On Tuesday I asked a rhetorical question about the math skills of eco-socialist scientists.
It turns out that that the rhetorical question may have been the right one.
Forget 5th graders, Cliff Mass gave the students in his Atmospheric Science 101 class a mathematics diagnostics test. These people are supposed to have passed a full year of algebra before being accepted into college level courses.
Not so much.
The results were stunning, in a very depressing way. This was an easy test, including elementary and middle school math problems. And these are students attending a science class at the State’s flagship university–these should be the creme of the crop of our high school graduates with high GPAs. And yet most of them can’t do essential basic math–operations needed for even the most essential problem solving.
Consider these embarrassing statistics from the exam:
The overall grade was 58%
43% did not know the formula for the area of a circle
86% could not do a simple algebra problem (problem 4b)
75% could not do a simple scientific notation problem (1e)
52% could not deal with a negative exponent (2 to the -2)
43% could not do simple long division problem with no remainder!
47% did not know what a cosine was.
Hit this link to go back to Cliff’s place and see a copy of the test.
Maybe these folks ARE just incompetent and not evil.
I got “C-Lane’d” in Math in Jr. High and it all went downhill from there. I can’t solve most of those, especially algebra – but I do know the formula for the area of a circle, I was good at geometry.
That is just crazy.
I write for a hobby. My peeve is the vast majority of those schooled in the past generation who can’t spell common English words.
My Doctor-daughter graduated from high school with a 3.9 GPa, and couldn’t spell. I helped edit most of her University papers, and two to four spelling mistakes per page were the average, this while using a spell-checker! She graduated Summa cum Laude anyway.
According to my RivrSis, who used to do medical transcription, most doctors under 45 couldn’t spell when they used the early keyboard-charting.
Educayshum is grate, an thas why we has to pay more an mor for it.
From the linked site:
“One problem is curriculum and textbooks. Starting in the mid-90s colleges of education and ‘curriculum specialists’ in districts become enamored with a new way of teaching math–called reform or discovery math. Instead of teaching the basics –followed by practice to mastery, the idea was that students could only learn math they ‘discovered’ themselves.”
Ah, yes. The problem becomes obvious. So-called “professional educators” (an oxymoron, IMNSHO) and their fellow travelers cast aside decades of proven techniques in favor of “feel-good” methods.
Rubbish. This crap seems to come around once a generation, and has to be beaten back every time.
NCLB was *supposed* to fix this, but created another set of problems…of course that it was created by one of those eeviilll Repubs meant that it had to fail, per the NEA playbook.
I agree with you on that pet peeve RIVRDOG. A part of my job when I worked, used to be to proof our Word Proccessor Specialist’s work ! Her returned, corrected documents were usually a sea of red ink …. this with both spell-check and grammer-check.
But it’s definately not a failing for just the last generation. She was in her late 50’s, and I’ve run across many, many others in all age groups who aren’t real English language savvy.
Maybe we’re just more attuned to the errors (like the first time I saw your pen name – I wanted to add the E) or maybe we’re just being too damn picky ! Nah !
The math failings would bother me more in that an error there, depending on the application, could potentially be deadly. Much more so than using there instead of their for instance.
Aren’t I feeling chatty today ………….?
Okay, so what IS a Cosine, and why should we care?
Isn’t that what Slide Rules were invented to do?
Oh, wait … these folks don’t know about Slide Rules, do they? And the probably don’t know what Texas Instruments builds, right?
Okay, without Wikipedea . we are in big, fat, deep doo-doo.
Gotcha!
Cosine is the ratio of the length of the hypotenuse of a right triangle to the length of the side adjacent to the acute angle in question. And for what it’s worth: no, that did not come from google or wikipedia. 🙂
I took the test, got them all right but took a while to solve 4b, longer than it should have.
This is the “app” Age. It’s all about “apps”. If we want to do something new to us, we just find the “app”, install it in either our computer or brain, and start performing the operation in question.
Used to be, you weren’t considered a professional when you did that, you were a tradesman, definitely a lower order of being. A professional could not only do the operation in question, he/she could also tell you why, i.e., the theory and mechanics behind what you were doing.
All that’s in the dustbin of history now, and we’re all just operators of equipment. We even have “apps” to write the theory…
Hey, time was I did a job where I could tell you exactly what I was doing and why I was doing it, down to the sub-molecular level.
Sometimes, I miss that job.
But only sometimes.