Winter 2021 LC Thread—I Want Sous Vide

i feel like simplicitus is trolling me in the most low key fashion i’ve ever seen

Anyhow, what I’m basically saying is that we shouldn’t worry scro, there are plenty of tards out there living really kick ass lives. My first wife was tarded. She’s a pilot now.

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I’m gonna be honest: I didn’t know small schools did the whole valedictorian thing. Home-schoolers don’t, right? So I was thinking of predominately minority public schools in major cities with >1k students.

The concept is correct, just the exaggeration is wild. The valedictorian not exceeding the minimum the athletes need to be eligible doesn’t sound right, right?

SATs seem…fine?

I’m fairly certain they are the admissions tool most correlated with academic success in college. I guess the idea is some combination of:

A. The test is racist and classist because people with resources can hire tutors, bribe doctors for unlimited time, etc.

B. Smart but lazy kids are somehow less deserving of spots in good colleges.

But, what about smart kids whose parents suck, who went to crap schools, etc. They used to get to good schools via SAT, what now?

Seems like you’re just kicking high IQ kids of all types out for highly disciplined grinders. Also, this further incentivizes cheating (which is already rampant).

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I think it just comes down to SATs were A Good Thing when they supported the mythology of meritocracy and well off white people could point to it as a data point to justify their stranglehold on all the best jobs. Now with non-white kids outperforming, probably due to increasingly available and accessible online data and tools, SATs are A Bad Thing because they miss all the Intangibles that rich white kids obviously have to justify their stranglehold on all the good jobs.

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Yeah my bad, I was showing my Big City Bias there.

Speaking as a very good test taker who isn’t a very good student tests are not particularly correlated to being good at the real world. Thankfully neither is being a diligent student. In fact I’ve watched quite a few supposedly excellent students flail around and fail totally on contact with reality… particularly when they are getting judged for the outcomes of their actions rather than whether or not the completed them with an adequate amount of neatness and glitter.

Our entire talent scouting and development system is busted. It overvalues rich kids, rules followers, angle shooters (everything from soft angle shoots like exploiting how grades are given to outright cheating), and people who taking tests comes easily to. It produces far too many people who are good at following instructions (which computers are better at full stop) and not enough people capable of figuring out what to do next without them.

For fucks sake the idea of having a standardized test that kids can cram for is antithetical to the goal of accurately evaluating them.

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There’s probably some kind of mold that could give DS a run for his SATs.
https://twitter.com/AlampayDavis/status/1394067139947081736?s=19

Ftr I’m against most testing and grading.

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obv feed kids those slime moulds

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I can attest to this as well – I took the GRE when I was flirting with doing a Master’s degree and my score would’ve gotten me a scholarship at pretty much any American university I wanted, despite not being cut out in any way for post-graduate work (and knowing it). Way too much emphasis is put on standardized testing.

CITR is very good.

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Tests are not written with that purpose in mind. In effect, they tell you your value as a person. In doing that they devalue you even if you score high.

I’ve gotten worse at being tested over time. At first they were a fun challenge and a break from the normal boring routine. The fun wore off.

POP QUIZ HOTSHOT

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Without standardized tests the only metrics left tell me I’m a piece of shit.

So yeah, should probably get rid of them.

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Standardized tests are a distraction, the big issue is that we treat quality education like it’s a rare commodity that needs to be rationed out to only the most deserving students. The barriers to entry are completely artificial and stupid and the whole way we deliver education needs to be overhauled.

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A little self evaluation is great for learning. I give myself little microtests as I read. As a result I’m a very slow reader compared to most people (I won’t make it through a @ChrisV post without looking up a word or two) but more effective than I would be otherwise.

Testing as a way to try to inspect our way out of the consequences of having a bad system doesn’t make sense.

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My metrics tell me you’re not.

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This is because the purpose of “education” has been changed from educating to providing channels to privilege. If the purpose of education is to establish which people get mapped to which quartile of affluence then by definition you can’t give the “best” education to everyone.

Lol today’s youth is if anything better than yesterday’s youth. The idea that children need to learn to accommodate the educational system rather than the other way around rubs me pretty wrong though.

You’re a high tier subject matter expert too though. It doesn’t really make a ton of sense for you to be the person whose job it is to sell your subject to a bunch of kids. That’s for someone who is good at selling not someone who can actually do the work. You’re supposed to be teaching people who are interested in math/physics to a pretty advanced degree.

In previous times if you didn’t want to learn what they were teaching you left school for the most part. Now that’s not really legal. HS graduation rate in the US in 1940 was 50%, now it’s almost 90%.