it’s always called a union up here, which leads to concerns that its basically socialist. But I’ve always maintained they should be called guilds, because of course, that’s exactly what they are. There’d be less friction if they were commonly called that.
Must be really weird having so many rules in place to do a certain job.
Yeah, actuarial societies would never do something like that.
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Standard, it’s alright when we do it, but its bad when they do it.
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Depressing results. But this is not surprising when you take the calculators away! Arithmetic skills are terrible.
And people are kind of proud about being bad at or not liking math.
Rounding to the nearest hundred is no harder without a calculator than with.
My youngest would struggle with the last 5, but I blame that on her age and having not yet seen negative numbers in school.
This is pretty much in line with what I see here at UC Santa Barbara. Similar student cohort to UCSD.
We used to have a remedial class, Math 15, which addressed these deficiencies, but the math department scrapped that about 20 yrs ago.
I’ve been developing an algebra skills program for these students for the last few years. It’s starting to catch on a bit. I may need to devote more time to it in the near future.
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The UC system scrapped SAT scores as a requirement for admission in 2021. This is the result.
No idea how many of these folks were “on” the rowing, tennis, or archery teams.
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No, this has been a problem for decades. Included in this underperforming group are science and engineering majors. The students on sports teams are generally good students in my experience. At least they are willing to put in the effort, where plenty of others are lazy enough to just slide by and barely pass.
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How does a school with a sub 30% acceptance rate struggle to find kids who are good at math? Surely there would be some in the 70% reject pool.
138 students out of, what, 8000 or so?
Crazy thing is that these students, despite their shortcomings, are studying for STEM degrees.
Also, why are students (20% of them) who have passed AP Calculus, in the remedial math course?? “Easy A”?
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This is not the general student population, it’s just students that have already been flagged as having math deficiencies. At my former university there was an initial math placement test; a score statistically indistinguishable from guessing got you assigned to the remedial math course (which I taught for a while).
One semester to get students prepped for precalculus. Most were doomed to failure. A portion of the class was student athletes, but way too many were eager young students who had been lied to and screwed over by their high schools and teachers. Kids who could have learned this stuff, but were let down by schools that told them they were competent at this stuff when they weren’t, and then were faced with the impossible task of relearning years on math in 4 months.
This is not a new phenomenon, it’s been happening for decades.
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This is the problem for most of them - they want an easy fix and I have to convince them it is probably going to be a longer process.
I have had plenty of students who can get competent enough with just a bit of review. Once they take it seriously, many of them can shake off the rust and do fine.
True.
I taught these exact courses long time ago at a state university while earning my Masters.
Kids thinking they were going to be engineers taking high-school Algebra, in college.
Sweet job, actually: lived at home about three miles from campus; free staff parking (it is a commuter school with not enough parking); taught during the day; had “office hours” where I studied, took classes at night. Took on tutoring kids for extra money.
I was gonna say that didn’t match my experience, but thinking about it I TAed about the 2nd or 3rd chem eng course and I suppose that by then those with math deficiencies had already failed and moved on to something else. I only remember one that REALLY couldn’t hack the math. It really was painful to grade his papers. You felt like you should be able to give him credit for something, but it just wasn’t there.