Unless you're in 8th grade, that's not super relevant. I don't think I would do very well on this test today, but I'm actually surprised at how similar the topics and depth of these questions are to my recollection of 8th grade standardized testing.
I will admit that this test would look daunting to "eighth grader me", but should I feel less intelligent than the eighth graders we were producing 101 years ago?
I think it would be more fair to show a criteria of how the students were taught back in 1912 as well.
We could easily teach children in grade 8 today to answer the following question: "give at least five rules to be observed in maintaining good health" (question 9 of physiology) by teaching them "the ten rules of maintaining good health" one day in class and moving on the next.
Health class and phys-ed today consists of much more than 5, 10 or even 50 rules of maintaining good health.
Or how about question 5 in Geography: "locate the following countries that border eachother: Turkey, Greece, Servia, Montenegro, Roumania.
If I was growing up in an Ottoman-empire-ruled world, perhaps I would be taught exactly which countries border with Turkey for example.
When I was about that age, NATO was in the process of bombing Serbia. The Balkans has receded a bit from the headlines, but today, Turkey remains critically important to the relationship between the West and the Muslim world. The ongoing struggle between the secular and Islamic forces may be crucial to determining the fate of the Islamic world over the next decades.
And of course most of Turkey's other neighbors: Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Bulgaria are in varying states of crisis. Something like 100,000 people have died in the ongoing Syrian civil war. Lebanon is in perpetual crisis. Georgia fought a war with Russia only a few years ago. Iraq and Iran need no further explanation.
So maybe we should be teaching our 8th graders exactly where Turkey is on the map?
The questions look daunting but It's naive to think the pupils were not taught the material before hand. I mean if you spent a week or two with year 8s and covered the necessary material I have no doubt the majority of them would answer all the questions.
Year 8 students in England are ~13 years of age, so yes.
They call pre-school nursery, kindergarten is reception, then it follows with american style numbered years. It is slightly off because they have 13 years and we have 12, but they both carry you to 18 years of age.
Note the biggest change from today: none of these are multiple-choice tests. Students are expected to write out the answers, and teachers are expected to mark them. I very much doubt whether the textbooks on 1912 had special teacher's editions with answer keys.
Of course, back then you could also support a family on a schoolteacher's income.
Most public School teachers make close to the meadean household income in the US (50,000$) with some earning double that. If it seems like there underpaid it's simply in comparison to other upper income professions requiring a collage degree or high cost of living areas. Also a teachers income is often looked at as a family friendly steady/supplemental income with good benefits as the time off matches up well with a dual income family raising children thus lowering aggregate pay.
EX: Arlington VA, has an average classroom teacher pay of 52,003$. However, According to a 2007 estimate, the median income for a household in the county was $94,876, and the median income for a family was $127,179.[37] Males had a median income of $51,011 versus $41,552 for females. The per capita income for the county was $37,706. About 5.00% of families and 7.80% of the population were below the poverty line, including 9.10% of those under age 18 and 7.00% of those age 65 or over.
Teaching might be "Looked at" as being family friendly but unless you're working in a really nice district or are completely apathetic you're probably going to be working 50 hour weeks.
Speaking of pay expectations... software developers with no college education and a few years of experience can be hired for twice an experienced teacher's salary - and these same developers consider themselves underpaid (which they are... but so is most of the middle class)
The good ones are. My wife puts in around 55-60 hours per week, especially when you consider all the junk they are required to be there for (sports, extracurriculars, dances, etc.) and continuing education requirements. However, amortized over a year with summers off it turns into a 40-45 hr work week - same as other professionals but with half the salary.
The average salary for full-time public school teachers in 2010–11 was $56,069 in current dollars (i.e. dollars that are not adjusted for inflation). In constant (inflation-adjusted) dollars, the average salary was about 3 percent higher in 2010–11 than in 1990–91.
Note the average is well above the median in this case.
He's comparing teachers to other professionals within a single metro area. It's a legitimate comparison to make, and in the absence of some reason to think it's atypical, I'm willing to assume that other areas will not have a huge difference.
>"Most public School teachers make close to the meadean household income in the US"
Yeah...no they don't. Both my parents are career teachers, and both have worked in both public and private school systems. You start out at ~$30,000 in major metropolitan areas and can reach $100,000 after close to a decade, with a graduate degree.
My dad's been a teacher at the high school level (math and English +SAT prep) for over 50 years. He's barely north of 70K/year in Dallas, TX. And he's one of the top paid teachers in the district. When you say "major metropolitan areas ... can reach $100,000" I think that must be in either very affluent areas, private schools, or the west/northeast coasts.
Even still, for such a vastly important profession, I've always been completely disillusioned by the lack of compensation and support for the teaching profession.
Hm, my comment must have come across as somewhat arrogant. Sorry, read the parent comment. I'm agreeing with you - my point was that you can't really make much more than median unless you're in an expensive area, you have high seniority, and you're very educated. We're agreeing :)
Your point was obscured by getting your history wrong.
Think about: you know, the Romans didn't drive around in nice fancy cars; they walked, or if they were lucky, rode a horse! Therefore we can conclude that they weren't as lazy as we were.
Ridiculous. If the teacher of 1912 had multiple choice tests in their toolbox, they probably would have used them. What point were you trying to make?
In your haste to project your meaning onto my words you misunderstood the point I was making. To go with your example, I'd say the Romans were almost certainly fitter than we are. You incorrectly assumed that I was making a moral critique.
Likewise I think the sutdents of 1912 were mentally fitter for having to write out the answers rather than use multiple-choice tests. As a European I'm constantly perplexed by how much Americans use multiple-choice questions for academic evaluation. Anything that allows you to get an exam score of 25% by chance alone is a pretty weak pedagogical tool.
Perhaps I should have phrased my point in the form of a multiple-choice question to make it easier for you to appreciate.
>Anything that allows you to get an exam score of 25% by chance alone is a pretty weak pedagogical tool.
That's a pretty weak argument. Not only can multiple choice questions be weighted to punish guessing, remember how the score system works. 50% is a complete failure.
Not to mention curving, but I think that is something that the Europeans don't like. American universities are dog-eat-dog compared to soft European ones.
The problem with this approach is that the score becomes an abstraction that's meaningless without an understanding of the weighting applied. When I've done these sorts of tests in the US I've found it intensely frustrating to find my score decoupled from the actual number of questions I've got right. Although I've enjoyed very high scores on recorded tests, I don't feel especially good about them because I can't easily determine how many questions I got right or wrong.
remember how the score system works
You realize that the particular scoring system you're referring to is a peculiarly American thing, right? There are many different grading systems in use around the world; I grew up with this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_grading_in_Ireland
50% is a complete failure.
This is part of the problem. How do you expect students to stay motivated and progress when 50% effectively equals 0%?
While I'm on this topic, I don't understand this American mania for scoring relative to a population, and there's a distinct lack of transparency in tests administered by institutions like the college board - for example http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/clep/clep-... Even if you're going to use weighting, I fail to see what the point is in using a T-Score (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Normal_distribution_and_sc...) instead of providing a percentile or standard deviation measure. It took me ages to work out what method they were using since they didn't bother naming it in the explanatory notes.
You've turned testing into such an industry in the US that providing the student with meaningful feedback on his/her actual performance seems to be the lowest priority. I score up int eh 98th or 99th percentile on things, I understand statistical distributions, and I still find this horribly alienating. I can't imagine what it's like for someone that isn't quantitatively inclined.
This data could actually be used to support my previous statement. Graduation rates are not a great indicator of actual knowledge gained. Nor are test scores, for that matter.
Ideally, someone with zero knowledge of a subject shouldn't score much above 0%. Perfect tests are unachievable but I find the ubiquity and frequency of multiple choice tests in the US alarming. Also, because they don't involve writing, I feel like literacy has been in a long slow decline over the ~20 years I've lived here, although that might just be because I can't stand Twitter.
this must be an american thing. I have never had a multiple choice test in school.
(okay, maybe some small test in geography or something, but very very rare)
We used to get a few on our exams (in Ireland) but we always assumed they were softballs placed at the beginning of the paper to help anxious students get past their exam jitters (you still had to write out 'Q1: a, Q2: c' etc., rather than marking a sheet, so putting down those got you past the scary blank page in the answer book. They never counter for more than about 5% of the total.
>> "Note the biggest change from today: none of these are multiple-choice tests."
In the UK, at least where I live, none of our tests are multiple choice. I've always wondered why in the US tests are given in this format. It seems very dumbed down. Is there a valid reason?
As I understand it the American educational tradition uses more frequent, shorter tests known as 'quizzes' - sometimes as often as for every class, every week.
Benefits of this approach include giving teachers fast feedback on whether students are understanding what they're being taught; and spreading the test workload evenly across the year instead of having a bunch of big make-or-break exams at the end of the year, within days of one another. Using multiple choice tests which can be marked automatically makes it simpler to do this as they can be marked by machine.
Multiple choice with automated marking also means you don't have to decipher students' bad handwriting; you can't recognise students' writing and apply subconscious favouritism; you have to ask questions with unambiguously right answers; it's simple to be consistent with marking; and rates of human error are reduced.
With that said, you can't teach someone to write an essay without having them write an essay and giving them feedback; and you can't check a student's math problem working and point out where they make a mistake. So multiple choice tests certainly aren't the be-all and end-all of student evaluation.
easier, cheaper and more objective marking probably.
multiple choice doesn't mean dumbed down. indeed, it can be much harder since you can't show working or explain reasons. It turns into an exercise of guessing the password (http://lesswrong.com/lw/iq/guessing_the_teachers_password/) rather than demonstrating any real learning has taken place. This can be hard to guess even if you know the material in question.
Much of this seems like rote memorization, to which I see very little use for in today's society. Need to get a list of state capitals? Google it. Need to plot a naval route from England to Malaysia? Look at a map. Students do not need a teacher nor a classroom to memorize facts. The time is better spent on developing problem solving and teamwork skills. Note the lack of any room for original expression or thought - no essays, no argumentation. Just rote memorization which will likely have no real use 99% of the time.
Facts are the building blocks of argument. One shouldn't expect an 8th grader in 1912 or 2013 to have particularly well-developed arguments until they understand basic facts. You might think "rote memorization" has little value, but I have to disagree with that here. We're not talking memorization of mathematical theorem without proving them. We're talking about having a rather basic understanding of the world in a handful of subjects.
Yes it's easy to look at a map if you're unsure which countries border Turkey. It's much easier to remember which countries border Turkey if you've studied geography, which allows you to move on from looking up the basics every time so that you can have a deeper understanding of the subject.
Honestly, as someone who grew up looking this up on Wikipedia, my ability to base an argument on credible sources has suffered immensely. Often, I want to make a point, and when I try to back it up I go through the "Did I read this on a reputable website, and if yes, what was the link".
But how important is it to form an argument on the spot based only on the facts you have memorized? Sure, it's valuable for things like competitive debate, extemporaneous speaking, pub trivia, and perhaps some unfortunate job interviews, but if I had to pick, I'd rather everyone be better at doing a bit of research and taking their time forming an argument.
Let's take an example from everyday life. Someone see an ad online, for a big discount on an hotel stay in south east Turkey. If you have no idea on the spot that you'll likely be close to the syrian border in might look like a good idea on first examination.
That might be a prejudice on my part, but I think that someone, who does not know some geographical facts is the less likely to look thoroughly at a map before planning a journey.
I'm not really talking about on the spot knowledge, though. After awhile, you should just know things. If every time you sat down to write a program, you had to look up the definition of a variable, you'd be in for quite a difficult time.
Some knowledge, like history or literature or even science outside of your field, doesn't really have an apparent application. I'm not really arguing against applied knowledge, but I'm saying that personal edification is a very good thing. Connections pop up in the strangest ways. In fact, I'd argue that without a degree of memorization, research skills will be lacking in most people, as they wouldn't have a clue where to begin.
To carry what zecho was saying, at what point does it become ridiculous? Everyone has a calculator in their pocket, should we stop worrying about teaching addition? You chose to use the extreme items that get memorized, but there where is the 'fine line' of things to memorize?
"Students do not need a teacher nor a classroom to memorize facts."
You are half-right here, the problem is, if we get rid of the teacher, how do you encourage the student to memorize boring rhetoric like math or reading comprehension? The teacher is also there to 'force' you to put down your toys/electronics and work. Doing your up-teenth geography homework question is a lot harder when there is no enforcement and all your friends are on Call of Duty. Teachers help teach discipline.
I've thought about this a bit as a game designer. Basically, teachers have to force (induce extrinsic motivation) students to learn things, because the student has no greater goal (intrinsic motivation) which would flag the knowledge to them as being immediately relevant. If, on the other hand, the student needed to be able to know the sums of large numbers quickly while they had their hands full (for, say, estimating a fair tip as a server in a restaurant), they'd quickly absorb a mental addition algorithm--because they would have created a mental gap, a place where their plans say "and then if only I could--".
The things that should be taught, I think, correlate highly to the types of things students will later wish they knew. These are mostly low-level rules and processes for things which are so "obvious" to everyone else that they're hard to communicate unless you have a background in education. To flip that around, the kinds of things we call "trivia"--things equally simple or obvious, but as easily learned as said (e.g. a state capitol) don't really need school to teach them--as, if someone later feels the need to know, they can just ask anyone, and pick it up on their own. School is mostly a place to impart knowledge that's hard to teach (including to self-teach) if you don't know the specific skills of teaching.
I disagree. 'Why should we study physiology?' and 'Give the cause of the war of 1812' (to name but two) are open-ended questions which encourage argumentation. Rote emorization, which is required by many other of the questions, has plenty of value - as does exercise for muscle tone. Your problem-solving and cooperation skills are going to be severely hobbled if you don't know anything without looking it up and have no ability to retain information.
> Note the lack of any room for original expression or
> thought - no essays, no argumentation.
Really? Answers to many of the quesions could be mini essays and some require argumentation. Better than multiple-choice test so popular now.
Also what could you write an essay about if all your knowledge is in Google? How can you argue, if you now no facts, because you avoided rote memorization? How do you know your expression is original if you did not spend time learning about other expressions out there?
You cannot build a palace without a fundament. Unless it's an air palace.
I find it interesting that the test actually has a couple questions based on the war of 1812. Perhaps that war had a higher profile in 1912, it being the centenary?
Also, it's interesting that several questions basically come down to the student knowing the definition of imperials units like cords or the number feet in a mile. It makes sense that students would need to know those definitions for daily life, but I still find it odd since I grew up using the metric system!
I know the test isn't meant to serve as a comparison of students from 1912 with those from today, but I must say, it certainly makes the teachers in some states of the U.S. today look like dunces!
Before the World Wars, what other war in US history, other than the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, would be well known? The Spanish-American War was recent events, the Mexican War was forgotten as it lay between two bigger and more impressive wars (just like Korea is easily forgotten between WWII and Vietnam), and that was it as far as major conflicts go.
>> "Also, it's interesting that several questions basically come down to the student knowing the definition of imperials units like cords or the number feet in a mile. It makes sense that students would need to know those definitions for daily life, but I still find it odd since I grew up using the metric system!"
With the metric system we still had to learn these things (how many metres in a kilometre etc.) it was just much easier.
What is most interesting to me is how the test shows the value we enjoy of living in the information age.
Without instant access to rote information, knowing some of these facts was probably rather important a hundred years ago. Schools today can avoid burdening the student with memorizing so many facts and focus more on developing conceptual understanding, which – coupled with free, rapid access to factual information – is much more valuable.
It is still important. If you have to go and look up even the most basic information about the world then many trains of thought are simply not going to occur to you because you don't have sufficient information in your head to think with. I'm not aware of any evidence that says we only have a limited number of facts that our brains can absorb and it's vital to omit older stuff so we can absorb the newer.
This observation strikes me a bit funny - regarding information access, 8th grade me (circa '88-89) probably had more in common with those from 100 years ago than those today.
Has education really changed that much in 25 years? Heck, 10 years? I don't think most people had heard of Wikipedia 10 years ago, and Google hadn't even IPO'ed yet.
The problem with these types of posts is that they never come with the context or the gravitas needed to substantiate the underlying claims that are implied by the presentation.
Were all eighth grade exams of similar difficulty? Did most children pass? Did the children that passed truly understand the underlying concepts?
Don't get me wrong; I don't think that things are honky dory right now. I have serious problems with our education system, but I don't buy for a second that kids 100 years ago were so advanced.
Putting this in context, I'm sure the gross overall level of education for teenagers in the early 20th century was higher than it is now.
Education was far less prevalent for minority groups, who, as an unfortunate side effect to class-wide limited incomes, don't have the same access to the kind of education which would give this sort of examination to an 8th grader.
Now, if you attend a private grammar school in a Westchester suburb you can expect a lot of your children will have exams like this...
How do you define 'level of education' on a per-student basis? (Well, I guess the whole issue is that that's hard a question to answer, right?)
I think, for instance, that the average eighth grader knows much more in 2013 than they did in 1912, but that the proportion of that knowledge that they gained from an education system is much smaller. Knowledge has become universally accessible; reasoning, less so.
I think you're wrong about the gross overall education of teenagers.
>Progressively fewer adults have limited their education to completion of the 8th grade which was typical in the early part of the century. In 1940, more than half of the U.S. population had completed no more than an eighth grade education.
>The problem with these types of posts is that they never come with the context or the gravitas needed to substantiate the underlying claims that are implied by the presentation.
I don't actually see any of that in this post, though I can't speak to the original headline here on HN.
I think your expectations tinted how you interpreted the framing. The test is presented as a historical document, and I didn't see any attempt at commentary on the current educational system.
And? If you'd directed your dismissal at HN readers, that would be one thing, but you didn't! There was no "underlying claim" evident in the linked article itself.
I think it's a typo - note the proximity of a and w on your keyboard. I didn't look up kalsomining, but it was obvious from the context that it was some sort of wall covering.
I think the error here may be the comma after "Magnetic"; Morse's telegraph system, e.g., was commonly known as "the electro-magnetic telegraph" (earlier, less successful, telegraph systems were electrical but not electromagnetic) and the first company that commercialized his invention was called the Magnetic Telegraph Company.
The effect of operating an electromagnet at a distance seems to have been thought of as "magnetic" more than "electrical"; see e.g. at http://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/56/62/case.html comments from Morse and his contemporaries like "If I can succeed in working a magnet ten miles, I can go around the globe" and "The chief anxiety ... was to ascertain the utmost limits at which he, Morse, could work or move a lever by magnetic power".
It seems plausible to me that even by 1912 the term "magnetic telegraph" might have been in use to distinguish the electromagnetic telegraph from other earlier sorts of telegraph.
(Note 1: the above is based on a small amount of web searching and may be full of errors. Note 2: it appears that in fact other people developed electromagnetic telegraphs before Morse -- e.g., a chap called Schilling in Russia in 1832 -- but Morse is the one commonly thought of as inventing it, and is surely the answer the examiners were looking for.)
Yep, not hard considering everyone here probably likes math. My wife has to search matrix multiplication even if she has to use it once a month. Otoh i have to read about grammar anytime a child ask me help with any simplistic question... Damn those meddling kids
Besides, The answer they present to #7 is a little crazy though when they try to equal 1/3b = 2/3g... I'm pretty sure it should be a simple 40g and 80b
> Besides, The answer they present to #7 is a little crazy though when they try to equal 1/3b = 2/3g... I'm pretty sure it should be a simple 40g and 80b
Um, no. The problem statement was b = 2/3 g, not b = 2g.
I feel like this essay helps me understand why I have trouble working with developers in offshore countries. Things go okay when the instructions are clear and the task is straightforward, but when i need problem solving on a task everything starts falling apart. I'm always unsuccessful when I begin with "I need you to figure out a way..."
I wish in one of these cases someone could also dig up the answers to the question. The questions are interesting, but the expectations are more implied than clear.
As an English teacher, I was fascinated by the grammar questions: much to love and much to hate.
On the one hand, diagramming a sentence is a powerful skill, which I wish was taught today.
On the other, this one made me chuckle:
> How many parts of speech are there?
If you put any two modern linguists in a room, you'd get about 5 different answers to that question.
The model of English grammar that students were expected to parrot at the time had only a passing resemblance to grammar as it is actually used. The sad part is that, even today, there are still pedants who go around correcting others' grammar on the basis of those outdated grammatical ideas.
"diagramming a sentence is a powerful skill, which I wish was taught today"
We learned the Reed-Kellogg system in 9th grade. I was horrible at it, so I guess I should say we were taught it. It wasn't until I studied grammar theory for my CS degree that I finally understood the concept, and the symbolism of Reed-Kellogg is still nonsensical to me. Most linguists use tree diagrams instead.
As you imply, few English teachers actually know linguistics, or the problems of diagramming Chomsky's "John is easy to please"/"John is eager to please", where John is the object of the verb in the first and the subject of the verb in the second.
It looks though that diagramming was introduced in large part because the previous system required more rote memorization of abstract grammar rules, and applied them only to the analysis of individual words, and not phrases. http://www.polysyllabic.com/?q=olddiagrams/beforediagrams
"there are still pedants who go around correcting others' grammar on the basis of those outdated grammatical ideas." -- hear hear!
I think someone needs to start posting modern-day eighth-grade tests, because a bunch of supposedly smart, middle-class guys going on about how horrifyingly hard they find tests like this is starting to worry me. I think your memories may be fading.
There isn't anything here that I didn't do in eighth grade, and those tests were half this length or longer for each class. My history classes had a different focus, mind, more "What lead to X war?" questions on tests than "Who were the commanders of the last battle in X war?".
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>Sketch briefly Sir Walter Raleigh...
I would have failed this horribly.
I think it would be more fair to show a criteria of how the students were taught back in 1912 as well.
We could easily teach children in grade 8 today to answer the following question: "give at least five rules to be observed in maintaining good health" (question 9 of physiology) by teaching them "the ten rules of maintaining good health" one day in class and moving on the next.
Health class and phys-ed today consists of much more than 5, 10 or even 50 rules of maintaining good health.
Or how about question 5 in Geography: "locate the following countries that border eachother: Turkey, Greece, Servia, Montenegro, Roumania.
If I was growing up in an Ottoman-empire-ruled world, perhaps I would be taught exactly which countries border with Turkey for example.
And of course most of Turkey's other neighbors: Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Bulgaria are in varying states of crisis. Something like 100,000 people have died in the ongoing Syrian civil war. Lebanon is in perpetual crisis. Georgia fought a war with Russia only a few years ago. Iraq and Iran need no further explanation.
So maybe we should be teaching our 8th graders exactly where Turkey is on the map?
They call pre-school nursery, kindergarten is reception, then it follows with american style numbered years. It is slightly off because they have 13 years and we have 12, but they both carry you to 18 years of age.
Of course, back then you could also support a family on a schoolteacher's income.
EX: Arlington VA, has an average classroom teacher pay of 52,003$. However, According to a 2007 estimate, the median income for a household in the county was $94,876, and the median income for a family was $127,179.[37] Males had a median income of $51,011 versus $41,552 for females. The per capita income for the county was $37,706. About 5.00% of families and 7.80% of the population were below the poverty line, including 9.10% of those under age 18 and 7.00% of those age 65 or over.
Looks like they make less than the national median income.
Doesn't look like you pass the median either until you've put in at least a decade. http://www.payscale.com/research/US/All_K-12_Teachers/Salary...
Teaching might be "Looked at" as being family friendly but unless you're working in a really nice district or are completely apathetic you're probably going to be working 50 hour weeks.
Speaking of pay expectations... software developers with no college education and a few years of experience can be hired for twice an experienced teacher's salary - and these same developers consider themselves underpaid (which they are... but so is most of the middle class)
Except that they aren't. http://stateimpact.npr.org/ohio/2011/10/05/teachers-work-few...
The average salary for full-time public school teachers in 2010–11 was $56,069 in current dollars (i.e. dollars that are not adjusted for inflation). In constant (inflation-adjusted) dollars, the average salary was about 3 percent higher in 2010–11 than in 1990–91.
Note the average is well above the median in this case.
Citation? You make that statement, and then choose as your example an affluent suburb of DC.
Yeah...no they don't. Both my parents are career teachers, and both have worked in both public and private school systems. You start out at ~$30,000 in major metropolitan areas and can reach $100,000 after close to a decade, with a graduate degree.
Even still, for such a vastly important profession, I've always been completely disillusioned by the lack of compensation and support for the teaching profession.
[1] http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=2007020403001...
Think about: you know, the Romans didn't drive around in nice fancy cars; they walked, or if they were lucky, rode a horse! Therefore we can conclude that they weren't as lazy as we were.
Ridiculous. If the teacher of 1912 had multiple choice tests in their toolbox, they probably would have used them. What point were you trying to make?
Likewise I think the sutdents of 1912 were mentally fitter for having to write out the answers rather than use multiple-choice tests. As a European I'm constantly perplexed by how much Americans use multiple-choice questions for academic evaluation. Anything that allows you to get an exam score of 25% by chance alone is a pretty weak pedagogical tool.
Perhaps I should have phrased my point in the form of a multiple-choice question to make it easier for you to appreciate.
That's a pretty weak argument. Not only can multiple choice questions be weighted to punish guessing, remember how the score system works. 50% is a complete failure.
remember how the score system works
You realize that the particular scoring system you're referring to is a peculiarly American thing, right? There are many different grading systems in use around the world; I grew up with this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_grading_in_Ireland
50% is a complete failure.
This is part of the problem. How do you expect students to stay motivated and progress when 50% effectively equals 0%?
While I'm on this topic, I don't understand this American mania for scoring relative to a population, and there's a distinct lack of transparency in tests administered by institutions like the college board - for example http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/clep/clep-... Even if you're going to use weighting, I fail to see what the point is in using a T-Score (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Normal_distribution_and_sc...) instead of providing a percentile or standard deviation measure. It took me ages to work out what method they were using since they didn't bother naming it in the explanatory notes.
You've turned testing into such an industry in the US that providing the student with meaningful feedback on his/her actual performance seems to be the lowest priority. I score up int eh 98th or 99th percentile on things, I understand statistical distributions, and I still find this horribly alienating. I can't imagine what it's like for someone that isn't quantitatively inclined.
Maybe we dumb Americans expect more out of our students than the oh-so-smart Europeans? Get over yourself.
Why?
this must be an american thing. I have never had a multiple choice test in school. (okay, maybe some small test in geography or something, but very very rare)
In the UK, at least where I live, none of our tests are multiple choice. I've always wondered why in the US tests are given in this format. It seems very dumbed down. Is there a valid reason?
Benefits of this approach include giving teachers fast feedback on whether students are understanding what they're being taught; and spreading the test workload evenly across the year instead of having a bunch of big make-or-break exams at the end of the year, within days of one another. Using multiple choice tests which can be marked automatically makes it simpler to do this as they can be marked by machine.
Multiple choice with automated marking also means you don't have to decipher students' bad handwriting; you can't recognise students' writing and apply subconscious favouritism; you have to ask questions with unambiguously right answers; it's simple to be consistent with marking; and rates of human error are reduced.
With that said, you can't teach someone to write an essay without having them write an essay and giving them feedback; and you can't check a student's math problem working and point out where they make a mistake. So multiple choice tests certainly aren't the be-all and end-all of student evaluation.
multiple choice doesn't mean dumbed down. indeed, it can be much harder since you can't show working or explain reasons. It turns into an exercise of guessing the password (http://lesswrong.com/lw/iq/guessing_the_teachers_password/) rather than demonstrating any real learning has taken place. This can be hard to guess even if you know the material in question.
Yes it's easy to look at a map if you're unsure which countries border Turkey. It's much easier to remember which countries border Turkey if you've studied geography, which allows you to move on from looking up the basics every time so that you can have a deeper understanding of the subject.
In any case, I don't disagree with your high-level point.
Or in total internet manier:
That might be a prejudice on my part, but I think that someone, who does not know some geographical facts is the less likely to look thoroughly at a map before planning a journey.
Some knowledge, like history or literature or even science outside of your field, doesn't really have an apparent application. I'm not really arguing against applied knowledge, but I'm saying that personal edification is a very good thing. Connections pop up in the strangest ways. In fact, I'd argue that without a degree of memorization, research skills will be lacking in most people, as they wouldn't have a clue where to begin.
"Students do not need a teacher nor a classroom to memorize facts."
You are half-right here, the problem is, if we get rid of the teacher, how do you encourage the student to memorize boring rhetoric like math or reading comprehension? The teacher is also there to 'force' you to put down your toys/electronics and work. Doing your up-teenth geography homework question is a lot harder when there is no enforcement and all your friends are on Call of Duty. Teachers help teach discipline.
The poem by Taylor Mali "What does a teacher make?" (http://zenpencils.com/comic/124-taylor-mali-what-teachers-ma...) sort of touches on this too.
The things that should be taught, I think, correlate highly to the types of things students will later wish they knew. These are mostly low-level rules and processes for things which are so "obvious" to everyone else that they're hard to communicate unless you have a background in education. To flip that around, the kinds of things we call "trivia"--things equally simple or obvious, but as easily learned as said (e.g. a state capitol) don't really need school to teach them--as, if someone later feels the need to know, they can just ask anyone, and pick it up on their own. School is mostly a place to impart knowledge that's hard to teach (including to self-teach) if you don't know the specific skills of teaching.
You cannot build a palace without a fundament. Unless it's an air palace.
Also, it's interesting that several questions basically come down to the student knowing the definition of imperials units like cords or the number feet in a mile. It makes sense that students would need to know those definitions for daily life, but I still find it odd since I grew up using the metric system!
I know the test isn't meant to serve as a comparison of students from 1912 with those from today, but I must say, it certainly makes the teachers in some states of the U.S. today look like dunces!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Indian_Wars
With the metric system we still had to learn these things (how many metres in a kilometre etc.) it was just much easier.
Without instant access to rote information, knowing some of these facts was probably rather important a hundred years ago. Schools today can avoid burdening the student with memorizing so many facts and focus more on developing conceptual understanding, which – coupled with free, rapid access to factual information – is much more valuable.
Has education really changed that much in 25 years? Heck, 10 years? I don't think most people had heard of Wikipedia 10 years ago, and Google hadn't even IPO'ed yet.
Were all eighth grade exams of similar difficulty? Did most children pass? Did the children that passed truly understand the underlying concepts?
Don't get me wrong; I don't think that things are honky dory right now. I have serious problems with our education system, but I don't buy for a second that kids 100 years ago were so advanced.
Education was far less prevalent for minority groups, who, as an unfortunate side effect to class-wide limited incomes, don't have the same access to the kind of education which would give this sort of examination to an 8th grader.
Now, if you attend a private grammar school in a Westchester suburb you can expect a lot of your children will have exams like this...
I think, for instance, that the average eighth grader knows much more in 2013 than they did in 1912, but that the proportion of that knowledge that they gained from an education system is much smaller. Knowledge has become universally accessible; reasoning, less so.
>Progressively fewer adults have limited their education to completion of the 8th grade which was typical in the early part of the century. In 1940, more than half of the U.S. population had completed no more than an eighth grade education.
http://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp
I don't actually see any of that in this post, though I can't speak to the original headline here on HN.
I think your expectations tinted how you interpreted the framing. The test is presented as a historical document, and I didn't see any attempt at commentary on the current educational system.
It's interesting to note that they spell Sir Walter Raleigh differently than we do now. I wonder if that's a typo.
Did anybody else have to Google kalsomining?
The effect of operating an electromagnet at a distance seems to have been thought of as "magnetic" more than "electrical"; see e.g. at http://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/56/62/case.html comments from Morse and his contemporaries like "If I can succeed in working a magnet ten miles, I can go around the globe" and "The chief anxiety ... was to ascertain the utmost limits at which he, Morse, could work or move a lever by magnetic power".
It seems plausible to me that even by 1912 the term "magnetic telegraph" might have been in use to distinguish the electromagnetic telegraph from other earlier sorts of telegraph.
(Note 1: the above is based on a small amount of web searching and may be full of errors. Note 2: it appears that in fact other people developed electromagnetic telegraphs before Morse -- e.g., a chap called Schilling in Russia in 1832 -- but Morse is the one commonly thought of as inventing it, and is surely the answer the examiners were looking for.)
http://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education
The math questions? I could have answered them in 8th grade. They're not hard, and they're the only part that's not just memorization.
Besides, The answer they present to #7 is a little crazy though when they try to equal 1/3b = 2/3g... I'm pretty sure it should be a simple 40g and 80b
Um, no. The problem statement was b = 2/3 g, not b = 2g.
http://www.bullittcountyhistory.com/bchistory/schoolexam1912...
They look pretty thorough, but I think question 10 in geography should include the Strait of Malacca as well.
On the one hand, diagramming a sentence is a powerful skill, which I wish was taught today.
On the other, this one made me chuckle:
> How many parts of speech are there?
If you put any two modern linguists in a room, you'd get about 5 different answers to that question.
The model of English grammar that students were expected to parrot at the time had only a passing resemblance to grammar as it is actually used. The sad part is that, even today, there are still pedants who go around correcting others' grammar on the basis of those outdated grammatical ideas.
We learned the Reed-Kellogg system in 9th grade. I was horrible at it, so I guess I should say we were taught it. It wasn't until I studied grammar theory for my CS degree that I finally understood the concept, and the symbolism of Reed-Kellogg is still nonsensical to me. Most linguists use tree diagrams instead.
As you imply, few English teachers actually know linguistics, or the problems of diagramming Chomsky's "John is easy to please"/"John is eager to please", where John is the object of the verb in the first and the subject of the verb in the second.
It looks though that diagramming was introduced in large part because the previous system required more rote memorization of abstract grammar rules, and applied them only to the analysis of individual words, and not phrases. http://www.polysyllabic.com/?q=olddiagrams/beforediagrams
"there are still pedants who go around correcting others' grammar on the basis of those outdated grammatical ideas." -- hear hear!
There isn't anything here that I didn't do in eighth grade, and those tests were half this length or longer for each class. My history classes had a different focus, mind, more "What lead to X war?" questions on tests than "Who were the commanders of the last battle in X war?".