Don't Stay in School
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@Dashrender said in Don't Stay in School:
What dumbfounds me is how easy this is to fix - HUGE pool of test questions.
Huge pools are harder than they sound. And they cause other issues.
For example, and not that these are impossible to fix but they are issues...
- The larger the pool the harder it is to generate meaningful questions.
- The larger the pool the more costly it is to write questions and moreso it is more costly to check them.
- The larger the pool the more likely that the questions and answers will be wrong.
- The larger the pool the more likely that the random selection of questions will drive scores rather than the ability to answer them.
- If every student doesn't get an identical test, is the test even remotely standardized (beyond format?)
- Not all topic categories can be treated this way. For example, important dates in history might include 100 possibly important dates. Increasing the pool would be dangerous.
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There is no perfect answer. The best answer I've ever seen is what SUNY Empire does... no testing. They believe that the entire process is pointless and they work around it. Tests mostly serve to prove who can take tests well, not what people know.
Example, I'm an awesome test taker. I have literally gotten certified on things I've never seen or used before just because I test so well that I can often socially engineer the test writer through analysing their test writing to understand what their thinking is making it often easy to answer questions when I don't know the answer at all, or have only common sense to guide me. Other people can know the material cold but cannot understand or handle testing and fall apart. Normal test processes don't test knowledge nearly as much as they appear to on the surface.
And that's before we look at the fact that anything that can be answered on a test is something that you can look up. We only test the "Googleable answers" and not the concepts, which are the important parts.
For example, we don't try to figure out if students understand the factors leading to or the dramatic world shift resulting from the defeat of the Spanish Armada, instead we ask for the useless fact of what year did it happen (1588, I remember from 24 years ago.)
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What is the work around they do?
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@Dashrender said in Don't Stay in School:
What is the work around they do?
Portfolios. You make a portfolio of your work that you have done in each class to demonstrate your understanding of the material. Might be project based, design based or whatever. Lots of options. But when you are done you have a portfolio to take to an employer and show "this is the stuff I covered and this is how you know that I know the material."
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I'd be interested to see an example of such a portfolio
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@Dashrender said in Don't Stay in School:
@tonyshowoff said in Don't Stay in School:
@scottalanmiller said in Don't Stay in School:
In IT we know this process well because of the infamous certification boot camp issues of the early 2000s. In the 1990s, certifications carried a lot of value. They were hard to obtain and there was very little possibility that someone had cheated or whatever.
10 Spiceworks topics a day asking which certs to get rather than worrying about experience, with 500 responses from people equally inexperienced and uncertified telling them what to do. It's a plague. I got most of mine way back when.
This is a double edged sword.. no cert no job, no work history, no job..
That's not true, I personally have hired, and most other IT managers / business owners I know of have hired plenty of people with only work experience, and also no experience for entry level. There are plenty of entry level IT jobs, things like computer repair in high schools or whatever, the pay is terrible, but you can start and move fast by changing jobs. Certifications typically aren't measured by anyone except HR now, unless they're specific for some purpose, like companies which require certs to buy certain products for some reason.
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The accreditation system itself is corrupt, the university I went to is not nationally accredited, only regionally accredited, it's Columbia University in New York, however because as @scottalanmiller brought up, the reality and how we view it are far different. I highly doubt if not for government research and projects, universities like Columbia, MIT, etc would be no more overseen than Phoenix or DeVry.
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Even in the big financial space, hiring straight from high school was acceptable, even for high end positions. I've never heard of the "can't get a job without experience" problem in real life. On SW it seems to be common and, of course, we all see it in mindless memes posted to Facebook, but everyone with a job, anywhere in the world has gotten past this barrier. It can't actually exist until we get to a point that we have a massive upsweep in unemployment making it momentarily possible.
I expect that people always said this, they just didn't have the Internet and cat memes to promote their disappointment in it.
My guess is that people who are unemployable or marginally employable complain about this and other related items like minimal wage increases a ton because it feels like a viable reason to them as to why they can't find work. But most of the time, not always, the issue is just that they aren't qualified, are not willing to do what it takes to be qualified and don't want to accept the jobs that they are eligible for.
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@dafyre said in Don't Stay in School:
@Dashrender said in Don't Stay in School:
@scottalanmiller said in Don't Stay in School:
@Dashrender said in Don't Stay in School:
I'll definitely agree that anything past probably 8th grade, and perhaps much less than that, are really needed by the common man.
Probably a mix. Few 8th graders are anywhere nearly prepared to talk politics. Things like geography and history are necessary for even basic functional citizenship (unless we remove democracy, then we don't have to educate every individual to all of these things - democracy comes at an incredible price.) Math needs to at least go to algebra. Science we go way, way too far. Computing we rarely even bother to introduce in any meaningful way. English lit... way too far.
I definitely understand where you are coming from - and I'll fully admit to my general lack of knowledge in history - but would dropping the general requirements for history really change much in the world we live in today?
History gives us good examples of things that have been tried and worked, or things that have tried and failed... In technology, government, business...
The issue is that, in the US, a lot of history is actually taught incorrectly, and is taught from a biased viewpoint that isn't really factually accurate, but is presenting the perception that is wanting to be imparted. I fully agree that "those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it", which is why we have candidates like Trump succeeding so well in the polls when he's very much a fascist. But we need to make sure that the history taught is being taught accurately, and not how people wanted it to be perceived, instead of what's the brutal reality.
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@scottalanmiller said in Don't Stay in School:
Even in the big financial space, hiring straight from high school was acceptable, even for high end positions. I've never heard of the "can't get a job without experience" problem in real life. On SW it seems to be common and, of course, we all see it in mindless memes posted to Facebook, but everyone with a job, anywhere in the world has gotten past this barrier. It can't actually exist until we get to a point that we have a massive upsweep in unemployment making it momentarily possible.
I expect that people always said this, they just didn't have the Internet and cat memes to promote their disappointment in it.
My guess is that people who are unemployable or marginally employable complain about this and other related items like minimal wage increases a ton because it feels like a viable reason to them as to why they can't find work. But most of the time, not always, the issue is just that they aren't qualified, are not willing to do what it takes to be qualified and don't want to accept the jobs that they are eligible for.
The problem is that a lot of folks don't know that they can intern or don't have local businesses that will let them intern when they are young enough to have the time to do it. As an adult, I could not afford to do any kind of intern jobs because I have bills to pay.
I got my foot in the professional world thanks to an intern-type program at my Highschool.
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@dafyre said in Don't Stay in School:
The problem is that a lot of folks don't know that they can intern or don't have local businesses that will let them intern when they are young enough to have the time to do it.
Agreed. That's why we need huge improvements in schools. How can anyone get hired as a teacher, guidance counsellor, etc. without knowing that there are internships?
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@dafyre said in Don't Stay in School:
As an adult, I could not afford to do any kind of intern jobs because I have bills to pay.
That logic, though, would rule out university FAR before it would rule out interning. Interning happens earlier, faster and at a fraction of the cost of university. So the things that make people wary of interning should make university out of the question.
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@DustinB3403 said in Don't Stay in School:
@Dashrender said in Don't Stay in School:
Learning how to research is probably a life skill most people should have - one that is rarely taught and when taught is poorly taught. I still consider myself a noob at it.
I think my google-magic has proven this a few times.
My Google-fu once found a copy of Act! 2000 installer files, etc, which the company was transitioning away from but still needed to install on the new PCs we were rolling out, with some Google-fu and Regex...I got very lucky but I managed to find it on a open file server somewhere on the internet, and it worked! My boss was so proud...LOL
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@scottalanmiller said in Don't Stay in School:
@dafyre said in Don't Stay in School:
As an adult, I could not afford to do any kind of intern jobs because I have bills to pay.
That logic, though, would rule out university FAR before it would rule out interning. Interning happens earlier, faster and at a fraction of the cost of university. So the things that make people wary of interning should make university out of the question.
I always wondered why interning isn't pushed harder in high schools. My conspiracy mindedness thinks that there is some monetary incentive for guidance counselors and teachers to push kids to going to college instead of looking at vocational or intern opportunities.
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@scottalanmiller said in Don't Stay in School:
@dafyre said in Don't Stay in School:
As an adult, I could not afford to do any kind of intern jobs because I have bills to pay.
That logic, though, would rule out university FAR before it would rule out interning. Interning happens earlier, faster and at a fraction of the cost of university. So the things that make people wary of interning should make university out of the question.
The difference is that a lot of folks can take classes at the university full time, and still work a full time or part-time job to pay for the university (assuming grants, scholarships, and financial aid make it not cost 25-50k per year out of pocket).
In that retrospect, I guess somebody could intern full time and work a second job to pay the bills.
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@coliver said in Don't Stay in School:
I always wondered why interning isn't pushed harder in high schools. My conspiracy mindedness thinks that there is some monetary incentive for guidance counselors and teachers to push kids to going to college instead of looking at vocational or intern opportunities.
There is a HUGE incentive for this. Teachers and GCs are totally dependent on the university system for their culture, jobs, etc. To suggest that there are other options would be to admit that they might not have done the right thing. Sure, they aren't paid to promote this, but every teacher or GC in a public school, at least, went to college. So they all have a huge emotional need and a cultural need and peer pressure to promote and enforce the culture of that. It's self fulfilling - only college graduates are allowed to be in the position to give that advice, so anyone who has a contrary or even just common sense view point is eliminated from the discussion.
Even if a teacher had a dissenting opinion, this would mean throwing the establishment under which they earn their living and on which they depend, under the bus.
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@dafyre said in Don't Stay in School:
@scottalanmiller said in Don't Stay in School:
@dafyre said in Don't Stay in School:
As an adult, I could not afford to do any kind of intern jobs because I have bills to pay.
That logic, though, would rule out university FAR before it would rule out interning. Interning happens earlier, faster and at a fraction of the cost of university. So the things that make people wary of interning should make university out of the question.
The difference is that a lot of folks can take classes at the university full time, and still work a full time or part-time job to pay for the university (assuming grants, scholarships, and financial aid make it not cost 25-50k per year out of pocket).
In that retrospect, I guess somebody could intern full time and work a second job to pay the bills.
Yup, even easier with interning because you can make the money and never have to pay to intern, and often internships pay something or provide some benefits. Those that are free normally have really flexible hours that class work does not have.
And for the record, I worked 50+ hours a week, went to college full time AND interned. It's a tough life, but very doable.
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@coliver said in Don't Stay in School:
I always wondered why interning isn't pushed harder in high schools.
One innocent aspect of this is that the GC and teacher worlds have effectively zero experience with industry, broader education and such. They just have no exposure. People working in the high school, with only the rarest exception, have been involved in the singular primary education system or the university focused training for that industry, since they were four or five years old, as young as three if they did public Pre-K!! Think about that... the level of "bubble syndrome", the degree of indoctrination is crazy.
In a great many cases, those people are the children of educators. They might have parents who have no exposure to other careers, too.
This is one of the huge issues with the education system - most of the people in the system have never left the system. They have no idea what normal work is like, no idea how other industries do things, they have the least academic exposure of nearly all fields - because every other field has, at a minimum, exposure to the academic work as students in additional to experience in their own field.
I've worked in nearly every field that my high school teachers taught in more than all of my high school teachers, combined. It's not their fault, it's just how it is. I know of only one who had a comparable amount of university education. None that travelled as much. None that wrote as much. None that actually worked in other fields.
Pretty much every casual acquaintance that I have has more exposure than every teacher that I have known. It's not their fault, it's the fault of the system. It's not all bad, but it introduces some huge problems caused by living in a huge bubble surrounded by people who also live in that bubble. It's so complete that even their vacation time is shared so when they travel, they almost always do so surrounded by other educators taking the same vacations at the same time leading to a tourism culture that is really insular as well!
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@coliver said in Don't Stay in School:
@scottalanmiller said in Don't Stay in School:
@dafyre said in Don't Stay in School:
As an adult, I could not afford to do any kind of intern jobs because I have bills to pay.
That logic, though, would rule out university FAR before it would rule out interning. Interning happens earlier, faster and at a fraction of the cost of university. So the things that make people wary of interning should make university out of the question.
I always wondered why interning isn't pushed harder in high schools. My conspiracy mindedness thinks that there is some monetary incentive for guidance counselors and teachers to push kids to going to college instead of looking at vocational or intern opportunities.
I was just thinking about this same thing the other day...
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As a thought, or even real, experiment... go talk to teachers that you know. Ask how many ever looked into or thought about interning or volunteering in education? My guess is that you will struggle to find one. Certainly they exist, but how many actually seriously considered it?
Pretty much all teachers that I know, and like most of you I know a lot, did the "high school is for high school, then you go to college, then you go to job interviews or job fairs set up by that college for the profession you went to college for." It's 100% "follow the system and follow the rules" without variance. There is no reason to intern because there is a stable, reliable workflow to get into teaching that starts with a seventh grader saying "I see teachers, that looks like fun, I want to do that." Which sometimes is good, if you love to teach, you should probably teach. But it is also bad because literally everyone that falls into the "I will just do the one job that I observe first" ends up teaching because it is also the common thing that everyone is exposed to. If you have the least interest, motivation or curiosity you end up going to school for education. So the education field suffers from being chock full of those people in addition to the people who actually want to be educators.
By contrast, I know a few people who do not really consider themselves to be educators who have taken that extra initiative to intern and/or volunteer in education. Name any other field where the people who put in the highest level of effort and dedication (or what we would consider so in other fields) are almost always the ones that then don't consider that field for a profession?
