I took an exam once and there was a question on it that wasn't covered. I had vaguely remembered something from somewhere else and was able to piece together the formula and actually got the correct answer. When the test marks came back, the prof apologized about the question and didn't count it in the grades. Myself and two other people in the class who got the answer were held after class and accused of cheating. That is the school system. They do not reward creativity or ingenuity.
I grew up poor. I thought my ticket to not being poor was an education. By the time I was applying for colleges (I had good grades) I realized that the education system was a joke.
I got through college, a very well-regarded engineering program, putting in the bare minimum effort to graduate.
I make a lot of money now, 20 years later. I attribute none of my success to public education or college, I didn’t learn anything besides our education system (in the US) is not what they tell kids it is growing up.
We beat the drum of education because it seems like a nice simple solution to fix a lot of perceived problems. “Oh you mean if we just throw money at this problem it’ll fix it?!”
Baltimore city gets some of the highest per-student federal funding in the country. My daughter is in a public middle school there, living with her mom. I’m in the burbs with my wife and kids.
She told me just yesterday she wants to go to high school in my district because “well it just seems more normal than city schools”
She also thought California was a country up until yesterday. Straight A student.
At some point, probably too late, we’ll realize we did it a wrong. Floating kids through high school, dropping an anvil of debt around their neck for a college degree they won’t use. Met a fellow the other day, he has his masters in social work. Making very, very good money, as a regional manager of a car sales group, I forget the specifics. Said he never used his degree and he is very grateful he has a clear path to pay the debt off.
I don’t know what the fix is, but I’ve seen enough to know what we do now, ain’t it.
> We beat the drum of education because it seems like a nice simple solution to fix a lot of perceived problems. “Oh you mean if we just throw money at this problem it’ll fix it?!”
Its strange to say, but its actually thanks to black racism is why we're here.
The result was that the courts determined that "aptitude/IQ tests" unfairly discriminated against black people. However, education requirements are not seen as such.
So, we get "decent paying job" requiring 'a degree'. What degree? Doesnt matter. The degree is the legal form of 'we dont hire blacks'. It also has the side effect of 'we dont hire the poors' as well.
Obviously there are positions that require advanced schooling. Im not talking about those.
It is an article of faith on message boards that IQ tests are somehow unlawful in employment in the US because of Griggs. That's patently not the case. Plenty of large corporations with deep pockets do general cognitive testing (and even IQ testing) of incoming applicants. The companies that administer these tests have logo crawls, like every other product company, and the names are companies your mom will recognize.
Griggs says that you can't employ IQ tests to discriminate for jobs where the IQ threshold you established is immaterial to the job. For modern knowledge work, that's a trivial bar to clear. It is essentially the case that Griggs is a nonfactor in white collar employment.
My motivation for calling this out isn't that I'm OK with discriminating against Black people; quite the opposite, in fact. IQ tests aren't used more widely because they aren't effective at qualifying employees. IQ is an idee fixee among A Certain Part Of The Internet, and part of their pitch is that IQ tests are a secret cheat code that would enable hiring purely on merit, if only the woke wouldn't prevent it. No, false.
Sounds like the synthesis problem could be the difference between a 8-9/10 and a 10/10 score. It would work in an accuracy grading system instead of a hedge against stupidity system.
> Myself and two other people in the class who got the answer were held after class and accused of cheating.
Wow. I was never able to escalate situation to the direct accusation of cheating. I just got my marks lowered a bit because I used methods that were "above my abilities", as my math teacher believed. Though really I thought school math was boring and tried hard to make it more interesting, less routine, less relying on memorizing things, and more clever shortcuts from general principles.
But she never accused me directly. I know her explanation for lowered marks just because my mother visited her once with a specific test results and asked why marks are so low. I wanted a direct accusation, I was trying to provoke her to doubt my methods, but either I tried too hard and she knew deep inside of her the real situation, or I needed to do something truly exceptional and failed.
Yeah, thinking about it now, I should probably try some existing and very known methods but far above the school level, something she felt herself familiar with, so she could hope to prove that I've used methods without understanding them. And then it would come to my ability to prove, that I understand my methods. Something like raising e^(ix) into n-th power, to derive a formula sin(nx) = f(sin(x), cos(x)). Though, it is might be too weird for her.
> They do not reward creativity or ingenuity.
You can stimulate yourself if you look at it as a rebellion against the system. Teenagers are good at rebelling. Though, rebellion can make matters worse. I rebelled against history trying to get the lowest marks possible. It didn't end well, and I not just didn't learn history, I've got a life-long trauma, I start to regress to my teenager mind level every time I face history.
That's infuriating to me, and I wasn't even the victim!
I'm so lucky such a thing never happened to me. The closest thing was a math teacher in middle school asking me about a problem solution of mine in a test, that he had marked "mysterious" (I had to come up with my own solution path during the test because I hadn't memorized the canonical one we were taught). He asked me to explain my reasoning, and when he was satisfied that it was sound he gave me full marks for the question.
