
I'm not sure this should be posted here where most won't understand the
context.

In the UK (bar Scotland), if you plan to go to University, you do A Levels in
3-4 subjects between the ages of 16 and 18. This means you need to make key
choices that go towards which subject you study at University at the age of
16. Many students either haven't decided on their degree subject or make
uninformed choices.

To reflect that reality, Universities are loosening their subject admission
requirements and putting the prerequisite material in the University course
instead.

Personally, I believe that A Levels should be reformed to reduce early
specialisation.

~~~
arethuza
"prerequisite material in the University course instead"

Isn't that pretty much what Scottish Universities have always done with a 4
year degree? Entrance used to be based on Highers taken in 5th year at
secondary school - with some people going straight to University after the 5th
year or others staying around to get more highers or to do additional higher
levels qualifications.

------
itcmcgrath
Suprised? Not I.

While studying at the University of Wollongong, they were dumbing down the
computer science courses to improve pass rates and keep more students (who
probably shouldn't be doing Comp Sc anyway).

Two of my first year courses with C++ were split into three after I completed
them with the _harder_ content removed (such as abstract classes, inheritance,
etc).

A lot of Universities are run like businesses now, rather than academic
centers of excellence (at least in my humble opinion).

~~~
cageface
Inheritance is considered "hard" content in a C++ course? What do you talk
about for a semester without it?

~~~
Someone
\- Turing-completeness of templates (or does one need inheritance to get
Turing-completeness?)

\- Exception-safety

\- Writing portable code (no, 'int' does not wrap around; chars are not ASCII,
signed int is neither equal to in int nor to unsigned int, etc)

~~~
cageface
If inheritance is too hard I doubt template metaprogramming is on the
syllabus.

------
mhw
I'm surprised that this is considered news, because it's been an observable
issue for 15 years or more. As I understand it, when O-Levels were replaced by
GCSEs the maths syllabus dropped some of the more challenging areas like
calculus, leaving all the study of these areas to the A-Levels. As a result
the standard of maths understanding for the university intake generally
dropped. Universities made a number of changes to deal with this: they
introduced more maths-light degrees (for example, combining some computing
content with business management, finance and languages content), some courses
increased the amount of maths tuition in the first year, and I believe that
some even extended the course to four years to give students time to 'get up
to speed'.

That said, I wouldn't class this as 'dumbing down'. They're reacting to a
change in the tuition that happens prior to university entry that they have
little control over. No one is saying that they're dropping the standard of
the teaching that the universities are actually delivering, so the ability of
a physics or computer science graduate today should be broadly similar to that
from 10 or 20 years ago. What seems to be changing is the amount of work that
the universities need to do to get students from a lower ability at entrance
to the same level at graduation. That, and a migration by the students towards
courses which are lighter in maths.

Caveat: it's 15 years since I worked at a university, so I have no inside
knowledge of what's going on these days.

------
ern
I don't like the phrase "dumbing down". Based on the article, they are
loosening their admission requirements, and seem to be allocating extra
coursework to help students catch up.

I think that what matters is if the students manage to acquire the necessary
skills after they do the mathematics coursework (which many should have done
at school). There are probably a significant number of students who thrive
after they catch up - implying that they are "dumb" is quite offensive.

~~~
thebooktocome
If the shoe fits...

In the US, "extra coursework to help students catch up" typically means these
people aren't graduating in four years. (My university just recently released
data that the average student was graduating in five to six years). That means
more gov't support, more student loans, and yet more time separated from the
workforce.

However, many incoming freshmen still seem to either 1) not be making an
informed decision about whether or not they will succeed in college, or 2) not
have enough character to resist the social forces that say they should go to
college no matter what and damn the consequences.

If that's not dumb, I don't know what is.

~~~
ern
As someone pointed out elsewhere in this thread, people choose their A Levels
at age 16.

I had a vague idea that I wanted to study medicine at age 16. I ended up doing
CS. 16 year olds tend to have very fuzzy ideas about what they want to do with
their lives.

Excluding them from entire fields of study based on poor A Level choices seems
a bit harsh to me.

~~~
gaius
That's no excuse tho'. For most of history 13-year-olds were considered
adults.

~~~
lurker14
For most of history 30-year-old women and off-color men were considered
property.

------
tokenadult
The submitted article is about the situation in Britain, and the situation in
the United States is similar.

[http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2010-05-11-remedial-c...](http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2010-05-11-remedial-
college_N.htm)

[http://www.all4ed.org/about_the_crisis/students/college_acce...](http://www.all4ed.org/about_the_crisis/students/college_access)

Providing remedial (secondary-school level) mathematics courses for college
and university students is a big business in United States higher education.

<http://www.aleks.com/>

<http://bluehawk.monmouth.edu/~bgold/DvMthIn.html>

It's commendable that higher education teachers give their students a second
chance to learn mathematics that young people could learn in primary or
secondary education, but even better would be for young people to have
opportunity to learn mathematics at a younger age.

<http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/NoticesAMS2011.pdf>

<http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/Lisbon2010_3.pdf>

<http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/CommonCoreIV.pdf>

<http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf>

Grade inflation after entry into higher education

<http://gradeinflation.com/>

has been going on in the United States for quite a while.

------
philh
Warwick university actually increased their requirements between 08 and 09.
(I'm not sure if there's been any changes since.) To get a place in 08, you
needed A's in maths and further maths at A-level, and either two other A
grades (NB. most people only take three A-levels) or a B together with a grade
2 in a STEP paper (a more difficult math paper used by Warwick and Cambridge
for entrance requirements). The 08 year was unexpectedly crowded, so in 09 the
AAAA option was dropped.

They're also making the course itself harder in at least some respects.
There's a second year business module which is popular with third year
mathematicians because it's easy marks; as of next year, it won't be an option
to them.

On the other hand, I've had a lecturer say that when he taught a module to
biologists, several of them didn't understand how to work with the relation "V
= IR", and he got negative feedback for making the module too math-heavy.

------
Newky
In Ireland, our situation is very much reflected in this, only that students
must study some level of maths up to the Leaving certificate (A-Level).

The problem is that there is no real initiative to do higher level maths
unless your course requires it. This means that there is a tiny proportion of
students who take the higher paper. While most others sit an ordinary level
paper, the difference in difficulty between the two is massive, and leads to a
lot of people with a below useful level of maths, and universities must really
be struggling.

Some initiatives have been started to make Maths a worthwhile option, by
changing its worth to the overall mark, but the reality is that it is a
subject that is largely rejected by the student body due to the fact that
there is a "I hate Maths" mentality and the fact that the workload to do well
is significantly more than other areas.

------
orenmazor
I used to be pretty involved with student government when I was an undergrad.
a few of our first year courses had a 70-80% failure rate, which the profs and
higher year students supported (of course) and which the administration
despised (of course).

the course was introduction to discrete math. it wasn't a very hard class, but
most people who enter computer science in first year have no idea what
computer science is, so this was a big shock.

~~~
jff
I swear, discrete math must have one of the highest failure rates of any
course in the CS curriculum. I knew _tons_ of otherwise bright students who
had to re-take that course, regardless of which professor they had.

------
za
England has multiple exam boards which offer the same qualifications, and
compete with each other for business. Total WTF.

[http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/aug/25/teachers-
cho...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/aug/25/teachers-choosing-
exam-boards-gcse) [http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/may/26/exam-
boards-...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/may/26/exam-boards-fined-
substandard-qualifications)

------
Tycho
When I was in highschool, I actually couldn't _imagine_ how anyone could enjoy
maths as a subject. Even though I was quite good at it, relatively (managed to
get A's).

~~~
Joakal
I enjoyed maths in high school because when I finally overcame that initial
comprehension in solving it, it felt like I was solving problems based on
present formulas.

~~~
nodata
Isn't that the problem though? To get good at maths at that level, you just
apply a bunch of memorised formulas or methods. It's not about discovery and
finding your own approaches to solving a problem, it's about applying formulas
and tricks.

~~~
jedbrown
Sounds like you had poor teachers. Mathematics should always be about problem
formulation and understanding which methods are appropriate and how they fit
together. Memorizing formulas is not mathematics at any level.

Here is a very good, albeit rather long, piece on the subject.

ftp://math.stanford.edu/pub/papers/milgram/milgram-msri.pdf

------
citricsquid
I finished high school in England a few years back, but education here is
pretty bad. The whole lowering the boundaries thing is very true, the school I
went to had a 20% pass rate the year before me, last year it was at almost
90%. They're just adding new "easier" qualifications and "easier" subjects to
improve the pass rates but the quality of education remains the same.

Luckily failing high school doesn't have any real bearing on life.

------
FlowerPower
The average human brain has shrunk by 20% in size since the last 10 000 years.
Thats the size of a tennis ball, or the size of an australopithecus afarensis
brain.

~~~
derleth
Cite that it has happened, and cite that it matters, please: Brain size is
only very loosely correlated with intelligence, and that doesn't sound like
it's something that actually occurred anyway. As per the Flynn Effect, in
fact, IQ has been trending upwards for quite a while.

~~~
arethuza
flowerpower is possibly thinking about Neanderthals - who have been reported
as having larger cranial capacity than "modern" humans:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal>

However, this isn't particularly relevant as we aren't descended from them and
AFAIK the link between cranial capacity and intelligence isn't clear.

