6 ms·

Senior House alum here... You are load balancing 5 servers. One has a latency issue that causes response time to be 2x the others. What do you do? You wait,

Senior House alum here... You are load balancing 5 servers. One has a latency issue that causes response time to be 2x the others. What do you do? You wait, it goes to 4x. Now what? You take it offline, spin up a new instance and investigate. MIT put them on notice (a year earlier), there was no attempt to improve and the bluff was called. I wish this wasn't happening, but sometimes you have to actually DO something.

jpmattia 9y ago
When I first heard about it, I noticed that McCormick had the highest GPA and SH the lowest. So I helpfully suggested moving all the SH residents to McCormick and are there any other campus problems you would like me to solve this morning? Only a few were amused. PS. Former EC guy here. PPS. Sorry for the inside baseball.
- mrgordon 9y ago
  Yeah lets move everyone to McCormick where all the suicides happen. Oh wait...
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
forgottenpass 9y ago
Considering that students are more akin to customers than worker bees, the obvious questions to that line of reasoning are: What is the MIT administration attempting to measure by using graduation rate as a metric? Why has the administration chosen to optimize for graduation rate? And the more general elephant in the room: What does/should a research university in general, and MIT in particular, seek to accomplish? And How does/should the administration classify emergent behaviors of the large group of people into helping/harming those ends?
- matt4077 9y ago
  "Citizen" might be the best analogy for students: Neither the pay-and-be-served attitude of consumers, nor the shut-up-and-work of labor. Instead, a sense of both empowerment as well as responsibility.
- Animats 9y ago
  MIT tries to select students who will make it through MIT, and then get them through. If you get in, you have a 93% chance of graduating. That's an unusually high success rate for a serious engineering school. (That may be the influence of Harvard, 97.5% graduation rate. It's hard to get into Harvard, but it's not hard to get through Harvard.) There are lower tier engineering schools with huge drop-out rates. Cal Poly flunks out about half their engineering students. It's much easier to get in, but the first year is designed to get rid of the unqualified students. MIT is trying not to go there.
- staunch 9y ago
  All of the exclusive universities sell degrees for a fortune. Their delivery rate is their graduation rate. The admissions process is gamed to hell by wealthy people and the graduation rate is still 95%+. Hmmm... The whole thing is a scam where the truly deserving students are a cover for the majority. It's the same reason they don't worry about giving away online courses. Education isn't their product. Their product is a piece of paper that ensures your child won't be serving burgers alongside Will Hunting.
mhalle 9y ago
I would alternatively suggest not treating groups of people, particularly young people, like monolithic machines. "Put them on notice": who is "them"? Senior House, like any dorm, is a bunch of people living together. Some were even assigned there without choosing it (I was one). Each resident has no responsibility for the behavior of others. Why should someone following the rules (and they are the huge majority) have any obligation to MIT to "DO something"? It is easy and understandable to think of groups as monolithic. But that doesn't make it fair. MIT administration, on the other hand, acts as a single official entity. And it is the one doling out collective punishment. To be clear, I'm not saying do nothing when problems come up. But there are plenty of established mechanisms to deal with the individuals creating those problems (Committee on Discipline, Committee on Academic Performance, Campus/Cambridge Police, ...). While not perfect, they are mature, they have known rules, they apply to everyone the same. Unlike what happened at Senior House, apparently, at least you're allowed to have a faculty representative with you when you appear before COD or CAP. It's at least a yellow flag for me when it becomes necessary to create new procedures and enlist new powers to special case a problem.
- ScottBurson 9y ago
  > collective punishment It's not like they expelled everyone who had been living there. They just have to find new housing. Presumably nothing is going on their record about it. I know they don't like it, understandably, but as punishment goes it seems pretty light. I don't completely disagree with you, though. It does seem like more effort could have been made to find out which individuals were causing the problems and focus on those.
  - Bartweiss 9y ago
    One bit of useful context is that MIT has way more culture and persistent identity tied to its dorms than most schools. My undergrad shuttled students to a new building every year, and wouldn't let anyone stay in dorms over the summer. "Dorm culture" was basically nonexistent. At MIT, students have significant choice of dorm, can stay in one place for four years, and can stay on campus in their room over summers. There's a lot of culture embedded in choice of housing. I'm not sure I would call this collective punishment, but it's got something in common with evicting everyone in an apartment building because some of them are noisy. Certainly it's much closer to that than it would be at most colleges.
ScottBurson 9y ago
Well, that's certainly a suitably nerdy analogy :-) I never lived in Senior House, but I hung out with friends there quite a bit. From what I've read, I've tentatively, and sadly, come to the same conclusion: there were persistent problems with the culture of the dorm, and the administration probably had no choice.
matt4077 9y ago
If the articles' portrayal is accurate, I have doubts that there ever was a problem. Yes, the rate of drop-outs was 3x the average (20% vs 7%). But it appears as if this dormitory draws its population from a subset of freshman that already starts out different than the average population. College admission should make a few bets on misfits with potential here and there. And if the mark of MIT's drug-infested den is that only 80% of them graduate MIT, it seems like they're still doing ok in absolute terms. The only real problem is that Wall Street has apparently infected MIT, and they're taking the love-yourself (and keel over with heart failure) drug.
Bartweiss 9y ago
In an interview around the announcement of the plan, we got this exchange: Tech interviewer: Do you, was there any sort of control for, sort of, selection bias. Maybe that people less likely to graduate are more likely to select Senior House? For example, maybe like, students who ranked Senior House first but didn’t get in, how they did? Chancellor Barnhart: Yeah, oh, that’s actually a really good way to think about that. So, that’s something we’ll look at. This was after the initial decision to bar freshmen came through. In the analogy, I think it's a mistake to compare to spinning a server up and down - that's a low-consequence, low-cost decision. Maybe compare to decommissioning a physical server and buying a new one. I think before throwing away the high-latency server, it'd be worthwhile to make very sure that the problem wasn't about some process running on the server that would simply carry over to the new machine. I'm worried that MIT has decided to solve a problem by shuffling 'hardware' without any clear evidence on whether that's the layer with the problem. Every university has populations with higher and lower graduation rates, and we know that Senior House attracted a lot of groups who might have been at high risk (e.g. people with financial difficulties or substance abuse issues). If those people just end up in other dorms with no more support, this might become a costly change (financially and culturally) with no real benefits.

jpmattia 9y ago

When I first heard about it, I noticed that McCormick had the highest GPA and SH the lowest. So I helpfully suggested moving all the SH residents to McCormick and are there any other campus problems you would like me to solve this morning? Only a few were amused. PS. Former EC guy here. PPS. Sorry for the inside baseball.

mrgordon 9y ago
Yeah lets move everyone to McCormick where all the suicides happen. Oh wait...

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

forgottenpass 9y ago

Considering that students are more akin to customers than worker bees, the obvious questions to that line of reasoning are: What is the MIT administration attempting to measure by using graduation rate as a metric? Why has the administration chosen to optimize for graduation rate? And the more general elephant in the room: What does/should a research university in general, and MIT in particular, seek to accomplish? And How does/should the administration classify emergent behaviors of the large group of people into helping/harming those ends?

matt4077 9y ago
"Citizen" might be the best analogy for students: Neither the pay-and-be-served attitude of consumers, nor the shut-up-and-work of labor. Instead, a sense of both empowerment as well as responsibility.
Animats 9y ago
MIT tries to select students who will make it through MIT, and then get them through. If you get in, you have a 93% chance of graduating. That's an unusually high success rate for a serious engineering school. (That may be the influence of Harvard, 97.5% graduation rate. It's hard to get into Harvard, but it's not hard to get through Harvard.) There are lower tier engineering schools with huge drop-out rates. Cal Poly flunks out about half their engineering students. It's much easier to get in, but the first year is designed to get rid of the unqualified students. MIT is trying not to go there.
staunch 9y ago
All of the exclusive universities sell degrees for a fortune. Their delivery rate is their graduation rate. The admissions process is gamed to hell by wealthy people and the graduation rate is still 95%+. Hmmm... The whole thing is a scam where the truly deserving students are a cover for the majority. It's the same reason they don't worry about giving away online courses. Education isn't their product. Their product is a piece of paper that ensures your child won't be serving burgers alongside Will Hunting.

mhalle 9y ago

I would alternatively suggest not treating groups of people, particularly young people, like monolithic machines. "Put them on notice": who is "them"? Senior House, like any dorm, is a bunch of people living together. Some were even assigned there without choosing it (I was one). Each resident has no responsibility for the behavior of others. Why should someone following the rules (and they are the huge majority) have any obligation to MIT to "DO something"? It is easy and understandable to think of groups as monolithic. But that doesn't make it fair. MIT administration, on the other hand, acts as a single official entity. And it is the one doling out collective punishment. To be clear, I'm not saying do nothing when problems come up. But there are plenty of established mechanisms to deal with the individuals creating those problems (Committee on Discipline, Committee on Academic Performance, Campus/Cambridge Police, ...). While not perfect, they are mature, they have known rules, they apply to everyone the same. Unlike what happened at Senior House, apparently, at least you're allowed to have a faculty representative with you when you appear before COD or CAP. It's at least a yellow flag for me when it becomes necessary to create new procedures and enlist new powers to special case a problem.

ScottBurson 9y ago
> collective punishment It's not like they expelled everyone who had been living there. They just have to find new housing. Presumably nothing is going on their record about it. I know they don't like it, understandably, but as punishment goes it seems pretty light. I don't completely disagree with you, though. It does seem like more effort could have been made to find out which individuals were causing the problems and focus on those.
- Bartweiss 9y ago
  One bit of useful context is that MIT has way more culture and persistent identity tied to its dorms than most schools. My undergrad shuttled students to a new building every year, and wouldn't let anyone stay in dorms over the summer. "Dorm culture" was basically nonexistent. At MIT, students have significant choice of dorm, can stay in one place for four years, and can stay on campus in their room over summers. There's a lot of culture embedded in choice of housing. I'm not sure I would call this collective punishment, but it's got something in common with evicting everyone in an apartment building because some of them are noisy. Certainly it's much closer to that than it would be at most colleges.

ScottBurson 9y ago

Well, that's certainly a suitably nerdy analogy :-) I never lived in Senior House, but I hung out with friends there quite a bit. From what I've read, I've tentatively, and sadly, come to the same conclusion: there were persistent problems with the culture of the dorm, and the administration probably had no choice.

matt4077 9y ago

If the articles' portrayal is accurate, I have doubts that there ever was a problem. Yes, the rate of drop-outs was 3x the average (20% vs 7%). But it appears as if this dormitory draws its population from a subset of freshman that already starts out different than the average population. College admission should make a few bets on misfits with potential here and there. And if the mark of MIT's drug-infested den is that only 80% of them graduate MIT, it seems like they're still doing ok in absolute terms. The only real problem is that Wall Street has apparently infected MIT, and they're taking the love-yourself (and keel over with heart failure) drug.

Bartweiss 9y ago

In an interview around the announcement of the plan, we got this exchange: Tech interviewer: Do you, was there any sort of control for, sort of, selection bias. Maybe that people less likely to graduate are more likely to select Senior House? For example, maybe like, students who ranked Senior House first but didn’t get in, how they did? Chancellor Barnhart: Yeah, oh, that’s actually a really good way to think about that. So, that’s something we’ll look at. This was after the initial decision to bar freshmen came through. In the analogy, I think it's a mistake to compare to spinning a server up and down - that's a low-consequence, low-cost decision. Maybe compare to decommissioning a physical server and buying a new one. I think before throwing away the high-latency server, it'd be worthwhile to make very sure that the problem wasn't about some process running on the server that would simply carry over to the new machine. I'm worried that MIT has decided to solve a problem by shuffling 'hardware' without any clear evidence on whether that's the layer with the problem. Every university has populations with higher and lower graduation rates, and we know that Senior House attracted a lot of groups who might have been at high risk (e.g. people with financial difficulties or substance abuse issues). If those people just end up in other dorms with no more support, this might become a costly change (financially and culturally) with no real benefits.