Re:Do the math: too much calculus? (2012)
by smallnamespace on Wednesday October 19, 2016 @02:46PM
(#12746518)
A pattern that you see almost everywhere is: imperfect incentives/objectives + strong competition = perverse outcomes
Over the last decades, we're increasingly seeing this in academia (publish or perish), the corporate world (boost the bottom-line at the expense of everything else), politics (win the election even if you have to burn your own party to the ground), and many other walks of life, as the world has gotten more competitive.
To fix this, you can either fix the objective (which may be very difficult), or you can reduce the level of competition.
Re:Do the math: too much calculus? (2012)
by Retric on Wednesday October 19, 2016 @02:49PM
(#12746563)
This also causes some odd results. If the MIT/Caltech/Harvard/etc student bodies are generally less intelligent than you might expect and often boring people.
You see the same thing at most national level high school competitions. The surface details may seem very diverse, but underneath that they tend to have a lot in common.
Maybe that's an odd way to put it, but some students wind up spending hours and hours studying AP/SAT/ACT/etc.-specific materials (literally 500+ page textbooks for each type of standardized test). Sure this method of studying helps them achieve great scores on the standardized tests, but my impression as a recent student in academia (finishing college now) is that this creates an issue where students are almost "overly" dependent on more specialized areas.
I don't know if it's an issue of not having time to learn "street smarts" (so to speak) because standardized studying takes up all their time, or if it's something else. But there's definitely some improvement that can be made.