Student Loans and the SAVE plan

Sanrith Descartes said:

I believe that standardized testing and its multiple choice questions is dumbing us down. Essay questions force the use of the brain beyond raw memorization ability. But of course essay questions are "racist".

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I don't disagree at all, essay questions are a far better way to judge the student's grasp of the subject than multiple choice. (oral exams are even better)

The problem is that its nearly impossible to grade written essays in a truly objective and reproducible manner. I've never seen a program that could truly evaluate writing quality like a human grader. Either it ends up as a system to be gamed, or a meaninglessly low bar (e.g. number of grammatical errors).

This makes it in my opinion not a better choice for mass testing applications, despite being in principle a better tool on its own.

If its any comfort, fill in the bubble multiple choice testing is also super racist!

Cad said:

This is not true at all, you're looking at outliers and drawing conclusions. You're ignoring all the people who drop out of college early or do nothing at all related to their field of study who are earning jack shit.

There's a very strong correlation between level of income and education, period.

Edit: Should go ahead and say this all only applies to STEM, they could cut the rest of the college programs and it would improve the overall quality of everyone's education.

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I don't disagree, education has always been critical. The difference is that it's not the same in every system or in every era. 'College' is sort of meaningless as a word to compare what you did in 1780 vs 1980 vs 2020 even in the same campus.

Let's recap what your question was by clarifying concepts:

Does anyone have any evidence that [people in 1900 of above average intelligence with a more traditional primary education who managed to excel in middle school enough to be given the opportunity to go to high school] are actually smarter than [average people in 2023 who it is de facto illegal to fail for low intellect but have an additional 4 years of memorizing mostly state propaganda and recently studied at any college for which there are zero barriers for entry].

If you distill that down, then, the question is really "does anyone have any evidence that an average person with 4 years of current high school curriculum is smarter than an above average person from 1900 who just entered 9th grade". Thus the question being presented is dependent on whether you believe the memorization of facts is education, and whether or not recall is 'smart'. I certainly don't think any evidence would show that the average high school education today is skills focused (critical thinking, problem solving, research, rhetoric, mathematics, etc.). I'm dubious as to if these high school graduates could even recall similar details or facts about subjects like grammar, history, civics, etc. Perhaps another way of asking this is "was the education through 8th grade in 1900 on average superior to that through 12th in 2023".

I digress. You have the weight of the entire propaganda machine of a multi billion dollar industry on your side, so you win.

Cad said:

Did you even look at that 1900's test? It was all memorization.

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That's really ignoring a lot of secondary skills that are required to understand, analyze, solve a problem and then write a solution. Yes of course you must memorize things. But even stuff like Geography requires spatial intelligence since you can't just 'memorize' a list of the countries that border every other country. Math problems that are simple symbol manipulation are much easier than complex word problems.

Cad said:

What is passing? What did the students in 1900 answer on that test? How was it graded?

Yes I think they trivially could depending on the answers above.

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Fair enough. Answer the questions in the most generous way you like, and I'd still disagree. We just have a fundamental difference in what we think of as the "average college student".
I suspect that whatever students you've been exposed to have been pretty far above average.

I mean, I disagree with almost everything about the current regime and status quo. I've no doubt the 'average graduate' from the Colorado School of Mines is orders of magnitude smarter than random KY 9th graders in 1900.

I just think that gets washed away to dust when you start looking at mean average smarts of '2020s college student' as a class of people.

Whatever we define "smarter" to be, modern people are almost certainly more so than their 1900 counterparts just on the basis of nutrition and medicine. Human genetics simply can't change that much in 3-4 generations. What we're really arguing about is education, and the fact that the average education level has improved isn't really debatable just on literacy rates alone.

Cad said:

you want to act like college graduates can't tie their shoes.

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I've taught many undergrad courses, and I can assure you that sandals and loafers are pretty popular

Sanrith Descartes said:

But as the instructor, it should be my opinion if they properly grasp the information I taught them. My opinion is the one that counts. The issue of impartiality is one of shitty unethical teachers and is the excuse to move away from essays. The problem isnt the essay tests but shitty unethical teachers and rather than fix the problem, we just do away with essay questions.

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Yeah we're talking about different contexts. When you brought up standardized testing I went straight to SAT / GRE / etc. I'm only defending it in those contexts.

In the classroom, absolutely I'm in favor of more essays and less multiple choice.

Aldarion said:

In the classroom, absolutely I'm in favor of more essays and less multiple choice.

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Even better, applied projects. In my experience on both the writing and grading end of essays, they mostly measure your ability to generate well-structured academic prose. That's not without value, but it's not exactly the same thing as demonstrating durable subject matter understanding and competence. I've written term papers where I can't even remember the topic, never mind arguments, but even now 25 years out of school I can tell you the hows and whys of every major application I worked on.

Of course, this is a massively higher workload on the teacher.

Cad said:

I also depose people constantly who are not educated, and I think you guys wildly overestimate how stupid the average worker at the average company is. I don't mean the IT people I mean like the machine shop guys, the forklift guys, the delivery drivers. These guys are absolute morons but you want to act like college graduates can't tie their shoes.

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I don't know why you are so antagonistic on this subject. I think there is a real discussion going on here at the bounds of acceptable 'science' since we're not actually permitted to learn the truth about certain things. But your premise was about college students, not graduates. I think you're shifting the goal posts. That might be an honest mistake in that you intended to claim something different, but that's not what many of us are questioning here.

I have a background in certain areas and have worked with population size datasets (as in literally all) from at least the finance and credit reporting perspective for various clients. So I can at least nominally say that the average college 'student' who touched any federal student loans is probably way worse off than you realize... it's just a numbers game. Now perhaps all these people are super smart also, and just haven't been given a real chance due to systemic something or other, and I can't readily prove or disclose things to you for obvious reason and only had anonymized records. Also of course while my own experience is a few years out of date and from a completely different perspective of credit reporting history which is only partially correlated to 'smartness'.

Cad said:

Did you even look at that 1900's test? It was all memorization.

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That isn't the one I was talking about. It was an actual test given to students of today using old material. Math, English, practical items of that nature.

Cad said:

Ok can you distill down your point to a cogent argument so we can be talking about the same thing then?

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(mean) average college student in 2023 = dumb dumb

Cad said:

Compared to what?

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An above average 9th grader from Kentucky in 1912 I guess?

I don't know how many records or metrics we could really compare, since there is such a maligning of history in the modern progressive lens. I admit my bias is that people where nowhere near as 'dumb' as everyone living past the 'end of history' readily admits. Stuff like people thinking electric cars started with Tesla, the fax machine is from the 80s and not the 1840s, etc.