Standardized Tests > Grades

Over at Inactivist, DA Ridgely has a pretty interesting post about grades and standardized testing. As a member of the (Smoke Free) Class of 2000 in Oregon I was one of the lucky sots used as an experimental rodentia for the CIM/CAM [warning: PDF]. The CIM/CAM was, and as far as I know still is, Oregon’s way of trying to measure student performance without having to give those peskily objective standardized exams.

Ridgely’s point is that the reason students do poorly on standardized tests in comparison to their class grades is that classes are graded incredibly easily. For the most part, I think he’s probably right. My elementary school didn’t even have letter grades until you hit sixth grade, and I went to a public school in the Portland, OR suburbs. Also, like Ridgely, I have always done extremely well on standardized tests: never below the 92nd percentile on anything, and the only time I was below the 95th was on a math test in third grade. I scored 1360 on the SAT without prepping, I got a four on the AP English exam without ever taking an advanced English course in high school, again without study. On the other hand, I was always a middling student. My GPA in high school was just a hair below 3.0 because, frankly, I didn’t care. School, especially once you realize that the rules are arbitrary and capriciously enforced, is often useless and usually tedious. I didn’t learn anything in my US History course my Junior year that I hadn’t learned during the US History course I took in 8th grade, I learned little in my Sophomore Government course that I hadn’t learned in Government in 7th. Primary and secondary education is more about keeping kids in line, making them behave, and getting them to conform to the whim of authority than it is about teaching them anything.

Is it any wonder that teachers give up and start handing out grades kids don’t deserve? I’m sure most teachers, especially in the public schools, feel brow-beaten and unappreciated. There’s no meritocracy, you can’t teach the way you want to, and to top it all off if you give little Biff a bad grade his lawyer mommy will come down and yell at you on your time off. So you give the kid a B and you shuffle him along.

This system serves no one: kids are bored and uneducated, parents are frustrated, teachers are at their wit’s end. Short of a massive structural change in the way we think about education (hint, I think cutting administration, reducing centralized planning and giving teachers more autonomy can’t hurt) we’ll continue to face exactly the same issues. Granted, in Libertopia there wouldn’t be compulsory education or public schools…but given that there will be, because they are extremely cherished if extremely faulty, there simply must be a better way. In my opinion, the best solution is to let failure happen. When there are consequences for failure, things start to shape up pretty quick.

‘We Are Watching You’

Every time one of my family members or friends teases me about my libertarian proclivities, which is often, I think of the UK. In particular, I think of their CCTV system. As now the telescreens are only in public places, but the new ability of CCTV monitors (who work for the state) to shout at citizens on the street has a very, very high creep factor.

From the article:

Big Brother is not only watching you - now he’s barking orders too. Britain’s first ‘talking’ CCTV cameras have arrived, publicly berating bad behaviour and shaming offenders into acting more responsibly.

The system allows control room operators who spot any anti-social acts - from dropping litter to late-night brawls - to send out a verbal warning: ‘We are watching you’.

That the cameras are present is enough to give anyone pause, who wants to be observed by the state at all times when wandering around on the streets? However, that the cameras are now shouting orders at people is perhaps the most frightening thing short of equipping them with automated weapons of some kind. Actually, given that most of we libertarians “crazy” fears tend to come true in one fashion or another, I’m going to speculate that within my lifetime there will be cameras on the street that tazer people.

I’ve always thought that the kind of future described in Brave New World was much more plausible than that of 1984, but given this development I’m not so certain of that anymore. Especially given perceptions from the “law-abiding majority”:

Law-abiding shopper Karen Margery, 40, was shocked to hear the speakers spring into action as she walked past them.

Afterwards she said: ‘It’s quite scary to realise that your every move could be monitored - it really is like Big Brother.

‘But Middlesbrough does have a big problem with anti-social behaviour, so it is very reassuring.’

And this is the problem that civil libertarians face going forward: most people are more than willing to trade freedom and privacy for security or the perception of same. The CCTV cameras were supposed to curb anti-social behavior, and that didn’t work well enough so they decided to give them speakers, and when that doesn’t work they’ll try something else. This is the same problem that we Americans are having at airports.

There were holes in the old system, so the government took over and instituted a new system…which was equally full of holes. When one of those holes, a small one that was unlikely to work, was exposed they tried to close it up by banning beverages. But you can still bring on other liquids and gels. Actually, “personal lubricant” is on the list but toothpaste is banned, so if you’re going to join the Mile High Club, well, your breath might stink but at least you’ll be adequately lubricated. And yet my family tells me to “get used to it” and my girlfriend sometimes chuckles about how much these sorts of things upset me.

And that’s the problem we face: liberty dies in plain view of all.

Hey, Teacher Administrator, Leave Them Undergrads Alone

I’ve been thinking a lot the past few weeks about College. Not so much the drunken memories of bad ideas from yesteryear, but rather about the sort of violence problems inherent in the system. There’s a lot sort of wrong with higher education in this country, but having a rather small sample I really can’t claim my observations are perticularly scientific. However, I do think that many of the problems could be solved with a fairly simple solution. I’ll use, oh, the not-at-all-randomly selected University of Oregon.

Now, the University of Oregon is on quarters and required 180 hours for my degree. Of those 62 hours had to be upper-division, some proportion had to be completed at the University of Oregon, 168 had to be taken for a grade (or transfer credit), 45 had to be taken at the University of Oregon for a grade, etc. The University also has, of course, general education requirements. 8 “multicultural” hours, 8 of written English, 16 of “Arts and Letters”, 16 “Social Science”, 16 “Science”, 12 hours of Mathematics for the Bachelor of Science, plus my degree requirements. I, and every other sot at the school, spent basically the first two years of his or her college experience retaking high school. Don’t believe me? The first day in WR122 (the second of two required writing courses, fortunately I’d placed out of the first) consisted of instructions in how to construct a proper thesis statement. Wait, no, excuse me, enthymeme. Yes, that’s right, they tried to teach us to construct logically unsound arguments around which to base papers. Frankly, I’d rather put all of my premises out in the open, thank-you-very-much. In any case, these are the sorts of things one should’ve learned in high school. If one didn’t, that really isn’t anyone else’s problem, and paying customers students should not be made to suffer through that sort of tripe. The same can be said for introductory World History courses, or introductory Science classes of any sort. By the time you’ve had 12 years of schooling, well, you certainly shouldn’t be unsure as to whether or not the Earth goes ’round the Sun. If you are, well, that’s your problem.

And here we have arrived at what I see as the root of the entire college problem: in order to obtain a degree, you are required to sit through what amount to another two years of high school. The material isn’t engaging, and it makes damn sure students are burned out by the time they can take the classes they’re actually interested in. So get rid of it. Instead of requiring all of that crap university wide, require 180 hours, only 30 of which can be taken pass/fail. Allow the individual departments to make whatever requirements they want: so the Journalism school might still require a bunch of the same stuff it requires, but the Mathematics department might keep the same degree requirements that they have now. Rather than “making students well-rounded” by forcing them to sample any number of the bad appetizers the university system has to offer, they would be free to take classes of their own interest and still get a degree in four years.

Corn Syrup and You, A User’s Guide.

Recent topics over at Hit & Run have led me to do a little bit of investigation into the exact nature of High Fructose Corn Syrup. One of the trolls commenters over there, a “Dave W” is absolutely convinced, beyond all evidence, that High Fructose Corn Syrup used to sweeten things is causing some sort of rise in diabetes. Also, that it is a conspiracy, and that scientists are too lazy to investigate his supposed causal link.

I am no scientific expert, but there are some basics that need to be gone over, and those are not that hard to understand, frankly. First of all, what’s the difference between High Fructose Corn Syrup and sucrose (table sugar)? Frankly, when it comes to soda sweetening, not all that much. The HFCS used in colas has a fructose/glucose sugar ratio of 55/45, by contrast sucrose is a disaccharide that’s 50/50. The other main difference is that in sucrose the fructose and glucose are bonded together, whereas they’re already separated in High Fructose Corn Syrup.

HFCS at that proportion can also taste sweeter than sucrose. It’s on the order of 1.3 times as sweet as sucrose at that concentration, at the 42% fructose concentration it tastes about the same and at the 90% fructose concentration it is much sweeter. The industry site linked above claims that HFCS-55 is taste-equivalent to sugar and can be substituted on a 1:1 basis.

I’ve seen the 1.3:1 number in more places than the 1:1 number, so for what follows that’s what I’m going to use. In the extended entry I will do the same sort of calculations for the 1:1 ratio of HFCS to sucrose. I’ll get along to how the nutrition would work out differently with taste-equivalent amounts of sucrose versus HFCS in a minute, but first I want to talk about the sugar proportions of a popular substitute for soda: apple juice.

As an example, Tropicana 100% apple juice has 25g of sugar per 8oz serving, 48g in the 15.2oz container that you find standard in most convienience stores. In a 100% apple juice product, there is roughly a 2:1 ratio of fructose to glucose with sucrose composing 10-20% of the total sugar, meaning that somewhere between 58% and 70% of the total sugar in a commercial 100% apple juice product will be fructose. Meaning that of the 48g of sugar in the aforementioned container of apple juice, something like 27.84g to 33.6g is fructose.

Over a 12oz serving there are 37.5g of sugar in that apple juice, which translates to about 21.75g to 26.35g of fructose per 12oz portion. If you compare this with the 39g of sugar in a Cocacola Classic 12oz can, which is 55% fructose from HFCS and thusly 21.45g of fructose, you can see that by-and-large on an equivalent serving basis the apple juice and soda have about the same amount of fructose. In some cases the juice might, in fact, have quite a bit more. Granted, the apple juice has a few nutrients that are, well, rather lacking from the soda, but on a purely sugar basis the amount of fructose in each is roughly equivalent.

In the context of banning soft drinks in schools, to replace them in the vending machines with juices, this won’t accomplish much. Even if one concedes, out of sportsmanship, that fructose is somehow worse for you than glucose, apple juice will provide the same more fructose than soda on a unit-volume basis. Citrus juices are about 50/50 fructose/glucose, and so on a unit-volume basis will provide slightly less fructose than soda. Tropicana Pure Premium Orange Juice (original), for instance, has 33g of sugar per 12oz serving, half of that is fructose, so it’s 16.5g of fructose per 12oz serving. Does a 4.95g difference? Maybe, but being that your just swapping fructose for glucose, and the metabolic processes aren’t too different, I’m going to guess not. The difference works out to about 4 lbs of fructose replaced by glucose, assuming one traded one 12oz serving of soda for one 12oz serving of OJ everyday of the year. Not really all that much, when you think about it.

Now that’s out of the way, let’s move on to examine what would happen if all of the HFCS in soda was replaced magically, overnight, by sucrose. If HFCS is 1.3 times as sweet as sucrose, that means that the 39g of sugar in Coke from HFCS will be replaced by 50.7g of sucrose to achieve a taste-equivalent level of sweetness. So, of those 50.7g of sugar, 25.35 of them would be fructose. Thusly, not only would your total sugar intake increase by 30%, but your intake of fructose would increase by 18%. If fructose is worse for you, it is hard to see how this might be an improvement*.

This all leads to one very obvious conclusion, even from a guy who only understands the basics of chemistry: that switching to sucrose from HFCS for the purposes of sweetening soft drinks is unlikely to have a large effect on the amount of fructose one consumes. Further, at worst, it could increase total sugar consumption fairly substantially. So, Dave’s of the world, please relax and have a nice cold soda. Put it on my tab.
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There Oughtn’t Be A Law

I got in a really, really silly argument with my lovely girlfriend a number of weeks ago…an argument about jam.

You see, I have a proclivity for Smucker’s Black Raspberry Jam which, for some reason or another, Amanda insists is not actually jam. In her world, apparently, the fruit product in question must contain seeds in order to be jam.

We insisted at one another that the product either was (my position) or was not (her position) certainly jam. Finally, because I am a pedant, I declared that there was likely a law about it. I wanted to be wrong, but I knew that the FDA would never let something as important as the labeling of fruit spreads to go unregulated. And, lo, 21 CFR 150 — FRUIT BUTTERS, JELLIES, PRESERVES, AND RELATED PRODUCTS.

This is the sort of world in which we live. Whether or not you’re allowed to make apple-pear jam is regulated by the federal government. The way in which you must label said jam, if you are even allowed to produce it, is regulated by the federal government. The ingredients and disclosure of same are, you guessed it, regulated by the federal government. Jumpin’ Jesus Christ on a pogo stick.

Let’s Give The Kids Some Speed

In writing this post over at the Commentator site earlier today, I got to thinking about how similar the ADHD diagnosis is to what we used to call “childhood”. And, frankly, I’m a little disturbed by it.

Now, this should be construed as some rant against mental health professionals or the like; I was helped immensely a few years back by therapy and an SSRI (Celexa, all fine but the dreams). However, I do think that ADD and ADHD are severely over diagnosed. It seems to be that any kid who doesn’t sit quietly, do the class activities, and do whatever the tall person at the front of the class asks is diagnosed as “hyper active” and put on pills. Sure, some kids really cannot function, period, without medication but I bet a lot more could do fine without it.

I’d like to offer an alternate hypothesis, one that might go a little way toward explaining this massive surge of “hyperactivity”. First of all, most of school is boring. Really boring. Bored kids find ways to entertain themselves, and some kids are going to find the mindless horror that is primary and secondary education more boring than others. This is particularly true of kids who are advanced beyond their peers in things like reading, math, critical thinking, and science. If your parents read to you and all that, like teachers in particular are always saying to do, you’re long past the Dick-and-Jane claptrap by the time you’re in elementary school. What’s more, if you’re even slightly precocious you’ll be reading on a “college level” (whatever that means) around fourth grade, so it’s not like Hardy Boys books are really goign to stimulate your little mind very much. Here’s the thing: it isn’t a kid’s fault if he/she is bored in class, that’s the teacher’s fault.

And it’s pretty easy to see why that happens. When was the last time you saw a national initiative to help smart kids stay interested in school? When? The last national programs on education I can recall are No Child Left Behind and HeadStart. Neither of which really seem to be doing all that much. Having grown up in Oregon, we had that horrid CIM/CAM thing, which was designed to make sure that all kids were meeting certain minimum standards (fortunately I graduated just before it was fully implemented, the class of 2000 being the test class, which should’ve shown them it was a terrible idea). Nothing, absolutely nothing, is being done for smart kids. Everybody figures they’ll get by on their own.

I can tell you exactly why my scholastic performance up through Junior High* was mediocre: it was all boring, and I knew most of it already. How? Am I some sort of wunderkind? No, but I did have the good fortune of family and family friends who taught me all sorts of things before I reached school. How to read, how to diagam a sentence, basic copy editing, a short course on US History, math up through basic algebra: I picked these things up simply by growing up around the people I did. Putting me in an environment where I was expected to read McGraw-Hill primers didn’t exactly challenge me. They didn’t introduce fractions until I was in 4th grade, and I was a year ahead in math. The first time I had an assignment in school that was interesting was 6th grade**, the first time I had one that was intellectually challenging was 8th***.

Oregon did have the Talented And Gifted (TAG) program for “smart” kids, but it was laughable. Often I was pulled out of math and science classes, the only things even sort of interesting in an otherwise boring day, so that I could draw pictures; build towers out of newspaper; or solve brain teasers with a few of my classmates. This accomplished two things: 1) made me even more bored in school, as the only things I was usually present for were bloody “art appreciation”****, etc and 2) further social stigmatization attached with being nerdy. The latter, well, whatever, that’s how kids are and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it so meh. The former, to this day, makes me incredibly angry to think about. What did I learn from any of that? That art is boring (especially when some guy’s mom is reading off museum cards to slides of 13th-century oils), and that there wasn’t a point in even trying to learn anything in school because it simply wasn’t there to learn. Not exactly what my primary educators were going for, I’d guess. And I’m not special, there are literally millions of individuals of similar intelligence to mine. The “highly gifted” category or above that comprises ~.7% of the population as a whole is 2.1 million folks in the US alone (on balance, usual statistical qualifiers).

Understandably the required curricula of public schools aim to satisfy the average child, and I’m sure that many an average child has been perfectly well educated by the public school system, the problem is once you get more than one standard deviation from the mean, especially on the upper end. The reasons that the smarter kids are largely ignored are many, but I think the two biggest is that they comprise such a small percentage of the population relative to the kids who’re about average, and the general perception that they’ll do fine on their own and not need any extra attention. There isn’t a one-size answer for this. We’ve developed an almost fetishistic urge to make sure that below average kids “get the help they need”, while at the same time devoting fewer and fewer resources to help exceptional kids stay interested and ahead. Often these are conflicting goals, but they needn’t be.

The solution is a combination of school choice and local curriculum selection. National, and to a lesser extent State, curricula beyond the basics such as reading and arithmetic impose a one-size model on all kids. Clearly, this fails all too often. If municipalities had more control over their programs, they could select options that benefited the distribution of students in their areas most. But that’s only part of the solution.

Current districting schemes, with children assigned to school largely by geographical area, do nothing to put kids into the best academic environment. Were parents allowed to choose any school in the district for their children, schools could specialize in one sort of student: below average kids, the average, the gifted, or any combination that might pop up. Oddly, this is an idea Milton Friedman has been putting forward since 1962. Granted, Friedman’s reasons for proposing school choice are different, but the principle is the same. Ideally, beyond setting very basic requirements and giving parents vouchers, the government would get out of the school business all together. Maybe then everbody could have a decent primary and secondary educational experience.
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Things I Could Afford If The Government Wasn’t Stealing 6.25% Of My Salary To Give To Old People.

1) An extra 150-200 square feet of living space (presuming I still rented).*

2) Full comprehensive and collision insurance with a $500 deductible for my car.*

3) Saving more for a new car.*

4) This.

5) Dropping $1,000 into the S&P 500 and just leaving it there until I retire. $1,000 placed in 1925 would’ve had a value over $10 million in 2002, even if past performance is no promise of future gains for $1,000 I’m willing to find out.

6) Either one of These along with a bunch of accessories, or one of these.

7) Somewhere between Four and Six round-trip plane tickets (coach).

8) A much larger contribution to my 401(k) and Roth IRA.*

9) To purchase instead of rent, thusly building equity and increasing my long-term financial stability.*

10) A nicer car once I decide to buy a new one.*

Things indicated with * would be on-going expenditures if I got my OASI contribution instead of sending it to somebody else because FDR decided it’d be a good idea. Things not so indicated I could purchase every year at the same wage/price level. That’s right, without OASI I could buy a 42″ Plasma TV every year.

Now maybe you think some old person I’ve never met and who planned for his or her retirement poorly is more important than my here-to-fore entirely hypothetical Plasma TV. Okay, but is that person more important than my here-to-fore entirely hypothetical equity in a townhouse? What about my hypothetical S&P investment? What about my hypothetical car insurance? Or my extra 200 square feet? My extra 401(k) and Roth IRA contributions? My car savings?

Suddenly it’s not so easy, sure I might “squander” this gain on consumer goods or consumer durables, but I already have a TV and this apartment is smaller than I’d really like. I know personally (and I know anecdote is no scientific measure, but the elderly are much more wealthy than the young on balance) elderly people who are getting nearly my annual salary in OASI benefits, and most certainly don’t need it. Does that seem right? Is that “fair” like everyone is always trying to make Social Security out to be?

I know you can’t just hack benefits off now, today, because people have the expectation of it. I have suggested before, though, that it wouldn’t really be any different just to outright screw everyone under 25 (or at least be honest about it, because it’s gonna happen one way or the other) and phase out the plan because I’m pretty sure those of us under that age aren’t expecting anything anyway.