The average human brain has shrunk by 20% in size since the last 10 000 years. Thats the size of a tennis ball, or the size of an australopithecus afarensis brain.
> The average human brain has shrunk by 20% in size since the last 10 000 years. Thats the size of a tennis ball, or the size of an australopithecus afarensis brain.
That sounds both crackpot and irrelevant. I suggest citing sources and elaborating how this has anything to do with the article.
But yeah, I don't see the number 10,000 or 20% and I don't see what that would have to do with increasing maths intake in Universities by devaluing degrees...
Cite that it has happened, and cite that it matters, please: Brain size is only very loosely correlated with intelligence, and that doesn't sound like it's something that actually occurred anyway. As per the Flynn Effect, in fact, IQ has been trending upwards for quite a while.
》Cite that it has happened, and cite that it matters, please: Brain size is only very loosely correlated with intelligence
Maybe you should share some of your own citations before making claims like that.
The correlation between raw volume performance on general mental ability assessments is about .4, which is very significant. For a comparison, siblings' intelligence has a correlation of about .47. Considering that siblings share both a great deal of the same genes and have a similar environment, the fact that brain volume has nearly the same correlation is huge.
I see there is a recent press release about that ridiculous and poorly evidenced claim. (The haphazard survival of fossils means the confidence interval around such an estimate must be quite large.)
A more nuanced view of the relationship between brain size and brain capability can be found in a Scientific American article that quotes some of the leading researchers on the issue.
is an empirical observation that IQ scores in large, pan-national data sets that have been gathered by standardized methodologies have been rising all over the world for most of the last century.
While studying at the University of Wollongong, they were dumbing down the computer science courses to improve pass rates and keep more students (who probably shouldn't be doing Comp Sc anyway).
Two of my first year courses with C++ were split into three after I completed them with the harder content removed (such as abstract classes, inheritance, etc).
A lot of Universities are run like businesses now, rather than academic centers of excellence (at least in my humble opinion).
This I found at the University I went to, too. It made everything mind-numbingly boring and this was a shame because I actually enjoy learning and difficult problems. I ended up not going to a lot of lectures and learning and working on problems on my own at my own rate.
I know that this is only certain universities though. Their are many academic institutions that have stuck by their values.
What where the final year courses like, and what was the level of thesis work being done? Making the first year easier for people not coming in with a CS or programming background doesn't have to be a bad thing as long as they ramp it up towards the end.
Well, they were pushing stuff out of first year and in to second year. They then moved stuff out of second year to cater for this (beyond this I wasn't there, so I cannot comment if it quite filtering down in the following years).
I don't like the phrase "dumbing down". Based on the article, they are loosening their admission requirements, and seem to be allocating extra coursework to help students catch up.
I think that what matters is if the students manage to acquire the necessary skills after they do the mathematics coursework (which many should have done at school). There are probably a significant number of students who thrive after they catch up - implying that they are "dumb" is quite offensive.
In the US, "extra coursework to help students catch up" typically means these people aren't graduating in four years. (My university just recently released data that the average student was graduating in five to six years). That means more gov't support, more student loans, and yet more time separated from the workforce.
However, many incoming freshmen still seem to either 1) not be making an informed decision about whether or not they will succeed in college, or 2) not have enough character to resist the social forces that say they should go to college no matter what and damn the consequences.
As someone pointed out elsewhere in this thread, people choose their A Levels at age 16.
I had a vague idea that I wanted to study medicine at age 16. I ended up doing CS. 16 year olds tend to have very fuzzy ideas about what they want to do with their lives.
Excluding them from entire fields of study based on poor A Level choices seems a bit harsh to me.
When I was in highschool, I actually couldn't imagine how anyone could enjoy maths as a subject. Even though I was quite good at it, relatively (managed to get A's).
I enjoyed maths in high school because when I finally overcame that initial comprehension in solving it, it felt like I was solving problems based on present formulas.
Isn't that the problem though? To get good at maths at that level, you just apply a bunch of memorised formulas or methods. It's not about discovery and finding your own approaches to solving a problem, it's about applying formulas and tricks.
You're talking about discovery education [0]. Understandably it is applications of a bunch of memorised formulas or methods but this also occurs in specialist roles in the industry (statistics, science, stock analysts and more). For example applying web language to a need although not as pure a solution as mathematics.
Sounds like you had poor teachers. Mathematics should always be about problem formulation and understanding which methods are appropriate and how they fit together. Memorizing formulas is not mathematics at any level.
Here is a very good, albeit rather long, piece on the subject.
In Ireland, our situation is very much reflected in this, only that students must study some level of maths up to the Leaving certificate (A-Level).
The problem is that there is no real initiative to do higher level maths unless your course requires it. This means that there is a tiny proportion of students who take the higher paper. While most others sit an ordinary level paper, the difference in difficulty between the two is massive, and leads to a lot of people with a below useful level of maths, and universities must really be struggling.
Some initiatives have been started to make Maths a worthwhile option, by changing its worth to the overall mark, but the reality is that it is a subject that is largely rejected by the student body due to the fact that there is a "I hate Maths" mentality and the fact that the workload to do well is significantly more than other areas.
I'm not sure this should be posted here where most won't understand the context.
In the UK (bar Scotland), if you plan to go to University, you do A Levels in 3-4 subjects between the ages of 16 and 18. This means you need to make key choices that go towards which subject you study at University at the age of 16. Many students either haven't decided on their degree subject or make uninformed choices.
To reflect that reality, Universities are loosening their subject admission requirements and putting the prerequisite material in the University course instead.
Personally, I believe that A Levels should be reformed to reduce early specialisation.
"prerequisite material in the University course instead"
Isn't that pretty much what Scottish Universities have always done with a 4 year degree? Entrance used to be based on Highers taken in 5th year at secondary school - with some people going straight to University after the 5th year or others staying around to get more highers or to do additional higher levels qualifications.
I'm surprised that this is considered news, because it's been an observable issue for 15 years or more. As I understand it, when O-Levels were replaced by GCSEs the maths syllabus dropped some of the more challenging areas like calculus, leaving all the study of these areas to the A-Levels. As a result the standard of maths understanding for the university intake generally dropped. Universities made a number of changes to deal with this: they introduced more maths-light degrees (for example, combining some computing content with business management, finance and languages content), some courses increased the amount of maths tuition in the first year, and I believe that some even extended the course to four years to give students time to 'get up to speed'.
That said, I wouldn't class this as 'dumbing down'. They're reacting to a change in the tuition that happens prior to university entry that they have little control over. No one is saying that they're dropping the standard of the teaching that the universities are actually delivering, so the ability of a physics or computer science graduate today should be broadly similar to that from 10 or 20 years ago. What seems to be changing is the amount of work that the universities need to do to get students from a lower ability at entrance to the same level at graduation. That, and a migration by the students towards courses which are lighter in maths.
Caveat: it's 15 years since I worked at a university, so I have no inside knowledge of what's going on these days.
Warwick university actually increased their requirements between 08 and 09. (I'm not sure if there's been any changes since.) To get a place in 08, you needed A's in maths and further maths at A-level, and either two other A grades (NB. most people only take three A-levels) or a B together with a grade 2 in a STEP paper (a more difficult math paper used by Warwick and Cambridge for entrance requirements). The 08 year was unexpectedly crowded, so in 09 the AAAA option was dropped.
They're also making the course itself harder in at least some respects. There's a second year business module which is popular with third year mathematicians because it's easy marks; as of next year, it won't be an option to them.
On the other hand, I've had a lecturer say that when he taught a module to biologists, several of them didn't understand how to work with the relation "V = IR", and he got negative feedback for making the module too math-heavy.
I used to be pretty involved with student government when I was an undergrad. a few of our first year courses had a 70-80% failure rate, which the profs and higher year students supported (of course) and which the administration despised (of course).
the course was introduction to discrete math. it wasn't a very hard class, but most people who enter computer science in first year have no idea what computer science is, so this was a big shock.
I swear, discrete math must have one of the highest failure rates of any course in the CS curriculum. I knew tons of otherwise bright students who had to re-take that course, regardless of which professor they had.
British education is tearing apart along class lines.
Oxbridge, the Russell group and a handful of other institutions are setting ever higher entry requirements and looking to break away from the existing system by promoting the IB or new qualifications like the Cambridge Pre-U. They have no qualms about stating that A-Level syllabuses are being dumbed down. Oxford and Cambridge maintain lists of A-level subjects that they do not recognise. Most of their prospective intake comes from independent, grammar and wealthier comprehensive schools with the resources and confidence to guide students towards the right qualifications (increasingly something other than A-levels) and coach them through application and interview.
Most other universities are engaged in a mad rush to the bottom, competing to fill the maximum number of places at the maximum fee at minimum cost. Their main appeal is to working and lower-middle class students who may not be confident in their ability to get a place at university, who are unlikely to have received any useful guidance in their application and who are foolish enough to believe that "a degree is a degree". Standards at secondary level are falling, as are contact hours at most universities. With a strong financial incentive to maximise intake, the results are obvious and inevitable.
The reputation of these universities is plummeting amongst employers, who are seeing increasing numbers of graduates and even postgraduates without basic skills in reading and writing. This is not hyperbole - I regularly deal with correspondence from recent graduates and often have to make follow-up phone calls because their written English incomprehensible.
Crisis is too mild a word for the current state of HE.
I am Australian and didn't go through the UK education system but I lived in the UK from 2001 to 2004 and I was somewhat shocked at the state of the education system when I was there.
At the time there was a show on Channel 4 called "That'll Teach 'Em". The idea was to put (then) current GCSE students through the old O-levels in a 1950s boarding school environment. It was of course (like any "reality" show) done up for TV but there were some interesting tidbits, which were news to me (as an expat):
- Grade inflation is rampant, so much so that they had to invent a grade above an A (the A<asterisk>) because too many people were getting As.
In the US I believe this to also be a problem but it's hidden behind scaling of results. At least I see so many people who have 3.8+ college GPAs (which, as I understand it, basically means 80% As and 20% Bs) that I have to wonder where all the C students are.
In Australia--at least when I went through the education system some 15+ years ago--it was nothing like that.
- Students who were getting 11 GCSE As couldn't pass 4 O-levels. Granted the curriculum structure is different (eg it once relied on more memorization) but still...
- Current education philosophy in the UK seems to emphasize creative expression, which to me sounds like the educational equivalent of moral relativism in that there is no wrong or right. The idea is to simply make students express themselves. Nevermind actually knowing anything or being able to critically formulate or deconstruct an argument.
- Students who were getting As in GCSE French couldn't even conjugate the verb "avoir" (to have). If you've never studied a language this means coming up with the French equivalent of I have / we have / you have / he/she/it has / they have (j'ai / nous avons / tu as / vous avez / il/elle a / ils/elles ont). This is as basic as it gets.
In case you were wondering why there was 6 for French and 5 for English, the second person singular in English (thou hast) has fallen into disuse.
From what I remember the exams were largely take-home translations, which in the Internet age typically meant getting someone French to do them.
- Maths was incredibly weak.
But the UK seems to have a similar problem to what Australia does now: a government who has treated the number of students in university as some kind of target. The uncomfortable truth is that not everybody belongs in university or will get anything out of it.
> what Australia does now: a government who has treated the number of students in university as some kind of target
I am beginning to see the first real results of these policies amongst that group of my friends who did not do technical degrees or have some other skill. The people who did "International Studies" or "International Politics" or any of a whole range of cool-sounding but, when it comes down to it, basically useless qualifications. None of them can get any sort of job commensurate with the headed-straight-for-the-UN promise of the degree title; at best they can hope for a public service bureaucrat job. More than one are teaching themselves programming after observing myself and others rocketing up on trajectories unthinkable in the arts degree world.
Disillusionment doesn't really begin to cover it. The realisation that a great number of degrees are, if not useless, then at least impractical has not yet seemed to make it back to the year 12 students doing the choosing - but the secret certainly seems to be getting out, in some demographics at least.
Holder of a useless non-technical degree here. Tens of thousands of dollars spent on education, and now I work an entry-level retail job. But I do count myself fortunate that I have no debt from my (perhaps mostly pointless) university experience.
Using my spare time to teach myself programming and some math. :-)
who are foolish enough to believe that "a degree is a degree"
That is foolish, but OTOH, an undergrad is 18. They're an adult and ought to be able to make decisions like one. Or if they're not, let's raise the voting and drinking age to 21. Can't have it both ways!
I finished high school in England a few years back, but education here is pretty bad. The whole lowering the boundaries thing is very true, the school I went to had a 20% pass rate the year before me, last year it was at almost 90%. They're just adding new "easier" qualifications and "easier" subjects to improve the pass rates but the quality of education remains the same.
Luckily failing high school doesn't have any real bearing on life.
Providing remedial (secondary-school level) mathematics courses for college and university students is a big business in United States higher education.
It's commendable that higher education teachers give their students a second chance to learn mathematics that young people could learn in primary or secondary education, but even better would be for young people to have opportunity to learn mathematics at a younger age.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 83.1 ms ] threadThat sounds both crackpot and irrelevant. I suggest citing sources and elaborating how this has anything to do with the article.
But yeah, I don't see the number 10,000 or 20% and I don't see what that would have to do with increasing maths intake in Universities by devaluing degrees...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal
However, this isn't particularly relevant as we aren't descended from them and AFAIK the link between cranial capacity and intelligence isn't clear.
Maybe you should share some of your own citations before making claims like that.
The correlation between raw volume performance on general mental ability assessments is about .4, which is very significant. For a comparison, siblings' intelligence has a correlation of about .47. Considering that siblings share both a great deal of the same genes and have a similar environment, the fact that brain volume has nearly the same correlation is huge.
http://informahealthcare.com/doi/abs/10.1080/002074508023258...
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK11129/box/A1833/
A more nuanced view of the relationship between brain size and brain capability can be found in a Scientific American article that quotes some of the leading researchers on the issue.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=does-brain-...
As another reply has already pointed out, the Flynn effect
http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/flynn-beyond/
is an empirical observation that IQ scores in large, pan-national data sets that have been gathered by standardized methodologies have been rising all over the world for most of the last century.
While studying at the University of Wollongong, they were dumbing down the computer science courses to improve pass rates and keep more students (who probably shouldn't be doing Comp Sc anyway).
Two of my first year courses with C++ were split into three after I completed them with the harder content removed (such as abstract classes, inheritance, etc).
A lot of Universities are run like businesses now, rather than academic centers of excellence (at least in my humble opinion).
- Exception-safety
- Writing portable code (no, 'int' does not wrap around; chars are not ASCII, signed int is neither equal to in int nor to unsigned int, etc)
I know that this is only certain universities though. Their are many academic institutions that have stuck by their values.
I think that what matters is if the students manage to acquire the necessary skills after they do the mathematics coursework (which many should have done at school). There are probably a significant number of students who thrive after they catch up - implying that they are "dumb" is quite offensive.
In the US, "extra coursework to help students catch up" typically means these people aren't graduating in four years. (My university just recently released data that the average student was graduating in five to six years). That means more gov't support, more student loans, and yet more time separated from the workforce.
However, many incoming freshmen still seem to either 1) not be making an informed decision about whether or not they will succeed in college, or 2) not have enough character to resist the social forces that say they should go to college no matter what and damn the consequences.
If that's not dumb, I don't know what is.
I had a vague idea that I wanted to study medicine at age 16. I ended up doing CS. 16 year olds tend to have very fuzzy ideas about what they want to do with their lives.
Excluding them from entire fields of study based on poor A Level choices seems a bit harsh to me.
[0] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Discovery_lea...
Here is a very good, albeit rather long, piece on the subject.
ftp://math.stanford.edu/pub/papers/milgram/milgram-msri.pdf
The problem is that there is no real initiative to do higher level maths unless your course requires it. This means that there is a tiny proportion of students who take the higher paper. While most others sit an ordinary level paper, the difference in difficulty between the two is massive, and leads to a lot of people with a below useful level of maths, and universities must really be struggling.
Some initiatives have been started to make Maths a worthwhile option, by changing its worth to the overall mark, but the reality is that it is a subject that is largely rejected by the student body due to the fact that there is a "I hate Maths" mentality and the fact that the workload to do well is significantly more than other areas.
In the UK (bar Scotland), if you plan to go to University, you do A Levels in 3-4 subjects between the ages of 16 and 18. This means you need to make key choices that go towards which subject you study at University at the age of 16. Many students either haven't decided on their degree subject or make uninformed choices.
To reflect that reality, Universities are loosening their subject admission requirements and putting the prerequisite material in the University course instead.
Personally, I believe that A Levels should be reformed to reduce early specialisation.
Isn't that pretty much what Scottish Universities have always done with a 4 year degree? Entrance used to be based on Highers taken in 5th year at secondary school - with some people going straight to University after the 5th year or others staying around to get more highers or to do additional higher levels qualifications.
That said, I wouldn't class this as 'dumbing down'. They're reacting to a change in the tuition that happens prior to university entry that they have little control over. No one is saying that they're dropping the standard of the teaching that the universities are actually delivering, so the ability of a physics or computer science graduate today should be broadly similar to that from 10 or 20 years ago. What seems to be changing is the amount of work that the universities need to do to get students from a lower ability at entrance to the same level at graduation. That, and a migration by the students towards courses which are lighter in maths.
Caveat: it's 15 years since I worked at a university, so I have no inside knowledge of what's going on these days.
They're also making the course itself harder in at least some respects. There's a second year business module which is popular with third year mathematicians because it's easy marks; as of next year, it won't be an option to them.
On the other hand, I've had a lecturer say that when he taught a module to biologists, several of them didn't understand how to work with the relation "V = IR", and he got negative feedback for making the module too math-heavy.
the course was introduction to discrete math. it wasn't a very hard class, but most people who enter computer science in first year have no idea what computer science is, so this was a big shock.
Oxbridge, the Russell group and a handful of other institutions are setting ever higher entry requirements and looking to break away from the existing system by promoting the IB or new qualifications like the Cambridge Pre-U. They have no qualms about stating that A-Level syllabuses are being dumbed down. Oxford and Cambridge maintain lists of A-level subjects that they do not recognise. Most of their prospective intake comes from independent, grammar and wealthier comprehensive schools with the resources and confidence to guide students towards the right qualifications (increasingly something other than A-levels) and coach them through application and interview.
Most other universities are engaged in a mad rush to the bottom, competing to fill the maximum number of places at the maximum fee at minimum cost. Their main appeal is to working and lower-middle class students who may not be confident in their ability to get a place at university, who are unlikely to have received any useful guidance in their application and who are foolish enough to believe that "a degree is a degree". Standards at secondary level are falling, as are contact hours at most universities. With a strong financial incentive to maximise intake, the results are obvious and inevitable.
The reputation of these universities is plummeting amongst employers, who are seeing increasing numbers of graduates and even postgraduates without basic skills in reading and writing. This is not hyperbole - I regularly deal with correspondence from recent graduates and often have to make follow-up phone calls because their written English incomprehensible.
Crisis is too mild a word for the current state of HE.
At the time there was a show on Channel 4 called "That'll Teach 'Em". The idea was to put (then) current GCSE students through the old O-levels in a 1950s boarding school environment. It was of course (like any "reality" show) done up for TV but there were some interesting tidbits, which were news to me (as an expat):
- Grade inflation is rampant, so much so that they had to invent a grade above an A (the A<asterisk>) because too many people were getting As.
In the US I believe this to also be a problem but it's hidden behind scaling of results. At least I see so many people who have 3.8+ college GPAs (which, as I understand it, basically means 80% As and 20% Bs) that I have to wonder where all the C students are.
In Australia--at least when I went through the education system some 15+ years ago--it was nothing like that.
- Students who were getting 11 GCSE As couldn't pass 4 O-levels. Granted the curriculum structure is different (eg it once relied on more memorization) but still...
- Current education philosophy in the UK seems to emphasize creative expression, which to me sounds like the educational equivalent of moral relativism in that there is no wrong or right. The idea is to simply make students express themselves. Nevermind actually knowing anything or being able to critically formulate or deconstruct an argument.
- Students who were getting As in GCSE French couldn't even conjugate the verb "avoir" (to have). If you've never studied a language this means coming up with the French equivalent of I have / we have / you have / he/she/it has / they have (j'ai / nous avons / tu as / vous avez / il/elle a / ils/elles ont). This is as basic as it gets.
In case you were wondering why there was 6 for French and 5 for English, the second person singular in English (thou hast) has fallen into disuse.
From what I remember the exams were largely take-home translations, which in the Internet age typically meant getting someone French to do them.
- Maths was incredibly weak.
But the UK seems to have a similar problem to what Australia does now: a government who has treated the number of students in university as some kind of target. The uncomfortable truth is that not everybody belongs in university or will get anything out of it.
I'm pretty sure the real motivation for increasing the number of places in higher education was simply to keep the unemployment numbers down.
I am beginning to see the first real results of these policies amongst that group of my friends who did not do technical degrees or have some other skill. The people who did "International Studies" or "International Politics" or any of a whole range of cool-sounding but, when it comes down to it, basically useless qualifications. None of them can get any sort of job commensurate with the headed-straight-for-the-UN promise of the degree title; at best they can hope for a public service bureaucrat job. More than one are teaching themselves programming after observing myself and others rocketing up on trajectories unthinkable in the arts degree world.
Disillusionment doesn't really begin to cover it. The realisation that a great number of degrees are, if not useless, then at least impractical has not yet seemed to make it back to the year 12 students doing the choosing - but the secret certainly seems to be getting out, in some demographics at least.
Using my spare time to teach myself programming and some math. :-)
That is foolish, but OTOH, an undergrad is 18. They're an adult and ought to be able to make decisions like one. Or if they're not, let's raise the voting and drinking age to 21. Can't have it both ways!
Was it a joke that you missed out the word 'is'?
Luckily failing high school doesn't have any real bearing on life.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2010-05-11-remedial-c...
http://www.all4ed.org/about_the_crisis/students/college_acce...
Providing remedial (secondary-school level) mathematics courses for college and university students is a big business in United States higher education.
http://www.aleks.com/
http://bluehawk.monmouth.edu/~bgold/DvMthIn.html
It's commendable that higher education teachers give their students a second chance to learn mathematics that young people could learn in primary or secondary education, but even better would be for young people to have opportunity to learn mathematics at a younger age.
http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/NoticesAMS2011.pdf
http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/Lisbon2010_3.pdf
http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/CommonCoreIV.pdf
http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf
Grade inflation after entry into higher education
http://gradeinflation.com/
has been going on in the United States for quite a while.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/aug/25/teachers-cho... http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/may/26/exam-boards-...