5 ms·

How Good Are UW Students in Math?

24 points by slackerIII 17y ago

swolchok 17y ago
The author says that UW students taking Atmospheric Sciences s101 "should be the creme of the crop of our high school graduates with high GPAs". 1) Atmospheric Sciences 101 sounds like a "blowoff" class that liberal arts students would take only to fulfill a science requirement. In other words, the students are likely self-selected for lack of math/science ability. 2) UW is a public university. It may very well be the best public university in Washington, but I'd bet the best students have a nontrivial rate of private school attendance. (So as to dispel any illusions of elitism, I attended the University of Michigan, which is also a public research university.)
- maximilian 17y ago
  Yes, but the questions were really easy. Even a liberal arts major should've been able to answer them. They would have seen problems like these in the first 2-3 years in high school many, many times.
  - bugs 17y ago
    In all reality most high school students don't pay attention in their math courses and only do minimal effort for what grade they required. To be honest I was taught how to do scientific notation in one day in high school and if you asked me the rules for how many places to keep through operations I could guess but I truthfully wouldn't know. I have taken 2 chemistry courses and many other high level lab courses in college and have only heard that scientific notation was preferred not required (for the chem courses) and given no refresher course. From personal experience I have met people who made it through AP Calculus in high school (passing grade in class not test) who really have difficulty understanding and passing a basic college algebra course. Summary: just because people are introduced to problems in high school doesn't mean they can do them.
- timr 17y ago
  "UW is a public university. It may very well be the best public university in Washington, but I'd bet the best students have a nontrivial rate of private school attendance." Don't kid yourself. This is an epidemic problem at all schools, public and private. I have friends who teach at both public and private universities, and they all have the same horror stories. My own personal experience (private undergrad / PhD at UW) bears out their anecdotes. With certain institutional exceptions, private school kids are richer, not smarter. Also, the GPA and SAT scores of incoming UW freshman are astonishingly high right now (IQR of 3.60-3.91 GPA, 570-680 SAT math, according to http://admit.washington.edu/Numbers http://admit.washington.edu/Numbers). Admittedly, those aren't Harvard numbers, but one would still expect a 600 math SAT student to be able to do well on a basic high-school algebra quiz.
  - swolchok 17y ago
    I did not disagree with the author's main point, merely the assertion I singled out.
    - timr 17y ago
      Perhaps, but your argument was a challenge to the statement that the students represent the best and brightest of the state, and that's what I was addressing. When the test is as easy as this one, the argument that these students aren't elite isn't important.
chancho 17y ago
I'm just as upset with the state of math education in the US as anybody, but if UW is anything like my alma mater, then "Atmospheric Science 101" is a class that liberal arts majors take to satisfy their math & science general education requirements. A lot of these students (my wife, for example) have serious math anxiety. She could probably get a 70% on this test, even today, so many years after school, but throw it at her without warning on the first day of a non-math class and she'd literally cry. Now there's a case to be made that a good high school math curriculum should not leave anyone anxious about math, but I still think it's a bit of a leap to take this test and extrapolate to all students.
- dschobel 17y ago
  Same experience with my girlfriend. She has a good analytical mind (she graduated near the top of her law class) but she's just terrified of math. The weirdest aspects of this phenomenon are that: a) there's a very real fear of math unlike any other subject and b) there's no stigma against being mathematically illiterate as there is for other subjects (most likely because so many people just accept that "math is hard" and not for them).
  - spamizbad 17y ago
    Is it any surprise, though? Math is taught in a manner that focuses very much on the how but rarely ever the why. And while Discovery Math/Reform Math/etc are lambasted for not teaching kids to memorize certain algorithms, they do something else that's very important: encourage students to use creative problem solving skills to develop their own solution algorithms. I'm not going to advocate reform math in its current form, but I have to question traditional "drill and kill" teaching methods in today's modern world. If I can't remember how to find the area of a triangle, I just Google it. Drilling it into my brain would have made sense in the 1920's when there was no internet, no assurances my peers had the appropriate level of education to know such a thing, and possibly no ability to reach an "expert" via telephone to tell me the algorithm. I'd be completely reliant on my memory and (possibly) a math book if I was fortunate enough to have one with me. For all practical purposes, memorizing one half times base time height would have been the way to go in a pre-Internet era. Today, it seems like it's far more worthwhile to develop students who are solid problem solvers with strong information retrieval skills, as opposed to wasting precious time memorizing trivial algorithms that are readily available.
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Dilpil 17y ago
Interesting premise, questionable conclusion. Kids can't do simple concept problems, so they need more drilling? Failure to calculate 1/.1 is not due to lack of practice, it is due to fundamental lack of understanding of fraction division. This is not a problem you fix via repeated long division of 4 digit numbers. This is a problem stemming from the fact that these students were never given a good idea of what the symbols they are being forced to move around really mean. And who cares that they don't know the definition of cosine, or the formula for the area of a circle? These are not fundamental ideas for non engineers.
- mquander 17y ago
  In my opinion, those are fundamental ideas for human beings in the year 2010; obviously we have to lower our expectations to match reality, but we shouldn't pretend they are unreasonable. Really, how difficult is the idea of a cosine? That's not exactly an unapproachable level of abstraction. Remember, these are people who have had 12 years of full-time mandatory schooling, and have signed up for a few more years on top of that. If anyone with an average IQ cared even a tiny bit about such things, they could learn all of it in half that time; and if they don't care at all, parents and teachers didn't do their job. Of course, I agree with the main thrust of your post. Somehow, you have to actually encourage (and allow) the students to understand what they're dealing with, instead of giving up, moving numbers and letters on paper, and passing to the next class. If that doesn't happen, there's no surprise that they've forgotten it six weeks after the course.
  - roundsquare 17y ago
    I agree that just drilling on the mechanics of long division doesn't help. But, drilling the concepts can help. The point of the article is that instead of letting kids discover everything on their own and then feeling happy, teachers should direct their learning. In doing so, I would say they should drill the same concept repeatedly and ask questions that test both the ability to do the procedure and understand the concept. Anecdotally, this is how I taught my sister multiplication and how my friend tutored someone in calculus.
tigerthink 17y ago
Actually, I'm pretty sure this problem is exclusive to Washington. Go here http://www.wheresthemath.com/ http://www.wheresthemath.com/ and scroll down to 'Washington State Facts'. Anecdote: I attend a community college in California, found the problems laughably easy, and have met tons of people in my classes who would feel much the same way.
lunchbox 17y ago
As shown on the scanned answer key, this was an anonymous quiz. College students have a tendency to put in pathetically minimal effort on things they're not being directly graded on. Also, the quiz's stated purpose was to help the teacher calibrate the assignments; maybe some students purposely answered questions wrong in hopes of dumbing down the class. (Though I don't dispute the author's central point.)
tkahn6 17y ago
I would bet these students got excellent grades in math. EDIT: As in, I'm sure that during high school they got high marks in math class without actually understanding the fundamentals of what they were 'learning'.
shalmanese 17y ago
In UW's defense, "Weather 101" is pretty commonly known as an easy class to fill up General Education requirements.
gommm 17y ago
And I remember in France how my university professors used to complain that high school students became weak in set theory... I didn't know that the level in the US had fallen that far... but it's true that I remember helping a girl in the nearby community college on her math classes and the level of the exercises she had was about the french 7-8th grade math. But of course, I think the emphasis on math in europeans countries is maybe different than in the us. In France, for example, ability in math is the main selection criteria and students who took the scientific curriculum in highschool had 6-8 hours/week of mathematics and for calculating the gpa, mathematics had a coefficient of 7-9 (compared to 3 for english for example). And because the scientific curriculum is considered the most prestigious a lot of students who intend to later study non-scientific specialities like law or business take it.
lutorm 17y ago
Another lament of what's wrong with mathematics, by mathematician Paul Lockhart: http://www.maa.org/devlin/devlin_03_08.html http://www.maa.org/devlin/devlin_03_08.html He doesn't quite agree with this article.

24 points by slackerIII 17y ago

The author says that UW students taking Atmospheric Sciences s101 "should be the creme of the crop of our high school graduates with high GPAs". 1) Atmospheric Sciences 101 sounds like a "blowoff" class that liberal arts students would take only to fulfill a science requirement. In other words, the students are likely self-selected for lack of math/science ability. 2) UW is a public university. It may very well be the best public university in Washington, but I'd bet the best students have a nontrivial rate of private school attendance. (So as to dispel any illusions of elitism, I attended the University of Michigan, which is also a public research university.)

maximilian 17y ago
Yes, but the questions were really easy. Even a liberal arts major should've been able to answer them. They would have seen problems like these in the first 2-3 years in high school many, many times.
- bugs 17y ago
  In all reality most high school students don't pay attention in their math courses and only do minimal effort for what grade they required. To be honest I was taught how to do scientific notation in one day in high school and if you asked me the rules for how many places to keep through operations I could guess but I truthfully wouldn't know. I have taken 2 chemistry courses and many other high level lab courses in college and have only heard that scientific notation was preferred not required (for the chem courses) and given no refresher course. From personal experience I have met people who made it through AP Calculus in high school (passing grade in class not test) who really have difficulty understanding and passing a basic college algebra course. Summary: just because people are introduced to problems in high school doesn't mean they can do them.
timr 17y ago
"UW is a public university. It may very well be the best public university in Washington, but I'd bet the best students have a nontrivial rate of private school attendance." Don't kid yourself. This is an epidemic problem at all schools, public and private. I have friends who teach at both public and private universities, and they all have the same horror stories. My own personal experience (private undergrad / PhD at UW) bears out their anecdotes. With certain institutional exceptions, private school kids are richer, not smarter. Also, the GPA and SAT scores of incoming UW freshman are astonishingly high right now (IQR of 3.60-3.91 GPA, 570-680 SAT math, according to http://admit.washington.edu/Numbers http://admit.washington.edu/Numbers). Admittedly, those aren't Harvard numbers, but one would still expect a 600 math SAT student to be able to do well on a basic high-school algebra quiz.
- swolchok 17y ago
  I did not disagree with the author's main point, merely the assertion I singled out.
  - timr 17y ago
    Perhaps, but your argument was a challenge to the statement that the students represent the best and brightest of the state, and that's what I was addressing. When the test is as easy as this one, the argument that these students aren't elite isn't important.

chancho 17y ago

I'm just as upset with the state of math education in the US as anybody, but if UW is anything like my alma mater, then "Atmospheric Science 101" is a class that liberal arts majors take to satisfy their math & science general education requirements. A lot of these students (my wife, for example) have serious math anxiety. She could probably get a 70% on this test, even today, so many years after school, but throw it at her without warning on the first day of a non-math class and she'd literally cry. Now there's a case to be made that a good high school math curriculum should not leave anyone anxious about math, but I still think it's a bit of a leap to take this test and extrapolate to all students.

dschobel 17y ago
Same experience with my girlfriend. She has a good analytical mind (she graduated near the top of her law class) but she's just terrified of math. The weirdest aspects of this phenomenon are that: a) there's a very real fear of math unlike any other subject and b) there's no stigma against being mathematically illiterate as there is for other subjects (most likely because so many people just accept that "math is hard" and not for them).
- spamizbad 17y ago
  Is it any surprise, though? Math is taught in a manner that focuses very much on the how but rarely ever the why. And while Discovery Math/Reform Math/etc are lambasted for not teaching kids to memorize certain algorithms, they do something else that's very important: encourage students to use creative problem solving skills to develop their own solution algorithms. I'm not going to advocate reform math in its current form, but I have to question traditional "drill and kill" teaching methods in today's modern world. If I can't remember how to find the area of a triangle, I just Google it. Drilling it into my brain would have made sense in the 1920's when there was no internet, no assurances my peers had the appropriate level of education to know such a thing, and possibly no ability to reach an "expert" via telephone to tell me the algorithm. I'd be completely reliant on my memory and (possibly) a math book if I was fortunate enough to have one with me. For all practical purposes, memorizing one half times base time height would have been the way to go in a pre-Internet era. Today, it seems like it's far more worthwhile to develop students who are solid problem solvers with strong information retrieval skills, as opposed to wasting precious time memorizing trivial algorithms that are readily available.

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Dilpil 17y ago

Interesting premise, questionable conclusion. Kids can't do simple concept problems, so they need more drilling? Failure to calculate 1/.1 is not due to lack of practice, it is due to fundamental lack of understanding of fraction division. This is not a problem you fix via repeated long division of 4 digit numbers. This is a problem stemming from the fact that these students were never given a good idea of what the symbols they are being forced to move around really mean. And who cares that they don't know the definition of cosine, or the formula for the area of a circle? These are not fundamental ideas for non engineers.

mquander 17y ago
In my opinion, those are fundamental ideas for human beings in the year 2010; obviously we have to lower our expectations to match reality, but we shouldn't pretend they are unreasonable. Really, how difficult is the idea of a cosine? That's not exactly an unapproachable level of abstraction. Remember, these are people who have had 12 years of full-time mandatory schooling, and have signed up for a few more years on top of that. If anyone with an average IQ cared even a tiny bit about such things, they could learn all of it in half that time; and if they don't care at all, parents and teachers didn't do their job. Of course, I agree with the main thrust of your post. Somehow, you have to actually encourage (and allow) the students to understand what they're dealing with, instead of giving up, moving numbers and letters on paper, and passing to the next class. If that doesn't happen, there's no surprise that they've forgotten it six weeks after the course.
- roundsquare 17y ago
  I agree that just drilling on the mechanics of long division doesn't help. But, drilling the concepts can help. The point of the article is that instead of letting kids discover everything on their own and then feeling happy, teachers should direct their learning. In doing so, I would say they should drill the same concept repeatedly and ask questions that test both the ability to do the procedure and understand the concept. Anecdotally, this is how I taught my sister multiplication and how my friend tutored someone in calculus.

tigerthink 17y ago

Actually, I'm pretty sure this problem is exclusive to Washington. Go here http://www.wheresthemath.com/ http://www.wheresthemath.com/ and scroll down to 'Washington State Facts'. Anecdote: I attend a community college in California, found the problems laughably easy, and have met tons of people in my classes who would feel much the same way.

lunchbox 17y ago

As shown on the scanned answer key, this was an anonymous quiz. College students have a tendency to put in pathetically minimal effort on things they're not being directly graded on. Also, the quiz's stated purpose was to help the teacher calibrate the assignments; maybe some students purposely answered questions wrong in hopes of dumbing down the class. (Though I don't dispute the author's central point.)

tkahn6 17y ago

I would bet these students got excellent grades in math. EDIT: As in, I'm sure that during high school they got high marks in math class without actually understanding the fundamentals of what they were 'learning'.

shalmanese 17y ago

In UW's defense, "Weather 101" is pretty commonly known as an easy class to fill up General Education requirements.

gommm 17y ago

And I remember in France how my university professors used to complain that high school students became weak in set theory... I didn't know that the level in the US had fallen that far... but it's true that I remember helping a girl in the nearby community college on her math classes and the level of the exercises she had was about the french 7-8th grade math. But of course, I think the emphasis on math in europeans countries is maybe different than in the us. In France, for example, ability in math is the main selection criteria and students who took the scientific curriculum in highschool had 6-8 hours/week of mathematics and for calculating the gpa, mathematics had a coefficient of 7-9 (compared to 3 for english for example). And because the scientific curriculum is considered the most prestigious a lot of students who intend to later study non-scientific specialities like law or business take it.

lutorm 17y ago

Another lament of what's wrong with mathematics, by mathematician Paul Lockhart: http://www.maa.org/devlin/devlin_03_08.html http://www.maa.org/devlin/devlin_03_08.html He doesn't quite agree with this article.