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When I see people argue "You can't measure the learning that's going on" I have to disagree. It's only based on my personal experience, but in undergrad I didn

When I see people argue "You can't measure the learning that's going on" I have to disagree. It's only based on my personal experience, but in undergrad I didn't see a lot of learning going on. My (large public Midwestern) school had CS and math majors that studied and learned. But there were a lot of people in other majors doing just enough to graduate. And professors didn't require much. I don't know if it's 10%, 20% or 30% that learned, but it wasn't 50%. I see this in NYC. The mayor's belief is that we are doing a little too much testing, and closing too many schools. Their reaction to bad schools is "We just might not be measuring the learning." In this case, they seem to be doing an accurate job of measuring the bullying at least.

nmrm 12y ago
Maybe I should have been more specific. Major and content agnostic standardized tests are useless at the college level. This should be fairly obvious; I think you have to do some work to believe it's possible that it isn't true. How can you measure how well a university prepared a student if you don't even know what the student majored in? On thing you can measure some fairly rudimentary stuff they should have had coming in (grammar, basic math, etc.). But this is answering the wrong question; universities shouldn't be responsible for catching students up. It's a disservice to people who actually wanted to take the course in which the review happens. The other thing you can do is measure generic "critical thinking". But I think this sort of test is ripe for abuse. I don't trust college administrators to not abuse it. And besides, generic "critical thinking" isn't. See the link I posted in my other response here.
- mathattack 12y ago
  I agree that content (17th century European history, for exam) and general thinking (How to think critically) are very hard to separate. I don't know of a good answer, but I think with all the money that gets thrown at schools, it's worth asking how they are improving the students.

nmrm 12y ago

Maybe I should have been more specific. Major and content agnostic standardized tests are useless at the college level. This should be fairly obvious; I think you have to do some work to believe it's possible that it isn't true. How can you measure how well a university prepared a student if you don't even know what the student majored in? On thing you can measure some fairly rudimentary stuff they should have had coming in (grammar, basic math, etc.). But this is answering the wrong question; universities shouldn't be responsible for catching students up. It's a disservice to people who actually wanted to take the course in which the review happens. The other thing you can do is measure generic "critical thinking". But I think this sort of test is ripe for abuse. I don't trust college administrators to not abuse it. And besides, generic "critical thinking" isn't. See the link I posted in my other response here.

mathattack 12y ago
I agree that content (17th century European history, for exam) and general thinking (How to think critically) are very hard to separate. I don't know of a good answer, but I think with all the money that gets thrown at schools, it's worth asking how they are improving the students.