I don't mean to be incredibly dense, but I'll risk looking that way here.
When you're at the elementary school level, I understand that there are easily quantified skills that we believe all citizens should possess. Standardized tests seem reasonable for standardized knowledge.
Once you're at the college level, what is the goal? What is the thing being maximized, the thing that can be measured and tested and presumably improved? Creativity? Problem solving? Social adroitness? Rote knowledge? Do I dare say that it may be different for different people?
The notion that colleges could be measured along just a few axes correlating with a few particular purposes confuses me in a way that the elementary school debate does not. What am I missing?
If the primary benefit of attending a good college is education from professors, then yes, there is something perverse in the rankings. But I'm not sure that's how college actually works.
At the undergrad level, a particular class at one college is likely pretty similar to a class at another college. And aside from a few exceptional students, you're likely to be able to find whatever classes you're looking for at any college you care to attend. There are more competent people who can teach, and want to teach, intro to Shakespeare, or second-semester thermodynamics, or whatever, than there are teaching positions available.
Most of the benefit you get from choosing college A over college B comes from your interactions with your peers. Some of this is just people working together on class projects, but a lot of it is the pervasive culture of a place. At some schools, people will hang out and talk about political theory. At others, there's a culture of making art. Some places care more about sports. And at some schools there's a culture of building things. Actually, at most schools, all of these things happen to some extent, but you're more likely to encounter them at some places than at others.
And if that's the benefit of college, then it absolutely makes sense to say that the best colleges are the ones with the best students.
To avoid the needlessly vague allusions to schools going on in this thread: I went to Princeton University for undergrad.
I'm sure Bill Gates has a more nuanced view on college ratings than this article suggests. Welcome to media.
We all know why the college rankings are the way they are. Frankly, no one cares who the "most improved" olympic athlete was in London. People generally want the unambiguity of an outright set of winners. Unambiguous winners may be ok in sports, but not in colleges, where the rankings have a big impact on education here in the US. Gates points out this flaw and argues instead for a "most improved student" metric.
Unfortunately, Gates' "solution" wouldn't really solve the problem either. What is the positive feedback loop for schools that rank highly on "produces the most improved students"? Would they receive extra government funding? Attract better students? I see neither of these as likely. Try again Mr. Gates.
Unless the metrics used for the ratings are based upon things like per capita salary x-many years after graduation (broken out into specific fields of study and private/public sectors), then it all comes down to either a popularity contest, or a measure of how well a school's policies reflect the latest "progressive" education practices.
In other words, unless it shows what the student "gets" out of the experience when done, they are selling dreams.
Couldn't this be just a side effect of what he advocated a few days ago in his WSJ commentary? [1]
By putting a lot of pressure on measuring things, people use the data that is easy accessible/comparable. Consequently they put a lot of effort into constructing the argument why these factors are the most important ones. Getting unskewed data is incredibly hard, especially when there is so much to gain from subtly manipulating the data.
[1]http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732353980457826...
One of the absurdities of the various college ranking systems is that reputation is a large component of the ranking. So if you have a good ranking, you get a good ranking.
When I graduated high school, all I wanted was a list of the top Computer Science schools in the world. I can't recall exactly what happened during that period, but somehow, I ended up at the University of Nebraska.
Something is broken.
> “The report concluded that there were observable, repeatable and verifiable ways of measuring teacher effectiveness,” wrote Gates in the letter. Anonymous student surveys that asked such questions as “Does your teacher use class time well, get class organized quickly, help you when you are confused" – were proven to provide useful feedback as were reports from trained professionals observing teachers at work.
Students are notoriusly bad at rating their professors. This was proved with almost ideal control groups at the Air Force Academy [1] and again with groups of trained professionals/graduate students who learned first hand about the 'Dr. Fox Effect' [2]. Even teachers don't seem to like the teacher evaluations done by students [3].
Anecdotally, I can say that most students in my college classes either didn't show up on the survey days, or they walked out the door as soon as the surveys were being handed out. There's also no incentive to provide useful feedback from the student's perspective. If you're taking a survey about the class, it means the class is over and you'll probably never see that professor again, so why bother? I made an effort only because I felt an obligation to help future students, but I'm not sure there are many kids in college who share that feeling.
> Mary Ann Stavney, a high school “Master Teacher” profiled in the annual letter, spends 70% of her time observing other teachers, meeting with them and providing input. The problem, of course, is that this kind of measuring, particularly the hands-on observation in classrooms, is costly, adding about 2% onto payroll.
So you can have cheap and unreliable measurements, or you can have accurate but costly ones. Who's going to pay for the latter? The rating agencies? The schools? The students? Imagine the costs to enact such a program across all colleges in the U.S. alone -- some of the larger state schools easily have > 1,000 teaching faculty across a myriad of disciplines, and they're teaching increasingly diverse student bodies.
The thought of trying to implement a thorough, standardized program of that scale is mind boggling. And that's probably why we've been facing this dilemma of measuring teacher effectiveness since the day the first schools opened. Bill Gates is right that we have a serious problem, but it doesn't sound like he's any closer to a solution.
[1] http://voices.washingtonpost.com/college-inc/2010/06/study_h...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Fox_effect
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Course_evaluation#Criticism_of_...
I am all for edumetrics but there doesn't seem to a way to get a good signal on a general "teaching skills" metric. Does such a metric even make sense? I would assume that a proper metric for a teacher would be dict like {"cares":"5*", "energy":4, "perceptibility":3, "subject_knowledge":5, general_knowledge:3}.
Furthermore I am not sure how school boards and schools will use the metrics. Should you fire a teacher because some data fit decided that you are a bad teacher? No way! Anyone who is willing to put in the energy and spend time with kids teaching them stuff should continue to do it. Metrics for self assessment YES, but metrics for firing teachers NO.
Also, the whole idea of "Value added" score has been called bullshit upon here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5059737 --> http://garyrubinstein.teachforus.org/2013/01/09/the-50-milli... . [ quote: ... the correlation is so low that I, and many others who have created similar graphs, concluded that this kind of measurement is far from ready to be used for high-stakes purposes like determining salaries and for laying off senior teachers who are below average on this metric. ]
The author basically says that there is no correlation of the "value added" metric that a teacher brings from year to year.
This lack of correlation is masked in the report "Measures of Effective Teaching" because "they averaged the predicted and actual scores in five percentile groups. In doing this, they mask a lot of the variability that happens" to make it look as if "value added" is a good stable metric.
US News's rankings are based upon metrics like acceptance rate, retention rate, yield rate, charitable donations, faculty-student ratio, endowment, etc. These rankings don't predict the "best" colleges, but rather the most prestigious.
It seems like the graduate school entrance exams (GRE, MCAT, GMAT, LSAT) would be a good indicator of undergrad performance (though not so much for engineering and non-medical science).
Are those scores available on a per undergrad-school basis?
Off-topic, but in Chrome I got the bar at the top saying "This page is in French. Translate?"
This mis-identification of language in Chrome happens to me probably once a day, though usually when looking at code.
Well everyone knew that. It's just that nobody really has the singular clout to change the college ranking system.
One of those ideas that's blatantly obvious, but which most will refuse to consider until someone 'big' mainstreams it.
I have a hard time reconciling the various useful things the Gates foundation seems to do with the tendency towards obnoxiousness that defines Microsoft.
Says the guy who went to Harvard
Implicitly stated in this is the idea that all sectors of society want, and feel they would benefit, from this better education of everyone.
We could posit a counter-point to that assumption. The counter-point being the posited, hypothetical idea that not all sectors of society think that "a rising tide lifts all boats". We could hypothesize that there are sectors of society who would be opposed to the working poor getting good educations.
But with such a non-mainstream contrarian hypothesis being posited, we'd have to think of a reason for this. Why would some sectors of society be opposed to this? Well, perhaps they would have a desire for a "reserve army of labor" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour ). Perhaps if they had a company, like say Microsoft, their company would pay dividends. Part of the money the company doesn't reinvest in continuing costs or re-investment, would not go to wages, but stock holders. Of course, with the small amount of stock options most Microsoft employees have relative to their wages (not to mention permatemping), in game theory it would be better for these workers, if money was to go to their wage or the dividend, for the money to go the worker. Perhaps for large MSFT shareholders like Gates, it would be better for the money to go to the dividends, and not to wages.
How can you stop the workers from demanding higher wages? Perhaps having a reserve army of labor, an inflated unemployment rate etc. would help. Perhaps a worker knowing other people as skilled or almost as skilled as him are lining up to try to get work at MSFT to get the wages he is getting, and are being rejected in interviews, keeps him being happy with his wage.
Of course this is all just wild, non-mainstream, out there conjecture. Obviously the world's richest billionaires like Bill Gates only have feelings of benevolence, and aligned interests with the rest of us. You can see how lauded he is for his charity and such in the press.
It's weird -- I used to feel I had complete mastery of writing. I had no problem getting A's on papers. I have forgotten things, but I sometimes find myself bewildered while writing, doing a construct I have no clue proper punctuation or grammar for.
The easy answer is just to rewrite and go with what I know. If I have to, I can do that.
stay with one tense -- past
don't use "I"
don't use dangling prepositions.
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What's awful is that I obsess on grammar while listening to radio interviews. It's a huge distraction. My favorite distraction is "me" or "I". Linking verbs use nomnative, but I think they almost never come-up. caring about grammar just distracts me. I'm an ass.
God says... C:\Text\WORD2.TXT
een the Seven Whistlers, &c." Both these superstitions are prevalent in the midland Counties of England: that of "Gabriel's Hounds" appears to be very general over Europe; being the same as the one upon which the German Poet, Burger, has founded his Ballad of the Wild Huntsman.
NOTE V.
PAGE 128 (302).--_Song, at the Feast of Brougham Castle_. Henry Lord Clifford, &c. &c., who is the subject of this Poem, was the son of John, Lord Clifford, who was slain at Towton Field, which John, Lord Clif
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God did some time travel -- Gabriel Giffords.
I'm Terry A. Davis, 1440 SAT, but don't give a fuck about grammar, anymore. I feel stupid writing full sentences. Bullet points, mon!!
You guys know that I pick from a fixed set of about 12 books?
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I wonder if this is true:
"A liar won't believe anyone."
It seems probably true.
I guess we could talk about Bible passages and passages that have become quotes from God. I don't know. I'm not in crisis. You'll have to work things out for yourselves.
God says...
C:\Text\HUCKFINN.TXT
's WELL for you to set there and blubber like a baby--it's fitten for you, after the way you've acted. I never see such an old ostrich for wanting to gobble everything --and I a-trusting you all the time, like you was my own father. You ought to been ashamed of yourself to stand by and hear it saddled on to a lot of poor niggers, and you never say a word for 'em. It makes me feel ridiculous to think I was soft enough to BELIEVE that rubbage. Cuss you, I can see now why you was so anxious to make
not that interesting article..
"Bill Gates, the world’s most generous and influential philanthropist." Good thing this writer is unbiased.
The currently most cited US college ranking is done by U.S News, which is heavily favored toward small private institutions from the east coast. I always find it irritating that a world renowned research power house such as UC Berkeley can't even make it into the top 20 ranking, where as schools such as Emory and Vanderbilt are ranked higher. It ALMOST feels like an east coast old money circle-jerk. I guess with the exceptions of a few schools such as MIT and Stanford, areas such as Law/Medicine/Business/Finance/Liberal Arts are historically valued a lot more than science and engineering in this country.
That simply has to change if we want to lure more young people into going into those fields (which is what the future of this country needs). It's still unbelievable how many high school kids (remember, most people don't live in SV) think accountants are these powerful people in suits making six figures straight out of school and engineers are nerdy people who work in a basement and gets no money/respect.