Math, Science Popular Until Students Realize They’re Hard

Re:Math, Science Popular Until Students Realize They’re Hard by rayiner on Tuesday July 09, 2013 @06:36PM (#6016153)

Exams like that are where the teaching function of school collides headlong with the (more important) sorting function of school. I found the phenomenon frustrating in engineering school, and even more frustrating in law school. They both prominently featured exams that looked nothing like what was taught in class. They both favor the kind of cynical person who ignores the larger ideas taught in class to focus on day 1 on the final exam, and also the socially competent who can get previous exams and the like from social networks. They also, completely incidentally, identify the few people who are so beyond the curve they could answer anything the professor might ask without studying, which lends them an air of legitimacy that perpetuates their existence.

You see it less in the humanities because the sorting function of school is so much less important than the teaching function. No lucrative jobs are riding on getting a 3.7 in art history versus a 3.4. (Everyone will be unemployed anyway...)

As an aside, I'm convinced grades are just an awful aspect of "education." They don't serve any purpose other than making it easier for employers to figure out who to hire, which I don't think is a legitimate function of school.

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Re:Math, Science Popular Until Students Realize They’re Hard by dvt on Tuesday July 09, 2013 @06:46PM (#6016206)

The irony here is that most R&D/engineering jobs do their own training. My mom, for example, works as a chem engineer/researcher -- every time they hire someone, they also train them. I think it's ironic that people bust their asses in school to get a 3.5+ and end up being trained like little robots anyway once they find their "dream job." Anyone with some elementary knowledge of chemistry could pass these training courses and get to work in a couple of weeks.

It just goes to show how disconnected academia is from real life.

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Re:Math, Science Popular Until Students Realize They’re Hard by eli_gottlieb on Wednesday July 10, 2013 @07:45AM (#6018791)

Well it's the employers who claim they need fresh workers with all that academic training!

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Re:Math, Science Popular Until Students Realize They’re Hard by tehwalrus on Wednesday July 10, 2013 @09:28AM (#6019309)

> "the socially competent who can get previous exams and the like from social networks"

side note: at Cambridge, every past exam in every subject[1] is in the college library[2], and it's assumed that you'll photocopy them and work through the last 5 years or so for practice. This doesn't help much, of course, because you get a new crazily difficult exam every year[3].

[1] probably not going all the way back to 1209... [2] i.e. 50-odd small libraries near the students' accommodation, mine was accessible 24 hours a day. [3] unless it's Terentjev in TP1 (Theoretical Physics 1), who just set us a bunch of previous years questions, which I hadn't bothered to finish solving because they never reused questions. I'm not bitter, I promise...

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Re:Math, Science Popular Until Students Realize They’re Hard by huherto on Tuesday July 09, 2013 @08:09PM (#6016555)

> They don't serve any purpose other than making it easier for employers to figure out who to hire, which I don't think is a legitimate function of school.

Interesting point. At the same time it justifies the existence of schools since a lot of people go to school to get a better job.

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