‘A Recipe for Idiocracy’

What happens when even college students can’t do math anymore?

 

 

Disturbing piece in The Atlantic. 

For the past several years, America has been using its young people as lab rats in a sweeping, if not exactly thought-out, education experiment. Schools across the country have been lowering standards and removing penalties for failure. The results are coming into focus.

Five years ago, about 30 incoming freshmen at UC San Diego arrived with math skills below high-school level. Now, according to a recent report from UC San Diego faculty and administrators, that number is more than 900—and most of those students don’t fully meet middle-school math standards. Many students struggle with fractions and simple algebra problems. Last year, the university, which admits fewer than 30 percent of undergraduate applicants, launched a remedial-math course that focuses entirely on concepts taught in elementary and middle school. (According to the report, more than 60 percent of students who took the previous version of the course couldn’t divide a fraction by two.) One of the course’s tutors noted that students faced more issues with “logical thinking” than with math facts per se. They didn’t know how to begin solving word problems...

Things are not good. Read the entire Rose Horowitch essay. U.S. education at all levels—public and private—is increasingly enervated.

 

I'll quickly go back to some of my own experiences as a high school and collegiate student, from a prior riff on LLM AI and "fluency."

I was an unremarkable "B" student in high school (1960-64). Opted to not attend college and instead went out on the road as a guitar player in a bar band.

Sixteen years later I entered undergraduate school at Tennessee. Divorced, custody of my two daughters, nothing to put in a resume.Time to make a substantive change.

Upon enrollment I took the CLEP Exam (College Level English Proficiency), a lengthy multiple-choice "reading comprehension / vocabulary" diagnostic with an essay section (topic unknown to the examinee ahead of time). At the time (1980), the national 99% percentile was 920.

I scored a 965.

That simply had to be a reflection of my compulsive reading habit, which had gotten fully underway by 1967, when I arrived in San Francisco and became fully politically aware. Didn't hurt that I lived in North Beach a few blocks west of the venerable City Lights Bookstore.

Across my adult life since that time I have continued to read 2-3 books a week on average, a broad range of periodicals, and, increasingly, all of the internet-based written material now widely available to all of us (i.e, our LLM "training data").

My AI/LLM joke now is that "I'm a Carbon-Based Relatively Large Recursive Language Model," a "CBRLRLM." A one-man "Fluency Heuristic," I suppose.

Got my undergrad at 39 and moved on to the white collar world.

My initial undergrad goal was to obtain a degree in advertising. I'd become a fairly adept photographer and learned some basics in print layout technique from a colleague guitarist who also had a degree in architecture from Auburn. I read everything I could find on the topics at the Knox County library.

My precise interest was focused on "B2B," corporate / industrial communications. While I enjoyed courses in copywriting, ad design, commercial TV production, etc, the UTK Ad Department was totally consumer products and services oriented. I had little enthusiasm for selling shampoo, cars, food & beverage, or tobacco products.

Coursework in deductive logic, inductive logic ("lying with statistics" according to my prof), philospohy of science, the gamut of stats classes, and the breadth of psychology curricula diverted my attention, with an eventual concerted study in "psychometrics" (psychological tests and measures design and empirical validation).

Then in January 1986 I got my first day gig. Systems programmer and QC analyst in a radiation lab in Oak Ridge.

Go figure.

I eventually engaged in other technical writing fields...

The training of a CBRLRLM 

 

And then...

 

After getting my Master's, I got to teach collegiate "critical thinking" for 5 fun years (1999 - 2004) while living in Las Vegas (evening school adjunct faculty; my day gig was that of a credit risk analyst in a bank). I never really liked the curricular title. I'm likewise guarded about cavalierly using the word "idiot."

Too many of my students came in thinking "oh, cool, we're just gonna argue about stuff endlessly and get our gripes off our chests..." 

Also, "idiot" is not a dtrect synonym for "stupid," notwithstanding common invective usage. Greek "idios," aware of only one's self. Yeah, one could argue that such egocentric fixations are "stupid:" I suppose, but, dunno, brosdly.

As that goes to the current Atlantic article topic, I would repeatedly look out over my Critical Thinking classes and think "man, half of y'all need to re-take high school."

 

It was by no means irascible, cynical snark. UNLV had admitted that 60% of incoming frosh found themselves promptliy remanded to remedial English and math.

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BACK TO THE ATLANTIC PIECE 

...Many schools across the country have shifted toward making math engaging for students at the expense of evidence-based teaching practices. And due to funding shortages or misguided efforts to improve equity, many students are held back from taking the hardest math courses.

The pandemic supercharged the decline. Districts that spent most of the 2020–21 school year mandating remote learning saw students fall more than half a grade behind in math; districts that reopened earlier saw more modest declines. These difficulties prompted teachers to further relax their standards. “Everyone was just exhausted and challenged by the circumstances around the pandemic,” Joshua Goodman, a Boston University professor of economics and education, told me. “And I think one of the reactions to that was for everyone involved to say: ‘Let’s lower our expectations. Let’s make sure that we don’t fail students when they’re not doing their work, because the world is challenging right now.’” Many districts adopted a “no zeros” policy, forcing teachers to pass students who had little command of the material. One study of public-school students across Washington State found that almost none received an F in spring 2020, while the share of students who received A’s skyrocketed. Math grades have remained elevated in the years since.

Together, these changes meant that even as students’ math preparation was stagnating, their grades were going up. The UC San Diego report notes that more than a quarter of the students who placed into the elementary- and middle-school-level remedial course last year had earned straight A’s in their high-school math classes. Almost all of them had taken advanced math courses in high school.

At the same time, the UC system eliminated its best tool for assessing students’ academic preparedness. In 2020, system leaders voted to phase standardized-test scores out of admissions decisions. They argued that the tests worsened racial divides and unfairly privileged wealthy students. But SAT and ACT scores are the most reliable predictors of a student’s math ability, the report found. “It’s not really surprising, then, that you’re going to be admitting more students who aren’t ready for mathematics, because you removed the one piece of data that would have told you that,” Morgan Polikoff, an education professor at the University of Southern California, told me. That same year, the UC system dramatically increased the number of students it enrolled from under-resourced high schools. These students are much more likely to place into Math 2, the elementary- and middle-school-level remedial course.

The new report calls on the UC system to consider reinstating the use of standardized-test scores in admissions, and for UC San Diego to bring its enrollment of students from under-resourced schools back in line with that of other selective UC colleges. “Admitting large numbers of students who are profoundly underprepared risks harming the very students we hope to support, by setting them up for failure,” the report observes.

Bringing back standardized-test scores might help elite institutions get out of the remedial-math business, but it will not address the underlying problem of widespread innumeracy.

Standardized admissions tests remain frequently viewed as a component of the minorities-stifling "woke faux-meritocracy" academic canard. More on that in a bit.

 

CAM3 ASSOCIATES

 

At UTK, I signed up for undergrad "Social Psychology."

The instructor, Michael K. Smith, was a doctoral student GTA. I subsequently served long-term as as his principal undergrad research assistant. His PhD effort comprised a broad and deep study on the salient psych elements of "math anxiety" afflticting undergraduate students.

We became fast friends.

And then business partners in an "Exam Cram" A/V production company. Mike, who'd been doing a long side-hustle of exam prep courses (PSAT, SAT, ACT, GRE, etc) was the Prez & content developer.

I was co-counder, VP, Producer, Director, Editor, Ads & Packaging Designer, Office Mgr, Customer Service Rep, Shipping Clerk and overall gofer. I built our A/V studio.

We Princeton Review wannabees scuffled for 5-6 yrs, managed to break even at about $600k. We pretty much sold to Guidance Departments and libraries (never could accrue the $$$ Juice to go consumer-national). The experience was priceless. Mike remains one of my favorite people.

Hence my interest in the Horowitch topic. I've learned standardaized exam development, validation, and administration rather thoroughly. Power, speeded, recall, recognition, internal/external validity, the gamut.

 

They remain widely regarded as "aptitude tests." (e.g., tangential IQ proxies). They are in fact "achievement tests." You can in fact train for them.

 

What of salience the  examinees have usefully "achieved" is a separate, inadequately addressed question. 
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Also during my undergrad days, I took physics. The professor was from Greece. Final exam? Three physics problems. No formula sheets or other crib stuff, no partial credit. My young classmates were horrified. He shruggingly asked "would you feel comfortable driving across a bridge designed by an engineer who got through college on "partial credit?"

 

I had to laugh. He also recounted his college student days in Greece: "You attend university for 4 years, and at the end you take 2 weeks of general exams. Pass/Fail. They want to see whether you actually learned and retained anything."

 

In the States we have kids slavishly honing their (ordinal metric) GPAs to 4 decimal places every quarter or semester.

 

Lordy. Yeah, right, that final one-ten thusandth of a GPA is gonna get me into Hopkins Med School or Harvard Law.
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UPDATE. AI IN THE COLLEGE CLASSROOM

 

'eh? 

 

Stay tuned...