Cutting these exams certainly won't get more minority students involved in these subjects. Seems like a crude hack to improve the College Board's diversity ratings. One is led to believe that they do not care about the students at all from this statement.
It was really good. I took it 6 years ago and even though I continued on to a non-CS degree, I still feel like I have a good grasp on basic CS topics (data structures, in particular).
This is a really terrible loss. I don't get it at all.
I think I took the AB test. This was in 2002, and AB covered binary arithmetic, data structures, Big-O, and a bunch of other stuff. The CS A test (which is all that remains now) cut out almost all of the data structures, and was light on all the rest. It was designed to be a single semester course, where AB is a full-year course.
Did they switch to Java at that point or was it still C++?
I had some great memories in that class and definitely gave me the background I needed. Probably learned more in that class than in the early college Comp Sci classes.
I took AP Comp Sci in high school back 2000. It was a great c++ class and really gave me headstart in the CS program when I went off to college. Of course I benefited by having a great teacher,
In actuality, my enjoyment of that class solidified my decision at the time to major in CS when I went to college.
Sad to see it go, I think it is a big mistake to cut it.
Thats the problem with AP CS in Java. In our school CS 105 is the first programming class, it is C and you basically learn basic io/if/for/while/structs/pointers. If you take the AP class you skip CS 105 and therefore you jump into the next level class without having ever heard what a pointer was, looking for an ArrayList and wondering where the libraries. That next class is C++ and covers OOP and streams and templates and they get lost immediately. Worse, most of the kids in mine got 4 or 5s on the exam, and said they had never created a program from scratch before, since Java has so much boiler plate the teacher would give them a skeleton and they would have to fill in the methods, the whole idea of how to structure a program into functions was never taught to them. It sounded like it did more harm than good to me, I would rather see a high school CS class do some fun python robotics or graphics programming to get people interested and then when they hit college get into the details, don't let them skip the basics by taking a test that doesn't actually replace the amount of knowledge it says it does.
My youngest sister is taking the AP CS exam next month, and I was helping her study a few weeks ago. The first question she asked me (she's taken a semester and a half of AP CS at this point) was: what's the difference between an Array and an ArrayList?
To explain this, I had to go into: primitives, objects, and references; auto-boxing and un-boxing; generics; memory allocation and garbage collection; the different APIs (one uses length, another uses size)...
About 80% of her textbook was stuff like this. Details of the Java language that have very little to do with learning Computer Science. Only about 20% of her textbook as devoted to "algorithms".
I would say learning the ins and outs of a single language prepares you a lot better for general coding in the real world than learning algorithms does. In day to day work, I haven't ever coded up a linked list, but knowing whether Python passes dict's by reference or by copied value is pretty valuable. I had a fundamental understanding of that based on my previous knowledge of the same in Java.
I only think you should go deep after you learned concepts shallow and wide. It is important that students, very early on, be able to build interesting and meaningful things with their CS skills and experience the associated gratification.
For many people this is essential. My young cousin changed his mind about pursuing CS in college because his HS course work focused too much on tedious details. He was not able to perceive what high-level programs are capable of doing and the power programming as a medium of creative expression. Its a big shame.
She's actually taking AP Computer Science A (as opposed to AB, which is the course getting axed). They're both taught in Java.
I'd much rather the course be taught in a language more amenable to teaching computer science (Python, perhaps?). But if it must be Java, better some CS education than none at all.
I feel old. My high school AP computer class used Pascal running on Apple IIe computers (I worked in C, E, assembly, and Rexx on my Amiga at home, though).
I had two courses of introduction which were pre-reqs to take that my senior year. These courses were in BASIC. While not the best, they got the job done.
That is correct: AP Comp Sci is not an introductory class.
It is merely a standardized test, with an accompanying standardized curriculum. How schools decide to teach that curriculum is up to them.
For example, I had to take two semesters of Java before I could take the AP/IB CS class; however, my high school currently allows students to enter AP CS (material unique to International Baccalaureate pushed back to an independent study) straight from Honors Algebra II.
I took AP comp sci AB, and later TA'd the class. It was surprisingly good, covering lots of fundamental data structures and some mean pointer logic, and it probably changed the course of my life. It's disgusting to see it killed for the purposes of optimizing College Board Inc's race statistics. (Assuming this article is accurate.)
I agree with that, teach computer scientists mathematics while they are in high school, NOT CS. Have any other mathematicians out there had to review mathematically intense papers written by CS students. Frightening isn't it! How about we update the whole AP system and bring it into the 21st century.
AP Chinese or Japanese Literature courses are still being debated, but we were teaching Italian Lit?
I think we should start giving our brightest young men a larger dose of mathematics and Asia. They will work the rest out on their own if we give them good fundamentals.
Incidentally, the idea that Calculus is an AP course is indicative of the challenges facing education in the US. This course, and all of the math up to it, should be required to graduate high school. AP should expect more, at least differential equations, and I myself would be more comfortable if AP required Advanced Calculus, (Real Analysis).
Some people think I expect too much. To them I would say look at the numbers. China has more HONOR students than the US has STUDENTS, even when we include the drop outs. Keep in mind that includes only their TOP students, their 'B' students are excluded from that count, and a 'B' student in China would be an honor student here. The luxury of educational tracking as we have known it is one that is too expensive for us going forward. Time to raise the bar. It is going to be increasingly difficult to address this issue through immigration. Education is the only way out. All hands on deck. We should start to do what it takes to get this done.
Yes, but the issue is one of numbers. It would be challenging, in the extreme, to convince enough Indonesians to move to the US to close the numbers gap. In fact, the projections state that if EVERY Indonesian honor student moved here, and stayed, we would still be short. In short, how many techies can you convince to move to the US? Would that number be equal to the shortfall in students? And MOST importantly, do you bet your nation's future on the belief that all these things will happen?
I am a firm believer that the only sure way forward, is through education.
They still do, but current American immigration policy makes it more difficult for them to do so.
In addition, students from some countries are bound by their gov't to return since the gov't paid for their full ride, they have to go back and work for a couple of years. So sometimes, they don't end up staying here in the US.
> Incidentally, the idea that Calculus is an AP course is indicative of the challenges facing education in the US.
Most colleges offer H.S. Algebra II-level courses to incoming freshmen -- nevermind requiring high school students to take calculus to graduate.
> This course, and all of the math up to it, should be required to graduate high school.
My guess is that all we would be accomplishing is reducing the high school graduation rate. The only way it would be worthwhile to require calculus to graduate from high school is if we created a two-track high school system and started sending non-college-track kids to vocational school.
In any case, I would say that if we were going to revise the high school math curriculum, we should add a year of probability and statistics, not more calculus, especially (god forbid) differential equations. Possibly by shifting "Algebra I" into junior high school coursework, or by making Geometry an elective. I strongly suspect that the fundamentals of probability would be a lot more useful to most people than Euclidean geometry.
Having high school kids take DiffEqs would do more to make kids hate math than anything I can imagine.
The problem with teaching ODEs is that some people just are not motivated to learn that stuff. Why would a business man need to know differential equations?
I bet this country would be a lot better off teaching Econ 101 to every student graduating than teaching differential equations, or even Calculus. Who needs to know Calc? Math, Science, and Engineering majors. Some business and finance majors, but not all. That is not the majority of people in college must less the country. Yet everyone should understand the country's economy a bit better. I have always found a lot of smart people do not understand the actual demographics of the country because they only see the people around them, who are in fact also smart people. Realize that the country is largely made up of people who have never gotten closer to high math than what they see on the blackboards in movies like Good Will Hunting, and could care less.
Also consider most education majors never are required to get past Calc 1, who would teach it?
I'm all for offering it, I took Calc in high school and I know other engineers who took ODEs in high school, but requiring any more than Calc 1 in high school makes no sense to me.
I find this trend disturbing; but am at a loss as to how to formulate a politically blameless response. Suffice to say, the converse is inconceivable; and I fail to see how limiting the choices of minorities or majorities serves either.
It's not a choice of just arbitrarily selecting some level of success for various minorities. Some minorities excel, and you can either allow it or make everyone worse off by banning it. For example, someone who cares about racial equality might demand that blacks be prevented from competing in national sports, or standup comedy, or political oratory, because they tend to excel in these areas. This would deprive us of lots of great entertainers and speakers, and it would create a more equal situation. But obviously the black people don't benefit (they lose the jobs they want and otherwise would have); the white audiences don't benefit (they get worse stuff to watch and hear); and even the whites and other minorities who get the positions reserved for them suffer -- they're out of their depth, and the painful difference between their talent and their ranking makes them even less successful than they otherwise would be.
This might have some sort of application to affirmative action schemes, or the efforts to sculpt a course so it somehow doesn't discriminate among the groups that are better or worse at it. But I'm not sure what that application might be.
"“For us, [the question is], are we able to achieve our mission of reaching a broader range of students?” Mr. Packer said."
If that isn't an ironic statement I don't know what is. The best way to reach a broader range is to reach less? Maybe the AP needs a course offering in logic.
When funds are limited, you have to justify the cost of something with its reward. This isn't an issue of "Not enough people are taking these courses, so let's cull them." It's an issue of "We're spending a lot of money on very few students. We can probably use that money to help more students."
I'm a CS PhD student. I think it's terrible that they have to cut some CS AP classes. But I also understand that they have a limited budget, and a mandate to help as many students as possible with that budget. It's easy to criticize them for cutting classes we think are valuable, but we aren't faced with the problem of trying to use a finite budget to cover classes in the sciences, math, history, literature, languages and the arts.
The average 13-year-old white student scores better on the SATs than the average 17-year-old black student.[1] This places minority students at a huge and completely arbitrary disadvantage, since the SAT doesn't correlate with academic performance at all beyond a slight correlation with GPA the first semester of freshman year in college.[2]
And yet somehow I doubt the College Board is going to drop the SAT anytime soon. Dropping AP classes "for racial diversity reasons" is like making Rosa Parks the TV spokeswoman in the front to mask the secret eugenics program going on in the back.
[1] It Takes a City: Getting Serious About Urban School Reform
[2] C.f. the academic research into the validity of the SAT on the College Board website. (There have been plenty of popular press articles written on this too.)
Although I myself did well on the SAT's, I too am hesitant to support the use of correlations like these in determining what students, or anyone deserves.
With regard to SATs and academic performance, the first google result:
"Findings indicated a very low correlation between SAT math scores and overall college math grades of six graduating classes at one university"
Finger length correlates with testosterone production, which correlates with different ratios of mathematical to verbal skills. So it would tell you whether to go to MIT or Yale, but not whether to go to Wash U or Forest Park Community College.
You may enjoy this anecdote, in which someone even more self-righteous about such things makes a fool of herself:
"Various studies conducted over the lifetime of the SAT show a statistically significant increase in correlation of high school grades and freshman grades when the SAT is factored in." from wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT
"How well does the SAT I predict first-year college grades? The College Board and ETS conduct periodic studies of the SAT I. This usually involves examining the relationship between test scores and first-year college grades, generally expressed as the correlation coefficient (or r value). The College Board's Handbook for the SAT Program 2000-2001 claims the SAT-V and SAT-M have a correlation of .47 and .48, respectively, with freshman GPA (FGPA). This number is deceptive, however. To determine how much of the difference in first-year grades between students the SAT I really predicts, the correlation coefficient must be multiplied by itself. The result, called r squared, describes the difference (or variation) among college freshman grades. Thus, the predictive ability (or r squared) of the SAT I is just .22, meaning the test explains only 22% of the variation in freshman grades. With a correlation of .54, high school grades alone do a better job, explaining almost 30% of the variance in first-year college performance."
Well, realistically I'm not sure if it would make a difference since GPA is such a tenuous concept to begin with. To quote Dressel, "A grade can be regarded only as an inadequate report of an inaccurate judgment by a biased and variable judge of the extent to which a student has attained an undefined level of mastery of an unknown proportion of an indefinite amount of material." This quote is actually from 1956; today it would be inaccurate since most classes factor some combination of attendance, homework, and participation into the grade. (To get GPA you just average all of those together using an arbitrary weighting scheme.) That's why (IIRC) GPA only accounts for about 3% of expected future earnings.
If you really wanted to figure out the value of the SAT you would have to use a much more robust measure of cognitive development than freshman GPA. However, it doesn't look like anyone is going to undertake such a massive project anytime soon. Incidentally, Alfie Kohn has some really good stuff to say about grades in both Punished By Rewards and also in What Does It Mean To Be Well Educated?
Also, I should have mentioned above that there are some meta-studies that find that degree of validity depends on the person's race, and that if you take the person's race into account the test can be useful. I have multiple objections to this though, both practical and theoretical.
I took a look at your source, their numbers actually seem to imply the SAT is very good.
They mention that a 100 point increase on the SAT corresponds to a 0.1 boost on college GPA. Assume a linear relation: this means that a 1500 SAT student might expect a 3.0 GPA, while a 1000 SAT student might expect a 2.5 GPA. That's actually a great predictor.
Then they mention other studies of SAT scores within a fixed college. This is deceptive. A typical college has students from a narrow SAT range (say 1200-1400). By the above numbers, one expects that SAT predicts only 0.1 GPA above/below the mean (within the college). However, it also predicts that if the school were to ignore SAT and admit a cohort with SAT's of 800, then those students would underperform by half a letter grade.
Unfortunately the College Board changed the information architecture scheme on their website a couple of years ago so the URLs from my class notes no longer resolve.
There is one study that shows there is a correlation between SAT score and college GPA, but only for students whose HS GPA is above a 4.0. In general though the test doesn't really have any validity.
Here is a link to the studies the College Board is promoting:
The real question is, how does "academic performance" correlate with actual proficiency? In AP Computer Science, probably not much. I'm taking the test soon (trying to skip the course and go on to fun stuff). At least half the review book is about the Java standard class library. Much of the remainder is Java syntax and semantics and the brain-damaged system that Java programmers call "good object-oriented design". Oh, and another thing: chapter 5 of the review book has a section called "The Software Development Life Cycle". The first subsection of that is titled "The Waterfall Model". After explaining the waterfall model, it proceeds to completely neglect the existence of any other software development model.
One of the most noticeable differences between A and AB is that in AB, you go into algorithms and big O notation in much more depth, and you do some work with implementations of binary trees and such. When they cut out AB, they are leaving what is essentially an AP Introduction to Java.
It's sad that this passes off as computer science. I'm taking the test so I can hopefully skip the course and move on to fun stuff that has APCS as a prerequisite. Fun stuff like AI. AI, the class where Python and Ruby are the default languages, and you get to use other things if you want, like Lisp.
(I found this out when I still didn't know much about Lisp, saw someone using it, and laughed at the stupid, old language with all the parentheses. The guy tried to explain that Lisp is a good language, but I wasn't convinced. Later I independently stumbled on some of PG's essays, and I was convinced.)
"The average 13-year-old white student scores better on the SATs than the average 17-year-old black student."
Thanks for the citation, but since I can't look up the book right now, perhaps you can answer a question. Is that really measuring the "average?" Or the average score of 13-year-old white students who are taking the test? That's a very biased sample; for instance, I took the test when I was 12 only because I seemed likely to qualify for the Center for Talented Youth.
Unfortunately I don't have my copy on me so I can't look up the footnote in the back. IIRC it was the SAT, but I'm not entirely positive.
If you want to see something really telling about standardized testing though, check out this Greg Palast article on how the NCLB discriminates against minorities:
That does not answer the question are they using a random selection of 13 year olds vs a random selection of 17 year olds or a self selecting group of 13 year olds that take the text vs a random selection of 17 year olds who take the test.
If the methodology was that severely flawed they obviously wouldn't use the study in the book. This isn't Oprah's book club, it's a report co-authored by multiple Ph.D.s that was commissioned by the Brookings Institution.
Aren't you judging the kind of thing that makes credentials meaningful by citing the credentials themselves? As high finglefarb of the church of deontoenails, I am fully able to condemn this as heretical. And as someone experienced with condemning people as heretics, I am obviously qualified to be the high finglefarb.
Good question: "That is an interesting finding, I'd be interesting in seeing the methodology behind the study."
Insulting question: I wonder if the authors made a certain specific error, when making said error implies the person is either ignorant, stupid, or intellectually dishonest.
I'm not not going to defend the statistic since I haven't seen the methodology. That said, I do think it's insulting to the authors to ask if they've made a very basic and specific error without first reading the methodology.
In any event, I'm sure you could email any of the authors and ask where the statistic came from if you are interested.
" since the SAT doesn't correlate with academic performance at all beyond a slight correlation with GPA "
Did you know that weight doesn't correlate very well with linebacker performance in the NFL? It could be that a 350-pounder is just as effective as a 150-pounder, and there's some pro-fat discrimination -- or it could be that you're talking about correlation within a school, which chooses people on the basis of multiple criteria including SATs, such that their students are about equal academically.
Consider: a school could look at two people, one of whom gets a perfect math SAT and a 500 verbal, and another of whom gets 600 on each and writes a killer admissions essay. The former student gets a 3.5 focusing on math and CS. The latter gets a 3.5 taking English and Philosophy. This is the kind of evidence schools find; that people play to their strengths, so as long as they're of similar average talent, they'll have similar success, even if an individual measure of that talent doesn't correlate with their relative success among people who by the average of many measures, are very similar.
This has been a well-known problem with the studies you cite for over a decade.
re [1] - the actual statement from the book is:
-- By age 17, the average test scores for minority students are no higher than the average scores for white 13-year-olds.
Note that the book is written about, and the comment refers to, <em>schools in large cities</em>.
"Mr. Packer said the decision was made principally because of demographic considerations.
Only a tiny fraction of the members of underrepresented minority groups who take AP exams take the tests in one of those four affected subject areas, he said.
The College Board has made it a priority to reach such students, including those who are African- American and Hispanic."
I disagree. There are really two separate stories here:
1) Four AP courses are being discontinued
2) High schools are are redesigning their curriculums and dropping classes in which minorities are either doing poorly or have no interest in taking. (I know that just because there is no longer an AP test for these subjects doesn't mean that schools are obligated to stop teaching the material, but many or perhaps even most of them will. Esp. since high schools are ranked by Newsweek solely based on the number of AP tests taken divided by the number of students.)
In the long run, I think story #2 is vastly more important than story #1.
Yeah. The way I see it, the purpose of the US is to make an environment friendly for smart people, not to create smart people. Looking at our history, I don't think a lot of our innovation is home grown. This explains why our universities are considered so good while our education system sucks balls.
Am I missing something? Our system obviously sucks and there are many better systems out there.
At the same time, we definitely have many of the best minds in the world in America. If educating Americans was so important, I'd think we'd have figured it out by now. Is it really that impossible to make our school system better?
On the other hand, we do seem to be good at producing the consumers who power our economic engine. Isn't there just a big gapping inconsistency here?
You should be careful about that "minorities" thing. Jews and Asians are minorities whose test scores are above the national average -- I think they would be very surprised to find that their collective underperformance was somehow an issue.
I think this kind of debate won't be fruitful as long as we're afraid to say precisely what we mean, and have to talk about 'diversity' or 'minorities'. Look at the Harvard math department: http://www.math.harvard.edu/people/senior.html . You've got Gottleib and Hironaka and McMullen and Yau and basically all the proof you need that they are pulling successful people from many backgrounds. They have a higher fraction of actual minorities than the rest of the country!
"Minorities" really means "non-asian minorities, primarily black/hispanic" to anyone involved with the diversity bureaucracy. Jews are lumped in with caucasians, and therefore do not count as diversity.
It gets worse.
Gypsies are caucasian/european. Gypsies are known to be genetically and phenotypically non-caucasian. They also suffer from historic (and current) discrimination. No bonus points for you, whitey.
However, a Brazilian of 100% European ancestry (who speaks no Spanish) qualifies as Hispanic. This, in spite of the fact that his ancestors almost certainly oppressed the natives/slaves, just like an American of Portugese ancestry (who is white/caucasian). You get bonus points, Mr. Diversity.
Think it's nonsense? Are you a racist or something?
Good to know I'm (presumably) not the only Sailer reader here.
I know Gypsies are discriminated against, but I was under the impression that they're also, uh, very criminal on average, and generally not well suited to many modern careers (outside of entertainment, especially music, at which they excel). I'm thus unsurprised that there is not a powerful Gypsy Lobby agitating for affirmative action benefits, or maybe some sort of foundation started by a wealthy Gypsy industrialist. (The punk band Gogol Bordello seems to agitate for Gypsy rights, though. It's a start!)
I've heard that the Chinese and Japanese immigrants in Chile and Brazil are also treated as 'Hispanic' for these purposes, even though they obviously don't need a leg up in such matters. The same source mentioned that the 'Mestizo' ethnicity covers what people think of when they think 'Hispanic'. Is that accurate? (This problem also shows up in racial crime stats; the FBI rather promiscuously mixes whites and Mestizos, so it's very hard to tell that, for example, white-on-black rapes are incredibly rare, at fewer than ten per year -- because Mestizo-on-black rapes are more common).
That's OK, the homeschoolers of today will be around in 10 years to start companies and employ the others... if anything, you would think that AP Latin would be easier for someone with a decent background in Spanish, as there is much similarity.
I went to high school in the Silicon Valley. AP Computer Science was a course offered to upperclassmen. It was discontinued the year I had intended to take it.
Instead, one of the new classes offered that fall was a dance class.
Another gigantic win for the US educational system. US system is so far ahead of other countries' systems that they can afford to drop few useless courses.
I don't know about the language tests, but CS AB was pretty worthless - the are two of them, the "AB test" and the "BC test" (not to be confused with Calc, which has the "Calc A" and "Calc B" tests). CS AB mostly came down to learning basic Java flavored OOP. Most of the time is spent on Java syntax and searching for missing semicolons. The BC test actually gets into some meaningful data structures and efficiency, but is still not really worthwhile.
In general, education seems to me to have very little to do with schooling, and a lot to do with culture. Most of my "really smart" friends learned on their own or from their parents. The ones who focus on learning things in class just can't keep up with the self-motivators.
The great thing about merit based society is that non merit based societies crumble under their own incompetence. As long as the meritocracy can avoid getting sucked down with the incompetents, it will rise to the top. If it doesn't, is it really a meritocracy?
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 155 ms ] threadEdit: "In the 2007 administration, 5,064 students took the exam." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP_Computer_Science#Grade_distr...
Maybe it's best if students see less badly taught computer science while in high school?
This is a really terrible loss. I don't get it at all.
It's a shame that they're discontinuing AB; it was actually pretty good when I took it.
I had some great memories in that class and definitely gave me the background I needed. Probably learned more in that class than in the early college Comp Sci classes.
Definitely a shame to lose it.
In actuality, my enjoyment of that class solidified my decision at the time to major in CS when I went to college.
Sad to see it go, I think it is a big mistake to cut it.
My youngest sister is taking the AP CS exam next month, and I was helping her study a few weeks ago. The first question she asked me (she's taken a semester and a half of AP CS at this point) was: what's the difference between an Array and an ArrayList?
To explain this, I had to go into: primitives, objects, and references; auto-boxing and un-boxing; generics; memory allocation and garbage collection; the different APIs (one uses length, another uses size)...
About 80% of her textbook was stuff like this. Details of the Java language that have very little to do with learning Computer Science. Only about 20% of her textbook as devoted to "algorithms".
For many people this is essential. My young cousin changed his mind about pursuing CS in college because his HS course work focused too much on tedious details. He was not able to perceive what high-level programs are capable of doing and the power programming as a medium of creative expression. Its a big shame.
I'd much rather the course be taught in a language more amenable to teaching computer science (Python, perhaps?). But if it must be Java, better some CS education than none at all.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP_Computer_Science
I had two courses of introduction which were pre-reqs to take that my senior year. These courses were in BASIC. While not the best, they got the job done.
It is merely a standardized test, with an accompanying standardized curriculum. How schools decide to teach that curriculum is up to them.
For example, I had to take two semesters of Java before I could take the AP/IB CS class; however, my high school currently allows students to enter AP CS (material unique to International Baccalaureate pushed back to an independent study) straight from Honors Algebra II.
AP Chinese or Japanese Literature courses are still being debated, but we were teaching Italian Lit?
I think we should start giving our brightest young men a larger dose of mathematics and Asia. They will work the rest out on their own if we give them good fundamentals.
Incidentally, the idea that Calculus is an AP course is indicative of the challenges facing education in the US. This course, and all of the math up to it, should be required to graduate high school. AP should expect more, at least differential equations, and I myself would be more comfortable if AP required Advanced Calculus, (Real Analysis).
Some people think I expect too much. To them I would say look at the numbers. China has more HONOR students than the US has STUDENTS, even when we include the drop outs. Keep in mind that includes only their TOP students, their 'B' students are excluded from that count, and a 'B' student in China would be an honor student here. The luxury of educational tracking as we have known it is one that is too expensive for us going forward. Time to raise the bar. It is going to be increasingly difficult to address this issue through immigration. Education is the only way out. All hands on deck. We should start to do what it takes to get this done.
I am a firm believer that the only sure way forward, is through education.
In addition, students from some countries are bound by their gov't to return since the gov't paid for their full ride, they have to go back and work for a couple of years. So sometimes, they don't end up staying here in the US.
Most colleges offer H.S. Algebra II-level courses to incoming freshmen -- nevermind requiring high school students to take calculus to graduate.
> This course, and all of the math up to it, should be required to graduate high school.
My guess is that all we would be accomplishing is reducing the high school graduation rate. The only way it would be worthwhile to require calculus to graduate from high school is if we created a two-track high school system and started sending non-college-track kids to vocational school.
In any case, I would say that if we were going to revise the high school math curriculum, we should add a year of probability and statistics, not more calculus, especially (god forbid) differential equations. Possibly by shifting "Algebra I" into junior high school coursework, or by making Geometry an elective. I strongly suspect that the fundamentals of probability would be a lot more useful to most people than Euclidean geometry.
Having high school kids take DiffEqs would do more to make kids hate math than anything I can imagine.
I bet this country would be a lot better off teaching Econ 101 to every student graduating than teaching differential equations, or even Calculus. Who needs to know Calc? Math, Science, and Engineering majors. Some business and finance majors, but not all. That is not the majority of people in college must less the country. Yet everyone should understand the country's economy a bit better. I have always found a lot of smart people do not understand the actual demographics of the country because they only see the people around them, who are in fact also smart people. Realize that the country is largely made up of people who have never gotten closer to high math than what they see on the blackboards in movies like Good Will Hunting, and could care less.
Also consider most education majors never are required to get past Calc 1, who would teach it?
I'm all for offering it, I took Calc in high school and I know other engineers who took ODEs in high school, but requiring any more than Calc 1 in high school makes no sense to me.
This might have some sort of application to affirmative action schemes, or the efforts to sculpt a course so it somehow doesn't discriminate among the groups that are better or worse at it. But I'm not sure what that application might be.
If that isn't an ironic statement I don't know what is. The best way to reach a broader range is to reach less? Maybe the AP needs a course offering in logic.
I'm a CS PhD student. I think it's terrible that they have to cut some CS AP classes. But I also understand that they have a limited budget, and a mandate to help as many students as possible with that budget. It's easy to criticize them for cutting classes we think are valuable, but we aren't faced with the problem of trying to use a finite budget to cover classes in the sciences, math, history, literature, languages and the arts.
And yet somehow I doubt the College Board is going to drop the SAT anytime soon. Dropping AP classes "for racial diversity reasons" is like making Rosa Parks the TV spokeswoman in the front to mask the secret eugenics program going on in the back.
[1] It Takes a City: Getting Serious About Urban School Reform [2] C.f. the academic research into the validity of the SAT on the College Board website. (There have been plenty of popular press articles written on this too.)
Actually, it's more likely that political correctness creates a chasm between what people say and what they really think.
http://www.livescience.com/health/070522_finger_sats.html
Although I myself did well on the SAT's, I too am hesitant to support the use of correlations like these in determining what students, or anyone deserves.
With regard to SATs and academic performance, the first google result:
"Findings indicated a very low correlation between SAT math scores and overall college math grades of six graduating classes at one university"
http://eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/custom/portlets/recordDetai...
You may enjoy this anecdote, in which someone even more self-righteous about such things makes a fool of herself:
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2007/05/finger-length-and-sat-sco...
http://www.fairtest.org/facts/satvalidity.html
If you really wanted to figure out the value of the SAT you would have to use a much more robust measure of cognitive development than freshman GPA. However, it doesn't look like anyone is going to undertake such a massive project anytime soon. Incidentally, Alfie Kohn has some really good stuff to say about grades in both Punished By Rewards and also in What Does It Mean To Be Well Educated?
Also, I should have mentioned above that there are some meta-studies that find that degree of validity depends on the person's race, and that if you take the person's race into account the test can be useful. I have multiple objections to this though, both practical and theoretical.
They mention that a 100 point increase on the SAT corresponds to a 0.1 boost on college GPA. Assume a linear relation: this means that a 1500 SAT student might expect a 3.0 GPA, while a 1000 SAT student might expect a 2.5 GPA. That's actually a great predictor.
Then they mention other studies of SAT scores within a fixed college. This is deceptive. A typical college has students from a narrow SAT range (say 1200-1400). By the above numbers, one expects that SAT predicts only 0.1 GPA above/below the mean (within the college). However, it also predicts that if the school were to ignore SAT and admit a cohort with SAT's of 800, then those students would underperform by half a letter grade.
There is one study that shows there is a correlation between SAT score and college GPA, but only for students whose HS GPA is above a 4.0. In general though the test doesn't really have any validity.
Here is a link to the studies the College Board is promoting:
http://professionals.collegeboard.com/data-reports-research/...
EDIT: http://www.fairtest.org/facts/satvalidity.html
One of the most noticeable differences between A and AB is that in AB, you go into algorithms and big O notation in much more depth, and you do some work with implementations of binary trees and such. When they cut out AB, they are leaving what is essentially an AP Introduction to Java.
It's sad that this passes off as computer science. I'm taking the test so I can hopefully skip the course and move on to fun stuff that has APCS as a prerequisite. Fun stuff like AI. AI, the class where Python and Ruby are the default languages, and you get to use other things if you want, like Lisp.
(I found this out when I still didn't know much about Lisp, saw someone using it, and laughed at the stupid, old language with all the parentheses. The guy tried to explain that Lisp is a good language, but I wasn't convinced. Later I independently stumbled on some of PG's essays, and I was convinced.)
Thanks for the citation, but since I can't look up the book right now, perhaps you can answer a question. Is that really measuring the "average?" Or the average score of 13-year-old white students who are taking the test? That's a very biased sample; for instance, I took the test when I was 12 only because I seemed likely to qualify for the Center for Talented Youth.
Unfortunately I don't have my copy on me so I can't look up the footnote in the back. IIRC it was the SAT, but I'm not entirely positive.
If you want to see something really telling about standardized testing though, check out this Greg Palast article on how the NCLB discriminates against minorities:
http://www.phillyblog.com/philly/nation/13968-no-child-left-...
Insulting question: I wonder if the authors made a certain specific error, when making said error implies the person is either ignorant, stupid, or intellectually dishonest.
I'm not not going to defend the statistic since I haven't seen the methodology. That said, I do think it's insulting to the authors to ask if they've made a very basic and specific error without first reading the methodology.
In any event, I'm sure you could email any of the authors and ask where the statistic came from if you are interested.
Did you know that weight doesn't correlate very well with linebacker performance in the NFL? It could be that a 350-pounder is just as effective as a 150-pounder, and there's some pro-fat discrimination -- or it could be that you're talking about correlation within a school, which chooses people on the basis of multiple criteria including SATs, such that their students are about equal academically.
Consider: a school could look at two people, one of whom gets a perfect math SAT and a 500 verbal, and another of whom gets 600 on each and writes a killer admissions essay. The former student gets a 3.5 focusing on math and CS. The latter gets a 3.5 taking English and Philosophy. This is the kind of evidence schools find; that people play to their strengths, so as long as they're of similar average talent, they'll have similar success, even if an individual measure of that talent doesn't correlate with their relative success among people who by the average of many measures, are very similar.
This has been a well-known problem with the studies you cite for over a decade.
Note that the book is written about, and the comment refers to, <em>schools in large cities</em>.
Only a tiny fraction of the members of underrepresented minority groups who take AP exams take the tests in one of those four affected subject areas, he said.
The College Board has made it a priority to reach such students, including those who are African- American and Hispanic."
1) Four AP courses are being discontinued
2) High schools are are redesigning their curriculums and dropping classes in which minorities are either doing poorly or have no interest in taking. (I know that just because there is no longer an AP test for these subjects doesn't mean that schools are obligated to stop teaching the material, but many or perhaps even most of them will. Esp. since high schools are ranked by Newsweek solely based on the number of AP tests taken divided by the number of students.)
In the long run, I think story #2 is vastly more important than story #1.
At the same time, we definitely have many of the best minds in the world in America. If educating Americans was so important, I'd think we'd have figured it out by now. Is it really that impossible to make our school system better?
On the other hand, we do seem to be good at producing the consumers who power our economic engine. Isn't there just a big gapping inconsistency here?
I think this kind of debate won't be fruitful as long as we're afraid to say precisely what we mean, and have to talk about 'diversity' or 'minorities'. Look at the Harvard math department: http://www.math.harvard.edu/people/senior.html . You've got Gottleib and Hironaka and McMullen and Yau and basically all the proof you need that they are pulling successful people from many backgrounds. They have a higher fraction of actual minorities than the rest of the country!
It gets worse.
Gypsies are caucasian/european. Gypsies are known to be genetically and phenotypically non-caucasian. They also suffer from historic (and current) discrimination. No bonus points for you, whitey.
However, a Brazilian of 100% European ancestry (who speaks no Spanish) qualifies as Hispanic. This, in spite of the fact that his ancestors almost certainly oppressed the natives/slaves, just like an American of Portugese ancestry (who is white/caucasian). You get bonus points, Mr. Diversity.
Think it's nonsense? Are you a racist or something?
I know Gypsies are discriminated against, but I was under the impression that they're also, uh, very criminal on average, and generally not well suited to many modern careers (outside of entertainment, especially music, at which they excel). I'm thus unsurprised that there is not a powerful Gypsy Lobby agitating for affirmative action benefits, or maybe some sort of foundation started by a wealthy Gypsy industrialist. (The punk band Gogol Bordello seems to agitate for Gypsy rights, though. It's a start!)
I've heard that the Chinese and Japanese immigrants in Chile and Brazil are also treated as 'Hispanic' for these purposes, even though they obviously don't need a leg up in such matters. The same source mentioned that the 'Mestizo' ethnicity covers what people think of when they think 'Hispanic'. Is that accurate? (This problem also shows up in racial crime stats; the FBI rather promiscuously mixes whites and Mestizos, so it's very hard to tell that, for example, white-on-black rapes are incredibly rare, at fewer than ten per year -- because Mestizo-on-black rapes are more common).
Instead, one of the new classes offered that fall was a dance class.
/sarcasm
In general, education seems to me to have very little to do with schooling, and a lot to do with culture. Most of my "really smart" friends learned on their own or from their parents. The ones who focus on learning things in class just can't keep up with the self-motivators.