I definitely know what is happening now, but what was happening in 1991???

As far as I can recall, it was a good year.

A damn good year.

NPR:

High school students’ scores on the ACT college admissions test have dropped to their lowest in more than three decades, showing a lack of student preparedness for college-level coursework, according to the nonprofit organization that administers the test.

Scores have been falling for six consecutive years, but the trend accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic. Students in the class of 2023 whose scores were reported Wednesday were in their first year of high school when the virus reached the U.S.

“The hard truth is that we are not doing enough to ensure that graduates are truly ready for postsecondary success in college and career,” said Janet Godwin, chief executive officer for the nonprofit ACT.

Bitch, it doesn’t matter.

Robots!

You stupid ass bitch!

Have you not been paying attention at all???

That college shit is over!

Robots are already in control!

The average ACT composite score for U.S. students was 19.5 out of 36. Last year, the average score was 19.8.

The average scores in reading, science and math all were below benchmarks the ACT says students must reach to have a high probability of success in first-year college courses. The average score in English was just above the benchmark but still declined compared to last year.

Many universities have made standardized admissions tests optional amid criticism that they favor the wealthy and put low-income students at a disadvantage. Some including the University of California system do not consider ACT or SAT scores even if submitted.

Yeah, see?

George Floyd!

The shit doesn’t matter! It’s racist!

It’s whatever, bitch.

It’s just whatever.

Shit doesn’t matter.

Just stop bugging people.

This shit don’t matter.

]]> https://www.anglinarchive.com/2023/03/14/uk-employers-say-skilled-workers-missing-because-schools-promote-memorization-based-learning/ Tue, 14 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Webmart Founder and Chairman Simon Biltcliffe.

We have a competency crisis across the Western world.

I think it’s probably a lot more to do with technology, in particular what smart phones are doing to the brain, than it is to do with the eduction system, and I think insofar as the eduction system is bad, it is bad because the people running it are incompetent.

However, it is interesting to consider the education system.

Reuters:

Frustrated with England’s education system, Simon Biltcliffe spends a lot of time training new hires at his marketing firm in the “soft skills” he and many employers say the country’s sluggish economy badly needs.

Finding that new starters often struggle to think on their feet, he sets them workplace challenges to learn to solve problems at pace and in teams. Many don’t adapt, leading to high attrition after three- and six-month reviews.

Across Britain, Biltcliffe’s frustrations are shared by businesses who say the nation’s schools, technical colleges and apprentice schemes are not turning out the workers they need, from software coders and designers to skilled machinists.

“There needs to be a step change,” Biltcliffe said, speaking at the offices of Webmart – which advises clients on the carbon footprint of their marketing operations – in an industrial estate in Barnsley, a former coal town in northern England. Neighbouring businesses include an IT security firm and other companies far removed from the region’s mining past.

Biltcliffe described the education system as “not fit for purpose” in a changing economy where the growth of automation and artificial intelligence will make creative skills and adaptability all the more important.

While Britain boasts world-leading universities, top scientists and a growing share of young people who continue academic studies after 18, less than a fifth of 25-64 year-olds have a vocational qualification, compared with more than half in Germany, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Biltcliffe and other employers argue that changes need to be made not only in post-school training, but in schools themselves, which they and some educational campaigners criticise for increasingly promoting memorisation for tests at the expense of creative thinking and practical learning.

The Edge Foundation, which seeks to improve ties between education and employers, says time for subjects such as computing and practical science work has been squeezed over the past decade, and that 71% fewer pupils studied design and technology courses to exam level in 2022 than in 2010.

Subjects that have seen big increases over the past decade included geography and history.

Despite the focus on exams, around 100,000 people leave school every year without required standards in English and maths and Britain has one of the highest rates of young people not in education, employment or training among the world’s leading economies.

At Webmart – with 43 staff and annual sales of about 20 million pounds – Biltcliffe says getting new hires up to speed in how to engage with clients or meet deadlines acts as a brake at a time when demands are getting ever more immediate.

“You’re slowing down really quite a lot to go at the pace of the education system,” he said of his company, which began as a print management firm in 1996.

The memorization conspiracy in education is part of the feminist conspiracy. Women are much less competent, generally, but they are also significantly better at memorization, i.e., test-taking. Therefore, for the sake of equality, test-taking is the entire focus of the modern education system.

Again, the problems are bigger. But it’s fine to just blame it all on women.

They do not care what this lockdown did to children.

In fact, they think it’s funny.

They are trying now to force-vax them all, so there is zero reason they would care about destroying their brains.

AP:

The COVID-19 pandemic spared no state or region as it caused historic learning setbacks for America’s children, erasing decades of academic progress and widening racial disparities, according to results of a national test that provide the sharpest look yet at the scale of the crisis.

Across the country, math scores saw their largest decreases ever. Reading scores dropped to 1992 levels. Nearly four in 10 eighth graders failed to grasp basic math concepts. Not a single state saw a notable improvement in their average test scores, with some simply treading water at best.

Those are the findings from the National Assessment of Educational Progress — known as the “nation’s report card” — which tested hundreds of thousands of fourth and eighth graders across the country this year. It was the first time the test had been given since 2019, and it’s seen as the first nationally representative study of the pandemic’s impact on learning.

“It is a serious wakeup call for us all,” Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, a branch of the Education Department, said in an interview. “In NAEP, when we experience a 1- or 2-point decline, we’re talking about it as a significant impact on a student’s achievement. In math, we experienced an 8-point decline — historic for this assessment.”

Researchers usually think of a 10-point gain or drop as equivalent to roughly a year of learning.

It’s no surprise that children are behind. The pandemic upended every facet of life and left millions learning from home for months or more. The results released Monday reveal the depth of those setbacks, and the size of the challenge facing schools as they help students catch up.

Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said it’s a sign that schools need to redouble their efforts, using billions of dollars that Congress gave schools to help students recover.

“Let me be very clear: these results are not acceptable,” Cardona said.

The NAEP test is typically given every two years. It was taken between January and March by a sample of students in every state, along with 26 of the nation’s largest school districts. Scores had been stalling even before the pandemic, but the new results show decreases on a scale not seen before.

In both math and reading, students scored lower than those tested in 2019. But while reading scores dipped, math scores plummeted by the largest margins in the history of the NAEP test, which began in 1969.

Math scores were worst among eighth graders, with 38% earning scores deemed “below basic” — a cutoff that measures, for example, whether students can find the third angle of a triangle if they’re given the other two. That’s worse than 2019, when 31% of eighth graders scored below that level.

No part of the country was exempt. Every region saw test scores slide, and every state saw declines in at least one subject.

You would think that the people complaining about what this did to the socialization and education of children would start getting thoughts about the vax. You’d think they’d start to wonder how much the government actually cares about kids.

But they don’t. They won’t.

People will just keep believing in the government because it’s easier.

It feels good to just believe. It’s a feeling of release.

I simply don’t care about test scores when the planet is dying and thousands of us are still dying weekly from the ever-evolving virus that is disabling thousands more.

— Wear a mask. (@senorhettler) October 24, 2022

MURRAY VS. REALITY:

Since the pandemic, student test scores have plummeted to levels not seen since 1990.

While most agree that keeping students out of school for 2 years was wrong, Patty Murray refuses to acknowledge anything should've been done differently.#WASenDebate pic.twitter.com/0sGwOqxs3q

— Tiffany Smiley (@SmileyForWA) October 24, 2022

Computers are faster at doing math than humans, yet they need a human to operate them.

Something similar happens with women, who, in theory, have the intellectual capacity to do meaningful stuff, yet remain fixated on their vaginas and on social media unless a man inputs commands into their brains.

Understanding that women are software running on human hardware puts the findings of this study into context.

Study Finds:

According to modern beliefs, the key to reducing gender bias in science is to increase the number of women in science. However, a new study by researchers at Colorado State University refutes this idea, finding that women still experience gender bias among peers. This holds true even in fields where they outnumber men and even when they consistently outperform them.

“The assumption has been that if you have the numbers, if you just increase the number of women, you won’t have bias,” explains researcher and professor Meena Balgopal in a university release.. “But we find that’s not the case.”

“Professor” Meena Balgopal

In physical science courses, the researchers say that women are outnumbered by men, but have higher GPAs and higher course grades. In fact, the study shows women are 1.5 times more likely to earn an A or A-plus than men.

Despite outperforming men, however, both women and men believe that men outperform women in physical science courses. Moreover, both men and women are less likely to seek help from a woman and less likely to perceive women as knowledgeable or the best in the class.

The findings for life sciences courses are similar, although the effect isn’t as strong. In life science courses, women tend to outnumber men and outperform them in terms of both GPA and course grades. In these courses, however, men are as likely to say that they’d seek help from a man as they are to say they’d seek help from a woman. They’re also equally likely to find men and women knowledgeable or the best in the class.

Women, conversely, are more likely to seek help from a woman and more likely to perceive women as knowledgeable.

While the results from life science courses may seem promising in terms of equality, it’s important to keep in mind that women outperformed men in the course. Thus, perceiving men and women as equal in the course is still an underestimation of women’s performance.

We could go into how the education system is set up in a way that benefits women’s learning process, which is based on memorization, repetition, and obeying orders, in contrast to men’s independent, hands-on learning process. We could also talk about how our cultural landscape is set up in a way that benefits women, while oppressing men.

But that still wouldn’t point people towards the elephant in the room: if women are so smart, how come they haven’t ever achieved anything of note without any men involved in the process?

The answer is quite simple. Women are just like computers. They’re dumb, but capable. They’re dumb in the sense that they need to be given explicit instructions in order to become useful, and they’re capable in the sense that once the instructions have been properly inserted into their brains, they can more or less manage a task.

Just as computers are useless without humans, women are useless without men. They do not have the spark of creation, or the drive to build, invent, and discover. They can ace all of your tests, yet their creations will never rival men’s.

Actual picture used by one of the study’s authors.

Every human is the same, so any human with any skin color can accurately represent the Human Race.

Daily Star:

Monkeys have shown that they’re better than humans at ‘thinking outside the box.’

Julia Watzek, a graduate student in psychology at Georgia State University, set up a test involving a problem-solving video game and invited human volunteers and a few selected capuchin and rhesus macaque monkeys to play it.

Julia Watzek has this tweet pinned on her Twitter:

Humans can get stuck doing things "the way we've always done it" & miss out on easier solutions. Capuchins and rhesus monkeys don't. Find out more in our newest paper on cognitive shortcut use out in @SciReports! w/ @SezDoesScience & SF Brosnan @CogSciGSU https://t.co/uzYfH6yNfM pic.twitter.com/T7T40uA03g

— Julia Watzek (@watzoever) September 13, 2019

Is she saying that those four monkeys beat humans in the study or is she implying that the African female monkey is the human beaten by the monkeys?

I can see capuchin and rhesus monkeys beating the African black female monkey, so maybe Julia Watzek is really presenting that female as “human.”

This opens up the deeper question of “what is human though?” Is proximity to the human form enough to make a creature “human”?

Is a human-looking animal with the brain of a chimp “human” because it looks human?

The simple game involved recognising geometric shapes, whereby when a player clicked a striped square and then a spotted square, the game would display a blue triangle.

Clicking the blue triangle resulted in a ‘win’ – humans got a simple audio “cheer”, while the monkeys got a little banana-flavoured sweet.

Once the players had got used to the game, the experimenters varied the playing conditions. They would pop up a blue triangle at the beginning of the game – before anyone had clicked any squares.

Most of the monkeys took advantage of the new rules straight away, with 70% of the monkeys going for the blue triangle as soon as they saw it.

Maybe the monkeys never understood the rules, so they were never really following any rules. Maybe that’s why they are monkeys and live like monkeys, while humans able to understand and follow rules are able to build complex rule-constructs and establish societies and civilizations.

Or maybe those monkeys are really smarter than that black female from the picture. It all depends on whether or not the study’s authors used blacks as the “human” group.

Meanwhile, nearly all of the humans stuck doggedly to the original rules and ignored the “free gift” blue triangle. Only one human trial subject out of 56 took advantage of the new conditions.

“I am really surprised that the humans, a sizeable portion … just keep using the same strategy,” Julia told Live Science .

These are supposed to be scientists doing research on intelligence, yet they speak of “humans” as if all groups of people were the same.

Well, this is embarrassing: Monkeys exhibit greater cognitive flexibility to solve problems compared to humans @watzoever https://t.co/O4y4tPVJ2b

— Susan Maury (@SusanMaury) October 15, 2019

Turns out monkeys don't always follow the rules and neither should we! More about this series of developmental, cross-cultural, and comparative studies come to my talk at #SEEHB4 tomorrow at 2.45pm! https://t.co/PeX0CASvSe

— Julia Watzek (@watzoever) October 17, 2019

They throw the words “humans” and “we” around as if differences in IQ and creativity and good-will didn’t exist, as if there were no differences in proclivity to violence, as if everyone were the same as everyone else except for “cosmetic” differences.

In a further experiment, the same human guinea-pigs were shown a video of someone else using the shortcut and were told not to be afraid “to try something new.”

Even then, about 30% of participants stuck with the original “two squares first” method.

Julia said that perhaps our education system, which focuses on memorising facts rather than encouraging improvisation, might be the issue: “To set ourselves up for good decision-making, sometimes that means changing available options.

Who designed our education system and what are their objectives? What is the stated goal of our education system and what are the actual effects accomplished by it?

Why are kids sitting around all day doing inconsequent busy work?

What are recesses?

A brilliant and well-produced video which highlights the insanity that is our modern day ‘politically correct’ school system.