That is because the entire world (so, SO many teachers included) is fucked upside the head up their own arse about grades, and keeps saying or thinking shit like this instead of understanding what the point of grading is to begin with. That includes parents who punish/reward their children based on their grades.
There are only two people in the world who are, or should be, concerned by a given test grade : the teacher, and the student. To the teacher, who can’t necessarily remember the specific performance of all 400 kids they teach to every week, it’s an indicator/reminder of where a class is at, where a student is at, which children are having difficulties with which specific subjects and thus who needs more help - it helps target advice. The aggregate is also useful to see longer term trends/issues or notice a sudden disruption. It’s also feedback for the teacher himself : if the entire class got shit grades or failed that one specific exercise then either the teaching method should be reviewed because it failed, or the test itself should be reviewed because it’s not testing what has been taught.
To the student, it’s an indicator of what exactly is going subpar, which topic or exercises they misunderstood exactly and thus what to focus their efforts on going forward (provided they care about reaching said specific par, which isn’t nor shouldn’t be a given).
Everyone else can fuck right off. It’s not a mark of worth or valor, nor is it a shameful moral failing. It’s not a hierarchy or an intelligence score. You can’t “make up” for a bad grade because that’s not what grades are for. You shouldn’t punish your children for not understanding something, you bunch of sociopaths - either help or sit down and shut up instead of fucking up your child and warping their worldview.
Hear ye to the motherfucking hear ye. To say nothing of blending data from every field into a single numerical average. What does *anyone *get out of a GPA ? What information does it convey ? Search me.
My jr. college GPA was 3.9 but I was at a satellite campus, not the main locale, and was not invited to the Honors graduation. So GPA alone wasn’t enough. Grrr.
I teach at a bilingual school as well as tutor some students from other schools.
In Japan and Taiwan, you life and die by a several-hour test. One test covering several subjects including math, Chinese, and English.
One of my private students is shooting for the electrical engineering department of the National University of Taiwan, which is the most difficult university to be accepted for. His test scores consistantly place him in the top two or three students in his high school which is one of the two best in the prefecture.
He just took the entrance exams but he made a couple of small mistakes on his math test and will probably not get admitted on the first round.
In the past, he would have been screwed. He would have had to apply for a lesser ranked school or waited a year, but now they have a system where there is a second test. For the second test they also look at the various accomplishments and such, but they never look at the student’s GPA. It’s just not taken into consideration.
There will always be a difference in the quality and desirability of universities and there will always need to be a way to differentiate between applicants.
Now I live and work in a test culture where grades just aren’t so important, I don’t think that eliminating them is the answer.
Nearly every country in the world has testing so why shouldnt the USA? plus for many countries the tests are required for passing onto the next level.
This is where I think the US does it wrong. The tests mean nothing to the kids so they dont take them seriously. I think they should be graded on them and they should have to pass them in order to move up a level.
We have discussed this topic on this board of just how much better is one American university compared to another. It was pretty much agreed on that for the most part, a degree from one college is just about the same as another. In the case for engineering I’m not so sure say even MIT is THAT much better than many other engineering schools. has there ever been a big test where say they put a bunch of engineering school graduates into a room, gave them some real world tests, and looked to see which ones actually had the best solutions?
Doesnt it sometimes come down to the student?
Granted Taiwan is a tiny country and there might well be only one good university with an electrical engineering school in it.
When I was in high school, New York had a Regents exam for most subject which you had to pass to get credit for the class. I don’t know if they still have it.
But I’m not too keen on European testing which determines a kids future early. My son-in-law didn’t do well on these tests, and had to wangle a space in a secretarial college to go. (Which has come in handy.) He made it through regular college and to graduate school, and now makes big bucks, but he had to work really hard to prove his ability.
Maybe your problem is that you seem to think that the way to measure the quality of an engineering student is giving them a test.
At MIT today every student does research. That was just starting when I went there, but it gives each student experience hard to find elsewhere.
I’ve looked at lots of resumes of MIT students also. They do amazing things. Far better than what we did.
If you say it comes down to the student, the best schools on the whole have the best students. I’ve taught computer science at Illinois and at a state school in Louisiana, where CS majors were the elite. No comparison on the average quality of the student, though of course there are exceptions.
Then there are the professors, who will be better at the better schools. I got taught Bio 101 by a Nobel Laureate. My lab was across the hall from Claude Shannon. (Look him up.)
And finally there is the halo effect. Prove that you can make it through a good school and you are halfway to first - at least when you start out. Good schools have good alumni associations also which can help.
BTW my company didn’t even recruit in lower level schools.
There is a difference. Though inferior schools don’t want to admit it.
My bolding. ::Checks location. Oddly enough, the entrance exams were not to see which American university he would be attending but which Taiwanese university he could get accepted to. Imagine that.
What does the difference in American universities have to do with someone in Asia? They are applying for a university here.
The same thing happens in Japan so that has nothing to do with it.
We test the hell out of students, and in many states we do require them to pass exams in order to graduate/move up a level. That has its own problems–the first being that the point of education turns into getting each kid to a very minimum standard and then stopping. But beyond state graduation exams, there are the big ones: SAT, ACT, AP, IB. Then there’s the specialty ones, like SAT Subject tests, AMC, PISA (which is for the school, not the student).
Right now, colleges and universities use a range of ways to evaluate students in order to get a more complete picture of a student–grades, test scores, essays, recs, accomplishments. It’s not perfect, but probably better than any of those in isolation. And it’s not that grades are meaningless: an A student is different than a B student is different than a C student. But when you start drawing conclusions between students based on a half-point difference in GPA, you might as well be using astrology.
You also have to look at the reasons, the context. Is this students a B student because they were working at the top of their academic potential and that’s their best day? Or were they working at a job to help pay bills? Or are they just more interested in some extracurricular activity, and that gets all their time and passion? Or do they settle easily, working hard enough but no harder, and spend most of their time smoking pot and playing video games? Or did they have a rough start Freshman year, but matured and improved dramatically? Or did they start high school with a weak skill set (bad middle school) and they caught up?
Each of those kids is really, really different. Grades alone don’t show that at all.
I really dont know too much about engineering. I’m from Kansas City and I only know a couple of engineering firms Like Burns and McDonnell and I know they mostly recruit from midwest schools like Missouri S&T or KU. I really dont know anyone who went to MIT.
So to be honest I dont really know in the field of engineering about how to decide which school is best.
They need to be in school, but that’s mostly not true of college. Why do kids have to shoulder the massive expense of this signalling via college loans so companies can save money? Is that really better for society?
Sorry, this keeps eating at me, and if anyone has yet pointed out how wrong it is, I missed it.
Transfer of information is only part of what education is, and not the most important part, especially now that we all have constant access to the Information Superhighway. If it were just passing along information, it would be both much easier and much less important. But it also involves training in skills (e.g. being able to solve mathematical equations and problems, being able to read and analyze a piece of text, being able to make a coherent argument in writing, being able to think in certain ways) and understanding (e.g. what all those facts mean, how they fit together, and which of them are important and why).
There are a lot of people that don’t believe you really learn anything in school. They think everything they know how to do they just know, and the remember school as a bunch of boring bullshit, just a matter of jumping through hoops. They think smart kids are fine regardless and other kids are hopeless. I’ve encountered this again and again as a teacher, from parents, students, and the community.
I read once that remembering where or when we learned something is it’s own type of memory and the one we develop last. I really honestly believe this is a cognitive bias a lot of people have. They remember suddenly understanding something and it seemed automatic, self-evident. They don’t remember the earlier iterations, when they didn’t get it, or the careful process it took to get them to the point that something suddenly seemed trivial.
The amount of time and skill it takes to get an idea into a child’s head is not to be believed. But they never see that.
I strongly agree with this. And I went (for undergrad EE) to an “inferior” school, a large land-grant university. I know that the standards I was required to meet weren’t in the same league as those at MIT.
But that EE degree got me a job at a government agency where I got to work with and for some really brilliant people. One of my bosses went to MIT (his thesis advisor was Alan Oppenheim, whom I’m sure **Voyager **won’t have to look up). I eventually completed advanced degrees at Johns Hopkins and George Washington (not MIT, but certainly better than where I went to undergrad). I recently retired after a very successful career–I had numerous Ivy League alumni reporting to me.
I guess my point is that while the quality of engineering schools does follow a bell curve (like most things) the educational system and workplace are very efficient at getting the most out of people, and surprisingly forgiving of motivated people who didn’t start out at top schools.
Incidentally, one Harvard physics alum told me that he thought people overrated the standards of many Ivy League schools. He said that MIT and Cal Tech alums were invariably six-sigma smart, but that there were mediocre Harvard grads. People tend to conflate name recognition with high standards.
Lots of more local companies recruit locally because it is cheaper and because the recruiters can build a good relationship with professors and thus get the top students.
And there are plenty of engineering jobs which require brains but not too much creativity. They are essential also. Not everyone even likes to do research, let alone is good at it.
And as an example of this very true observation, almost all the computer science facts I learned in college 50 years ago are now worthless. What I learned about learning, analyzing problems, and working out things has been priceless.
Finland is a sequestered society that developed its culture over thousands of years. Kind of like what the nation-states of the Lenape and the Siwash and the Mikmaq might preside over today if larger and more powerful empires hadn’t come in totally fucked up their society in the name of “progress”.
You want communitarian ideas to work, you have to have a community first. A real one, not one that’s artificially manufactured, one that has grown organically.
There are different class-levels of boxes in the SRA bunch [or there used to be, no idea if they are still used, I know they seem to have stopped using the Dick and Jane books] We had them every year from first grade on, but they were restricted previously by those teachers to 1 per class [english class was 1 hour of a 6.5 hour day and I had it on tuesdays and thursdays most years.]