[segasaturn]

I don't understand this sentiment, even though it is common among Americans. Why is education seen as a competition between students, even in the younger grades? I've even heard stories of parents of young children fighting with each other over their children's grades.

[moduspwnens14]

That seems to be a common theme in the responses to me here.

The teachers set the course material and grading standards at least partially on how well the students are performing. Maybe not for a given class or year, but certainly over time. Scholarships are competitive. Slots in higher level courses are competitive, and often (at least partially) based on grades.

Can you imagine that the coursework and education overall might, over time, look quite different if half or more of students are regularly using LLMs, without explicitly disclosing it?

[wvenable]

Teachers aren't dumb here; they know what's going on. And they're actively working to figure out how best to navigate this situation. They're not looking to grade how well ChatGPT does in their course.

[Yoric]

I have many teachers among my friends. So far, they're mostly powerless. If a student is creative, there is basically nothing that will prevent them from cheating at any homework/exam.

My father, who was a math teacher, already faced the problem mid-90s, as cheap mobile phones became available in my country. Things have only gotten worse since then. ChatGPT is only one more brick in the wall.

[lukeschlather]

The problem is tests/quizzes and especially standardized ones. They have never been good teaching tools, and teachers have been railroaded into using them because they provide a blunt way to measure outcomes at a population level. But real teaching is 1:1 and teachers have a lot of power, it's just stuff that doesn't scale and you can't mandate organizationally. But this has mostly always been the case. Trying to measure student performance with a student who is more interested in gaming the process than learning is a fools' errand.

[nradov]

Tests/quizzes are good teaching tools. Students learn more effectively when they are frequently tested on the material.

https://www.hubermanlab.com/episode/optimal-protocols-for-st...

[macrocosmos]

Students do better on tests the more they’re tested. How was the effectiveness of learning measured?

I’m not doubting your claim but I don’t have time to listen to that podcast and I’m interested in what was said since you did.

[dns_snek]

> Tests/quizzes are good teaching tools.

I skimmed the linked material and that's not my conclusion. Practice tests are better teaching tools than just memorizing the material and then taking a real test, but on an absolute scale, I'm convinced that they're pretty terrible for most types of material.

Throughout my education I've come across countless people who could memorize the material and recite it with relative ease but they didn't have any intuitive understanding so they couldn't use that "knowledge" to solve real problems. Much like ChatGPT itself.

Equating good memorization and recall performance with good education and knowledge seems like a form of cargo culting to me, it's missing the essence of what makes knowledge powerful in the first place.

[nxobject]

Reading the abstracts and introduction of the linked articles: the testing literature focuses on recall performance, no? It's only part of the picture of "learning'. Of course, any good educator will interleave quizzes with integrative projects, chances to review past work, etc.

[Yoric]

That is true, but the problem shows up even with open-ended tests. In my country, we generally don't use tests/quizzes, and nevertheless, every year, many students attempt to cheat – and some of them undoubtedly get away with it.

Regardless, I agree, attempting to assess the progress of a cheater is a fool's errand.

[cma]

Why have grades like this that then still move everyone on to the next class. Don't move on until you've mastered the prerequisite. Why have a track of people making C's moving on from Algebra I to algebra II with the same people making A's. Get to college earlier by mastering, rather than a weird compounding competition that kicks off in middleschool.

Something like that was advocated by the Khan academy guy, but I'm not sure if he worked out a full replacement system. There are some things in the current system like honors classes or retaking the classes for people who got an F, but why have the F ruin their chance at college if they later master it and get an A? If they always lag but eventually get there, I guess an argument is college would be too expensive if it took them a long time to get through it.

[TheNewsIsHere]

Are you suggesting that in general and over the longer term teachers are going to advocate for changing curriculum and grading standards in such a way that students outsourcing their homework to ChatGPT (or whatever popular LLM comes after) would be advantageous in some way?

I would not wish to live in a society where “can bullshit an assignment with ChatGPT” is generally competitive in education.

[fnimick]

Grades determine what college you go to, which determines the connections you make, which determines the trajectory of your entire life.

[MichaelZuo]

This never made sense to me,

Unless the child is a literal genius or very charismatic, wouldn’t they almost certainly have worse prospects after graduating in the 10th to 30th percentile of their class at Harvard than from the 80th to 90th percentile of their class at Boston U?

(Assuming they could even manage to squeak into Harvard in the first placd)

[htrp]

No one cares about your gpa after 2 years of experience. All they will see is Harvard or BU

[MichaelZuo]

Who mentioned ‘gpa’?

[rcxdude]

how else did you intend percentile to be inferred in your comment?

[MichaelZuo]

Based on their actual merit?

For example, if someone on HN says ‘a 50th percentile intern’ at a certain company, they probably wouldn’t be suggesting the intern literally has a gpa in the 50th percentile among all the other interns at that company.

[itishappy]

Anecdotally, I failed out of undergrad 3 times. When I finally graduated, it had been 9 years and my final GPA was a 2.4. I also walked out that door with 6 interviews and an offer from each, all through the school job fair. Nobody ever asked about my GPA, they care about my degree and where I got it. For reference, I attended a respectable private school, but not one anywhere near the level of Harvard.

[0xBDB]

No. There are entire categories of employers (such as most of the prestigious financial firms for financial jobs) that only hire from the Ivy League. Twitter had its internal hiring policy leaked some time ago (before Elon) and Harvard was on the list (GPA 3.6) but BU was not at any GPA. School matters much more in the American class system than GPA (edit: or class rank) does. My understanding is that too high a GPA may in fact be disqualifying in some places; you might be uptight.

https://www.teamblind.com/post/twitters-internal-hiring-poli...

[j7ake]

Yes but people actually think about 20th percentile Harvard vs 20th BU, and correctly deduces that Harvard would be better path.

Parents are worried about the worst case scenario, and going to Harvard raises that floor by ensuring they can get noticed straight out of graduation, even if they are bottom of the class.

[actionfromafar]

How do you figure that? Isn't Harvard very much about the network of contacts?

[MichaelZuo]

‘The network of contacts’ isn’t some automatic mechanism that by default joins everyone in a class…?

By definition to join a network they need to be accepted by their class peers.

[satvikpendem]

The network is not (only) your graduating peers, it's primarily the alumni. If you see a job you want and the hiring manager also went to Harvard, they will have a more favorable opinion of you. You may ask how this is any different from any other college, but, due to prior network effects, the prior Harvard graduates themselves are more likely to be in higher positions of power. Prestige begets prestige, in a way that lower universities do not.

[pavel_lishin]

But the difference might not be between Harvard and a local community college. People don't come out of "slums" to Harvard and immediately join the upper class.

But you'll be exposed to different people and opportunities by going to a state school instead of a community college, or a better school out of state with a scholarship vs. a state college, etc. The small differences matter.

I literally got my first job because my roommate's dad knew of someone looking for a software developer job. Would I have met that person in community college? Maybe! Lots of people with good networks go to community colleges, too - but I'd bet fewer than more expensive schools.

[fivelorn]

Crucially, this also determines the quality of your medical care, and how hard the nursing home staff will hit you after you retire.

[lazide]

If you think it’s bad in America in this aspect, Asia is 10x worse. (Well, China and India anyway)

[HWR_14]

Entrance to elite colleges is dependent on your academic record. Only so many spots exist. So competition in high schools is common. Then elite high schools only have so many spots, so competition in middle school exists. And so on down to preschool.

[seanmcdirmid]

> I don't understand this sentiment, even though it is common among Americans. Why is education seen as a competition between students, even in the younger grades?

Oh wow, I thought Americans were super lax when it came to this, especially compared to more competitive educational systems like China. My kid is in second grade and hasn't gotten a real grade yet.

[CamperBob2]

Oh wow, I thought Americans were super lax when it came to this

It's hard to generalize here, as Americans are a heterogeneous bunch. Demographic subsets exist where education is seen as a vigorous competitive sport, where the goal is to achieve admission to the "right" college. The parents are as involved as the kids, usually for better but sometimes for worse.

At the same time, among other groups of Americans, the goal is simply for kids to reach adulthood without too much interaction with the police. You can't draw sweeping conclusions that will cover the entire spectrum.

[seanmcdirmid]

Ya, I assume Americans are all over the map so to speak. Anyone who wants to go to MIT, however, has to start early.

[itishappy]

Why wouldn't it be? Education's job is to prepare students for life in the real world, and life in the real world is often a competition with your peers. When I was in grade school (admittedly close to 20 years ago) we had accelerated and slowed tracks for students starting in 5th grade.

[TheNewsIsHere]

Typically the accelerated/gifted and talented/special education system in public education is designed to prevent students from being variously bored or overwhelmed, leading to poorer outcomes in either direction. It isn’t designed as a competitive construct.

AP courses notwithstanding. AP courses were insanely competitive and speaking as someone had been all over the map in my K12 years (AP, accelerated courses, early foreign language, and a touch of remedial relative to grade level) the students in AP were mainly in competition with themselves. That however is just personal anecdote.

[itishappy]

I'm sure it's not designed this way, but the end result is still a competition for resources. Schools aren't accelerating their whole class.

I also suspect that most kids, particularly grade schoolers, aren't aware they're competing in this sense. Parents are a different story.

[MVissers]

I mean, they should probably prepare people with knowledge of taxes and investing then.

The competition is very obvious in societies with a lot of wealth disparity. In Europe there tends to be less disparity and less competition.

US, China, India, UK, etc, much more disparity so it’s much more important for kids to be ‘top of the field’.

[itishappy]

> I mean, they should probably prepare people with knowledge of taxes and investing then.

Fully agree.

> The competition is very obvious in societies with a lot of wealth disparity. In Europe there tends to be less disparity and less competition.

Fascinating observation! Wonder if that shows up at the school level as well? For example, In the US the highest/lowest performing schools tend to correlate to high/low income areas and have significant disparity in quality of education, and I expect this is a strongly self-reinforcing trend towards elite private institutions.

[fivelorn]

Everything in America is a competition. I'm sorry, but I chuckled considering that this _very website_ is devoted entirely to ruthlessly choosing winners and losers in (what purports to be) a cutthroat field. It's Hunger Games over here, buddy.