

How Good Are UW Students in Math? - slackerIII
http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2010/01/how-good-are-uw-students-in-math.html

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lunchbox
As shown on the scanned answer key, this was an anonymous quiz. College
students have a tendency to put in pathetically minimal effort on things
they're not being directly graded on. Also, the quiz's stated purpose was to
help the teacher calibrate the assignments; maybe some students purposely
answered questions wrong in hopes of dumbing down the class. (Though I don't
dispute the author's central point.)

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swolchok
The author says that UW students taking Atmospheric Sciences s101 "should be
the creme of the crop of our high school graduates with high GPAs".

1) Atmospheric Sciences 101 sounds like a "blowoff" class that liberal arts
students would take only to fulfill a science requirement. In other words, the
students are likely self-selected for lack of math/science ability.

2) UW is a public university. It may very well be the best public university
in Washington, but I'd bet the best students have a nontrivial rate of private
school attendance. (So as to dispel any illusions of elitism, I attended the
University of Michigan, which is also a public research university.)

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timr
_"UW is a public university. It may very well be the best public university in
Washington, but I'd bet the best students have a nontrivial rate of private
school attendance."_

Don't kid yourself. This is an epidemic problem at _all_ schools, public and
private. I have friends who teach at both public and private universities, and
they all have the same horror stories. My own personal experience (private
undergrad / PhD at UW) bears out their anecdotes. With certain institutional
exceptions, private school kids are richer, not smarter.

Also, the GPA and SAT scores of incoming UW freshman are _astonishingly_ high
right now (IQR of 3.60-3.91 GPA, 570-680 SAT math, according to
<http://admit.washington.edu/Numbers>). Admittedly, those aren't Harvard
numbers, but one would still expect a 600 math SAT student to be able to do
well on a basic high-school algebra quiz.

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swolchok
I did not disagree with the author's main point, merely the assertion I
singled out.

~~~
timr
Perhaps, but your argument was a challenge to the statement that the students
represent the best and brightest of the state, and that's what I was
addressing. When the test is as easy as this one, the argument that these
students aren't elite isn't important.

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chancho
I'm just as upset with the state of math education in the US as anybody, but
if UW is anything like my alma mater, then "Atmospheric Science 101" is a
class that liberal arts majors take to satisfy their math & science general
education requirements. A lot of these students (my wife, for example) have
serious math anxiety. She could probably get a 70% on this test, even today,
so many years after school, but throw it at her without warning on the first
day of a non-math class and she'd literally cry.

Now there's a case to be made that a good high school math curriculum should
not leave anyone anxious about math, but I still think it's a bit of a leap to
take this test and extrapolate to all students.

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dschobel
Same experience with my girlfriend. She has a good analytical mind (she
graduated near the top of her law class) but she's just terrified of math.

The weirdest aspects of this phenomenon are that: a) there's a very real fear
of math unlike any other subject and b) there's no stigma against being
mathematically illiterate as there is for other subjects (most likely because
so many people just accept that "math is hard" and not for them).

~~~
spamizbad
Is it any surprise, though? Math is taught in a manner that focuses very much
on the _how_ but rarely ever the _why_. And while Discovery Math/Reform
Math/etc are lambasted for not teaching kids to memorize certain algorithms,
they do something else that's very important: encourage students to use
creative problem solving skills to develop their own solution algorithms.

I'm not going to advocate reform math in its current form, but I have to
question traditional "drill and kill" teaching methods in today's modern
world. If I can't remember how to find the area of a triangle, I just Google
it. Drilling it into my brain would have made sense in the 1920's when there
was no internet, no assurances my peers had the appropriate level of education
to know such a thing, and possibly no ability to reach an "expert" via
telephone to tell me the algorithm. I'd be completely reliant on my memory and
(possibly) a math book if I was fortunate enough to have one with me. For all
practical purposes, memorizing one half times base time height would have been
the way to go in a pre-Internet era. Today, it seems like it's far more
worthwhile to develop students who are solid problem solvers with strong
information retrieval skills, as opposed to wasting precious time memorizing
trivial algorithms that are readily available.

~~~
maximilian
_Is it any surprise, though? Math is taught in a manner that focuses very much
on the how but rarely ever the why. And while Discovery Math/Reform Math/etc
are lambasted for not teaching kids to memorize certain algorithms, they do
something else that's very important: encourage students to use creative
problem solving skills to develop their own solution algorithms._

The idea sounds really great, but everything i've ever seen is that the
students just end up terrible at everything. I even tried to teach it some,
and the material seemed great to me as a teacher, but the students just never
got it. I feel like the discovery idea makes a lot more sense in hindsight,
but when learning that way, doesn't work out like hoped.

However, I study applied math and I would say i learn in a more discovery
way... But thats at the graduate level.

~~~
spamizbad
If students are ending up terrible at everything, then the problem is deeper
than just tradition vs reform. What's likely occurring is we are much better
at teaching plug-and-chug than we are at developing problem solving. That's to
be expected, as it's significantly harder to develop problem solving skills
than it is to simply memorize steps, grade, correct, and repeat until perfect.
This is especially true when you consider most math teachers really aren't
trained in the art of problem solving, and were likely taught in a traditional
manner themselves. As such they have no real frame of reference to go off of
when attempting to foster problem solving skills in their students.

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gommm
And I remember in France how my university professors used to complain that
high school students became weak in set theory...

I didn't know that the level in the US had fallen that far... but it's true
that I remember helping a girl in the nearby community college on her math
classes and the level of the exercises she had was about the french 7-8th
grade math.

But of course, I think the emphasis on math in europeans countries is maybe
different than in the us. In France, for example, ability in math is the main
selection criteria and students who took the scientific curriculum in
highschool had 6-8 hours/week of mathematics and for calculating the gpa,
mathematics had a coefficient of 7-9 (compared to 3 for english for example).

And because the scientific curriculum is considered the most prestigious a lot
of students who intend to later study non-scientific specialities like law or
business take it.

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Dilpil
Interesting premise, questionable conclusion. Kids can't do simple concept
problems, so they need more drilling? Failure to calculate 1/.1 is not due to
lack of practice, it is due to fundamental lack of understanding of fraction
division. This is not a problem you fix via repeated long division of 4 digit
numbers. This is a problem stemming from the fact that these students were
never given a good idea of what the symbols they are being forced to move
around really mean.

And who cares that they don't know the definition of cosine, or the formula
for the area of a circle? These are not fundamental ideas for non engineers.

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mquander
In my opinion, those are fundamental ideas for human beings in the year 2010;
obviously we have to lower our expectations to match reality, but we shouldn't
pretend they are unreasonable. Really, how difficult is the idea of a cosine?
That's not exactly an unapproachable level of abstraction.

Remember, these are people who have had _12 years_ of full-time mandatory
schooling, and have signed up for a few more years on top of that. If anyone
with an average IQ cared even a tiny bit about such things, they could learn
all of it in half that time; and if they don't care at all, parents and
teachers didn't do their job.

Of course, I agree with the main thrust of your post. Somehow, you have to
actually encourage (and allow) the students to understand what they're dealing
with, instead of giving up, moving numbers and letters on paper, and passing
to the next class. If that doesn't happen, there's no surprise that they've
forgotten it six weeks after the course.

~~~
roundsquare
I agree that just drilling on the mechanics of long division doesn't help.
But, drilling the concepts can help. The point of the article is that instead
of letting kids discover everything on their own and then feeling happy,
teachers should direct their learning. In doing so, I would say they should
drill the same concept repeatedly and ask questions that test both the ability
to do the procedure and understand the concept.

Anecdotally, this is how I taught my sister multiplication and how my friend
tutored someone in calculus.

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shalmanese
In UW's defense, "Weather 101" is pretty commonly known as an easy class to
fill up General Education requirements.

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lutorm
Another lament of what's wrong with mathematics, by mathematician Paul
Lockhart:

<http://www.maa.org/devlin/devlin_03_08.html>

He doesn't quite agree with this article.

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tigerthink
Actually, I'm pretty sure this problem is exclusive to Washington. Go here

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

and scroll down to 'Washington State Facts'. Anecdote: I attend a community
college in California, found the problems laughably easy, and have met tons of
people in my classes who would feel much the same way.

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tkahn6
I would bet these students got excellent grades in math.

EDIT: As in, I'm sure that during high school they got high marks in math
class without actually understanding the fundamentals of what they were
'learning'.

