Our family is far from wealthy at all (we never lived in the posh neighborhoods in town, or drove the top-line model of the European marques) - yes to all you wrote; it very much mirrors our parenting.
But I feel that the privilege of being offered all you itemized is in fact directly related to family economics: even just “doing okay” or “well enough”.
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Competitive grading in small classes (like in high school or many upper level college courses) will create cutthroat incentives among students, as well as creating incentive for students to avoid classes with the strongest peers.
I have close friends (my generation) that came from a different country that are worth 10s of millions here, that grew up in households with one or both parents who haven’t finished schooling.
You should just have one class for grading :-). In my business school class on OR, we didn’t have a choice. In a class of 157 or something (the whole batch that year), the top mark was 92, I was the second kid at 82, the third kid was at 62. And the rest were below that. You don’t have a choice whether you are taking the class with strong peers or weak peers. There are many high schools with 500 sized graduating classes. Not hard to create a large pool.
Seems like it is more the case that elite colleges in the US want to admit those who are both generalists (i.e. A grades in all of the usual high school subjects) and experts (i.e. extraordinary achievement in some area), at least among unhooked applicants who are not inheriting anything like relation to big donors.
From their point of view, why admit an expert in some area who has C grades in other areas when you can admit an expert in the same area who also has A grades in other areas? … especially if the college has general education requirements that someone who scraped by with C grades in high school in non-preferred subjects would have difficulty passing in college to graduate.
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This is certainly true for unhooked kids at top schools. Kids have strong spikes in some areas that are not measurable by just looking at grades, and As in everything else.
Not all 500 are taking the same classes at the same time, especially when the high school offers different options for regular versus honors (and sometimes finer gradations like advanced, accelerated, etc.).
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You can have fuzzy clustering based models for giving out grades. Those work fine. Kids know who the top kids are anyway. There are usually no controversies. Either you have it. Or you don’t. It is usually not cut throat because cramming for the test won’t usually get you into the next cluster. You need to fundamentally rethink your exams, your syllabus, and how you teach. I have had national exams where the top mark in Math is less than 60% on the paper with a few hundred thousand kids taking the exam – this was some years ago, and is an extreme example of course.
Seems like a point of view where testing in education is primarily about ranking and competition rather than about checking for competence and mastery of the subject matter.
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No. The correct kind of testing will ensure kids will study properly, and get things deeply, rather than studying for the test. Because studying for the test leads to shallow learning. Studying for tests that don’t penalize you for silly mistakes, but penalize you for lack of understanding, and allow you to be creative in the exams etc, encourages serious learning. Tests that are open book, open everything, and where the questions are open ended …
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People being tested will always “study for the test”, regardless of the format of the test. But that is a different issue from testing for ranking and competition versus testing to check competence and mastery.
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That is a fair point I guess. Competition testing encompasses 2-4 years of material, and encompasses a large amount of material. Competence testing encompasses a semester of material. But the other differences are not material. Competition testing can also be open book or open formula page. They can’t be take home and you can’t discuss with your friends of course.
We frequently hear the word “mastery” (of class/subject material). What does it mean? How do we measure that a student has “mastered” the material, if s/he isn’t tested in a written or oral exam?
It’s no surprise that any broadly-administered and standardized test can only test the basics and wouldn’t be able to discern “mastery”, let alone originality and creativity, unless we’re willing to fail the vast majority of students on those questions that may allow students to show their originality and creativity, along with mastery. The irony is that we’ve been doing the exact opposite and then claim the tests are too easily prepable, too regurgitatable, too shallow…
That US standardized tests do not include more harder stuff is more of a function of the market for them – the elite colleges that may find harder standardized tests useful are too small a portion of the standardized testing market for the SAT and ACT to cater to, compared to thousands of other colleges they market to (and then add marketing to states to try to get the states to use them for state assessments).
Also, standardization of tests across test administration does limit the testing for originality and creativity, unless you mean originality and creativity in finding ways to game the test.
There’s no reason why a standardized test can’t have subsections that are more discerning with different purposes.
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Changes?
Maybe increasing transfer admissions could increase diversity.
Harvard/Stanford used to accept 150+ transfers a year in the 1990s. You can browse old college confidential threads from like 2005 and 2006 where kids would spend one-two years at another college and then transfer into Harvard/Stanford.
Harvard now accepts like 12 kids a year as transfer students. Compare that to the 100+ per year they used to accept in the 1990s as transfers.
Stanford has accepted around 30 per year for the past few years (they accepted over 100 in 2020 and 55 in 2021).
Except for the marketing motives of the CB and ACT (not defending them, but just pointing out that they exist). They do not think it is worthwhile for them to add harder sections of the tests (or harder tests) for a very small number of elite colleges to distinguish between gradations of eliteness in areas that they can test for.
There was a class at a school here of 100 graduating (all girls). There were 25 who took Calc BC and every one got a 5 on the AP test. Are you saying they all shouldn’t have received As in the class, that for every A there should have been an F? Or that maybe all should have received Cs as they were all average for that class?
the bell curve is long gone. there is not an F for every A, most students don’t receive Cs even though most students are average. Grades are given for mastering the subject.
I doubt very much that many in that class of 100 had ever received a D or F, and very few Cs. There is a ‘top’ high school in that same neighborhood with graduating classes of 800 and I’m sure very few students get Ds and Fs, with many many never receiving even a C.
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I am saying that there is a lot of depth and breadth in calculus, and a curve surely exists amongst the kids that took that course. I don’t mean all the way from F to A+.
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I don’t think a high school needs to differentiate between the stellar math student (depth) and the merely “I got a 5 on the AP test, i.e. mastered the material”.
I don’t think that’s what HS is for. It is hard enough for most schools (obviously not where most CC’ers go, but your typical HS in America) to hang on to the one teacher who can teach math past trig, let alone start assessing students at such a granular level.
We all get it- there are kids who are Princeton/Berkeley/MIT math kids, and the kids at Southern CT State College who wants to teach middle school math so is majoring in math for now and will get a teacher certification down the road. But if both sets of kids can get through BC Calc with 5’s-- that’s good enough for me. Everyone doesn’t need to be Johnny Von Neumann for our educational system to work.
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