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1 in 8 incoming freshmen at UCSD (a leading institution in the states) cant solve "x + 5 = 3 + 7"... Why would I pay 30k a year or whatever it is to get a degre
by throwaway21321 10mo ago
1 in 8 incoming freshmen at UCSD (a leading institution in the states) cant solve "x + 5 = 3 + 7"... Why would I pay 30k a year or whatever it is to get a degree from somewhere like that?
- Beijinger 10mo agoMy roommate can solve this. And he just turned 6. I gave him today some equations with two unknowns....
- Beijinger 10mo agoWhy the Downvote? It is true.
- SanjayMehta 10mo agoIt's due to your username; they think you're a troll.
- Beijinger 10mo agoWell. I love Beijing. But I am not Chinese, nor do I currently live in China. Unfortunately.
- 11101010001100 10mo agoIt may come across as bragging to some. You can decide if that is fair.
- Beijinger 10mo agoWell, if someone feels extremely inferior, true. Many mothers claim their child is gifted. In this case, I believe it. It is not my son, unfortunately. I am just in a roommate situation. I give him math challenges sometimes. Today I started introducing equations with 2 unknowns.
- SanjayMehta 10mo agoMy father taught me simple algebra when I was around 8 using puzzles.
- fragmede 10mo agowhat does it add to the conversation? The fact that incoming UCSD freshman cannot solve the problem is being brought up as a failure. That this six year old can solve it does nothing to address the issue of UCSD students being unable to solve a problem that we all expect them to. It it as if you are a stoichastic parrot, bringing up a fact that, yes, it happens to be true, because it is nearby on some vector space. Hence the downvotes.
- Beijinger 10mo agoWhat do you do add to the discussion?
- jrflowers 10mo agoI can’t do a standing backflip. This is a true statement and contributes the same amount to a discussion about higher education in the US as “I know a kid that can do algebra”
- AnimalMuppet 10mo agoYou'd go to UCSD if you could solve that equation, and want to learn to do more. (If you can't solve the equation, UCSD is a very expensive way to learn how.) I think the more relevant question is, why would you go to grade school and high school at institutions that produce graduates like that?
- Cheer2171 10mo ago> why would you go to grade school and high school at institutions that produce graduates like that? Do you not know how U.S. K-12 public schools are funded by local property taxes, which means the quality of a child's education is a direct causal relationship of the wealth of their neighborhood? Why don't these children just grow up in richer neighborhoods?
- derwiki 10mo agoSan Francisco USD’s lottery system has entered the chat
- okigan 10mo agoMost are overpaying in taxes for what they are getting. Not to mention single/families without kids and seniors that still pay for school districts.
- lunar-whitey 10mo agoFear not - the American school system was built on and holds fast to the supposition that the affluent should be able to avoid any unwanted exposure to the problems of those less fortunate than themselves.
- roenxi 10mo agoThe quality of an education isn't proportional to the amount of money spent; learning is remarkably cheap if a school wants to focus on outcomes. There's a bit of give in where the teacher sits on the bumpkin-genius scale (although even then, the range of salaries isn't that wide in the big picture). Although forcing the funding to go through a collective rather than letting people choose a school and pay on in individual basis would probably deliver a pretty serious blow to the quality.
- xboxnolifes 10mo agoThe more important question is do they learn to solve it, fail out, or just get pushed through? One of those is a bad outcome, but the other 2 are fine.
- kaashif 10mo agoIf standards aren't lowered and they're just failed out, that's fine eventually, but I would prefer it to be fine from day 1.
- galleywest200 10mo agoAt my liberal arts and sciences college about 10 years ago my entry level biology teacher straight up said to the class that if people are having trouble with some of this math on the board to go home and learn algebra tonight.
- nradov 10mo agoNone of those are "fine". The problem is that such students aren't college material and shouldn't be admitted in the first place.
- cvoss 10mo agoWhat does your (dubious) example have to do with the quality of post-secondary education? If it has any relevance, it's for the quality of secondary education.
- delichon 10mo agoI wish it were dubious. I recently worked with 11th grade Algebra 2 students in New Mexico and found exactly that, and worse. Most couldn't begin to do algebra because they couldn't do simple addition and subtraction. Out of a class of 24 there were two who were arguably ready for it. But everyone is moved forward anyway. I understand your skepticism because I was shocked by it. The teachers said it all went down the drain during Covid and has not recovered. It must severely limit what they can learn in college.
- TehShrike 10mo agoIf the college would accept someone like that, they probably don't aim to take their students to a very high level.
- zetanor 10mo agoIf a university's administration overlooks a complete failure of the student selection process, it's easy to imagine that it may well overlook a complete failure of the professor selection process. The price of admission is also way too steep to wind up being the peer of mental 8th graders.
- lunar-whitey 10mo agoIlliterate incoming freshman are the product of the public middle and high school systems, not the university system. For reference: > Beginning in Fall 2022, the number of students placed into Math 2 began to grow rapidly. Math 2 was first created in 2016, and it was originally designed to be a remedial math course serving a very small number of first-year students (less than 100 students a year or around 1% of the incoming class) who were not prepared to start in our standard precalculus courses [...] In Fall 2024, the numbers of students placing into Math 2 and 3B surged further, with over 900 students in the combined Math 2 and 3B population, representing an alarming 12.5% of the incoming first-year class (compared to under 1% of the first-year students testing into these courses prior to 2021). https://senate.ucsd.edu/media/740347/sawg-report-on-admissions-review-docs.pdf https://senate.ucsd.edu/media/740347/sawg-report-on-admissio... These are students that even middling American public schools would have failed to pass from high school in decades past, or would have later failed to meet standardized test requirements prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.
- admissionsguy 10mo ago> Illiterate incoming freshman are the product of the public middle and high school systems, not the university system. That doesn't matter for the op's point. Students starting from this base won't get good in 4 years.
- maxlybbert 10mo agoIt so happens I went to high school in California. My math teacher mentioned how much interaction she had with the state universities, and also lamented the fact that universities offered remedial math courses. She felt that if somebody needed remedial math, they shouldn't be in a university; a junior college would be a better fit. At the time it felt elitist, but now I agree with her. Yes, this example shows that the high schools are doing a bad job, but it's not clear to me that the universities should clean up the mess. There are other possibilities.
- rahimnathwani 10mo agoThis is incorrect. It's 1 in ~50. Still bad! 8.5% of incoming freshmen place in Math 2. 25% of a class of Math 2 students could (EDIT: couldn't) answer 7+2=_+6 8.5% x 25% is about 2%, so 1 in 50.
- tzs 10mo agoShouldn't that be 8.5% x 75% since you want the percent who could not answer it?
- rahimnathwani 10mo agoSorry, typo. I meant 25% couldn't answer it.