Investing in education is individually rational, but collectively destructive

Tuesday, May 13th, 2025

Case Against Education by Bryan CaplanArctotherium summarizes Bryan Caplan’s Case Against Education and notes that the chief implication of the signaling model of education is that investing in education is individually rational, but collectively destructive:

Goodhart’s Law states that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

Whenever there is a signal for desirable traits, prospective signalers can focus on either (1) improving those traits or (2) optimizing for the signal itself, making it a worse signal of the underlying traits (i.e., “Goodharting”). Educational attainment has been a target for a very long time, so it’s not surprising that it has been aggressively gamed.

[…]

If you’ve ever spent time tutoring, attended a college admissions prep course, gone to a selective institution like Stuyvesant High School, or done STEM at a selective college, you might have noticed a glaring omission in all of the articles linked in the introduction. Not one of them mentions Asian immigration—except in the context of Asians being harmed by affirmative action at elite colleges.

Stereotypes suggest that Asian immigrants put much more effort into Goodharting education (and other zero-sum status signals) than other groups in the United States. Don’t take my word for it: Yale Law professor Amy Chua wrote an entire book about how she and other Chinese immigrants aggressively (some might say abusively) parented their daughters to maximise status.

[…]

This grind culture is found in first- and second-generation immigrants, and I would expect it to dissipate by the third generation. (Sample sizes are too small to check, but Jews had a similar reputation in mid-20th century America and don’t any more). Pro-immigration conservatives often use this focus on education status-signaling as evidence of immigrant moral superiority, but it is in fact destructive and wasteful.

[…]

Korean private tutoring schools or “hagwons” are infamous. About 78% of Koreans between first and twelfth grade attended a hagwon in 2022, as did 83% of five-year-olds in 2017, and about 95% of Koreans do at some point in their student lives. The average hagwon student attends for 7.2 hours a week, in addition to regular studies and homework, and as a consequence the average South Korean student works 13 hours a day. South Korea spends three times the OECD average on private schooling as a percentage of GDP, the highest in the world. These thousands of hours of studying are all to get high scores on the CSAT, the standardized test that determines most college admissions in South Korea. Government regulations and crackdowns to try to stop South Korean parents from spending so much time and money on wasteful zero-sum signaling have thus far failed.

[…]

About 73% of junior high schoolers in Taiwan attend some form of cram school, for an average of 6.24 hours per week. About 70% of Singaporean students do the same. China is much poorer than South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore, and therefore has far fewer resources to spend on costly signaling. Yet the Chinese education industry grew at 11.3% per year between 2019 and 2023. This provoked a massive government crackdown in 2023–24 that banned people from offering classes in English, Chinese, or mathematics for profit. As with South Korea, demand is so high that the ban led to an explosion in underground quasi-legal tutoring. Note that China also relies primarily on standardized tests for college admissions.

China and India are both infamous for cheating—to the point that there have been riots by students in both countries when students were prevented from cheating by investigators. (China now threatens students with jail time for cheating.) International Asian SAT takers are also notorious for cheating, with common methods including impersonation14, purchasing tests from insiders at College Board, buying questions and answers from test takers in other time zones, and smuggling in vocabulary lists. The persistence of traits would suggest that this doesn’t stop when they enter the US, and indeed anecdotes from teachers suggest that recent Asian immigrants are dramatically overrepresented in cheating rings.

[…]

The SAT score gaps between every major race in the United States have been roughly constant since the late 1970s (Native Americans have small samples), with all trending up and down together in line with test changes, external factors such as the COVID lockdown, the rise of the test prep industry, and other things that might affect scores—with one glaring exception. Asian-Americans have gone from testing approximately equal to whites to breaking away from the pack like Secretariat at Belmont, to the point that they are now about 100 points ahead on average.

[…]

A remarkable 25% of Asians in Michigan (which forces all high schoolers to take the SAT and hence is more representative than other states) scored between 1400 and 1600 versus 4% of white students.

What’s Really Wrong With Standardized Tests

Tuesday, April 29th, 2025

Standardized testing is glorious, Bryan Caplan proclaims, but many standardized tests royally suck:

The worst prominent test is almost surely the Graduate Record Exam (GRE). About 9% of test-takers get a perfect score of 170 on the Quantitative part of the exam. A score of 169 puts you at the 87th percentile, and by 166 you’re already out of the top quarter. Most of the STEM majors taking the exam did the relevant coursework in middle school, so for fields that emphasize math, marginally lower scores largely capture not incomprehension but carelessness.

This is especially ridiculous when you remember that only top programs are highly selective. So when the focal standardized exam bunches all the top students together, the exam delivers near-zero value. At least in STEM fields, the point of the GRE is no longer to pinpoint the stars who deserve admission to top programs. The point is to weed out the manifestly unqualified. So the final cut almost has to be grotesquely “holistic.”

The regular SAT math is, by comparison, vastly better. Something like 1% get a perfect score — roughly one-tenth the share that get a perfect score on GRE math. But in absolute terms, the SAT still sucks. At least for STEM students, the problems are easy, so marginally lower scores again primarily capture carelessness rather than incomprehension. Since about two million students take the SAT, roughly 20,000 have perfect math scores — more than enough to fill all the spots in the Ivy League.

[…]

Perfect scores should be vanishingly rare. Instead of clumping the best candidates together, you should be able to clearly distinguish the 99th percentile from the 99.9th, 99.99th, and so on.

Out of all the well-known standardized tests, the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) best satisfies these conditions. A perfect score is, bizarrely, 528. The fraction that gets a 528 in a given year is about .02%.

[…]

When your goal is to find the best of the best, the ideal test is so demanding that you get a big clump of scores not at the top of the distribution, but at the bottom.

At least one such standardized test exists: the Putnam Competition. As you’d expect, it’s a test of mathematical prowess. To call the test “hard” is a severe understatement: In 2025, the median score was 2 out of 120. Which is historically high! In many years, the median score is exactly 0 for the roughly 4000 test-takers, who are already highly selected. At the other end of the distribution, only five perfect scores have ever been achieved.

[…]

There are many lines of defense in the War Against Merit. The first is to get rid of standardized tests entirely. The second is to go “test-optional.” But if these approaches are too blatantly corrupt, there is a third option. A stealthy way to pretend applicants are far more equal than they truly are.

Just use lousy top-coded tests.

[…]

Admissions to graduate econ programs could be greatly improved simply by requiring the AP Microeconomics and AP Macroeconomics exams. They’re flawed tests, but if you can’t get 5’s on both, you’re not ready for grad school. Indeed, graduate admissions could probably be sharply improved across the board if programs required 5’s on all subject-relevant APs. Would-be historians should have 5’s on the U.S., European, and world history APs just to apply, and would-be literature professors should have 5’s on English literature and language.

While most students are not creative, heavy K-12 investment fertilizes society’s creative potential by giving everyone the mental tools to innovate

Monday, April 28th, 2025

Case Against Education by Bryan CaplanWhen Bryan Caplan started writing The Case Against Education, he expected to confront a massive research literature claiming that education definitely has a massive effect on economic growth:

Imagine my surprise, then, when I discovered that — despite overwhelming pro-education bias — the massive research literature on education and growth hadn’t found much of anything. Contrary to conventional stories about the positive externalities of education, mainstream estimates of education’s national rate of return were consistently below estimates of education’s individual rate of return. Just as the signaling model predicts.

[…]

New ideas are the root of progress. People today live far better than they did in 1800 because people today know far more than they did in 1800. Earth in 1800 contained all the materials required to make an airplane or iPad. But until the right ideas came along, the materials lay fallow. Why did mankind have to wait so long for the right ideas to arrive? Part of the answer is that ideas, once created, are cheap to copy. As a result, innovators glean only a sliver of the value they create.

These truisms lead straight to a stirring sermon on “Education, Foundation of a Dynamic Society.” While most students are not creative, heavy K-12 investment fertilizes society’s creative potential by giving everyone the mental tools to innovate. Heavy investment in colleges and universities, similarly, brings top students up to the research frontier and provides innovation leaders with employment and funding. If consistently investing 10% of national income in education elevates the annual growth rate from 1% to 2% without any further benefits, the social return is a hefty 11%.

Unfortunately, this stirring sermon is wishful thinking.

[…]

While the evidence is messy, education seemingly does less for countries than individuals. At the national level, it’s not clear that education increases living standards at all, much less that education makes countries’ living standards increase at a faster rate. If you can’t tell if your machine moves, you may safely assume it’s not a perpetual motion machine.

It failed because it was based on a lie

Sunday, April 27th, 2025

In 2001, an overwhelming bipartisan majority passed the worst education policy in decades, Tracing Woodgrains says, No Child Left Behind, a bill based on the idea that all children should be expected to learn at the same pace:

It doled out punishments and rewards to schools based on what percent of students could meet arbitrary thresholds, asserting on the basis of nothing but a wish that it could get all schools to the same arbitrary thresholds within 12 years. This both punished educators serving disadvantaged students—blaming them for the students’ slower paces—and encouraged the systematic neglect of above-average ones—who, after all, were already past the thresholds schools were told to care about. Year after year, it failed to meet its targets. It did not fail because of complex implementation issues. It did not fail because people did not try hard enough. It failed because it was based on a lie: that all kids should learn at the same pace.

At the same time, “detracking”—forcing fast and slow students into the same classrooms and expecting teachers to somehow differentiate instruction—has become the common wisdom among groups of educators like the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and in school districts around the country. San Francisco waged a years-long battle to prevent any of its eighth grade students from learning algebra. Cities like Seattle and Boston dismantled their gifted programs.

Often, objective measures of performance themselves become targets, as educators find it easier to smash the thermometers than to change the temperature. Universities perennially look for excuses to abolish entrance tests, kicking against their own findings that those tests work before reluctantly slinking back to them. Activists have waged the same wars against high schools with admissions tests, targeting some of the best free schools in the country—from Thomas Jefferson in Virginia to New York’s Stuyvesant, Philadelphia’s Masterman to San Francisco’s Lowell High School. At the same time states weaken these schools, they often ban alternatives altogether, forbidding charter schools from using comparable tests.

[…]

In the 1960s, the federal government commissioned the most expensive education research project in history, comparing elementary school curricula against each other. One program, Direct Instruction, defied all the conventional wisdom: teachers taught in ability-grouped, orderly classrooms, drilling kids via whole class call-and-answer approaches. When Direct Instruction clearly outperformed the rest on preliminary measures, it was a “horrifying surprise” to many of the established education figures funding the study. As a result of lobbying, the study’s final results aggregated all its programs together, obscuring the success of the most effective approaches and producing a headline result that the study had failed. From there, people moved on.

In 1985, based on the theory that funding would close education gaps, a judge ordered enormous spending increases in Kansas City Schools, tripling the district’s budget and enabling them to run through a wish list of everything they could dream of to close the gaps. They built new schools, created a busing plan, and reduced the student-teacher ratio to a record low nationwide, throwing money at the problem for more than a decade. But when the Supreme Court ordered a reversal in 1995, the district’s test scores had not improved, its black-white gap had not closed, and it was no more integrated than when it began.

That same year, a movement to “detrack” schools—removing advanced classes—took off with the release of Jeannie Oakes’s book Keeping Track. Letting stronger students go faster, Oakes alleged, was inequitable, and before long education schools and education policy circles agreed. That the best evidence at the time indicated that ability grouping helped the strongest students and did not harm the weakest ones did not matter. The consensus had been set.

These missives don’t spend taxpayer dollars directly, but they’re masterful at prying them loose from state and local coffers

Wednesday, March 5th, 2025

Good luck finding the smoking gun, Robert Pondiscio says to anyone hunting for waste in the US Education Department:

The agency’s roughly $240 billion annual haul isn’t a slush fund for whimsical bureaucrats — it’s mostly a conveyor belt, dutifully delivering dollars to programs Congress has already blessed.

Title I’s $18 billion for poor kids? Mandated. IDEA’s $15 billion for special education? Same deal. Pell Grants topping $30 billion? That’s the Higher Education Act, not some rogue educrat’s hobbyhorse.

He calls our attention to the Department’s “Dear Colleague” letters to schools and districts:

These missives don’t spend taxpayer dollars directly, but they’re masterful at prying them loose from state and local coffers.

Thinly veiled as “guidance,” they’re closer to a shakedown: Comply with our enlightened vision or risk a civil rights probe that could cost you your federal funding.

And when that vision skews ideological — as it often did during the Obama and Biden years — the result is a cascade of spending and disruption that leaves educators scrambling and taxpayers poorer.

All without a single line-item to point to in the federal ledger, much less any measurable benefit to students.

Take the April 2011 Title IX letter on sexual violence. A noble aim — protecting students from harassment — morphed into a bureaucratic sledgehammer.

Schools and colleges were told to adopt a lower “preponderance of evidence” standard for adjudicating cases of alleged campus rape and sexual assault, and to sidestep legal protections like cross-examination of witnesses and accusers.

The result was an explosion in the number of Title IX coordinators hired, each earning $150,000 a year or more. The cost of compliance rose by at least $2 million per year at some universities.

Multiply that across thousands of institutions, and you’re staring at hundreds of millions yearly — state and local dollars, mind you, not Uncle Sam’s — until the letter’s 2017 rescission.

[…]

The Biden administration similarly sought to warp Title IX to its liking. Its 2021 executive order decreed “gender identity” would come under Title IX’s umbrella.

The Education Department dutifully followed up with a “Notice of Interpretation” a few weeks later, nudging schools to toe the line — and shoulder the cost — or risk their federal funds.

Then there was the January 2014 discipline letter, a joint production with the Justice Department that tackled racial disparities in K-12 school suspensions.

[…]

Districts suddenly wary of “disparate impact” on racial minorities embraced trendy fixes like restorative justice, or simply stopped disciplining unruly kids altogether.

Teachers got implicit bias training costing $2,000 to $10,000 per session, with no guarantee that it works; facilitators were hired or redirected, and new data systems tracked every classroom time-out by race.

A conservative estimate of the cost of compliance would be $100 million to $200 million over several years, mostly in urban school districts desperate to avoid a civil rights investigation.

Who should skip college?

Thursday, February 20th, 2025

The central thesis of The Case Against Education, Bryan Caplan explains, is that education has a low (indeed, negative) social return, because signaling, not building human capital, is its main function — but the selfish return to education is negative, too, for many students, depending on ability:

First and foremost: know thyself.

  • Don’t base your life choices on what your immediate social circle finds “demeaning.” As Dirty Jobs repeatedly proves, people routinely get used to jobs that initially disgust them.
  • Don’t base your life choices on whether parents and teachers constantly tell you that you’re “smart.” They’re not trustworthy assessors of your intelligence.
  • Don’t rule out options because they require “declining status.” If your family’s initial status is above average, declining status is the mathematical norm. That’s what “regression to the mean” means.

What should you do instead? First and foremost: Get objective evidence on your own intelligence.

  • If your SAT score is at 1200 or greater, your odds of successfully finishing a “real” major are quite good.
  • If your SAT is in the 1100-1200 range, it’s a toss-up.
  • If you’re in the 1000-1100 range, only try college if your peers consider you an annoyingly hard worker.
  • Below 1000? Don’t go.

[…]

What will go wrong if you ignore my advice? The most likely scenario is that you spend years worth of time and tuition, then fail to finish your degree. Maybe you’ll keep failing crucial classes. Maybe you’ll keep switching majors. Maybe you’ll die of boredom. The precise mechanism makes little difference: Since about 70% of the college payoff comes from completion, non-completion implies a terrible return on investment.

There will always be prigs

Monday, January 13th, 2025

The word “prig” isn’t very common now, Paul Graham notes, but if you look up the definition, it will sound familiar:

Google’s isn’t bad:

A self-righteously moralistic person who behaves as if superior to others.

This sense of the word originated in the 18th century, and its age is an important clue: it shows that although wokeness is a comparatively recent phenomenon, it’s an instance of a much older one.

There’s a certain kind of person who’s attracted to a shallow, exacting kind of moral purity, and who demonstrates his purity by attacking anyone who breaks the rules. Every society has these people. All that changes is the rules they enforce. In Victorian England it was Christian virtue. In Stalin’s Russia it was orthodox Marxism-Leninism. For the woke, it’s social justice.

So if you want to understand wokeness, the question to ask is not why people behave this way. Every society has prigs. The question to ask is why our prigs are priggish about these ideas, at this moment. And to answer that we have to ask when and where wokeness began.

The answer to the first question is the 1980s. Wokeness is a second, more aggressive wave of political correctness, which started in the late 1980s, died down in the late 1990s, and then returned with a vengeance in the early 2010s, finally peaking after the riots of 2020.

[…]

Basically, the 1960s radicals got tenure. They became the Establishment they’d protested against two decades before. Now they were in a position not just to speak out about their ideas, but to enforce them.

A new set of moral rules to enforce was exciting news to a certain kind of student. What made it particularly exciting was that they were allowed to attack professors. I remember noticing that aspect of political correctness at the time. It wasn’t simply a grass-roots student movement. It was faculty members encouraging students to attack other faculty members. In that respect it was like the Cultural Revolution.

[…]

Imagine having to explain to a well-meaning visitor from another planet why using the phrase “people of color” is considered particularly enlightened, but saying “colored people” gets you fired. And why exactly one isn’t supposed to use the word “negro” now, even though Martin Luther King used it constantly in his speeches. There are no underlying principles. You’d just have to give him a long list of rules to memorize.

The danger of these rules was not just that they created land mines for the unwary, but that their elaborateness made them an effective substitute for virtue. Whenever a society has a concept of heresy and orthodoxy, orthodoxy becomes a substitute for virtue. You can be the worst person in the world, but as long as you’re orthodox you’re better than everyone who isn’t. This makes orthodoxy very attractive to bad people.

[…]

One aspect of social media that surprised almost everyone at first was the popularity of outrage. Users seemed to like being outraged. We’re so used to this idea now that we take it for granted, but really it’s pretty strange. Being outraged is not a pleasant feeling. You wouldn’t expect people to seek it out. But they do. And above all, they want to share it.

[…]

For the press there was money in wokeness. But they weren’t the only ones. That was one of the biggest differences between the two waves of political correctness: the first was driven almost entirely by amateurs, but the second was often driven by professionals. For some it was their whole job. By 2010 a new class of administrators had arisen whose job was basically to enforce wokeness. They played a role similar to that of the political commissars who got attached to military and industrial organizations in the USSR: they weren’t directly in the flow of the organization’s work, but watched from the side to ensure that nothing improper happened in the doing of it.

[…]

This new class of bureaucrats pursued a woke agenda as if their jobs depended on it, because they did. If you hire people to keep watch for a particular type of problem, they’re going to find it, because otherwise there’s no justification for their existence.

[…]

The election of Donald Trump in 2016 also accelerated wokeness, particularly in the press, where outrage now meant traffic. Trump made the New York Times a lot of money: headlines during his first administration mentioned his name at about four times the rate of previous presidents.

[…]

Twitter, which was arguably the hub of wokeness, was bought by Elon Musk in order to neutralize it, and he seems to have succeeded — and not, incidentally, by censoring left-wing users the way Twitter used to censor right-wing ones, but without censoring either.

[…]

Is there a simple, principled way to deal with wokeness? I think there is: to use the customs we already have for dealing with religion. Wokeness is effectively a religion, just with God replaced by protected classes. It’s not even the first religion of this kind; Marxism had a similar form, with God replaced by the masses. And we already have well-established customs for dealing with religion within organizations. You can express your own religious identity and explain your beliefs, but you can’t call your coworkers infidels if they disagree, or try to ban them from saying things that contradict its doctrines, or insist that the organization adopt yours as its official religion.

[…]

The more general problem — how to prevent similar outbreaks of aggressively performative moralism — is of course harder. Here we’re up against human nature. There will always be prigs. And in particular there will always be the enforcers among them, the aggressively conventional-minded. These people are born that way. Every society has them. So the best we can do is to keep them bottled up.

We all laughed and laughed at the lunacy of Political Correctness…

Darwin and Wallace were not just Victorian naturalists who traveled the tropics

Saturday, January 4th, 2025

Growth of Biological Thought by Ernst MayrMidway through his 900 page history of biology, The Growth of Biological Thought, zoologist Ernst Mayr notes that Alfred Wallace independently developed a theory of speciation by means of natural selection after Darwin had been sitting on his evolutionary theory for two decades:

Reading Wallace’s 1858 paper “On the Tendency of Species to Form Varieties” spooked Darwin. He did not want to be scooped. Within a year Darwin had rushed his material into an “abstract which… must necessarily be imperfect” as it only gave “the general conclusions” of his theory, and offered only a “few facts in illustration” to support them. We know this abstract well: it was published as The Origin of Species.

[…]

[Mayr] suggests that Darwin and Wallace were not just Victorian naturalists who traveled the tropics — they were Victorian naturalists who traveled the tropics with a copy of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology in hand.

Charles Lyell was an essentialist and a creationist. He answered questions like “what are the causes for the extinction of species?” and “how did the specific species we see in the fossil record arise?” in an explicitly essentialist and creationist fashion. These answers were not sound—but the questions were. These questions “were encountered by Darwin when he read the Principles of Geology during and after the voyage of the Beagle. As a result of Lyell’s writings, these questions became the center of Darwin’s research program.” This was all true for Wallace as well.

Mayr argues that the “Lyell-Darwin relationship illustrates in an almost textbook-like fashion a frequently occurring relationship among scientists.” This is not quite the relationship between pupil and teacher, or that of the “forerunner,” but something else. It is the relationship between the question-poser and the answer-finder.

Tanner Greer sees examples of the same dynamic in history and social science often:
Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire by Edward N. Luttwak

To pick one example, Edward Luttwak’s book Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire is wrong in every one of its essential arguments. So conclusively wrong is this book that I do not think it should be included on any syllabus. Since Luttwak published that book in 1976, a dozen studies of Roman frontier deployments, Roman strategic culture, and Roman decision making have been published. All offer a steady refutation of Luttwak’s work. However, not one of those books or articles would have been written without Luttwak’s work. Luttwak was wrong in every particular except the questions he asked—but those questions were good enough to create an entire subfield of research. May all our errors do such good!

U.S. higher education is going to muddle through

Saturday, December 28th, 2024

With apologies to Peter Thiel, Tyler Cowan believes U.S. higher education is going to muddle through:

Adjusting for grants, rather than taking sticker prices at face value, the inflation-adjusted tuition cost for an in-state freshman at a four-year public university is $2,480 for this school year. That is a 40% decline from a decade ago…

As might be expected, the trajectory for student debt is down as well. About half of last year’s graduates had no student debt. In 2013, only 40% did. That famous saying from economics — if something cannot go on forever, it will stop — is basically true. Due to changes in the formula, aid for Pell Grants is up, which helps to limit both student debt and the expenses of college.

The Great Cosmic Mind is smarter than most of the books you could jam into the context window

Tuesday, December 10th, 2024

Tyler Cowen explains how to read a book using o1:

You don’t have to upload any book into the system.  The Great Cosmic Mind is smarter than most of the books you could jam into the context window.  Just start asking questions.  The core intuition is simply that you should be asking more questions.  And now you have someone/something to ask!

I was reading a book on Indian history, and the author reference the Morley reforms of 1909.  I did not know what those were, and so I posed a question and received a very good answer, read those here.  I simply asked “What were the Morley reforms done by the British in India in 1909?”

Then I asked “did those apply to all parts of India?”

You can just keep on going.  I’ll say it again: “The core intuition is simply that you should be asking more questions.”

Most people still have not yet internalized this emotionally.  This is one of the biggest revolutions in reading, ever.  And at some point people will write with an eye toward facilitating this very kind of dialogue.

I’ve long said that looking things up is a superpower, and I suppose this reduces the friction — but you might imagine I tend to look things up, even if I have to open up a new tab and type in a search term.

Napoleon was conservative about primary education, but revolutionary in secondary education

Monday, November 4th, 2024

Napoleon by Andrew RobertsNapoleon was conservative about primary education, putting it back in the hands of the clergy, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), but revolutionary in secondary education, which began at age eleven:

In May 1802 he passed a law setting up forty-five lycées (state secondary schools) whose aim was to produce future soldiers, administrators and technicians. The lycée was his answer to the question of how to create a patriotic, loyal generation of future leaders.

All eligible French children were now taught Greek, Latin, rhetoric, logic, ethics, mathematics and physics, and also some of the other sciences and modern languages. Here religion was kept to a minimum: he did not want a secondary system dominated by the Church as that of the Ancien Régime had been. Discipline was strict, school uniforms of blue jackets and trousers with round hats were worn until fourteen, and pupils were grouped into companies with one sergeant and four corporals commanded by the best student, who was called the sergeant-major.

Lycées offered 6,400 full-fees scholarships for what were called ‘national students’, but were also open to others who passed exams to enter, and to those whose parents paid fees. Students followed a mandatory programme of courses, instead of the old system where they could choose.

[…]

By 1813 French secondary schools were the best in Europe and some of Napoleon’s original lycées, such as Condorcet, Charlemagne, Louis-le-Grand and Henri IV, are still among the best schools in France two centuries later.

Your A student is average

Wednesday, October 30th, 2024

Your A student is average, David Blobaum explains:

The most common refrain from parents is that their child “is a good student but a bad test-taker.” This comment reveals a fundamental disconnect between what parents understand about grades from school and standardized test scores.

[…]

In most cases, an alternate explanation is true: Despite having a sky-high GPA in honors classes, the student is actually just an average student.

According to UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute Freshman Survey, 86 percent of the surveyed students at BA-granting universities had A-averages in high school. Thus, A-averages are not rare at all. They are, in fact, average.

[…]

The median SAT score is 1020. The median ACT score is 18.

[…]

“SAT and ACT tests are better predictors of Harvard grades than high school grades.”

“Test scores are the single largest predictor of a student’s academic performance at Yale, and this is true over all four years, and it’s true even when we control for every other available variable that we can.”– Mark Dunn, assistant director of admissions at Yale, on the Yale Admissions Podcast

“Standardized test scores are a much better predictor of academic success than high school grades.” – Christina Paxson, president of Brown University, quoted by the New York Times (2024)

“SAT scores have significant predictive value for academic achievement over and above other measures such as high school GPA.” – Dartmouth Admissions Research

Dartmouth puts numbers behind its statement: “High school GPA by itself explains 9 percent of the variation” in the first-year GPA of Dartmouth students. An SAT score by itself explains “about 22 percent of the variation.” Thus, at least for Dartmouth students, SAT/ACT scores are about 2.4 times more predictive of academic success than high school grades.

High school students’ grades keep getting better, but standardized tests tell a different story

Wednesday, October 16th, 2024

High school students’ grades keep getting better, but standardized tests tell a different story:

Last month, the ACT released research indicating that student GPA in the post-COVID-19 era has declined in its power to predict student success in college. In contrast, standardized test scores stayed relatively stable in their ability to predict whether students will receive passing grades in their first year of college.

According to researchers, the average high school GPA, measured on a 4.0 scale, has risen slightly since 2017, increasing from 3.44 to 3.59. While ACT scores stayed fairly stable from the mid-90s to 2019, they faltered during and after the pandemic, declining from 20.7 on a 36-point scale in 2019 to 19.5 in 2023. The decline was particularly steep between 2021 and 2022, falling from 20.3 to 19.8. While these drops seem small, they portend a significant problem.

[…]

Another research paper, published earlier this year paints a similar picture. The study, from the Equitable Grading Project, looked at more than 30,000 grades from the 2021-2022 and 2022-2023 school years. When compared to students’ performance on corresponding standardized tests, researchers found that almost 60 percent of grades “did not match the standardized test scores designed to measure students’ content knowledge of those courses.” Two-thirds of these mismatched grades were inflated, an outcome that affected low-income, black, and Hispanic students most.

These results indicate that grade inflation is rampant, and colleges should turn back toward standardized testing in admissions if they want to reliably predict which student will be able to handle the rigors of college.

She had never been required to read an entire book

Wednesday, October 2nd, 2024

Nicholas Dames has taught Columbia University’s required great-books course, Literature Humanities, since 1998, and he loves the job, but it has changed:

Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college — even at highly selective, elite colleges — prepared to read books.

This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.

“My jaw dropped,” Dames told me. The anecdote helped explain the change he was seeing in his students: It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to.

The fatal decision can be 10 decisions back

Thursday, September 26th, 2024

Infantry Combat by John F. AntalKulak’s recent review of Infantry Combat: The Rifle Platoon: An Interactive Exercise in Small-Unit Tactics and Leadership, by John F. Antal, intrigued me enough to pick up a (digital) copy:

Infantry Combat: The Rifle Platoon is a simultaneous Military Tactics and Leadership crash course and semi-political argument about the wrong lessons that were learned from Operation Desert Storm (it was first published in 1995) in the format of a “Choose your own Adventure” novel.

And my god does it work. Its argument is incredibly well presented, its intangible concepts and ethos are really strongly conveyed, it teaches an impressive amount of theory and application despite NOT being a textbook of theory or doctrine…

And it just has no conceivable right to work as well as it works.

[…]

A choose your own adventure is just a series of binary choices, maybe a few 3 pronged choices to mix it up. That clearly can’t teach anything.

But Antal’s writing and veteran understanding of the concepts can, and he exploits the format perfectly to REALLY creates painful choices and moments of indecision. Your pre-knowledge of even very broad pop-military concepts, or study of history, is GREATLY rewarded. Your observing the map ever so much longer is rewarded. And your attention to detail is rewarded. Your intuitive understanding of leadership or your having read about the subject, or your complete lack of any such instincts, plays a shockingly impactful role for leading what are static words and binary decisions.

I’m certain there are skilled military officers and professionals who could go in this and get the best ending right, first try… But I doubt it’d be a majority of even actual infantry officers.

Likewise an attentive amatuer or student of history could probably do it…

But I died shot by friendly fire my first read/playthrough, so not me.

[…]

Life isn’t a videogame. There isn’t instant feedback when you’ve screwed yourself and everyone around you. The fatal decision can be 10 decisions back and every subsequent decision is just determining exact conditions and flavor text of how that failure will happen…

And absolutely all of it makes sense, is tied into the core principles Antal is teaching, and has a necessary logic such that once you see it you understand why that could only have ended that way.

I’m being incredibly vague because I don’t want to spoil the book. Failing and getting the bad endings is the real teaching part of the exercise, and if it is “Spoiled” the actual teaching value is greatly reduced.

That’s your cue to get your own copy and run through it.