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I hated taking the SAT/ACT, but holy cow are we in the US in a better situation than Chinese students dealing with the Gaokao. A Chinese pen-pal once showed me

I hated taking the SAT/ACT, but holy cow are we in the US in a better situation than Chinese students dealing with the Gaokao. A Chinese pen-pal once showed me some calculus problems from the Gaokao and the example I saw (a bunch of integrals) looked like a math test a sadist would create: long, complicated expressions just for the sake of complexity, "ugly" numbers that turned into messy fractions you have to carry around. I (a graduate engineering student at the time) couldn't identify any trick or educational point to the complexity, only the malice of the people giving the test. EDIT: wording

ken47 5y ago
As someone who uses to be very good at this kind of "math" in high school...it's not even real math. It's a bunch of teenagers being tested on how good they are at being poor man's computers. And I don't just mean standardized tests - almost the entirety of the high school math "education" is sad.
wraptile 5y ago
I really don't understand how many tests still allow trick questions like that when we have so much data that indicates that it's an awful metric. To me it indicates incompetence of the test creators.
Mountain_Skies 5y ago
In the software development world, we simply moved it from university admissions to employment interviews.
fdgsdfogijq 5y ago
Yeah, a lot of tests like that are actually testing for memorization, and not problem solving ability.
- frankchn 5y ago
  I don't think the math part of the Gaokao tests memorization. Looking at a sample paper (https://medium.com/@yujia_jo/2016-jiangsu-gaokao-national-higher-education-entrance-exam-mathematics-2beefb93cec7 https://medium.com/@yujia_jo/2016-jiangsu-gaokao-national-hi...), it seems like the examination really tests for the ability to do math and problem solve under fairly heavy time pressure (150 minutes total for all questions if you are in the science stream).
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - squaresmile 5y ago
    I would say the questions by themselves don't test memorization but all the circumstances around the test push it towards memorization. Given decent fundamentals you can solve all these problems from first principles but you would take way too much time (unless you are a genius, of course). To solve these problems within the allotted time would require grinding a ton of problems so you can get familiar with a part of or the full question beforehand. Don't get me wrong, practicing problems is a good way to study math and I don't have any issue with this in a vacuum. However, this is before bringing other people into the equation. The floor is raised every year and the competition is intense. You also need to study for other subjects, not just math. All in all, "memorization" became the only strategy. It's fair to debate whether it's "rote memorization" or actually "learning the material" but with how much the students study the line between the two blurs. It feels too "overfitting" if I would borrow a statistics word.
  - alskdjflaskjdhf 5y ago
    This honestly looks perfectly reasonable to me. It's obviously far harder than the SAT math section (which isn't saying much since SAT math is a bit of a joke), but the questions look completely fair and not at all like they're trying to trick or screw the student. Makes the comment upthread that started this come across as just more racist prejudices about China, unless the commenter has something to back up their claim.
    - cauthon 5y ago
      Yeah the SAT and the GRE suffer from the same problem - they’re meant to be taken by everyone, so the math is made basic and the non-STEM folks aren’t penalized when looking at total score. Completely agree regarding the Gaokao sample. This all looks like it should be well within the means of a high school senior.
    - fdgsdfogijq 5y ago
      very odd that you called my post racist
jxramos 5y ago
sounds painful, the only thing I could think of would be to test the precision of transcribing step by step. Sounds like the surface area for loss of precision is wider when you just add the noise of messy figures into a problem. A clever student could just replace the messy figures with constant variables that are shorter to write of course and at the very end substitute everything back to evaluate what comes out in the end.
gime_tree_fiddy 5y ago
I am not sure how it compares but India suffers through the same problem. It is essentially a rat race. A lot of those problems could be trick questions, but to be able to identify it, especially on a regular basis takes longer(when the question has less than a minute dedicated to it).
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- shmde 5y ago
  Yes exactly, I remember our Physics teacher in 11-12th grade used to just solve trick questions and asked us to remember shortcuts and rote memorise formulae. I completely fucked up the physics portion of entrance exam and got a mere 7 out of 120 on a national test. I fucking hate physics now.
  - mattwad 5y ago
    I did great in Physics because I was a year ahead in math and had already taken Pre-Cal (Trigonometry). I thought it was incredibly dumb they were asking kids to calculate velocity and acceleration before they knew what an integral or differential equation is.
  - jp0d 5y ago
    The Indian education system doesn't care about learning at all. It's all about scoring good grades and getting a job at the end. It's quite important as every individual needs to be able support themselves. However, it's really bad for learning. I'm a product of that. I've been struggling a lot with an online course from MIT but at least I'm enjoying learning a lot of stuff as I'm employed now. Physics and Mathematics are the most beautiful things if done right and not under stress. Good luck, man!
    - AussieWog93 5y ago
      >The Indian education system doesn't care about learning at all. Honestly, I think people from other countries get that impression about you guys too. I've been a part of multiple (honestly, quite racist) conversations where we just WTF over the fact that these guys have masters degrees but can't solve the most basic problem assigned to them.
muh_gradle 5y ago
I have a hard time seeing US standardized testing as "better." All of my Korean peers who have studied for the CSAT or Suneung laugh at how easy the SAT/ACT math section is in comparison. K-12 education in the US is years behind at this point from many Asian countries. The fact that we are debating whether standardized testing for colleges and prestigious high schools (Lowell in SF, Stuyvesant in NYC, etc) should be banned is just laughable and only sets us further back.
- strikelaserclaw 5y ago
  I always wonder why these asian countries aren't doing laps around USA or other western countries if they were learning calculus in pre school.
  - dahfizz 5y ago
    They're all too busy studying to run laps around us.
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    Probably because high levels of math skill don’t translate to economic success. Analytical thinking is a good skill that math can teach you, but there is more than one path to that. In the context of a college education the ability to write clearly and persuasively is far more an important skill to learn. As someone with a degree in math, I’ve always found the monomaniacal focus on how America is “behind” on math education quite baffling. Do people really thinking calculus skill is necessary to succeed?
    - muh_gradle 5y ago
      It's not just math education. It's science as well. I'm bewildered that this is even something that people are even contesting what I wrote in 2022 on Hacker News of all places. The majority of PhDs in the STEMs are done by international students and have been for many years now. It's well known that American K-12 is woefully insufficient. But sure, I guess a-ok. But carry on with the straw man.
a-dub 5y ago
i mean... integrals are weird. there's a whole slew of ways of doing them and usually there's a handful of techniques that are taught for a handful of integrals of specific forms and then those show up on tests with the forms sometimes slightly hidden. how do you know it wasn't just forms and techniques you were unfamiliar with? any math you're unfamiliar with can appear as complexity for the sake of complexity.
- lupire 5y ago
  Part of the point is that pointless trivia is on the curriculum. Math is usually the most immune of all subjects.
  - a-dub 5y ago
    yeah... my point is the whole mythology around solving "difficult" problems. "difficult" is often conflated with "not previously exposed to." similar to the mythology of the "10xer". is it brilliance, or is it having prior exposure to the right things?
    - a-dub 5y ago
      but if we're getting at the point... like the real point.. everything knowledge comes in trees. skills, abilities, talents are all the product of tradeoffs between time and choices of focus. the lazy approach is to attempt to linearize these trees when evaluating people, institutions, programs and the rest. it's this laziness, this linearization, this attempt to construct a global ordered set, that causes all the problems.

ken47 5y ago

As someone who uses to be very good at this kind of "math" in high school...it's not even real math. It's a bunch of teenagers being tested on how good they are at being poor man's computers. And I don't just mean standardized tests - almost the entirety of the high school math "education" is sad.

wraptile 5y ago

I really don't understand how many tests still allow trick questions like that when we have so much data that indicates that it's an awful metric. To me it indicates incompetence of the test creators.

Mountain_Skies 5y ago

In the software development world, we simply moved it from university admissions to employment interviews.

fdgsdfogijq 5y ago

Yeah, a lot of tests like that are actually testing for memorization, and not problem solving ability.

frankchn 5y ago
I don't think the math part of the Gaokao tests memorization. Looking at a sample paper (https://medium.com/@yujia_jo/2016-jiangsu-gaokao-national-higher-education-entrance-exam-mathematics-2beefb93cec7 https://medium.com/@yujia_jo/2016-jiangsu-gaokao-national-hi...), it seems like the examination really tests for the ability to do math and problem solve under fairly heavy time pressure (150 minutes total for all questions if you are in the science stream).
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- squaresmile 5y ago
  I would say the questions by themselves don't test memorization but all the circumstances around the test push it towards memorization. Given decent fundamentals you can solve all these problems from first principles but you would take way too much time (unless you are a genius, of course). To solve these problems within the allotted time would require grinding a ton of problems so you can get familiar with a part of or the full question beforehand. Don't get me wrong, practicing problems is a good way to study math and I don't have any issue with this in a vacuum. However, this is before bringing other people into the equation. The floor is raised every year and the competition is intense. You also need to study for other subjects, not just math. All in all, "memorization" became the only strategy. It's fair to debate whether it's "rote memorization" or actually "learning the material" but with how much the students study the line between the two blurs. It feels too "overfitting" if I would borrow a statistics word.
- alskdjflaskjdhf 5y ago
  This honestly looks perfectly reasonable to me. It's obviously far harder than the SAT math section (which isn't saying much since SAT math is a bit of a joke), but the questions look completely fair and not at all like they're trying to trick or screw the student. Makes the comment upthread that started this come across as just more racist prejudices about China, unless the commenter has something to back up their claim.
  - cauthon 5y ago
    Yeah the SAT and the GRE suffer from the same problem - they’re meant to be taken by everyone, so the math is made basic and the non-STEM folks aren’t penalized when looking at total score. Completely agree regarding the Gaokao sample. This all looks like it should be well within the means of a high school senior.
  - fdgsdfogijq 5y ago
    very odd that you called my post racist

jxramos 5y ago

sounds painful, the only thing I could think of would be to test the precision of transcribing step by step. Sounds like the surface area for loss of precision is wider when you just add the noise of messy figures into a problem. A clever student could just replace the messy figures with constant variables that are shorter to write of course and at the very end substitute everything back to evaluate what comes out in the end.

gime_tree_fiddy 5y ago

I am not sure how it compares but India suffers through the same problem. It is essentially a rat race. A lot of those problems could be trick questions, but to be able to identify it, especially on a regular basis takes longer(when the question has less than a minute dedicated to it).

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
shmde 5y ago
Yes exactly, I remember our Physics teacher in 11-12th grade used to just solve trick questions and asked us to remember shortcuts and rote memorise formulae. I completely fucked up the physics portion of entrance exam and got a mere 7 out of 120 on a national test. I fucking hate physics now.
- mattwad 5y ago
  I did great in Physics because I was a year ahead in math and had already taken Pre-Cal (Trigonometry). I thought it was incredibly dumb they were asking kids to calculate velocity and acceleration before they knew what an integral or differential equation is.
- jp0d 5y ago
  The Indian education system doesn't care about learning at all. It's all about scoring good grades and getting a job at the end. It's quite important as every individual needs to be able support themselves. However, it's really bad for learning. I'm a product of that. I've been struggling a lot with an online course from MIT but at least I'm enjoying learning a lot of stuff as I'm employed now. Physics and Mathematics are the most beautiful things if done right and not under stress. Good luck, man!
  - AussieWog93 5y ago
    >The Indian education system doesn't care about learning at all. Honestly, I think people from other countries get that impression about you guys too. I've been a part of multiple (honestly, quite racist) conversations where we just WTF over the fact that these guys have masters degrees but can't solve the most basic problem assigned to them.

muh_gradle 5y ago

I have a hard time seeing US standardized testing as "better." All of my Korean peers who have studied for the CSAT or Suneung laugh at how easy the SAT/ACT math section is in comparison. K-12 education in the US is years behind at this point from many Asian countries. The fact that we are debating whether standardized testing for colleges and prestigious high schools (Lowell in SF, Stuyvesant in NYC, etc) should be banned is just laughable and only sets us further back.

strikelaserclaw 5y ago
I always wonder why these asian countries aren't doing laps around USA or other western countries if they were learning calculus in pre school.
- dahfizz 5y ago
  They're all too busy studying to run laps around us.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  Probably because high levels of math skill don’t translate to economic success. Analytical thinking is a good skill that math can teach you, but there is more than one path to that. In the context of a college education the ability to write clearly and persuasively is far more an important skill to learn. As someone with a degree in math, I’ve always found the monomaniacal focus on how America is “behind” on math education quite baffling. Do people really thinking calculus skill is necessary to succeed?
  - muh_gradle 5y ago
    It's not just math education. It's science as well. I'm bewildered that this is even something that people are even contesting what I wrote in 2022 on Hacker News of all places. The majority of PhDs in the STEMs are done by international students and have been for many years now. It's well known that American K-12 is woefully insufficient. But sure, I guess a-ok. But carry on with the straw man.

a-dub 5y ago

i mean... integrals are weird. there's a whole slew of ways of doing them and usually there's a handful of techniques that are taught for a handful of integrals of specific forms and then those show up on tests with the forms sometimes slightly hidden. how do you know it wasn't just forms and techniques you were unfamiliar with? any math you're unfamiliar with can appear as complexity for the sake of complexity.

lupire 5y ago
Part of the point is that pointless trivia is on the curriculum. Math is usually the most immune of all subjects.
- a-dub 5y ago
  yeah... my point is the whole mythology around solving "difficult" problems. "difficult" is often conflated with "not previously exposed to." similar to the mythology of the "10xer". is it brilliance, or is it having prior exposure to the right things?
  - a-dub 5y ago
    but if we're getting at the point... like the real point.. everything knowledge comes in trees. skills, abilities, talents are all the product of tradeoffs between time and choices of focus. the lazy approach is to attempt to linearize these trees when evaluating people, institutions, programs and the rest. it's this laziness, this linearization, this attempt to construct a global ordered set, that causes all the problems.