Does calculus count too much for admissions?

[Frances]

1 hour ago, Sneezyone said:

We don't need tracks. We need robust, comprehensive, math education K-12. You shouldn't have to work as a technician for 2-4 years if that's not your ministry. In the absence of that, PARENTS need to ensure their kids know the material and not push them forward when they're not ready. Hasn't anybody watched Hidden Figures?! Talent is talent. We need strong courses K-12 such that people can stop when they want/need knowing that everything they received/mastered to that point was robust preparation for the next thing.

While I completely agree we need strong k12 math education for everyone, I actually think many engineers would be better engineers if they worked an applied hands-on job first. My dad was head of maintenance at a power plant and he was also a machinist and welder who made and/or repaired everything in the plant. There was always at least one engineer manager at the plant. In his entire career there, only one actually had a clue about how things really worked. The rest were book smart, but actually amazingly ignorant about anything applied.

A friend who did his undergrad in engineering at UT Austin said the best prof he ever had worked first in the industry and then went to engineering school.

I’m not advocating we keep offering bad k12 math education in this country in order to force people to work first and then attend engineering school. But I actually think for many students a combined apprenticeship/schooling route would be very appealing. I guess somewhat like engineering schools that have strong co-op programs, but maybe starting hands on first or simultaneously from the beginning of the college work.

[Sneezyone]

11 minutes ago, Frances said:

While I completely agree we need strong k12 math education for everyone, I actually think many engineers would be better engineers if they worked an applied hands-on job first. My dad was head of maintenance at a power plant and he was also a machinist and welder who made and/or repaired everything in the plant. There was always at least one engineer manager at the plant. In his entire career there, only one actually had a clue about how things really worked. The rest were book smart, but actually amazingly ignorant about anything applied.

A friend who did his undergrad in engineering at UT Austin said the best prof he ever had worked first in the industry and then went to engineering school.

I’m not advocating we keep offering bad k12 math education in this country in order to force people to work first and then attend engineering school. But I actually think for many students a combined apprenticeship/schooling route would be very appealing. I guess somewhat like engineering schools that have strong co-op programs, but maybe starting hands on first or simultaneously from the beginning of the college work.

I absolutely value hands on work. It’s why DH has been so successful and why I have no doubt DD will make an outstanding civil engineer. Her bridge still hasn’t collapsed, after 250 lbs. 🤣 All of the engineering schools DD is considering are small pond, ABET-certified places, lots of industry collaboration and hands on work. That practical work /orientation is important, I think, as an industry professional. I’m not sure I’d mandate it but it needs to be a pathway.

Edited February 17, 2022 by Sneezyone

[Frances]

26 minutes ago, Sneezyone said:

I absolutely value hands on work. It’s why DH has been so successful and why I have no doubt DD will make an outstanding civil engineer. Her bridge still hasn’t collapsed, after 250 lbs. 🤣 All of the engineering schools DD is considering are small pond, ABET-certified places, lots of industry collaboration and hands on work. That practical work /orientation is important, I think, as an industry professional. I’m not sure I’d mandate it but it needs to be a pathway.

My son’s strengths are verbal, but he chose chemistry as a college major combined with the very humanities heavy honors college. His physical chemistry lab professor and TA (it was three full blown courses, not just labs tacked onto the regular physical chemistry lecture class) were both constantly trying to convince him to go to grad school for physical chemistry which is something he would never ever consider actually doing for numerous reasons, not the least of which is that he is not gifted in math. But they were both blown away by his ability to trouble shoot and fix lab equipment and his intuitive understanding of how things work. While he’s not nearly as oriented this way as my husband, he has been surrounded by it his whole life. Even when he was a preschooler, I was learning so much from reading aloud to him books about how things work.

[Clarita]

2 hours ago, Sneezyone said:

That practical work /orientation is important, I think, as an industry professional. I’m not sure I’d mandate it but it needs to be a pathway.

I agree. People who do the technician to school to engineer, I have IMMENSE respect for and they are usually the best of the best. Seriously finishing Calculus in the 12th grade and going to a 4 year university is the easy route.

MY first company made me mainly work under the technician for a few months before gradually assigning me more designing tasks. I think interaction with the factory is also really important for engineers whose products eventually go into mass production.  

[Sneezyone]

3 hours ago, Clarita said:

I agree. People who do the technician to school to engineer, I have IMMENSE respect for and they are usually the best of the best. Seriously finishing Calculus in the 12th grade and going to a 4 year university is the easy route.

MY first company made me mainly work under the technician for a few months before gradually assigning me more designing tasks. I think interaction with the factory is also really important for engineers whose products eventually go into mass production.  

The disdain with which some parents of college-bound students view construction, welding, machining class work tho is unreal. SWB’s last book focused on how parents could use homeschooling principles to hack public education. I believe in that concept. I don’t think we’re hapless recipients of a hard/fast recipe for student success.

[Frances]

27 minutes ago, Sneezyone said:

The disdain with which some parents of college-bound students view construction, welding, machining class work tho is unreal. SWB’s last book focused on how parents could use homeschooling principles to hack public education. I believe in that concept. I don’t think we’re hapless recipients of a hard/fast recipe for student success.

My husband still uses the skills he learned in high school drafting and woodworking classes. He picked up welding later when I was in grad school and he was bored and is self taught in construction, plumbing, electrical work, etc. He can make, fix, or build just about anything and is never happier than when he is planning for or working on a project.
 

I’ve never understood people who look down on the trades or the skills associated with them. My husband has two science doctorates (one academic and one professional), but if you asked him about his most prized accomplishments, he would point to his art and the work he has done on our home and yard and car projects, not his degrees. 
 

At my last job, the owner had a PhD in physics and after teaching college for a few years, he went through an accelerated MD program and became a radiation oncologist. Later, while still practicing, he founded a medical software company. He credited the vast majority of his academic success to the votech high school he attended.

Edited February 18, 2022 by Frances

[Sebastian (a lady)]

17 hours ago, regentrude said:

A person who writes this sentence

does not seem to have the math expertise to know what they are speaking of.

There is nothing to "memorize" about the "intricacies" of the chain rule - once understood, it is a very basic principle. And you cannot use "mathematics to model physical phenomena" without an understanding of calculus. You cannot "look up" the chain rule when you need it- you need to know how to apply it. It's a very basic principle of first year college math, not something heinously complicated.

I question whether whoever wrote this actually understands calculus and its applications. 

I think you might be missing their point, that the engineering students they have taught are often memorizing to get through a test or course, but understand the math they are using so poorly that they don't recognize when the results they come up with make no sense. 

The authors aren't armchair pundits. 

Sheryl Sorby is past president of the American Society for Engineering Education and professor in the Department of Engineering Education at the University of Cincinnati. Norman L. Fortenberry is executive director of ASEE. Gary Bertoline is curriculum task force chair at ASEE, the senior vice president for Purdue Online & Learning Innovation, and a Distinguished Professor of Computer Graphics Technology and Computer & Information Technology at Purdue University.

[regentrude]

25 minutes ago, Sebastian (a lady) said:

I think you might be missing their point, that the engineering students they have taught are often memorizing to get through a test or course, but understand the math they are using so poorly that they don't recognize when the results they come up with make no sense. 

The authors aren't armchair pundits. 

Sheryl Sorby is past president of the American Society for Engineering Education and professor in the Department of Engineering Education at the University of Cincinnati. Norman L. Fortenberry is executive director of ASEE. Gary Bertoline is curriculum task force chair at ASEE, the senior vice president for Purdue Online & Learning Innovation, and a Distinguished Professor of Computer Graphics Technology and Computer & Information Technology at Purdue University.

But they are professional *educators* and not people who actually USE math to solve physical problems. 

That is a constant issue with people in education.

You can't "look up" the chain rule; it has to be completely automatic if you want to actually achieve anything in modeling. 

Edited February 18, 2022 by regentrude

[Dmmetler]

On 2/16/2022 at 8:44 PM, daijobu said:

Exactly.  We should be using that precious time when they are under 16 to be studying.  Instead they are learning a sport or playing an instrument.  Even high school these poor students get jobs.  Why not use that time to learn those academic skills before life gets in the way?  

The single strongest lesson  L got when taking CC classes as a barely 12 yr old was "You're so lucky-you can just learn this stuff now, instead of having to deal with a lot of other stuff". 

The single strongest lesson I got was "You're doing the right thing. If I'd had people in my life who encouraged me to go on and start college classes early, I'd be so much better off now". Almost invariably, these were folks who were strong students in middle school and before, but got pushed off an academic path. Maybe their family needed the income of them working, and they couldn't really do both. Maybe they got pregnant. Maybe their school tracked them into low level classes due to their race/SES and they got bored and checked out. Maybe they had undiagnosed learning disabilities, or mental health issues that became worse. But for so many of them, school just plain went wrong between age 12-16. 

 

This was also one reason why, when L decided to graduate at 16 and move on, and was really starting to hit the limits of what was available, I supported it, even though it meant competing against students who were two years older and had ALSO had high level academic schedules, major projects, etc. Because ultimately, I'd learned that it was far more important for a kid to just keep swimming and moving forward.  Too many don't get that chance. 

[Arcadia]

Related post on MAA https://www.mathvalues.org/masterblog/calculus-ccollege-admissions-and-the-high-school-curriculum

“CALCULUS, COLLEGE ADMISSIONS, AND THE HIGH SCHOOL CURRICULUM

By: David Bressoud @dbressoud”

https://justequations.org/wp-content/uploads/Just-Equations-2021-Report-New-Calculus-Final-Digital.pdf
“Anderson, V., & Burdman, P. (2022). The calculus of college admissions: How policy, practice, and perceptions limit equity in high school mathematics. Just Equations”

[Roadrunner]

@ArcadiaI love and agree with MAA’s take on this. At least they acknowledge that  there are kids who live and breath math (like your kids and mine) and who are studying it because they want/need math.

I don’t think I care to read what NACAC has to say about anything frankly. 

[Arcadia]

24 minutes ago, Roadrunner said:

@ArcadiaI love and agree with MAA’s take on this. At least they acknowledge that  there are kids who live and breath math (like your kids and mine) and who are studying it because they want/need math.

I don’t think I care to read what NACAC has to say about anything frankly. 

If you are referring to the PDF (second link), page 14 and 15 is on California. Also the suggestion was data science (statistics and linear algebra) instead of calculus, but linear algebra courses typically has a calculus prerequisite.

[Roadrunner]

26 minutes ago, Arcadia said:

If you are referring to the PDF (second link), page 14 and 15 is on California. Also the suggestion was data science (statistics and linear algebra) instead of calculus, but linear algebra courses typically has a calculus prerequisite.

And you would know better than me. Is there a rational why linear algebra  is a better course than calculus? I understand statistics and discrete math arguments and I am all for teaching those. But linear algebra to somebody like me (non math person) seems a bit random. Do you know why they chose it? 
 

I will read those pages. Thanks for pointing me. 

Edited March 4, 2022 by Roadrunner

[Sneezyone]

15 hours ago, Arcadia said:

Related post on MAA https://www.mathvalues.org/masterblog/calculus-ccollege-admissions-and-the-high-school-curriculum

“CALCULUS, COLLEGE ADMISSIONS, AND THE HIGH SCHOOL CURRICULUM

By: David Bressoud @dbressoud”

https://justequations.org/wp-content/uploads/Just-Equations-2021-Report-New-Calculus-Final-Digital.pdf
“Anderson, V., & Burdman, P. (2022). The calculus of college admissions: How policy, practice, and perceptions limit equity in high school mathematics. Just Equations”

It's sad what happened to the hard work being done in VA to shift narratives around math preparation. We have a lot of people here who work in defense and aerospace and all they know is calculus as the end all and be all. Meanwhile, those same organizations are beyond themselves because they're having a hard time finding and paying sufficient numbers of data and computer scientists.

[Frances]

59 minutes ago, Roadrunner said:

And you would know better than me. Is there a rational why linear algebra  is a better course than calculus? I understand statistics and discrete math arguments and I am all for teaching those. But linear algebra to somebody like me (non math person) seems a bit random. Do you know why they chose it? 
 

I will read those pages. Thanks for pointing me. 

The linear algebra I took did not have calculus as a prerequisite. It’s important for statistics and data science because it deals with matrices, among other things.

I did my graduate work in Statistics. Coming in as a psych major, I was lacking the full math background of most of my classmates, although I had taken numerous math and computer science courses. Linear algebra was the only prerequisite class my grad advisor thought I needed to  actually take. He said everything else I was missing I would be able to easily pick up as I went along and no full classes were needed. So I took linear algebra my first semester of grad school.

Edited March 4, 2022 by Frances