*John A. Hill

Where I live, most people do not go for face to face interviews for university courses. You're admitted on the strength of your personal statement and predicted grades instead which is why I was confused about it being a "diversity" thing.

This the movie with Jonah hill

College mismatching is one of the worst things to happen to poor black students.

Someone that would be top 90% of his class at a standard state college could very well be on academic probation at an Ivy League school. This is very much not a good thing to do on the whole.

>Wasn't there an article recently about some biochem professor getting fired because he refused to lower testing standards?

I'd have to know the context for that one, sometimes that kind of story is actually just "professor is so bad at teaching that the majority of the class fails the exam because the professor didn't properly prepare them". Or even a situation where they teach or test a 200 level course as if it's a graduate level one, and then act like it's the students' fault when none of the sophomores know what's going on.

Does it also show how most of them flunk out?

One interesting aspect of reading is that “background knowledge” plays a big part in reading comprehension. Kids from wealthy backgrounds tend to have more exposure to knowledge and information not just in school, but in their home life too.

Yeah it reminds me how solid POV is as a series, and PBS' other stuff.

Saw this at a film festival earlier this year and really enjoyed it!

That and people who fail/drop out of harder pursuits such as the BAR exam usually teach this subject (or history) as they have (most) all the credits necessary to transfer majors.
I had a teacher like this; felt so bad for the dude.
Tried to become a lawyer cause his mom pushed him to be like his older brother. Went to one of the top schools in the US; but he quickly found out he didn't have the chops or the will to keep pursuing this major and dropped out. He said his choices of jobs using his current credits and not going back to school; essentially amounted to history/sociology teacher... so that's what he became.
To add insult to injury (at least at the time I had him as a teacher); he was classified as a substitute and got paid 13k a year for a school who has a teacher on tenure who was milking maternity leave for well over a year and a half according to him.
Dude was getting fucked royally and at the expense of the kids too. Man didn't get paid enough so he litterally had 2 additional jobs after school (he was a soccer and MMA coach surprisingly); so he almost never came in with a prepared lesson plan.
I remember just about everyday him googling a lesson plan related to what we were learning and we'd just go along with some video or assignment someone else made. Shit even grading was a joke; he'd have us make our own rubrics and then have us grade ourselves lmao.
God bless that man tho, he was a good dude who was trying his best. Hopefully he's getting paid what he deserves now; but yeah this is how you end up with teachers sometimes 😅🤷‍♂️

I’m not sure that view is accurate given the information that has come out regarding the test scores required of individuals of different races to be accepted into top universities.

Here is an article from the Harvard crimson that has a graph of the average SAT scores of admitted students by race: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/10/22/asian-american-admit-sat-scores/

You can find similar information regarding academic qualifications for med school applicants and law school applicants.

For law, bar passage rates provide an interesting data point. Those taking the bar have all graduated law school and are taking the same test (which, from my experience, is far easier than most law school tests). We would expect that if all law school applicants were qualified, they would be able to pass the minimum qualifications test at nearly the same rate. What we see instead is that the first time bar passage rate in 2021 for white takers was 24% higher than black takers (85% vs 61%). The passage rate for black takers was also 9% less than any other group, which may suggest schools are accepting and graduating black students who are less qualified than their peers of other races.

How long do you think you would be fooled by a below-average student claiming to be an excellent one? Would you honestly need more than five minutes to tell they're full of shit?

It seems unlikely that university admissions would have swallowed all those bullshit applications if they hadn't actively wanted to.

It pisses me off that people seem to equate “elite universities” with “better”. It’s like putting a beginning swimmer on the Olympic team. They’ve got the best coaches, the best facilities, massive funding… it must be the best place to learn to swim… right? When people hear you were on the Olympic swim team, you can definitely get a job as a lifeguard, maybe even a coach…. Are we all tracking?

I have a friend who is a reading specialist in a wealthy NJ school district. Parents will routinely complain to her that there is a mistake. They are doctors/lawyers/scientists, etc., and their children can’t possibly be struggling. She has to explain that it’s not a reflection on them. Even wealthy kids sometimes struggle. It doesn’t mean that they are stupid and it’s not a reflection of their parenting. But you’re right, wealthy kids certainly have more educational advantages, including access to private tutors.

It’s called gentrification and the activists don’t like it.

They’re just making a joke about how sociology (maybe humanities in general) is easy.

Yeah, even a lower ranking college is too hard for some students.

The school itself definitely sold itself on being a place that helped young black students succeed. But yeah, I doubt the colleges took race so strongly into account when accepting students. Sure, a lot of colleges want to say they’re diverse, (whether they actually care is another discussion) but a highly accomplished student being black is at best a bonus to them, they’re not going around enrolling under qualified black kids.

Plus every high school has different academic standards. How are you going to know that an A from this one school means nothing? Some schools have a reputation but not all are well-known.

Yeah, at a shitty high school, a reasonably intelligent kid can make good grades without a lot of effort. The numbers look good, but they didn’t learn a lot.

Grade inflation is a common problem in American public schools. The academic standards are so low that any reasonably intelligent student can get a good grade without much effort. A lot of kids pass without doing much work at all.

Saw it happen a lot in Atlanta with inner city schools and some other schools as well; they don't want to lose funding so they drop the testing standards and pressure teachers to pass students that have no business doing anything but failing, so they look like they have a decent % graduating. Then you have colleges stuck with a crop of students that learned fuckall in high school, and start pressuring college professors to drop their standards as well. Wasn't there an article recently about some biochem professor getting fired because he refused to lower testing standards?

The tricky part is that a lot of American public schools are pretty bad, and I guess that makes a lot of people not trust the government to regulate private schools.

At the moment most of the pressure is preschool/kindergarten privatization and on the other hand private donations cover more and more higher education like university. At least in Finland.

When private money is involved that basically means deregulation in some way or the other. Private companies want to decide how they use their money and there's less democratic oversight.

I’d agree except for the data showing many students lie about their race on applications by saying they are part of a minority group in the hopes of having better chances at getting in, so it’s not just charter schools. If you create a vulnerability this obvious in a system, it WILL be exploited, and the ultimate victimes will be those you were trying to help.