22 ms·

Cal State will no longer require math and English placement exams

150 points by mbgaxyz 9y ago

oh_sigh 9y ago
"At Cal State, about 40% of freshmen each year are considered not ready for college-level work and required to take remedial classes that do not count toward their degrees." This is crazy to me. I'm not familiar with Cal State but do they just let anyone in who applies?
- akhilcacharya 9y ago
  Cal State LA Accept rate: 68% UCLA Accept Rate: 18%
  - oculusthrift 9y ago
    uhh.. this is a really messed up comparison considering UCLA is the most applied to college in the world.
    - digitalzombie 9y ago
      > UCLA is the most applied to college in the world. That's just your opinion really. It is a good school. Most applied in the world doesn't mean anything. A trade school could be more applied than UCLA. But UCLA does have Alan Kay, creator of smalltalk, and Terrance Tao one of the most famous mathematician. Also their med school is nice.
      - WillPostForFood 9y ago
        http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/this-college-made-history-with-over-100000-applications_us_58e3e222e4b09dbd42f3daeb http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/this-college-made-histor...
  - tyingq 9y ago
    Cal Poly Accept rate: 29.5% UC Irvine Accept rate: 40.7% Not sure where we're going with this though.
    - bebop 9y ago
      Even better, UC Merced Acceptance rate: 73.7%
      - digitalzombie 9y ago
        It's the newest UC and also middle of nowhere.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- andy-wu 9y ago
  A quick Google search tells me the closest Cal State to me, Sacramento, has a 67.3% acceptance rate. Slightly higher than the national average of 64.7%, although I'm not sure how trustworthy those numbers are.
  - snapetom 9y ago
    I went to CSUS. I'm very surprised it's that low. Shortly after the one year I went there, they implemented a "fast track" acceptance which basically meant they accepted you as long as you had a high school diploma.
- xienze 9y ago
  It's amazing that there's such a thing as remedial classes in a university, but hey, how else are we going to get an adequately diverse student body?
  - Clubber 9y ago
    Are you insinuating white people don't need remedial classes?
    - oh_sigh 9y ago
      Are you insinuating that white people can't be diverse?
      - Clubber 9y ago
        They can't be racially diverse if they are white. If you mean educationally diverse, you're just trolling.
        msla 9y ago
        So White people are all one race, now? Germans and Slavs and Scandinavians and Italians are all the same? When did that happen?
        Clubber 9y ago
        Yes, it's Caucasian. There is a difference between race and country of origin. I mean wow.
        msla 9y ago
        Huh. Hasn't always been. Look up the history of race sometime. Race is politics and not biology. I mean wow.
        9y ago
- pirocks 9y ago
  Not all cal states are created equal. Many are effectively glorified community colleges(not necessarily a bad thing) , while others (like calpoly slo) are excellent universities. Source:was recently a California high school student
  - thaumasiotes 9y ago
    Cal Poly SLO shouldn't be used as an example of the CSU system; it is technically considered a CSU but is exempt from the admissions process that every other CSU campus is required to use. Cal Poly SLO can indeed be described as more or less an excellent university; no other CSU can.
- csuwldcat 9y ago
  I went to a Cal State university - it was a joke.
  - cm2187 9y ago
    Would be happy to hear more about your experience. In what respect?
    - snapetom 9y ago
      * Slept through my year there. Managed a 4.0. * After I was there, they literally accepted anyone with a high school diploma. They called this "fast track acceptance." * In the orientation, I, as an anthro major was somehow grouped with about 40 engineers. The guy was discussing the math and English assessment tests. If you had x on your math SATs, you can skip the math test. If you had y in your English SATs, you can skip the English test. He asked how many people can skip the English test. Me and like 5 people raised our hands, which wasn't surprising in a room full of engineers. He asked how many can skip the math test. Maybe 10 more people raised their hands. Somehow, I, the anthro major had a higher math SAT score than a bunch of people who wanted to build the bridges I drive over.
  - Rodd45 9y ago
    Sounds you got bad experience there.
  - snapetom 9y ago
    Went to CSUS. Indeed it was.
- digitalzombie 9y ago
  > I'm not familiar with Cal State but do they just let anyone in who applies? No, it depends on the Cal state. There are two cal state that have high acceptance rate and have low grad rate. IIRC CalState Domigez have the highest acceptance rate. But there are other very selective calstate such as cal poly. Cal State (CSU) is an umbrella term for many california state universities across California excluding UC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_California). Examples are CSULB, CSUF, CSU-whatever... edit: I had to take remedial English classes at a UC in my program ESL. So it's not amazing... Examples for UC is UCI, UCLA, UCR, UCSD....
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- daodedickinson 9y ago
  My family members who teach at Berkeley indicate it is not much better there and they've been complaining about it more and more for a decade now.
- ryanSrich 9y ago
  I can't comment on Cal State, but SUNY schools in New York will pretty much take anybody. That doesn't necessarily make them bad institutions, it's just widely varied. I was fortunate enough (or unfortunate depending on how you look at it) to attend a SUNY CC and two private schools. My education at the SUNY CC was far superior to one of the private colleges, while the college I actually graduated from blew them both out of the water. It still surprises me how drastic the differences can be.
- thaumasiotes 9y ago
  > I'm not familiar with Cal State but do they just let anyone in who applies? No, Cal State is the 2nd of three public college tiers defined by California law. (Top is the UC system, bottom is the community college system, which will indeed let in anyone who applies.) CSUs, except for Cal Poly SLO, admit on a quota-by-major system, scoring all applicants objectively and taking the top $quota who applied in each major with a score above the minimum admittance threshold. Some majors at particular campuses, and some entire campuses, are considered "impacted", which means they get enough applicants that you're unlikely to be admitted with a score near the minimum threshold. The converse of this is that if you're above the minimum threshold, and you apply to a non-impacted campus, you'll be admitted. If your school gave you As, you'll beat the threshold without any inquiry into the quality of your school, or whether it was possible to receive grades lower than A. Here's CSU San Jose's policy (they're impacted): > To be considered for admission, graduates of California high schools or residents of California, as defined for tuition purposes, must have a minimum eligibility index of 2950 using the redesigned SAT or 694 using the ACT. The minimum eligibility index for nonresidents of California is 3570 using the redesigned SAT or 842 using the ACT. The CSU eligibility index is calculated by using either the SAT or ACT as follows: > SAT (sum of scores in mathematics and critical reading) + (800 x high school grade point average) > -or- > (10 x ACT composite score without the writing score) + (200 x high school grade point average) ( http://info.sjsu.edu/web-dbgen/narr/static/admission/freshman-req.html http://info.sjsu.edu/web-dbgen/narr/static/admission/freshma... ) Obviously, this scoring system is massively biased in favor of GPA over test scores (if you were running a college, would you rather admit someone with a 4.0 GPA and an 800 total SAT score, or someone with a 3.0 and a 1600?), which does a lot to explain why the caliber of students in CSUs is so low. I found it interesting, when I was looking into this a few years ago, that CSU San Francisco was impacted in their "social work" "major", but not in computer science.
  - reducesuffering 9y ago
    While interesting, being of college age and living in the area, SFSU impaction makes sense. CS majors are generally more serious about their education and major choice and also know that SFSU is a poor choice for a CS degree. Meanwhile, I know many people that, getting into their 20s, go "I wanna live the city life!", and quickly pick a major with SFSU being an easy admission.
- scruple 9y ago
  A co-worker has his CS degree from CSU Long Beach. I mentioned this to him the other day when I saw it elsewhere. He said, "it was basically high school when I was there and that was a decade ago."
godzillabrennus 9y ago
College is really the new high school...
- shados 9y ago
  And this hurts the people they're trying to help. If you devalue highschool to the point you need another 4 years to prove you have the basics, anyone who's doesn't the privileged to wait that extra 4 years is that much more screwed.
  - defined 9y ago
    Perhaps devaluation explains the trend towards requiring ever-higher degrees (Masters and PhD) in jobs that once were satisfied with a Bachelors.
- esaym 9y ago
  Next steps: Lets make it free!
  - tyywebb 9y ago
    There's no point to making college compulsory if the banks can't get rich off student loans.
- smelly_turd 9y ago
  Another four years of baby sitting please!
bloaf 9y ago
This is part of a long and slow change in the role of higher education. Previously, college was seen as being for people who academically deserved it. College was not for teaching high-school level concepts, it was for teaching advanced concepts to students who had already demonstrated some bona fides. Now, it is seen as an extension of high school; the onus is on the college to mold all comers into more educated and productive citizens, even if that means re-teaching the basics. [1998] http://articles.latimes.com/1998/may/28/local/me-54085 http://articles.latimes.com/1998/may/28/local/me-54085 >The Times reported in March on data from the California State University system showing that roughly half of the freshmen at the Fullerton campus failed basic-skills placement exams and had to enroll in remedial math and English courses. New statistics released Wednesday show that those students had a mean high school grade-point average of 3.1, or a B. > "How can it be that students can be getting Bs in English and not pass a fairly basic test and end up having to take a remedial class?" Klammer asked... "We cannot afford, as a state, to be reteaching high school classwork at the university," he said.
- Osmium 9y ago
  > Now, it is seen as an extension of high school; the onus is on the college to mold all comers into more educated and productive citizens, even if that means re-teaching the basics. This seems to be the case with grad programs now too: doing the teaching that undergrad should have already done. Turtles all the way down.
  - bloaf 9y ago
    In which departments have you seen that? [Not denying, genuinely curious]
    - oculusthrift 9y ago
      i've seen some pretty shitty grad students but i don't really blame the grad school. a lot of non-cs undergrads go into cs grad programs with barely any programming experience. in my experience, the grad programs don't teach them the fundamentals (assuming they know them) but instead teach very specific niche areas. They end up never learning basic programming fundamentals.
choonway 9y ago
More students = more $. Do you really think they care about whether you pass or not?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- discombobulate 9y ago
  I think this is part of the answer. Education is a business like anything else.
- dsfyu404ed 9y ago
  Yup. Schools make money by being bottom heavy. Classes with hundreds of students make money. Classes with tens of students lose money. Allowing people to enroll in programs they're not prepared for results in more people who drop out or change majors after taking a semester or two of classes with a high profit margin.
userbinator 9y ago
The hope is that these efforts will also help students obtain their degrees sooner — one of the public university system's priorities. Cal State has committed to doubling its four-year graduation rate, from 19% to 40%, by 2025. The implicit message here seems to be, "let everyone pass through the system regardless of how qualified they actually are, but we'll have to lower the bar to keep grades and graduation rates high." In a society where there seems to be an increasingly prominent discussion about the (ir)relevance of university degrees, it seems astonishing that they would hold such a position. It's debatable whether there was ever a time when having a university degree actually meant you had a very high likelihood of being "ready to move into the workforce, ready to move into graduate or professional school.", but this certainly doesn't help...
- xienze 9y ago
  When you realize that it's all about equality of outcome instead of equality of opportunity, it makes much more sense. > It's debatable whether there was ever a time when having a university degree actually meant you had a very high likelihood of being "ready to move into the workforce, ready to move into graduate or professional school." You're kidding right? That most certainly was the case... many years ago.
- WheelsAtLarge 9y ago
  As far as I can tell from the article the goal is to reduce the number of classes the students need to graduate. They are not say that that graduates will not meet the graduation requirements for math and english but that they have better ways to get them to learn what they need to learn to graduate. I have no doubt that every extra class that a student needs to take makes it less likely that he/she will graduate. It seems like the change is positive. The real problem is that high schools aren't preparing some students for college. That's really where things need to change.
  - wfunction 9y ago
    I don't know about you but the last time I saw a class take on extra teaching load to help students "catch up" and not sacrifice on other teaching goals was... never. You seem unrealistically hopeful that things are going to work out the way they claim.
seibelj 9y ago
I recently interviewed a master's CS student at a decent state school looking for a part-time job. She had barely programmed before the master's CS (undergrad was in MIS). Did not know what a hash table / dictionary / etc. was. So troubling for someone soon to graduate with a master's in CS.
- daodedickinson 9y ago
  That school may have once been decent, but is no longer. Employers are gonna have to start looking at degree award dates very closely. They don't have time for that, though, so maybe that's a good idea for a website.
- wikibob 9y ago
  Which state school? As mentioned elsewhere, sadly many CS masters programs are designed with the assumption that students already have solid foundations from undergrad CS, but now are often admitting people without those skills. Also cheating is unbelievably rampant at many state schools (I say this from witnessing it first hand). Lastly, all the MIS programs I'm familiar with are a sad joke. Often the result of a turf war between a business school and the engineering school, the MIS department is often incredibly weak on the technical side.
- nradov 9y ago
  CS is a broad discipline. It doesn't necessarily include much programming or data structures, depending on the student's focus. If you want programmers then you should be recruiting based on other qualifications than a MSCS degree, or expect to provide a lot of training.
imron 9y ago
Gotta keep that student loan cash flowing.
daodedickinson 9y ago
There's just no reason to get a degree from any but a few schools anymore. Employers have already caught on, and this is a move in the wrong direction. If they'll give you a degree for free, fine, but no one should be taking out loans or paying a dime for a school without making sure diplomas from that schools are still worth anything to employers. There are schools where a CS degree from them makes you look worse than having no degree at all.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  This isn't about degrees for free, it's about replacing a broken model of remediation with newer models that have been shown to work better at getting people ready to pass the same substantive classes better and with less delay.
- Clubber 9y ago
  That's not anywhere close to true.
ProfessorLayton 9y ago
I don't take too much of an issue with this. It's clear that the current system isn't working well enough, evidenced by the low graduation rates and high student loan burdens, so I don't see what's wrong in trying out a new approach and measuring the results. If this doesn't work, then I think we should try something else. Ultimately we need to change the way we fund education, but that a whole lot more complicated. For those who disagree, I'd definitely like to read why over just a vote in either direction.
Animats 9y ago
California has a three-tier system * University of California - real college * California State University - college lite * Community colleges - advanced high school
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  Community colleges are simply lower division; they have guaranteed transfer programs to both University systems, and arguably stronger lower-division programs because they have better lower-division faculty-to-student ratios, and a pure teaching focus.
- mathperson 9y ago
  cal poly slo is a pretty decent school
lsh123 9y ago
Heinlein, Friday When it was noted that Californians with college degrees earned more than those with high school diplomas alone, the California voters passed a law granting all citizens a bachelor’s degree upon graduation from high school.
- starik36 9y ago
  That sounds awfully close to Idiocracy. Next up, law degrees from Costco.
halfnibble 9y ago
If you live on the West Coast and want your children to be able to read Hacker News, then you better send them to a private school.
- digitalzombie 9y ago
  > If you live on the West Coast and want your children to be able to read Hacker News, then you better send them to a private school. You know University of Phoenix is a private school right? It's just run for profit. (edit: also Trump University is a private school) The difference between private school and public is if it's state run. So you're basically saying Cal, UCLA, UCSF, and other good public school aren't able to read Hacker News...
- oculusthrift 9y ago
  yeah i'm sure berkeley students can't read hacker news
- posguy 9y ago
  More like its a quick way to get your kids sick with some nasty ass diseases, West Coast private schools are a petri dish with a ton of unvaccinated kids. Considering the Catholic Church runs most of these schools, the local diocese need to crack down and not endanger their student body with these nasty ass, bug chasing parents & their unvaccinated children! https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/09/wealthy-la-schools-vaccination-rates-are-as-low-as-south-sudans/380252/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/09/wealthy-l...
  - dsfyu404ed 9y ago
    You talk about "nasty ass diseases" and them go on to talk about the religious affiliation of those schools. The obvious XKCD notwithstanding, I hope the humor and stereotype reference there is not lost on readers.
    - posguy 9y ago
      Its so odd, seeing that when I was in Catholic School they'd have kicked me out had I not been vaccinated, but now private schools in Washington State are basically the only place you can easily skip vaccination.
Nickersf 9y ago
Let's just drop meritocracy all together. Everything is subjective, right? Seriously though, I'm worried about our future as a spieces. The knowledge and technologies we have developed, which require nurturing. We nurture modern civilization by making sure the smartest get into positions where they can express their intellect. Part of that process needs to be keeping rigours standards in place when it comes to education.
- tzs 9y ago
  Nowhere does the article say they are lowering standards. They are just changing how they handle students who need extra preparation in English or math. Before: give them standard English and math tests, and if they do not pass make them take a year of non-credit remedial classes before letting them take any credit glasses. After: everyone can take credit classes. For those that need extra work in math or English there will be programs that work concurrently with or as part of credit classes to catch them up on math or English.
  - notyourday 9y ago
    > Nowhere does the article say they are lowering standards. They are just changing how they handle students who need extra preparation in English or math. Just re-read the sentence dispassionately. You do realize that these are people who would flunk TOEFL if the TOEFL was a requirement the way it is for foreign student? Why are we accepting people who fail basic English into a university that has English as a primary teaching language? What are going to be the classes that these students would be taking concurrently with "Expressing yourself in paragraphs 49"? All of the soft sciences require papers that are graded. So they are out. Hard sciences? Nope, they are require algebra and our students cannot do basic algebra ( let us not pretend that universities have math proficiency requirements for admissions - it is just basic algebra and some geometry plus ability to reason ) or do basic problem solving. So I guess those classes would be yoga and basket weaving. And in just 6-7 years ( these people won't graduate in 4 ) we would be wondering why is that we are having so few people getting jobs in STEM fields.
- rodgerd 9y ago
kerpele 9y ago
Unless the point is to have more people in regardless of whether they have any possibility to graduate I don't understand this. How many highly talented kids have already been lost just because they didn't know what they wanted in life at 15 and thus have much lower high school grades and sat scores and whatnot than what they are actually capable of?
- ebola1717 9y ago
  This isn't an admissions criteria. This is just a commitment to helping kids that come in with weaker backgrounds get up to speed faster, without having to spend credits on remedial classes.
gigatexal 9y ago
Translation: Diluting the prestige of the cal stage degree
- gigatexal 9y ago
  Dang mobile typos. s/stage/state
- snapetom 9y ago
  There hasn't been any prestige for a while. I went to CSUS about 20 years ago. I only went there for my freshman year because I spent more time asleep in class than awake, and still managed a 4.0. It was then I realized it was a joke. Dropped out, scraped together money, went to a real school on the other side of the country.
aphextron 9y ago
The level of elitism in this thread is staggering. Should kids that are not at the top of their class be left to work in the salt mines? Do we just abandon the idea of educating people and make all universities a private "smart people only" club? The CSU system's mandate is to provide accessible education to all Californians. Ragging on them for working towards that goal makes no sense. The UC system is still the most prestigious, selective public university system in the world, and this will not affect that.
- camus2 9y ago
  > Should kids that are not at the top of their class be left to work in the salt mines? This is the canonical definition of a strawman argument. How about looking the issue differently: what can education do to make students better at Math and English? Focus on these two disciplines.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- vostok 9y ago
  > The UC system is still the most prestigious, selective public university system in the world, and this will not affect that. Is the UC system more prestigious than Oxford, Cambridge, LSE, Imperial, or top prepas/grandes ecoles? Even the most jingoistic American wouldn't argue that the UC system is more prestigious than Oxford or Cambridge for undergraduate studies.
  - ebola1717 9y ago
    I mean I don't know if Oxford and Cambridge should be considered "public" the way the UCs are, but UC Berkeley and UCLA are in that tier, and like, does changing that line from "in the world" to "in the US" really change the point?
  - dvt 9y ago
    You're confusing a public school system with individual schools. Of course UC Merced is not on the same level as Oxford or LSE. But Berkeley and UCLA certainly are[1]. [1] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/2017/reputation-ranking#!/page/0/length/25/sort_by/rank/sort_order/asc/cols/stats https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankin...
samcodes 9y ago
I TAed at a Cal State and worked in the math tutoring center. If the tests were like other standardized tests I encountered there, they probably were not a very good measurement of anything. And the remedial courses, best I could tell, did not help. Some people seem to be interpreting this as lowering the bar. That position supposed that these tests are more accurate measurements than grades and SAT scores. I believe you are putting way too much faith in these tests. Also, the plan of "stretch" courses seems like a better one - motivation is a large factor in performance, and students will be more motivated in classes that count towards their degree, and don't tell them they preemptively failed. K-12 education needs lots of improvement. But the Cal State system can't affect that. This is a change they can make, and it seems like it will help bring the kids who need it up to speed faster.
- kaitai 9y ago
  Your second paragraph is spot on. These tests are not very accurate, and students who see a bunch of remediation rather than progress in front of them often quit or switch majors, rather than gearing up and doing the math that is required!
jlebrech 9y ago
I always thought degrees were useless, was just ahead of the curve (they still taught useful skills until now)
johnpython 9y ago
This is a change for the better. Ultimately, pedigree does not matter and a meritocratic society should not care about the institution that awarded the degree. Assess the individual and check your privilege.
mathattack 9y ago
This seems like they're focusing on the wrong metric. They look and say, "Graduates earn more money" and say "ok, for the best NPV, let's reduce the cost and increase the graduates". The problem is they mistake causality with correlation. If you focus strictly on graduation, without improving the students, then you will find that graduates will earn less. This same problem happens in high school - lowering the standards of students does improve graduate rates, but not necessarily life outcomes. An extreme example of this is to observe, "On days when there is a lot of ice cream sold, violent crime is higher, therefore let's make it harder to sell ice cream." The reality is hot days cause the rise in both ice cream sales and violent crime. If you only address the visible metric of ice cream sales, you miss the underlying cause. This abuse of statistics is rampant in education.
- strictnein 9y ago
  College graduation and home ownership were markers of success that were misinterpreted as the source of success.
  - mathattack 9y ago
    Very good point. I saw some research that suggested that once you control for income and SAT scores, where you applied to school (Signaling ambition) was as much a predictor of success as where you actually attended.
- ThinkingGuy 9y ago
  In my opinion it is part of a wider trend, of both public- and private-sector schools, moving away from the "education business" and more toward the "diploma business."
  - mathattack 9y ago
    Yes. So the question is, "Are schools giving up their academic rigor, or just facing up to the reality that students aren't learning anything anyway?" My soft anecdotal observation is... - At my large public undergrad, very little classroom learning happened for 80+% of the students outside the hard subjects. (Physics, Computer Science, etc) 80+% of the students in the hard subjects learned a lot in the class. Many students learned a lot outside of the classroom. - At my private research focused professional grad school, there was a lot more learning, but even then more of the learning was outside the classroom. It was also possible to treat the experience as a multi-year job interview, and do fine skating by with low grades.
almonj 9y ago
They want to lower the bar so that they can pass more low-mediocre people though the system, give them the false idea that they are intelligent and eventually give them government jobs. They need a class of useful idiots in power to achieve their goal of a complete technocratic surveillance state. These type people are already taking power positions all over and totally changing the working culture. Look at that guy who wrote the google diversity criticism memo, it wasn't even a controversial thing, yet he was brought down by this mob of new brainwashed low-intellect people pushing an insane agenda. The kind of person who can't pass a remedial English exam or do any kind of advanced mathematics is perfect for this role. Having advanced reasoning skills, language and mathematics skills actually puts them at a disadvantage here, what they need is a new class of bullies and manipulators that will go along with whatever they are told.
tomcam 9y ago
How can this end well?
agentgt 9y ago
You might be asking how one fails the state testing (then gets put in remedial class) but gets accepted to college (particularly a CA state one). Let me tell you a funny yet embarrassing story. I went to GaTech and I failed the English Regents test not once but twice! Now at first I thought it was my fault. I didn't really take the test seriously. However I was seriously embarrassed. After all this was Georgia not California. Long story short after having to go through a remedial english class that was a complete waste of my time and somewhat embarrassing I learned the reason I was failing.... the exam testers could not read my hand writing! To this day I'm still sort of jaded about the whole thing.
- purple-again 9y ago
  I feel that this story needs a date to make any sense. 2015? Wow that's completely ridiculous and infuriating. 1984? Yeah that makes sense, handwriting was a critical skill for effective communication in the college setting.
  - agentgt 9y ago
    I believe it was circa 2001. My whole life I have had terrible penmanship but most teachers still had the ability to read my writing. There were a couple of other problems that exacerbated the situation. I believe you had to use their pencils and their blue notebook. This was a problem for me because by that time I had gotten quite accustomed to typing and when I did write I used a high end mechanical drafting pencil. I didn't find out about the illegible part till I had my college's dean check out why I had failed it yet again.
  - mnarayan01 9y ago
    He should have been told regardless. I can totally understand, sympathize, and even potentially agree with an evaluator not wanting to deal with sloppy handwriting, but a context-free failing grade is just totally unacceptable.
- kaitai 9y ago
  My brother and parents were quite upset one year when he failed his 6th grade standardized test. 20% -- so low! They were talking about his study habits etc etc and I asked to see the results. Perfect 20% in each topic. How many choices for answers? 5. Hm. Can I see your form? You filled in the B bubble for "test form" and it was an A form.
danschumann 9y ago
It seems like they just want EVERYONE to go to college, even if they go $100k into debt to study German Polka History. They should give fewer student loans, or make them bankruptable, and make sure students actually will be financially benefited within 10 years. There is a surplus of students, which technically means they can give inferior education. If there were a shortage of students, universities would need to up their game.
- kazen44 9y ago
  what is a far larger problem is the fact that employers basically demand college and university degrees for jobs which require neither. I am not american, but i wonder why the US seems to lack a tiered tertiary education system? In the netherlands for example, we have different levels of tertiary education going all the way from trade school to polytechnical education to research universities. This systems seems to create a far more fitting model for the labour market, instead of requiring everyone to have a college education which all vary widly in terms of levels of competence.
  - danschumann 9y ago
    I once applied for a job at a university to develop backend systems. They rejected me immediately because I didn't have higher education, then they called me 2 months later, when someone actually read my resume and saw my skills. I will tell everyone that skills, recent projects, and cool hobbies will prove you are qualified way more than a degree!
matt_wulfeck 9y ago
It's easy to get trapped in those courses. I took the placement test and tested way lowered in math because I basically wasn't very good. The class was extremely difficult for me. I remember being required to solve square roots by hand without a calculator ("show your work!"). Probably fun for some people but I was going to be there forever, and programming was a breeze. Instead I simply studied the placement exam, retook it and passed into college level math and dropped my other classes. Higher level math classes are much easier in my opinion because there isn't the same emphasis on process but instead on competency. This is also the biggest difference between high school and college classes in my opinion. Later on life i do enjoy solving square roots by hand for fun.
mannykannot 9y ago
From the executive order: Students whose skills assessments indicate academic support will be needed for successful completion of general education written communication or mathematics/ quantitative reasoning courses shall enroll in appropriate college-level, baccalaureate credit-bearing courses that strengthen skills development to facilitate achieving the appropriate general education student learning outcomes. Supportive course models may include, among others, co-requisite approaches, supplemental instruction, or "stretch" formats that extend a course beyond one academic term. In these approaches, instructional content considered pre-baccalaureate may carry a maximum of one unit and shall be offered concurrently with a college-level, baccalaureate credit-bearing course. Taken at face value, this says that the academic burden will be increased for the weakest students. Excuse me for being skeptical (that this will work or that this is how it will actually be done; take your pick.)
toast0 9y ago
I know someone who teaches (or taught, I guess) remedial math at CSULB. From what I've heard, her students do seem to need the classes. A large number of the students don't show up to class, and many of those that do attend have trouble with the class and may not pass. There has been a lot of pressure from administrators to increase the pass rate. I wasn't aware they didn't allow taking courses for credit before passing the remedial classes though. It seems to me that you could take some general Ed or major courses, but science and engineering without math requirements is hard, and humanities courses without paper writing skills is also hard. It doesn't make any sense to me to pay CSU level tuition if you're not going to get credit if you pass the course. It would be better to redirect these students to a community college, where the costs to the students are lower, and offer a guaranteed spot for them to transfer in when they can earn credit. Some amount of connection to the CSU may help with student motivation.
vondur 9y ago
One of the main drivers for these initiatives is to reduce the time of graduation for students, which I believe was 46% graduation rate within six years. When you add in the mix of minority students who aren't properly prepared for college level courses, you get the really low grad rates in the CSU system. The longer you have students taking classes, the more money is costs the CSU, so they have an interest in lowering that number. Of course, the way they are going about it is bad in my opinion. Professors are pressured to not fail students in key classes that tend to slow down the graduation rates. One way to do that is to have non-tenured faculty teach these courses, who can be let go for not enforcing these practices. Lecturer's are hired on a contract basis, and may not be rehired. I've seen some lecturers on one year contracts. Some of this is not completely a bad thing in my opinion. I remember losing half of an Organic Chem class by the middle of the semester, due to the sink or swim mentality in many of the sciences/engineering faculty.
- remline 9y ago
  My University had a policy of letting you retake things and take the new grade. In the modern world, I think you should be able to retake the tests and rely on MOOCs. I'm not at all a fan of allowing failure to pass or even average for a first attempt in a hard subject to pass. I had a few courses that I should have failed and I never revisited them because I got a B or even an A.. Today I am falsely educated in most of those subjects.
pitaa 9y ago
There's a lot of talk about the motives behind this, but moving beyond that: is this even going to work? They say that: > Under the new system, all Cal State students will be allowed to take courses that count toward their degrees beginning on Day 1. Students who need additional support in math or English, for example, could be placed in “stretch” courses that simultaneously provide remedial help and allow them to complete the general math and English credits required for graduation. Which sounds great, but thinking about it I think it will end up putting an unreasonable workload on students. They talk like students are wasting time in these remedial classes, but the entire purpose of the remedial classes is to get students to a point where they can succeed in the next class. If they go into a college algebra class not being able to multiply fractions, or not being comfortable with addition and subtraction (which is way more common for people entering college than you might think), they're going to have a very hard time. Sure, these "stretch courses" might be there to help them, but I fear that essentially taking 2 math courses concurrently will be overwhelming for an already disadvantaged population of students. Not to say that one needs a full k-12 math education to succeed in college math classes; you definitively do not. Like many things we teach our kids, the vast majority of what is covered in those math classes is basically useless. But they do (hopefully) result in students being comfortable with manipulating numbers and doing the basic arithmetic needed for further study. The remedial classes shouldn't be trying to cover a k-12 math education, just enough that the students can follow what is happening in subsequent classes without being confused by the arithmetic.

150 points by mbgaxyz 9y ago

"At Cal State, about 40% of freshmen each year are considered not ready for college-level work and required to take remedial classes that do not count toward their degrees." This is crazy to me. I'm not familiar with Cal State but do they just let anyone in who applies?

akhilcacharya 9y ago
Cal State LA Accept rate: 68% UCLA Accept Rate: 18%
- oculusthrift 9y ago
  uhh.. this is a really messed up comparison considering UCLA is the most applied to college in the world.
  - digitalzombie 9y ago
    > UCLA is the most applied to college in the world. That's just your opinion really. It is a good school. Most applied in the world doesn't mean anything. A trade school could be more applied than UCLA. But UCLA does have Alan Kay, creator of smalltalk, and Terrance Tao one of the most famous mathematician. Also their med school is nice.
    - WillPostForFood 9y ago
      http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/this-college-made-history-with-over-100000-applications_us_58e3e222e4b09dbd42f3daeb http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/this-college-made-histor...
- tyingq 9y ago
  Cal Poly Accept rate: 29.5% UC Irvine Accept rate: 40.7% Not sure where we're going with this though.
  - bebop 9y ago
    Even better, UC Merced Acceptance rate: 73.7%
    - digitalzombie 9y ago
      It's the newest UC and also middle of nowhere.
deleted 9y ago
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andy-wu 9y ago
A quick Google search tells me the closest Cal State to me, Sacramento, has a 67.3% acceptance rate. Slightly higher than the national average of 64.7%, although I'm not sure how trustworthy those numbers are.
- snapetom 9y ago
  I went to CSUS. I'm very surprised it's that low. Shortly after the one year I went there, they implemented a "fast track" acceptance which basically meant they accepted you as long as you had a high school diploma.
xienze 9y ago
It's amazing that there's such a thing as remedial classes in a university, but hey, how else are we going to get an adequately diverse student body?
- Clubber 9y ago
  Are you insinuating white people don't need remedial classes?
  - oh_sigh 9y ago
    Are you insinuating that white people can't be diverse?
    - Clubber 9y ago
      They can't be racially diverse if they are white. If you mean educationally diverse, you're just trolling.
      - msla 9y ago
        So White people are all one race, now? Germans and Slavs and Scandinavians and Italians are all the same? When did that happen?
        Clubber 9y ago
        Yes, it's Caucasian. There is a difference between race and country of origin. I mean wow.
        msla 9y ago
        Huh. Hasn't always been. Look up the history of race sometime. Race is politics and not biology. I mean wow.
        9y ago
pirocks 9y ago
Not all cal states are created equal. Many are effectively glorified community colleges(not necessarily a bad thing) , while others (like calpoly slo) are excellent universities. Source:was recently a California high school student
- thaumasiotes 9y ago
  Cal Poly SLO shouldn't be used as an example of the CSU system; it is technically considered a CSU but is exempt from the admissions process that every other CSU campus is required to use. Cal Poly SLO can indeed be described as more or less an excellent university; no other CSU can.
csuwldcat 9y ago
I went to a Cal State university - it was a joke.
- cm2187 9y ago
  Would be happy to hear more about your experience. In what respect?
  - snapetom 9y ago
    * Slept through my year there. Managed a 4.0. * After I was there, they literally accepted anyone with a high school diploma. They called this "fast track acceptance." * In the orientation, I, as an anthro major was somehow grouped with about 40 engineers. The guy was discussing the math and English assessment tests. If you had x on your math SATs, you can skip the math test. If you had y in your English SATs, you can skip the English test. He asked how many people can skip the English test. Me and like 5 people raised our hands, which wasn't surprising in a room full of engineers. He asked how many can skip the math test. Maybe 10 more people raised their hands. Somehow, I, the anthro major had a higher math SAT score than a bunch of people who wanted to build the bridges I drive over.
- Rodd45 9y ago
  Sounds you got bad experience there.
- snapetom 9y ago
  Went to CSUS. Indeed it was.
digitalzombie 9y ago
> I'm not familiar with Cal State but do they just let anyone in who applies? No, it depends on the Cal state. There are two cal state that have high acceptance rate and have low grad rate. IIRC CalState Domigez have the highest acceptance rate. But there are other very selective calstate such as cal poly. Cal State (CSU) is an umbrella term for many california state universities across California excluding UC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_California). Examples are CSULB, CSUF, CSU-whatever... edit: I had to take remedial English classes at a UC in my program ESL. So it's not amazing... Examples for UC is UCI, UCLA, UCR, UCSD....
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daodedickinson 9y ago
My family members who teach at Berkeley indicate it is not much better there and they've been complaining about it more and more for a decade now.
ryanSrich 9y ago
I can't comment on Cal State, but SUNY schools in New York will pretty much take anybody. That doesn't necessarily make them bad institutions, it's just widely varied. I was fortunate enough (or unfortunate depending on how you look at it) to attend a SUNY CC and two private schools. My education at the SUNY CC was far superior to one of the private colleges, while the college I actually graduated from blew them both out of the water. It still surprises me how drastic the differences can be.
thaumasiotes 9y ago
> I'm not familiar with Cal State but do they just let anyone in who applies? No, Cal State is the 2nd of three public college tiers defined by California law. (Top is the UC system, bottom is the community college system, which will indeed let in anyone who applies.) CSUs, except for Cal Poly SLO, admit on a quota-by-major system, scoring all applicants objectively and taking the top $quota who applied in each major with a score above the minimum admittance threshold. Some majors at particular campuses, and some entire campuses, are considered "impacted", which means they get enough applicants that you're unlikely to be admitted with a score near the minimum threshold. The converse of this is that if you're above the minimum threshold, and you apply to a non-impacted campus, you'll be admitted. If your school gave you As, you'll beat the threshold without any inquiry into the quality of your school, or whether it was possible to receive grades lower than A. Here's CSU San Jose's policy (they're impacted): > To be considered for admission, graduates of California high schools or residents of California, as defined for tuition purposes, must have a minimum eligibility index of 2950 using the redesigned SAT or 694 using the ACT. The minimum eligibility index for nonresidents of California is 3570 using the redesigned SAT or 842 using the ACT. The CSU eligibility index is calculated by using either the SAT or ACT as follows: > SAT (sum of scores in mathematics and critical reading) + (800 x high school grade point average) > -or- > (10 x ACT composite score without the writing score) + (200 x high school grade point average) ( http://info.sjsu.edu/web-dbgen/narr/static/admission/freshman-req.html http://info.sjsu.edu/web-dbgen/narr/static/admission/freshma... ) Obviously, this scoring system is massively biased in favor of GPA over test scores (if you were running a college, would you rather admit someone with a 4.0 GPA and an 800 total SAT score, or someone with a 3.0 and a 1600?), which does a lot to explain why the caliber of students in CSUs is so low. I found it interesting, when I was looking into this a few years ago, that CSU San Francisco was impacted in their "social work" "major", but not in computer science.
- reducesuffering 9y ago
  While interesting, being of college age and living in the area, SFSU impaction makes sense. CS majors are generally more serious about their education and major choice and also know that SFSU is a poor choice for a CS degree. Meanwhile, I know many people that, getting into their 20s, go "I wanna live the city life!", and quickly pick a major with SFSU being an easy admission.
scruple 9y ago
A co-worker has his CS degree from CSU Long Beach. I mentioned this to him the other day when I saw it elsewhere. He said, "it was basically high school when I was there and that was a decade ago."

godzillabrennus 9y ago

College is really the new high school...

shados 9y ago
And this hurts the people they're trying to help. If you devalue highschool to the point you need another 4 years to prove you have the basics, anyone who's doesn't the privileged to wait that extra 4 years is that much more screwed.
- defined 9y ago
  Perhaps devaluation explains the trend towards requiring ever-higher degrees (Masters and PhD) in jobs that once were satisfied with a Bachelors.
esaym 9y ago
Next steps: Lets make it free!
- tyywebb 9y ago
  There's no point to making college compulsory if the banks can't get rich off student loans.
smelly_turd 9y ago
Another four years of baby sitting please!

bloaf 9y ago

This is part of a long and slow change in the role of higher education. Previously, college was seen as being for people who academically deserved it. College was not for teaching high-school level concepts, it was for teaching advanced concepts to students who had already demonstrated some bona fides. Now, it is seen as an extension of high school; the onus is on the college to mold all comers into more educated and productive citizens, even if that means re-teaching the basics. [1998] http://articles.latimes.com/1998/may/28/local/me-54085 http://articles.latimes.com/1998/may/28/local/me-54085 >The Times reported in March on data from the California State University system showing that roughly half of the freshmen at the Fullerton campus failed basic-skills placement exams and had to enroll in remedial math and English courses. New statistics released Wednesday show that those students had a mean high school grade-point average of 3.1, or a B. > "How can it be that students can be getting Bs in English and not pass a fairly basic test and end up having to take a remedial class?" Klammer asked... "We cannot afford, as a state, to be reteaching high school classwork at the university," he said.

Osmium 9y ago
> Now, it is seen as an extension of high school; the onus is on the college to mold all comers into more educated and productive citizens, even if that means re-teaching the basics. This seems to be the case with grad programs now too: doing the teaching that undergrad should have already done. Turtles all the way down.
- bloaf 9y ago
  In which departments have you seen that? [Not denying, genuinely curious]
  - oculusthrift 9y ago
    i've seen some pretty shitty grad students but i don't really blame the grad school. a lot of non-cs undergrads go into cs grad programs with barely any programming experience. in my experience, the grad programs don't teach them the fundamentals (assuming they know them) but instead teach very specific niche areas. They end up never learning basic programming fundamentals.

choonway 9y ago

More students = more $. Do you really think they care about whether you pass or not?

deleted 9y ago
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discombobulate 9y ago
I think this is part of the answer. Education is a business like anything else.
dsfyu404ed 9y ago
Yup. Schools make money by being bottom heavy. Classes with hundreds of students make money. Classes with tens of students lose money. Allowing people to enroll in programs they're not prepared for results in more people who drop out or change majors after taking a semester or two of classes with a high profit margin.

userbinator 9y ago

The hope is that these efforts will also help students obtain their degrees sooner — one of the public university system's priorities. Cal State has committed to doubling its four-year graduation rate, from 19% to 40%, by 2025. The implicit message here seems to be, "let everyone pass through the system regardless of how qualified they actually are, but we'll have to lower the bar to keep grades and graduation rates high." In a society where there seems to be an increasingly prominent discussion about the (ir)relevance of university degrees, it seems astonishing that they would hold such a position. It's debatable whether there was ever a time when having a university degree actually meant you had a very high likelihood of being "ready to move into the workforce, ready to move into graduate or professional school.", but this certainly doesn't help...

xienze 9y ago
When you realize that it's all about equality of outcome instead of equality of opportunity, it makes much more sense. > It's debatable whether there was ever a time when having a university degree actually meant you had a very high likelihood of being "ready to move into the workforce, ready to move into graduate or professional school." You're kidding right? That most certainly was the case... many years ago.
WheelsAtLarge 9y ago
As far as I can tell from the article the goal is to reduce the number of classes the students need to graduate. They are not say that that graduates will not meet the graduation requirements for math and english but that they have better ways to get them to learn what they need to learn to graduate. I have no doubt that every extra class that a student needs to take makes it less likely that he/she will graduate. It seems like the change is positive. The real problem is that high schools aren't preparing some students for college. That's really where things need to change.
- wfunction 9y ago
  I don't know about you but the last time I saw a class take on extra teaching load to help students "catch up" and not sacrifice on other teaching goals was... never. You seem unrealistically hopeful that things are going to work out the way they claim.

seibelj 9y ago

I recently interviewed a master's CS student at a decent state school looking for a part-time job. She had barely programmed before the master's CS (undergrad was in MIS). Did not know what a hash table / dictionary / etc. was. So troubling for someone soon to graduate with a master's in CS.

daodedickinson 9y ago
That school may have once been decent, but is no longer. Employers are gonna have to start looking at degree award dates very closely. They don't have time for that, though, so maybe that's a good idea for a website.
wikibob 9y ago
Which state school? As mentioned elsewhere, sadly many CS masters programs are designed with the assumption that students already have solid foundations from undergrad CS, but now are often admitting people without those skills. Also cheating is unbelievably rampant at many state schools (I say this from witnessing it first hand). Lastly, all the MIS programs I'm familiar with are a sad joke. Often the result of a turf war between a business school and the engineering school, the MIS department is often incredibly weak on the technical side.
nradov 9y ago
CS is a broad discipline. It doesn't necessarily include much programming or data structures, depending on the student's focus. If you want programmers then you should be recruiting based on other qualifications than a MSCS degree, or expect to provide a lot of training.

imron 9y ago

Gotta keep that student loan cash flowing.

daodedickinson 9y ago

There's just no reason to get a degree from any but a few schools anymore. Employers have already caught on, and this is a move in the wrong direction. If they'll give you a degree for free, fine, but no one should be taking out loans or paying a dime for a school without making sure diplomas from that schools are still worth anything to employers. There are schools where a CS degree from them makes you look worse than having no degree at all.

dragonwriter 9y ago
This isn't about degrees for free, it's about replacing a broken model of remediation with newer models that have been shown to work better at getting people ready to pass the same substantive classes better and with less delay.
Clubber 9y ago
That's not anywhere close to true.

ProfessorLayton 9y ago

I don't take too much of an issue with this. It's clear that the current system isn't working well enough, evidenced by the low graduation rates and high student loan burdens, so I don't see what's wrong in trying out a new approach and measuring the results. If this doesn't work, then I think we should try something else. Ultimately we need to change the way we fund education, but that a whole lot more complicated. For those who disagree, I'd definitely like to read why over just a vote in either direction.

Animats 9y ago

California has a three-tier system * University of California - real college * California State University - college lite * Community colleges - advanced high school

dragonwriter 9y ago
Community colleges are simply lower division; they have guaranteed transfer programs to both University systems, and arguably stronger lower-division programs because they have better lower-division faculty-to-student ratios, and a pure teaching focus.
mathperson 9y ago
cal poly slo is a pretty decent school

lsh123 9y ago

Heinlein, Friday When it was noted that Californians with college degrees earned more than those with high school diplomas alone, the California voters passed a law granting all citizens a bachelor’s degree upon graduation from high school.

starik36 9y ago
That sounds awfully close to Idiocracy. Next up, law degrees from Costco.

halfnibble 9y ago

If you live on the West Coast and want your children to be able to read Hacker News, then you better send them to a private school.

digitalzombie 9y ago
> If you live on the West Coast and want your children to be able to read Hacker News, then you better send them to a private school. You know University of Phoenix is a private school right? It's just run for profit. (edit: also Trump University is a private school) The difference between private school and public is if it's state run. So you're basically saying Cal, UCLA, UCSF, and other good public school aren't able to read Hacker News...
oculusthrift 9y ago
yeah i'm sure berkeley students can't read hacker news
posguy 9y ago
More like its a quick way to get your kids sick with some nasty ass diseases, West Coast private schools are a petri dish with a ton of unvaccinated kids. Considering the Catholic Church runs most of these schools, the local diocese need to crack down and not endanger their student body with these nasty ass, bug chasing parents & their unvaccinated children! https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/09/wealthy-la-schools-vaccination-rates-are-as-low-as-south-sudans/380252/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/09/wealthy-l...
- dsfyu404ed 9y ago
  You talk about "nasty ass diseases" and them go on to talk about the religious affiliation of those schools. The obvious XKCD notwithstanding, I hope the humor and stereotype reference there is not lost on readers.
  - posguy 9y ago
    Its so odd, seeing that when I was in Catholic School they'd have kicked me out had I not been vaccinated, but now private schools in Washington State are basically the only place you can easily skip vaccination.

Nickersf 9y ago

Let's just drop meritocracy all together. Everything is subjective, right? Seriously though, I'm worried about our future as a spieces. The knowledge and technologies we have developed, which require nurturing. We nurture modern civilization by making sure the smartest get into positions where they can express their intellect. Part of that process needs to be keeping rigours standards in place when it comes to education.

tzs 9y ago
Nowhere does the article say they are lowering standards. They are just changing how they handle students who need extra preparation in English or math. Before: give them standard English and math tests, and if they do not pass make them take a year of non-credit remedial classes before letting them take any credit glasses. After: everyone can take credit classes. For those that need extra work in math or English there will be programs that work concurrently with or as part of credit classes to catch them up on math or English.
- notyourday 9y ago
  > Nowhere does the article say they are lowering standards. They are just changing how they handle students who need extra preparation in English or math. Just re-read the sentence dispassionately. You do realize that these are people who would flunk TOEFL if the TOEFL was a requirement the way it is for foreign student? Why are we accepting people who fail basic English into a university that has English as a primary teaching language? What are going to be the classes that these students would be taking concurrently with "Expressing yourself in paragraphs 49"? All of the soft sciences require papers that are graded. So they are out. Hard sciences? Nope, they are require algebra and our students cannot do basic algebra ( let us not pretend that universities have math proficiency requirements for admissions - it is just basic algebra and some geometry plus ability to reason ) or do basic problem solving. So I guess those classes would be yoga and basket weaving. And in just 6-7 years ( these people won't graduate in 4 ) we would be wondering why is that we are having so few people getting jobs in STEM fields.
rodgerd 9y ago

kerpele 9y ago

Unless the point is to have more people in regardless of whether they have any possibility to graduate I don't understand this. How many highly talented kids have already been lost just because they didn't know what they wanted in life at 15 and thus have much lower high school grades and sat scores and whatnot than what they are actually capable of?

ebola1717 9y ago
This isn't an admissions criteria. This is just a commitment to helping kids that come in with weaker backgrounds get up to speed faster, without having to spend credits on remedial classes.

gigatexal 9y ago

Translation: Diluting the prestige of the cal stage degree

gigatexal 9y ago
Dang mobile typos. s/stage/state
snapetom 9y ago
There hasn't been any prestige for a while. I went to CSUS about 20 years ago. I only went there for my freshman year because I spent more time asleep in class than awake, and still managed a 4.0. It was then I realized it was a joke. Dropped out, scraped together money, went to a real school on the other side of the country.

aphextron 9y ago

The level of elitism in this thread is staggering. Should kids that are not at the top of their class be left to work in the salt mines? Do we just abandon the idea of educating people and make all universities a private "smart people only" club? The CSU system's mandate is to provide accessible education to all Californians. Ragging on them for working towards that goal makes no sense. The UC system is still the most prestigious, selective public university system in the world, and this will not affect that.

camus2 9y ago
> Should kids that are not at the top of their class be left to work in the salt mines? This is the canonical definition of a strawman argument. How about looking the issue differently: what can education do to make students better at Math and English? Focus on these two disciplines.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
vostok 9y ago
> The UC system is still the most prestigious, selective public university system in the world, and this will not affect that. Is the UC system more prestigious than Oxford, Cambridge, LSE, Imperial, or top prepas/grandes ecoles? Even the most jingoistic American wouldn't argue that the UC system is more prestigious than Oxford or Cambridge for undergraduate studies.
- ebola1717 9y ago
  I mean I don't know if Oxford and Cambridge should be considered "public" the way the UCs are, but UC Berkeley and UCLA are in that tier, and like, does changing that line from "in the world" to "in the US" really change the point?
- dvt 9y ago
  You're confusing a public school system with individual schools. Of course UC Merced is not on the same level as Oxford or LSE. But Berkeley and UCLA certainly are[1]. [1] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/2017/reputation-ranking#!/page/0/length/25/sort_by/rank/sort_order/asc/cols/stats https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankin...

samcodes 9y ago

I TAed at a Cal State and worked in the math tutoring center. If the tests were like other standardized tests I encountered there, they probably were not a very good measurement of anything. And the remedial courses, best I could tell, did not help. Some people seem to be interpreting this as lowering the bar. That position supposed that these tests are more accurate measurements than grades and SAT scores. I believe you are putting way too much faith in these tests. Also, the plan of "stretch" courses seems like a better one - motivation is a large factor in performance, and students will be more motivated in classes that count towards their degree, and don't tell them they preemptively failed. K-12 education needs lots of improvement. But the Cal State system can't affect that. This is a change they can make, and it seems like it will help bring the kids who need it up to speed faster.

kaitai 9y ago
Your second paragraph is spot on. These tests are not very accurate, and students who see a bunch of remediation rather than progress in front of them often quit or switch majors, rather than gearing up and doing the math that is required!

jlebrech 9y ago

I always thought degrees were useless, was just ahead of the curve (they still taught useful skills until now)

johnpython 9y ago

This is a change for the better. Ultimately, pedigree does not matter and a meritocratic society should not care about the institution that awarded the degree. Assess the individual and check your privilege.

mathattack 9y ago

This seems like they're focusing on the wrong metric. They look and say, "Graduates earn more money" and say "ok, for the best NPV, let's reduce the cost and increase the graduates". The problem is they mistake causality with correlation. If you focus strictly on graduation, without improving the students, then you will find that graduates will earn less. This same problem happens in high school - lowering the standards of students does improve graduate rates, but not necessarily life outcomes. An extreme example of this is to observe, "On days when there is a lot of ice cream sold, violent crime is higher, therefore let's make it harder to sell ice cream." The reality is hot days cause the rise in both ice cream sales and violent crime. If you only address the visible metric of ice cream sales, you miss the underlying cause. This abuse of statistics is rampant in education.

strictnein 9y ago
College graduation and home ownership were markers of success that were misinterpreted as the source of success.
- mathattack 9y ago
  Very good point. I saw some research that suggested that once you control for income and SAT scores, where you applied to school (Signaling ambition) was as much a predictor of success as where you actually attended.
ThinkingGuy 9y ago
In my opinion it is part of a wider trend, of both public- and private-sector schools, moving away from the "education business" and more toward the "diploma business."
- mathattack 9y ago
  Yes. So the question is, "Are schools giving up their academic rigor, or just facing up to the reality that students aren't learning anything anyway?" My soft anecdotal observation is... - At my large public undergrad, very little classroom learning happened for 80+% of the students outside the hard subjects. (Physics, Computer Science, etc) 80+% of the students in the hard subjects learned a lot in the class. Many students learned a lot outside of the classroom. - At my private research focused professional grad school, there was a lot more learning, but even then more of the learning was outside the classroom. It was also possible to treat the experience as a multi-year job interview, and do fine skating by with low grades.

almonj 9y ago

They want to lower the bar so that they can pass more low-mediocre people though the system, give them the false idea that they are intelligent and eventually give them government jobs. They need a class of useful idiots in power to achieve their goal of a complete technocratic surveillance state. These type people are already taking power positions all over and totally changing the working culture. Look at that guy who wrote the google diversity criticism memo, it wasn't even a controversial thing, yet he was brought down by this mob of new brainwashed low-intellect people pushing an insane agenda. The kind of person who can't pass a remedial English exam or do any kind of advanced mathematics is perfect for this role. Having advanced reasoning skills, language and mathematics skills actually puts them at a disadvantage here, what they need is a new class of bullies and manipulators that will go along with whatever they are told.

tomcam 9y ago

How can this end well?

agentgt 9y ago

You might be asking how one fails the state testing (then gets put in remedial class) but gets accepted to college (particularly a CA state one). Let me tell you a funny yet embarrassing story. I went to GaTech and I failed the English Regents test not once but twice! Now at first I thought it was my fault. I didn't really take the test seriously. However I was seriously embarrassed. After all this was Georgia not California. Long story short after having to go through a remedial english class that was a complete waste of my time and somewhat embarrassing I learned the reason I was failing.... the exam testers could not read my hand writing! To this day I'm still sort of jaded about the whole thing.

purple-again 9y ago
I feel that this story needs a date to make any sense. 2015? Wow that's completely ridiculous and infuriating. 1984? Yeah that makes sense, handwriting was a critical skill for effective communication in the college setting.
- agentgt 9y ago
  I believe it was circa 2001. My whole life I have had terrible penmanship but most teachers still had the ability to read my writing. There were a couple of other problems that exacerbated the situation. I believe you had to use their pencils and their blue notebook. This was a problem for me because by that time I had gotten quite accustomed to typing and when I did write I used a high end mechanical drafting pencil. I didn't find out about the illegible part till I had my college's dean check out why I had failed it yet again.
- mnarayan01 9y ago
  He should have been told regardless. I can totally understand, sympathize, and even potentially agree with an evaluator not wanting to deal with sloppy handwriting, but a context-free failing grade is just totally unacceptable.
kaitai 9y ago
My brother and parents were quite upset one year when he failed his 6th grade standardized test. 20% -- so low! They were talking about his study habits etc etc and I asked to see the results. Perfect 20% in each topic. How many choices for answers? 5. Hm. Can I see your form? You filled in the B bubble for "test form" and it was an A form.

danschumann 9y ago

It seems like they just want EVERYONE to go to college, even if they go $100k into debt to study German Polka History. They should give fewer student loans, or make them bankruptable, and make sure students actually will be financially benefited within 10 years. There is a surplus of students, which technically means they can give inferior education. If there were a shortage of students, universities would need to up their game.

kazen44 9y ago
what is a far larger problem is the fact that employers basically demand college and university degrees for jobs which require neither. I am not american, but i wonder why the US seems to lack a tiered tertiary education system? In the netherlands for example, we have different levels of tertiary education going all the way from trade school to polytechnical education to research universities. This systems seems to create a far more fitting model for the labour market, instead of requiring everyone to have a college education which all vary widly in terms of levels of competence.
- danschumann 9y ago
  I once applied for a job at a university to develop backend systems. They rejected me immediately because I didn't have higher education, then they called me 2 months later, when someone actually read my resume and saw my skills. I will tell everyone that skills, recent projects, and cool hobbies will prove you are qualified way more than a degree!

matt_wulfeck 9y ago

It's easy to get trapped in those courses. I took the placement test and tested way lowered in math because I basically wasn't very good. The class was extremely difficult for me. I remember being required to solve square roots by hand without a calculator ("show your work!"). Probably fun for some people but I was going to be there forever, and programming was a breeze. Instead I simply studied the placement exam, retook it and passed into college level math and dropped my other classes. Higher level math classes are much easier in my opinion because there isn't the same emphasis on process but instead on competency. This is also the biggest difference between high school and college classes in my opinion. Later on life i do enjoy solving square roots by hand for fun.

mannykannot 9y ago

From the executive order: Students whose skills assessments indicate academic support will be needed for successful completion of general education written communication or mathematics/ quantitative reasoning courses shall enroll in appropriate college-level, baccalaureate credit-bearing courses that strengthen skills development to facilitate achieving the appropriate general education student learning outcomes. Supportive course models may include, among others, co-requisite approaches, supplemental instruction, or "stretch" formats that extend a course beyond one academic term. In these approaches, instructional content considered pre-baccalaureate may carry a maximum of one unit and shall be offered concurrently with a college-level, baccalaureate credit-bearing course. Taken at face value, this says that the academic burden will be increased for the weakest students. Excuse me for being skeptical (that this will work or that this is how it will actually be done; take your pick.)

toast0 9y ago

I know someone who teaches (or taught, I guess) remedial math at CSULB. From what I've heard, her students do seem to need the classes. A large number of the students don't show up to class, and many of those that do attend have trouble with the class and may not pass. There has been a lot of pressure from administrators to increase the pass rate. I wasn't aware they didn't allow taking courses for credit before passing the remedial classes though. It seems to me that you could take some general Ed or major courses, but science and engineering without math requirements is hard, and humanities courses without paper writing skills is also hard. It doesn't make any sense to me to pay CSU level tuition if you're not going to get credit if you pass the course. It would be better to redirect these students to a community college, where the costs to the students are lower, and offer a guaranteed spot for them to transfer in when they can earn credit. Some amount of connection to the CSU may help with student motivation.

vondur 9y ago

One of the main drivers for these initiatives is to reduce the time of graduation for students, which I believe was 46% graduation rate within six years. When you add in the mix of minority students who aren't properly prepared for college level courses, you get the really low grad rates in the CSU system. The longer you have students taking classes, the more money is costs the CSU, so they have an interest in lowering that number. Of course, the way they are going about it is bad in my opinion. Professors are pressured to not fail students in key classes that tend to slow down the graduation rates. One way to do that is to have non-tenured faculty teach these courses, who can be let go for not enforcing these practices. Lecturer's are hired on a contract basis, and may not be rehired. I've seen some lecturers on one year contracts. Some of this is not completely a bad thing in my opinion. I remember losing half of an Organic Chem class by the middle of the semester, due to the sink or swim mentality in many of the sciences/engineering faculty.

remline 9y ago
My University had a policy of letting you retake things and take the new grade. In the modern world, I think you should be able to retake the tests and rely on MOOCs. I'm not at all a fan of allowing failure to pass or even average for a first attempt in a hard subject to pass. I had a few courses that I should have failed and I never revisited them because I got a B or even an A.. Today I am falsely educated in most of those subjects.

pitaa 9y ago

There's a lot of talk about the motives behind this, but moving beyond that: is this even going to work? They say that: > Under the new system, all Cal State students will be allowed to take courses that count toward their degrees beginning on Day 1. Students who need additional support in math or English, for example, could be placed in “stretch” courses that simultaneously provide remedial help and allow them to complete the general math and English credits required for graduation. Which sounds great, but thinking about it I think it will end up putting an unreasonable workload on students. They talk like students are wasting time in these remedial classes, but the entire purpose of the remedial classes is to get students to a point where they can succeed in the next class. If they go into a college algebra class not being able to multiply fractions, or not being comfortable with addition and subtraction (which is way more common for people entering college than you might think), they're going to have a very hard time. Sure, these "stretch courses" might be there to help them, but I fear that essentially taking 2 math courses concurrently will be overwhelming for an already disadvantaged population of students. Not to say that one needs a full k-12 math education to succeed in college math classes; you definitively do not. Like many things we teach our kids, the vast majority of what is covered in those math classes is basically useless. But they do (hopefully) result in students being comfortable with manipulating numbers and doing the basic arithmetic needed for further study. The remedial classes shouldn't be trying to cover a k-12 math education, just enough that the students can follow what is happening in subsequent classes without being confused by the arithmetic.