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It is obvious the college education system is flawed just from it's incentive structure. Colleges don't get paid based on the amount that you learn, they get pa

It is obvious the college education system is flawed just from it's incentive structure. Colleges don't get paid based on the amount that you learn, they get paid based on the amount of your time they take up. Up to a point they even have a disincentive to aid learning, since they make more money when their students have to repeat classes. Each additional semester gives the colleges many more opportunities to get money from students, so it should be no surprise that an environment of wastefulness flourishes, where students are encouraged to change majors midway through their degree programs and classes are taught by grad students who have never been trained as educators. If we really want to fix education we have to find some way of ensuring that universities interest are actually aligned with educating their students. Maybe a way to do this would be to separate teaching from testing. Have testing be established by some external body, and make it so both the university and the student receive a payout when the student succeeds on the test. Something like that would clearly require big changes in the way that people pay for college, but it seems likely that major changes will be needed anyway.

dstaley 8y ago
> Maybe a way to do this would be to separate teaching from testing. Have testing be established by some external body, and make it so both the university and the student receive a payout when the student succeeds on the test. This is basically what standardized testing is all about, and it's a significant contributor to the inadequacy of education in the United States. We haven't figured out a scalable way to measure classroom outcomes.
- lotsofpulp 8y ago
  How does standardized testing contribute to the inadequacy of education? If anything, it shows which students need help, as opposed to grade inflation and throwing out A grades to everyone that hands in a homework assignment on time. Local parents can influence grades, but they can’t get past standardized testing (which is why colleges use SAT/ACT/AP grades to filter rather than GPA). Perhaps funding as a result of standardized testing is a problem and distracts from teaching. But the actual problem is children who grow up in unsupportive environments with lack of parental guidance. That socioeconomic class divide exposed by standardized testing isn’t going to be fixed by getting rid of standardized testing.
  - sethammons 8y ago
    Standardized testing leads to teaching to the test, and the tests need to be easily gradable, so we teach kids how to take tests that represents content in a mannor that is a mile wide but an inch deep. Multiple choice is a crap way to measure most understanding. This doesn't take away your other point: unsupportive environments. Socio-economically disadvantaged kids are truly disadvantaged.
    - barry-cotter 8y ago
      Your argument proves that PhD qualifying exams are crap because it’s a generalised argument against testing, not a specific one against multiple choice tests. It’s perfectly possible to write good tests, ones with good reliability and validity. If the test is good teaching to the test is not a problem.
    - distances 8y ago
      > Standardized testing leads to teaching to the test, and the tests need to be easily gradable, so we teach kids how to take tests that represents content in a mannor that is a mile wide but an inch deep. Not true, the test could be arranged in other ways depending on the goals. I've taken one standardized suite of test, after 12 years of schooling, and the questions were quite deep enough. The limited number of questions you can cram into six hours per subject meant that the math test could contain only one task in statistics, one in geometry, and so on; with luck you could do well while lacking in some areas. That would be a gamble though.
      - sethammons 8y ago
        As a former math teacher in a disadvantaged area, I'm going to have to stick to my original statement. It could be different in other regions of the world, but, in the US, because funding is based on test scores, and teachers are required to teach the test concepts, whether students are ready for them or not. Students have to cover so much material in a given time period. For many, the time to truly "get" the material is not there. They can memorize something, test on it, move on. The fact that some students are capable of getting through this and learn or retain information does not mean it is a good method of doing things. As a practical example why multiple choice can be unfair: a student could understand that solving for the roots of a parabolic curve (quadratic equation) could model the landing point of a ballistic projectile. They could understand the difference of squares method to solving quadratics, factoring, solving linear equations, etc. But a simple arithmetic mess up (they add instead of subtracting on one step even though they wrote a subtraction sign) leads to the wrong answer. Because it is a multiple choice test and because test makers have seen this same error before, the wrong answer the student found is one of the multiple choice solutions. Boom. Zero credit on that question. This failed to measure the student's understanding. How do you get around that? More questions with more nuances. Can you get signal on student understanding from multiple choice tests? Sure. Is it good? Depends on the test and it is hard to write good tests.

dstaley 8y ago

> Maybe a way to do this would be to separate teaching from testing. Have testing be established by some external body, and make it so both the university and the student receive a payout when the student succeeds on the test. This is basically what standardized testing is all about, and it's a significant contributor to the inadequacy of education in the United States. We haven't figured out a scalable way to measure classroom outcomes.

lotsofpulp 8y ago
How does standardized testing contribute to the inadequacy of education? If anything, it shows which students need help, as opposed to grade inflation and throwing out A grades to everyone that hands in a homework assignment on time. Local parents can influence grades, but they can’t get past standardized testing (which is why colleges use SAT/ACT/AP grades to filter rather than GPA). Perhaps funding as a result of standardized testing is a problem and distracts from teaching. But the actual problem is children who grow up in unsupportive environments with lack of parental guidance. That socioeconomic class divide exposed by standardized testing isn’t going to be fixed by getting rid of standardized testing.
- sethammons 8y ago
  Standardized testing leads to teaching to the test, and the tests need to be easily gradable, so we teach kids how to take tests that represents content in a mannor that is a mile wide but an inch deep. Multiple choice is a crap way to measure most understanding. This doesn't take away your other point: unsupportive environments. Socio-economically disadvantaged kids are truly disadvantaged.
  - barry-cotter 8y ago
    Your argument proves that PhD qualifying exams are crap because it’s a generalised argument against testing, not a specific one against multiple choice tests. It’s perfectly possible to write good tests, ones with good reliability and validity. If the test is good teaching to the test is not a problem.
  - distances 8y ago
    > Standardized testing leads to teaching to the test, and the tests need to be easily gradable, so we teach kids how to take tests that represents content in a mannor that is a mile wide but an inch deep. Not true, the test could be arranged in other ways depending on the goals. I've taken one standardized suite of test, after 12 years of schooling, and the questions were quite deep enough. The limited number of questions you can cram into six hours per subject meant that the math test could contain only one task in statistics, one in geometry, and so on; with luck you could do well while lacking in some areas. That would be a gamble though.
    - sethammons 8y ago
      As a former math teacher in a disadvantaged area, I'm going to have to stick to my original statement. It could be different in other regions of the world, but, in the US, because funding is based on test scores, and teachers are required to teach the test concepts, whether students are ready for them or not. Students have to cover so much material in a given time period. For many, the time to truly "get" the material is not there. They can memorize something, test on it, move on. The fact that some students are capable of getting through this and learn or retain information does not mean it is a good method of doing things. As a practical example why multiple choice can be unfair: a student could understand that solving for the roots of a parabolic curve (quadratic equation) could model the landing point of a ballistic projectile. They could understand the difference of squares method to solving quadratics, factoring, solving linear equations, etc. But a simple arithmetic mess up (they add instead of subtracting on one step even though they wrote a subtraction sign) leads to the wrong answer. Because it is a multiple choice test and because test makers have seen this same error before, the wrong answer the student found is one of the multiple choice solutions. Boom. Zero credit on that question. This failed to measure the student's understanding. How do you get around that? More questions with more nuances. Can you get signal on student understanding from multiple choice tests? Sure. Is it good? Depends on the test and it is hard to write good tests.