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> Exactly 0 of 627 college students can answer simple questions like 'What is the name of the mountain range that separates Europe from Asia?' or 'What is the l

by xwdv 4y ago

> Exactly 0 of 627 college students can answer simple questions like 'What is the name of the mountain range that separates Europe from Asia?' or 'What is the last name of the author of The Brothers Karamazov?'. These simple questions that are just recitation of facts are worthless. I don’t even know the answers to these. The only questions that measure anything useful are critical thinking type questions, consider simple things any CS student should be able to answer such as “Describe the design for a roles based authentication system” or “Describe an implementation of a communications bus between multiple systems in a micro services architecture”

baazaa 4y ago
Critical thinking is such a nebulous term there's not even an agreed-upon way of measuring it, much less old tests of it to compare against. It's largely been used by the educational establishment to justify why students come out of 13 years of compulsory schooling functionally innumerate and illiterate. Oh sure they don't know anything, but their critical thinking skills are off the charts! If we use the slightly better-defined term of problem solving skills, there's no worse way of teaching that than putting a teacher up in front of 20 students teaching a standardised curriculum and giving out standardised tests. In the CS context, most students first learn how to think through a problem when they learn to code. What were they doing in school? Certainly not thinking through problems. Edit: Also you completely misunderstood the import of those two questions. Anyone with a passing familiarity with world literature can answer the Dostoyevsky question, and anyone with a passing familiarity with geography or Russian history can answer the Urals question. You're note supposed to memorise the answer, the answer comes naturally if you're not pig-ignorant about the world. I wouldn't expect most students to know them, I sure as hell would expect more than 0.00% to know them. Kids know nothing because schools imbed extreme anti-intellectualism into even the brightest of kids.

by xwdv 4y ago

baazaa 4y ago

Critical thinking is such a nebulous term there's not even an agreed-upon way of measuring it, much less old tests of it to compare against. It's largely been used by the educational establishment to justify why students come out of 13 years of compulsory schooling functionally innumerate and illiterate. Oh sure they don't know anything, but their critical thinking skills are off the charts! If we use the slightly better-defined term of problem solving skills, there's no worse way of teaching that than putting a teacher up in front of 20 students teaching a standardised curriculum and giving out standardised tests. In the CS context, most students first learn how to think through a problem when they learn to code. What were they doing in school? Certainly not thinking through problems. Edit: Also you completely misunderstood the import of those two questions. Anyone with a passing familiarity with world literature can answer the Dostoyevsky question, and anyone with a passing familiarity with geography or Russian history can answer the Urals question. You're note supposed to memorise the answer, the answer comes naturally if you're not pig-ignorant about the world. I wouldn't expect most students to know them, I sure as hell would expect more than 0.00% to know them. Kids know nothing because schools imbed extreme anti-intellectualism into even the brightest of kids.