The Student and the Algorithm: How the Exam Results Fiasco Threatened One Pupil's Future (theguardian.com) 174
Josiah Elleston-Burrell had done everything to make his dream of studying architecture a reality. But, suddenly, in the pandemic summer of 2020, he found his fate was no longer in his hands -- and began a determined battle to reclaim his future. From a long read at The Guardian: The algorithm did what it was supposed to do. Humans, in the end, had no stomach for what it was supposed to do. Algorithms don't go rogue, they don't go on mutant rampages, they only sometimes reveal and amplify the cruddy human biases that underpin them. Ofqual's mistake was to think this exercise -- which made plain our usual tricks for filtering and limiting young lives -- would be morally tolerable as it played out in public view.
What? (Score:5, Informative)
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Yep, the summary might as well be "RTFA" and the article is what you get when someone wants to write documentaries for a living but can be bothered to do more research than sitting down for an hour each with one or two people.
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Re:What? (Score:5, Informative)
It's a bit too long for me too, but I can give you the summarised story based on what actually happened (I read the last paragraph to check):
* In the UK we cancelled exams last year.
* Instead of exams, they decided to have an algorithm guess what each student got
* They designed the algorithm based on previous years data and tested it on the same data which is a total fuck up.
* The algorithm ended up giving students grades based on the school they came from rather than anything they did
* This was very bad for good students in bad schools and good for bad students in good schools
* Then people complained
* Then the algorithm was cancelled but it was too late for universities to take into account new grades
* Some people managed to fight on and get into university based on other evidence than their grades
* This is the story of one of those people
* He happens to be black so both the left and the right are out to make specific, irrelevant and wrong comments about the story
The main deviation from the facts in this story seems to be that they want to forgive the computer programmers and the computer which was "just doing as it was told". As nerds we know that computers are inanimate so don't need excused and that the job of computer programmers is to know that computers do what they are told and to make sure that it doesn't have harmful results. This they failed to do.
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* This is the story of one of those people
* He happens to be black
It is "The Guardian". His colour is no accident.
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* This is the story of one of those people
* He happens to be black
It is "The Guardian". His colour is no accident.
Kind of; they definitely prefer "ethnic minority" stories. Partly I'd say it's a distractor to get you thinking about whether it's racism so that you don't notice as they nail the head of Ofqual and aim at the useless minister, trying to take the blame away from the developers. In fact this should be between the software developers and the minister with the head of ofqual being the blameworthy stooge/victim in the middle.
From our point of view it's entirely arbitrary because there are a bunch of white kids
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There were six pictures accompanying the article.
Three were of the student, one of them including his mother.
One was a of a page from his art sketchbook.
Two were of other students demonstrating against what was going on, about half of those students happened to be white. Pretty much par for the course.
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It's almost as if this was a story about this individual.
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Universities were actually swamped. The offers they made were legally binding, so once grades were revised they suddenly had too many students.
To make things worse this year has been a disaster for students. Universities can't provide the courses they are paying for. They can't use the accommodation they rented.
All the kids at school are basically a year behind now too.
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Universities were actually swamped. The offers they made were legally binding, so once grades were revised they suddenly had too many students.
To make things worse this year has been a disaster for students. Universities can't provide the courses they are paying for. They can't use the accommodation they rented.
All the kids at school are basically a year behind now too.
Yeah, but it's okay because the "private school" kids and "public school [wikipedia.org]" (dear American friends, when I use it, that word does not mean what you think it means) kids mostly benefited from the situation so none of the ruling class are losing out badly on this. And when you say "all the kids", any kids I heard of in private schools have been having direct lessons on Zoom all the way through. I doubt they are more than a month behind, if that.
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Thank you for posting this, and doing what TFA, TFS, the editors, and every other poster here utterly failed to do.
I'm sorry the burden of fixing everyone else's fuck-up fell on your shoulders, but thank you for bearing the burden.
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True. However, the fault wasn't so much in the algorithm as in pretty much everything around the algorithm.
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I gave up.
Sadly, so did journalism in favor of hype and clickbait.
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Re: What? (Score:2)
It is called long-form journalism.
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https://www.theguardian.com/ne... [theguardian.com]
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Yep. I mean, it's one thing to find long-form journalism tedious or annoying or turgid or what have you, but it's quite another to complain that a long-form article has failed because it's not written short-form, and it's one step beyond that to see all these complaints from people who failed to read the words "The long read" right at the top...
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Re:What? (Score:5, Informative)
It's really not that complicated or surprising. Instead of grading students through exams, which had been cancelled due to a pandemic, the schools deferred grading to an algorithm which took prior performance into account as well as rankings created by teachers based on expected exam performance, but also parameters like grading averages for the school and other inputs not strictly based on the student's individual performance. This algorithm apparently did poorly for a relatively small number of students (the article says half a percent) who were outliers of some sort. One year before, the protagonist of the story expected to get a result better than three Bs, which was the threshold for his planned architecture studies, but through no fault of anyone else he got an A, a B and, crucially, a U (ungraded) in maths, which prevented him from getting into college. When he repeated his final year for another shot at the exams, the exams were cancelled and the algorithm gave him A, C and E. Apparently an algorithm which grades mostly on past performance doesn't do too well for students who strive to improve on their past performance. Had the algorithm graded him the year before, he probably would have been graded a lot better than in his actual exams.
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The point is: if he had written the exams, he had received an AAA.
That an algorithm gave him an E (worst possible grade) and an Ungraded is just absurd!
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TL;FA (Score:2)
also known as "Too long; Fell Asleep".
The Algorithm (Score:5, Informative)
Schools were asked to make a fair and objective judgement of the grade they believed a student would have achieved, but in addition to rank the students within each grade. This was because the statistical standardisation process required more granular information than the grade alone
+
The normal way to test a predictive algorithm is to run it against the previous year's data: this was not possible as the teacher rank order was not collected in previous years.
This is worse than stack ranking in the corporate world. With stack ranking its based on the performance of the individual vs. the group within the past year with opportunities for managers to argue for/against ratings. This algorithm used incomplete historical dataset to predict a specific grade distribution for this year. It also assumes an evenly distributed bell curve for everybody - which may not be the correct statistical distribution model. Worst of all, it did the group rankings based on school, which for a standardized test has no bearing on an individual's output.
Algorithm is horribly flawed and stories like this that come out are a sad result.
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Summary (Score:5, Insightful)
This is one of the worst summaries in a long time. You cannot even discern what the article is about, other than a student and an exam.
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This is one of the worst summaries in a long time. You cannot even discern what the article is about, other than a student and an exam.
The summary writer didn't want to read the whole article any more than the rest of us, so I get it.
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Then it's a very good summary, because you can't discern that from the actual article either.
Bigger issue (Score:3)
Goddamn clickbait (Score:4, Insightful)
WTF It is a SOAP opera not news (Score:2, Informative)
TL;DR He got in
The previous year he got ABU, the algorithm downgraded him to ACE. He appealed and was awarded AAC by the exam board which was not quite enough. So asked for a concession from the University and it was granted.
Story told in three sentences, not three excessively worded pages.
I tried to RTFA (Score:2)
Half of the article is irrelevant details about a person.
The other less than half of the article is irrelevant details about a grading system that ultimately did not apply to this same person.
"On 16 August, after Roger Taylor acknowledged âoea situation that was rapidly getting out of controlâ, a decision was made that the Approach-1 algorithm was by now so tarnished it would be better if they abandoned it. Elleston-Burrell was at work the next day, on 17 August, when he heard. Ofqual and the gove
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There's a bit more than that. In most years, lots of people fail their conditional result but then are either allowed in directly by the university they applied to since it has enough space for them or are offered a space in the same course in a different university. In 2020 the algorithm knocked down some people but also pushed up lots of other people (obviously impossible to be sure exactly who, but mostly students from small private schools). That meant that more students from small private schools an
Re:Summary: Did exam, failed it. (Score:4, Insightful)
He blew an exam with a result of 'U' - ungraded. Then he wanted an algorithm to say that he was an 'A' student. Strangely, it didn't. Why should/would it?
Happens to lots of people - including me in my A' Level chemistry.
read the story. in full. what he did was far more important than exams: he demonstrated that he *does not give up*. this is not something that can be taught by any amount of "exams", and it's why he deserves more than anything else to see his ambitions and dreams fulfilled. his story - his committment - is astounding and heartwarming.
Ummm... no. (Score:4, Insightful)
*does not give up*
That is not a quality I would substitute for maths in an architect.
Re:Ummm... no. (Score:5, Insightful)
*does not give up*
That is not a quality I would substitute for maths in an architect.
Architects are not civil engineers. Never let your architect use maths to do the safety check on your building; get someone qualified. Architects are also not quantity surveyors. Never let your architect count the bits of your building either, unless the numbers are easily recognisable ones like "3".
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I think you mean Leon Moisseiff [wikipedia.org] who you will note was an engineer. Note how engineers get excoriated for one single failure in a careers of many successes whilst for some architects bad designs are almost a badge of honour.
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Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater and Tacoma Bridge say otherwise.
Quite a bit of difference there, as Fallingwater was fixable and the Tacoma Bay Narrows bridge had some real resonance issues.
I suspect there was some professional antagonism involved as well, Wright was a brilliant asshole. He named flies with his "enemies" names before swatting them. So they had reasons to diss his work. But the recent fixes that the more firmly anchored Fallingwater to the mountainside took care of the major problem.
When I toured Fallingwater a couple years ago, I was expecting to f
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Architects don't to the safety check on big stuff, but it is common in the US for a architect to do everything on a lot of residential. While anecdotal evidence from a building construction engineer friend indicates this isn't a great approach, architects should in theory learn this stuff.
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*does not give up*
That is not a quality I would substitute for maths in an architect.
Architects are not civil engineers. Never let your architect use maths to do the safety check on your building; get someone qualified. Architects are also not quantity surveyors. Never let your architect count the bits of your building either, unless the numbers are easily recognisable ones like "3".
No they are not, but it does not follow that Architects have no need for any math or understanding of construction. If your architect comes up with visually beautiful plans that the customer loves, but are not possible to implement engineering wise, you have endless arguments and a real mess on your hands.
Re: Ummm... no. (Score:5, Interesting)
Heh. My son recently showed me the research results on the math olympiad tests. One of the main predictors of success on the physics and math olympiad turns out to be perseverance. Not study results, not SAT scores, just how long it takes before you give up on something.
So actually, I *would* select this student over others, as the chance of him being successful in the study is pretty good.
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the chance of him being successful in the study is pretty good.
Correlation != Causation
Doesn't matter in math, but it matters a lot in most subjects to which you might apply math.
Perhaps there is an important filter being employed at an earlier stage in the area of
math olympiad tests
Re:Summary: Did exam, failed it. (Score:5, Insightful)
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What's at issue isn't *facts*; it's the *interpretation* of facts. Is this kid's score on a completely new test more *factual* than his history of classroom performance?
I'm a big proponent of managing by numbers, but you have to be aware of the limitations of your numerical instruments. A proven test may well do a fine job at ranking the potential of two neurotypical students, but it's not going to rank the potential of a neurotypical student and a dyslexic student accurately.
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read the story. in full.
Very few people are going to read that dumpster fire of an article in full. Nearly 7000 words to say a student didn't get a chance to retake an exam he bombed the first time partially because of a death in the family. It was about ten times too long. If you want to go into that kind of detail at least provide a good summary up front.
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read the story. in full.
I tried that. It's written like a cheap dime store novel on the clearance rack for a nickle. I tried skimming through to get at the meat of it, but unfortunately I wasn't successful in trying to avoid all the filler and fluff to get at the actual subject of it. What I did get out of it is that he was diagnosed in 2019 with dyslexia. How does someone get into the 10th or 11th grade and just then get diagnosed with dyslexia, all the while making A's?
Sorry, if someone want's to summarize that story and cut
Architect can't do maths. (Score:2)
So you want your buildings to be designed by an architect who got a U and an E in maths, but boy did he try hard.
Re:Summary: Did exam, failed it. (Score:5, Interesting)
Multiple people are saying "he blew his exams" / "he failed his exams". The article clearly states his exams never took place. I think that's worse than a lie - theres just a bunch of people who don't even know that truth exists. I don't know what this kid would get if he actually did his exam, but nor do you. You had your exams when there was no pandemic and so you are fine. We're already sacrificing their future in order to allow a few idiots to go out drinking and wonder around without masks. Fairness means we have to try to give these kids a chance at what they might have done, not just what they can prove they would do.
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He repeated his final year because he did fail his final exams. He got a U (ungraded) in maths, which is kind of important if you want to study architecture. Then, during his go-around, the exams were cancelled and he was graded by an algorithm based on many parameters, including his past performance. I'll let you figure out how that went..
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Hi did not fail his final exams There was no final exam. An algorithm (it is in the headline already!!) decided what grade he might have gotten if he had written the exam. And the algorithm chose for what ever dumb reason an U.
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Are you retarded? The article is a long-form piece of fact-obscuring garbage, but surely you can read the short explanation and understand that a person can fail a final exam, try to retake it and then be graded on past performance because the retake was cancelled. The algorithm did not choose a U. That was his very own making. The algorithm gave him an E on his cancelled final exam retake. Jesus fucking Christ, the press presents a minority person down on their luck, with a funny name and "a female perspec
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You nitwit are trying to argue facts away. He did indeed fail his finals, the finals which he actually sat. That is a fact, which - according to the article - he freely admits. The algorithm doesn't have anything to do with that, because it happened before the algorithm was invented and applied. And btw., you're imagining things if you think I said he deserved the algorithmic grades given to him after his go-around and the cancelled final exams. Fucking Greta groupies. I know asking you to think for yoursel
Re:Summary: Did exam, failed it. (Score:5, Interesting)
you could check the right box when you're at home with all of the Internet at your side.
Why? In my job, I check the internet all the time. Lawyers have tons of case law to sift through. Oncologists consult the literature and each other when treating a cancer patient. Aircraft maintenance use checklists to make sure everything is done and done properly.
It's extremely stupid to test, essentially, for memorization. Nothing in real jobs have anything like exam conditions (or interview conditions, for that matter).
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All the people you mentioned consult information AFTER THEY FUCKING GRADUATED!
Were you allowed to consult external info (internet, books, other people) when you passed your exams?
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Were you allowed to consult external info (internet, books, other people) when you passed your exams?
Other than maths where we're allowed a page of notes and graphics calculators, no we couldn't consult external info.
But I'm arguing for that to be CHANGED, you fucking idiot. TRADITION is not a valid reason. The only reason why people aren't allowed to consult external information is merely a throwback to when people were expected to MEMORIZE things, and that memorization was confused with intelligence or ability. So asking whether I had to memorize completely misses the fucking point, dumbass.
And the
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So it's ok for a graduate NOT to know basic principles because hey! you can always search it online, right?
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Re:Summary: Did exam, failed it. (Score:4, Informative)
To be fair the OP , that isn't really the same as his point. I don't know if he's right but he does make a fair point, that I've thought about myself. I'm sure recent studies have shown that people are holding less facts in their heads, but use the same space to now store where to find the facts (excuse my bad description). So why are we placing such emphasis still on people remembering everything?
Even in your own examples, I don't actually care if my doctor can remember everything. I'm more concerned that they understand the facts enough to get the right outcome, even if they have to look up some of the data. It can't be that hard to test people based on their understanding of easily obtainable facts, rather than their memorisation of them (although, granted, its easier to avoid cheating if you just ban the internet).
Re: Summary: Did exam, failed it. (Score:2)
I'd did rebuild my cars engine from just consulting the internet you insensitive clod.
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Were you allowed to consult external info (internet, books, other people) when you passed your exams?
Actually, I was, in nearly every class that wanted my output to be analysis and critical thinking rather than rote regurgitation of facts. I don't think I ever had a closed-book philosophy exam, for instance.
Sometimes it matters that you know some knowledge off the top of your head. I wouldn't want to be in the care of a doctor that didn't know a philangee from a scapula by heart, or eat the product of a baker who didn't know flour from salt.
Other times, however, what you know internally is less important t
Re:Summary: Did exam, failed it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Nothing in real jobs have anything like exam conditions (or interview conditions, for that matter).
Most of what you wrote I agree with, but this sentence is very, very incorrect.
Many applications in real life jobs happen in real-time, where there does not exist the luxury of consulting a manual, or the internet, or fellow practitioners. A surgeon can't stop to read a manual when a patient's artery ruptures in the middle of surgery; they must have completely memorised the procedure for resolving it without turning their attention from it. A police officer can't stop to check whether the law allows them to chase and apprehend a suspect; they must know by rote the codes allowing or restricting their actions.
Does any of this apply to architecture? I can hardly think of a circumstance where an architect would need absolute real-time knowledge, but I might be incorrect.
The test condition may be (and I agree with you, very much is) grossly overused, but it is important to learn the skill of studying, memorising, and internalising knowledge in a great many professions.
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Your examples are pretty silly and basically support your parents point.
I never heard about a surgeons job interview happening in an operational room working on a heart and suddenly having a ruptured artery.
Same for the police job interview - it is most certainly not a: hey lets get out and chase one!! to see how you perform ....
I never had a job interview - or an school/university exam for that matter - which had anything to do with my later job.
The only exams that somewhere are close to reality are my bla
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Emmm.. you do know that most police services require prospective officers to go through some sort of academy, yeah? Where there are things like, oh, live fire exercises; spot checks for knowledge; ride-alongs; plus extensive on-the-job training..
And what on earth do you think a residency period is for doctors but a year-long industry interview where they are supervised and marked on each aspect of their performance?
I never had a job interview - or an school/university exam for that matter - which had anything to do with my later job.
In that case, I'd guess that you have never had occupation-specific education, nor an intervi
Re:Summary: Did exam, failed it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Aren't exams just an algorithm that grades you based on past performance.
No, exams don't do that at all (unless exams mean something else in British English). Exams don't care about past performance, they are a point in time assessment in an attempt to determine your knowledge at the time of the exam. Grades are an algorithm that assess you based on past performance, which generally take past exams and assignments as their primary data source.
If you do bad all year, you shouldn't pass a class simply because you could check the right box when you're at home with all of the Internet at your side.
Well there is a false dichotomy if I ever heard one. Schools could have easily set up exams in person. Test taking in gymnasiums, auditoriums, closed businesses, etc. Tens of thousands of proctors hired from the temporarily unemployed community. Just focus on students in their last 2 years of secondary education, as everyone else will have enough years before secondary school graduation for universities to ignore 2020 exams. It would have been easy to practice good social distancing in spring 2020 if it was a priority.
The failure wasn't just the exam replacing algorithm. It was the decision to use it in the first place. It didn't have to be handled this poorly.
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I agree that all children could've been out at school all year and get their exams done. It's the teachers unions in the US that don't want this to happen. This whole debacle happened because we are politically beholden to a group that does not have the best interest of our children at heart.
But my point was that exams are supposed to be a reflection on what you've learned all year. You do point-in-time testing with homework, exams should span everything that was learned in the year. If you flunk your homew
Failed the exam, the second chance got cancelled (Score:2)
The article is so long-winded that it's easy to miss, but it does state it at least twice. The student bombed the exams. He then came back to try again. It was the second go-around that got cancelled.
To get a second chance (after he bombed the first time), he'd have to wait since this round was cancelled.
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The article is so long-winded that it's easy to miss, but it does state it at least twice. The student bombed the exams. He then came back to try again. It was the second go-around that got cancelled.
To get a second chance (after he bombed the first time), he'd have to wait since this round was cancelled.
Yes, totally. And some people that repeat the whole year then subsequently fail again. Most do not however and in the UK we normally accept the result after the retake. For this guy, it's almost certain that they calculated his new result based partly on his old and mostly on his school so he never had a chance to prove whether or not he would do better.
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And I swear the author either wants to write novels instead of being a journalist, or they get paid per word. Dear GOD that was insufferable. Maybe its my ADD but I couldn't read it all.
Or maybe the author has a raging case of ADD? Because he writes like my 8YO self communicated:
Let me tell you a story about how I fell off the playground equipment. So I was on my bike riding to the playground when I looked over and saw a turtle. Did you know turtles can live a REALLY long time? And not all turtles eat the
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The article is so long-winded that it's easy to miss, but it does state it at least twice. The student bombed the exams. He then came back to try again. It was the second go-around that got cancelled.
To get a second chance (after he bombed the first time), he'd have to wait since this round was cancelled.
Yes, that was the most painful trek through treacle I ever tried to read. Could have been 25 percent as long and communicated better.
My suspicion is that with this whacked out year, he'll just be able to take his maths exam again at some time that it wasn't cancelled.
In the end, all I can glean from the article is that they believe he should have been summarily admitted because he has a good fashion sense and "tactfully coordinated" Nike sneakers.
But is this where young people are trying to take us
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Actually, if he hadn't been admitted (he was), he'd have had to take the make-up exam, which would have been *after* admissions was complete this year, and wait an entire year longer to get admitted-- at which point some hack on the admissions board would decide he's too old, or the grades were too long ago. Bureaucracy always finds a way to screw up even the simplest things.
While the article is terribly written, and apparently to a word-count (I don't mind that, but stop jumping around from one subject to
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Actually, if he hadn't been admitted (he was), he'd have had to take the make-up exam, which would have been *after* admissions was complete this year, and wait an entire year longer to get admitted-- at which point some hack on the admissions board would decide he's too old, or the grades were too long ago. Bureaucracy always finds a way to screw up even the simplest things.
While the article is terribly written, and apparently to a word-count (I don't mind that, but stop jumping around from one subject to another and one time period to another... sheesh!), it still boggles my mind how many people didn't successfully assimilate the salient points.
Is the writer a product of the British education system? I think a lot of people didn't get the main point because it was so difficult to figure out what it was, and the writing violated most of the tenets of proper writing, like introducing the problem area quickly, and then flesh out the story.
As well, how about some idea of an alternative? The best I could read from that mishmash is that the Students i Great Britain are being destroyed by an algorithm th tis not at all representative of what real lif
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You're missing the context.
The algorithm was a very high profile failure from last year. Everyone in the UK knows that it fucked up, knows what happened next (the algo decisions were replaced with teacher-assessed grades), knows about the impact in general terms on those kids and the kids sitting exams this year, knows that alternatives were discussed and what actually happened, etc etc. This article wasn't about any of that. It wasn't a news article at all. It was a human interest magazine article delving
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Multiple people are saying "he blew his exams" / "he failed his exams". The article clearly states his exams never took place.
It clearly says he did sit an actual exam and got a 'U' grade - the worst possible.
Re:Summary: Did exam, failed it. (Score:4, Informative)
It clearly says he did sit an actual exam and got a 'U' grade - the worst possible.
That was in the previous year. In the UK, when a student retakes, we do not take the previous years work into account and the majority of students that retake do much better than they did the first time. That's the same in most European countries where I know about, though I guess it might be different with SATs? It seems most Americans improve on the re-take too [collegeboard.org].
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When I took the SATs, I managed to cock-up the bubble forms and an entire section went un-marked.
When I re-took it, my score increased by 360 points.
Thank goodness they didn't simply hold me to the lower score.
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It clearly says he did sit an actual exam and got a 'U' grade - the worst possible.
That was in the previous year.
So you admit that you were talking complete bollocks when you said he hadn't sat an exam, then? That all that sanctimonious shit about how it was "worse than a lie" was just some sort of virtue signalling for people who hadn't read the article?
Now you're trying to move the goalposts to cover it up.
Re:Summary: Did exam, failed it. (Score:5, Insightful)
He blew an exam with a result of 'U' - ungraded. Then he wanted an algorithm to say that he was an 'A' student.
He took the whole course over and asked for a grade that reflected his mastery of the subject after having done so. If they knew than 1 student in 200 would be an outlier, how hard would it have been for 1 student in 200 to appeal by sitting an actual exam to demonstrate their skill with the subject.
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The existence of outliers does not mean he was one. That awful article was long on irrelevant details, while seeming to go out of its way to avoid saying how good he actually is in mathematics.
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The existence of outliers does not mean he was one. That awful article was long on irrelevant details, while seeming to go out of its way to avoid saying how good he actually is in mathematics.
I'm wondering how it was even chosen - it was a horrible read.
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I'm wondering how it was even chosen - it was a horrible read.
That's pretty simple. Those responsible for choosing it never read it.
They *can* sit for the exam if they aren't happy (Score:2)
> If they knew than 1 student in 200 would be an outlier, how hard would it have been for 1 student in 200 to appeal by sitting an actual exam to demonstrate their skill with the subject.
That's an option students have. Scheduling means that they'd have to wait until the next semester to apply for university, after they get the grade from the appeal exam.
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You missed the part about how he repeated the year in good faith then was denied the chance to take the exam, then the algorithm pretended the whole year of improved achievement and tutoring didn't exist.
The algorithm did such a poor job that the person who advocated it resigned in shame.
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No, not SJW outrage. It didn't call them names or commit a micro-agression, or decide they were using the wrong bathroom. It significantly under-graded a number of students (race, gender, and family income not disclosed) who probably should have done better based on objective reports from their in-class performance and teacher impressions.
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It significantly under-graded a number of students (race, gender, and family income not disclosed) who probably should have done better based on objective reports from their in-class performance and teacher impressions.
TFA is like watching an earth disaster movie and three quarters of the way thru learning the people calculating trajectories of the asteroid flunked every math class they ever took.
Half way thru this particular novel we find out the algorithm was dropped and he still ended up with a C.
Re: (Score:2)
And that going from an E to a C was apparently enough to get him in. We also learned that the delays caused by waffling about with a bad algorithm was very nearly enough to set him back another year. Meanwhile, we'll never know what he would have done had he actually taken the exam.
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If you read to the end, he was, in fact accepted, so it must have been enough. Your reply is counter-factual.
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He got a U in 2019. Then came back for 2020 to try again-- improved in all areas, but was graded by a poorly written algorithm that not only grades on a curve, but builds the curve based on historical performance of the school in general. Even his teachers agreed he should get at least a C.
I guess you got a "U" in reading articles.
Re: (Score:2)
He got a U in 2019. Then came back for 2020 to try again-- improved in all areas, but was graded by a poorly written algorithm that not only grades on a curve, but builds the curve based on historical performance of the school in general. Even his teachers agreed he should get at least a C.
I guess you got a "U" in reading articles.
How often did you do badly in an exam but got a higher mark because your teachers agreed that it was a disappointing result?
He got a U when he sat the ACTUAL exam; the algorithm gave him a HIGHER mark.
What psychic power are you using to determine that if he had sat the ACTUAL exam he wouldn't have blown it again?
He just has to wait the covid out and do a normal re-sit. It's not a big deal.
Your summary sucks (Score:2)
Summary: Did exam, failed it.
This isn't even remotely accurate. Obviously you didn't actually read the whole thing.
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Summary: Did exam, failed it.
This isn't even remotely accurate. Obviously you didn't actually read the whole thing.
I read the whole tedious thing. He sat an exam and failed it. Stop the presses!
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Comparing McDonald's burger flippers to working for modern ragebaiting journalism is an insult to burger flippers.
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You're stretching the truth when you're saying they're used to "feed" people. While many people consume them, the notion that they're 'fed' is speculative at best. You can feed people sawdust but that doesn't mean you can consider them fed.
Re: (Score:2)
What else do you expect from The Grauniad?
Re: Not sure whatâ(TM)s going on here (Score:2)
What's going on here is they used an algorithm to determine the grades for each pupil, irrespective of other circumstances. It was trained on pre- corona data. So far so good. However, they basically gave higher scores to pupils from good schools, and lower to pupils from bad schools. This is a great advantage for the schools with rich, white parents.
This wasn't even that bad for most kids, but very bad for those who had put in an effort to improve beyond the average for that school. That basically just did
Re:Posted as news, not opinion?? (Score:4, Interesting)
"Harvard is full of circle-jerking egomaniacs, Yale is full of evil liars, Princeton is full of spoiled rich kids, Cornell is full of people rejected by the other 3, etc."
Kind of. Ivy League admission has become a total arms race and is comprised of legacies combined with parents willing to do anything to get their kids in. This is because it's basically the only can't-fail express route to a wealthy life left in the US. The legacy admissions will always get in even if the parents have to donate a building or something. Among everyone else, its hundreds of thousands of students, domestic and international, competing for a couple thousand openings.
What it buys you is guaranteed employment in management consulting at the low end, and elite academic posts, investment banking and coveted law/medical school admissions at the high end. The management consulting spots alone are a good enough graduation present...you're paid six figure salaries with zero work experience and paid to fly around the world pretending you're a wise oracle for executives. Compare this to someone like me who graduated from a state university, with a marketable degree, and who had to hustle for their first job and work hard ever since. The Ivy League crowd is just handed a position when they leave.
As a result, well-off parents are grooming their kids for a 3 or 4 percent chance that their application might be picked out of the thousands that all have perfect grades, volunteer work, sports, patented inventions, crazy hardship stories, whatever. It's a desperate hail-mary pass to get kids the instant success that graduating from one of these places brings, vs. having to grind it out the rest of your life.
Re:Posted as news, not opinion?? (Score:4, Insightful)
My kids went through that. One got in, the the other did not.
Do they still come to your house to do the personal interview these days? Back then it was crucial.
What they look for is two things.
1) Can you AND YOUR FAMILY be expected to show absolute loyalty to your fellow Ivy league graduates and the social system they represent?
Sure, everyone thinks those places are full of Marxists, and they are. But you're not asked to become a Marxist unless you want to be a professor.
2) Can we expect you AND YOUR FAMILY to generously contribute to us for the remainder of your life?