Are we getting smarter all the time?

Great Debates
1

UK “A” level exam results came out today. They show an increase in the number achieving a passing grade, and in the number achieving the higher grades. This is the eighteenth year running such an increase has been observed.

Some cynics might wonder if, since school-leavers are judged on their “A” level grades, and schools are also judged on the number of passes they deliver, and schools have some latitude over which exam boards they go with… if, all these things being the case, everybody has an interest in students getting higher and higher grades, and nobody involved in the process has an interest in maintaining standards, and so those standards have been, well, slipping. Revised downwards in tune with market expectations, sorta thing.

However, education minister Stephen Timms has assured us otherwise. They do stuff, he tells us, to ensure “A” level standards do not slip. He’s not terribly specific on what stuff, but he assures us that it’s being done. And I believe him.

Well, think about it. If the standard stays the same, and more school-leavers pass it every year, this can only mean that school-leavers are getting cleverer year by year. And, since it seems to me (from my personal observation) that school-leavers are not any brighter, relative to me, than they were cough-cough years ago when I left school… then it follows that I must be getting cleverer at the same rate. And I was in the upper percentile ranges to start with - so, by now, I must have left losers like Einstein behind years ago, and in the next few years I can look foward to shedding my physical body, becoming a luminous being of pure mental force, joining the Q Continuum and getting to sexually harass cute Starfleet officers, all that sort of thing. I can’t wait!

“Is there a Great Debate here?” I hear you ask. Well… yes. Is there, I wonder, a remote chance that education minister Stephen Timms is, ahem, talking through an orifice normally reserved for another purpose here? And, if so… what can we do about it?

2

There is another interpretation that doesn’t have people getting smarter. It is possible that people are just working harder at their studies than they once did. OR it is possible that teachers are getting better at relating the material being taught (or some combination of the two).

Remember, IQ does not equate to intelligence. It is merely a measure of learning ability. Who knows how many Einstein’s and Mozart’s and the like the world has missed out on because they were born in lousy conditions. There is no way to know, of course, but I’d bet the world has missed out on more than a few geniuses because of circumstances. So, even if your IQ is improving that doesn’t necessarily equate to anything in terms of actual smarts. Unless you use and exercise and expand your mind a higher IQ will not mean you are smarter.

Besides, I don’t know that it is possible to significantly affect your IQ once it is established (in early childhood I would guess). I suppose it can always get lowered via age, diet, accidents and the like but I think it is difficult if not impossible to push your IQ up by more than a few points (if that).

3

The suggestion that modern teenagers are studying harder is bound to excite immediate derision from anyone my age… which doesn’t mean it’s necessarily wrong. Facts, anyone?

The idea that teachers are getting better - well, that too is certainly possible, but it’s at odds with some of the other things we know about teaching in the UK. There is a continuing difficulty in filling teaching posts, and constant complaints from the teaching unions about how administrative duties are detracting from actual teaching time. Given these factors, it’s hard to see how we can be getting a consistent increase in teaching quality over a period of years.

4

In my limited experience, teachers seem to be more focused on teaching to pass exams. That’s not the same as a well-rounded, thorough education or teaching all areas of a subject, but sticking to ‘what you need to know to pass’. In the UK at least it’s not suprising when schools are increasingly concerned with league tables and performance-related funding.

5

Yes - as Crusoe said.

Schools haven’t necessarily got better at teaching - they’ve just got better at getting pupils through exams. After all, they’ve had 18 years practice at A levels now.

I remember when I did A-level physics, we finished the course 8 weeks early and then did 40 papers in class until it was time for the exams. That’s 10 years worth of A-level papers! By the time I took the exam, I didn’t really need to understand it. I’d seen every bloody question before. “Ah yes,” I’d say, “this is question 4 from 1989 paper 3.” Well, maybe not quite that extreme but you get the idea.

I answered every question in the supposed 3 hour paper “hard” paper in about 90 minutes without having to think once. I doubt there I made a single error. Was I “cleverer” than those that had come before? No, I just had better exam technique. Was I taught better? Not really, I was just taught how to pass the exam better. This is what examiners need to address. Hell, even the total dipshit in my class got a grade B!

(At the same time, it seems that the kabbess went to the antithesis of this type of school. This makes the system even more unfair, since they had to compete in the exam based on mere understanding against those of us who are Exam Technique Supreme Rulers)

Now the Cambridge maths exams were far more cunning. They had the floowing facets:[ul][li]Regular change of syllabus[/li]
[li]Questions from year to year were based on entirely different premises. Knowledge of how to answer a particular type of question from a past year would get you nowhere, since that style wouldn’t come up again. A different lecturer with a different field of interest would be setting the question, which would probably relate to whatever research they happened to be doing at the time.[/li]
[li]Unless you got 19 or 20 out of 20 for a question (or possibly 18), the marks were all but worthless. 19+ would get you an “alpha” and the top grades were based on the number of alphas that you got. This means that being good at a broad range of stuff wouldn’t get you good marks, you really had to understand a few topics deeply.[/ul]Believe me when I say that these exams were hard. But they sure as hell separated the wheat from the chaff. If you got a first class degree, you really deserved it.[/li]
I don’t know anyone who got a first in maths at Cambridge that I didn’t think was a genius at maths.

pan

6

Well, been a while for me but I did my studying and even a very little teaching. FWIW, I think teachers have improved as have teaching methods (if passing exams is the goal) as have the methods of measuring teaching performance. But I also think pupils are more focused because there is both greater expectation and a clearer path to further education – ever since the expansion of Uni places in the mid-late 80’s (larger classes rather than more Institutions, mind), students have been more easily able to see a route beyond the 6th Form.

Also, this has developed into a society with a particularly broad middle-class stylie affluence bracket (albeit that much of that is based on property prices) which helps funding your offspring as does the sea change from a primarily industrial society into one in which the service sector (office jobs, if you will) dominates.

7

So, what we’re saying is that teachers and pupils are getting better at meeting the defined performance criteria… but sceptics like myself (and, incidentally, the Institute of Directors) remain unconvinced that “meeting performance criteria” translates into “understanding the subject”. Yes…

So… how easy would it be to adjust the performance criteria so that they do relate directly to an understanding of the subject? My guess is “not very”, “understanding” being one of those concepts which are easy to grasp but hard to explain, and even harder to quantify.

(On a related tangent: I remember once seeing a TV interview with Michael Heseltine, in which he was holding forth on the benefits which the Conservative government had brought to this country. I felt like yelling at the screen, “That’s not how you measure benefits! Are people happier, safer, saner than they were before? Those are the things that matter, not how many hatchbacks we assemble for South Korea!” But happiness, safety and sanity also fall into the “hard to quantify” category).

8 

Data for... **kabbes**

Happiness... 32.8
Safety...... pi*r[sup]2[/sup]
Sanity...... - ln(googol)

pan