How Good Are UW Students in Math?

As shown on the scanned answer key, this was an anonymous quiz. College students have a tendency to put in pathetically minimal effort on things they're not being directly graded on. Also, the quiz's stated purpose was to help the teacher calibrate the assignments; maybe some students purposely answered questions wrong in hopes of dumbing down the class. (Though I don't dispute the author's central point.)

The author says that UW students taking Atmospheric Sciences s101 "should be the creme of the crop of our high school graduates with high GPAs".<p>1) Atmospheric Sciences 101 sounds like a "blowoff" class that liberal arts students would take only to fulfill a science requirement. In other words, the students are likely self-selected for lack of math/science ability.<p>2) UW is a public university. It may very well be the best public university in Washington, but I'd bet the best students have a nontrivial rate of private school attendance. (So as to dispel any illusions of elitism, I attended the University of Michigan, which is also a public research university.)

I'm just as upset with the state of math education in the US as anybody, but if UW is anything like my alma mater, then "Atmospheric Science 101" is a class that liberal arts majors take to satisfy their math &#38; science general education requirements. A lot of these students (my wife, for example) have serious math anxiety. She could probably get a 70% on this test, even today, so many years after school, but throw it at her without warning on the first day of a non-math class and she'd literally cry.<p>Now there's a case to be made that a good high school math curriculum should not leave anyone anxious about math, but I still think it's a bit of a leap to take this test and extrapolate to all students.

And I remember in France how my university professors used to complain that high school students became weak in set theory...<p>I didn't know that the level in the US had fallen that far... but it's true that I remember helping a girl in the nearby community college on her math classes and the level of the exercises she had was about the french 7-8th grade math.<p>But of course, I think the emphasis on math in europeans countries is maybe different than in the us. In France, for example, ability in math is the main selection criteria and students who took the scientific curriculum in highschool had 6-8 hours/week of mathematics and for calculating the gpa, mathematics had a coefficient of 7-9 (compared to 3 for english for example).<p>And because the scientific curriculum is considered the most prestigious a lot of students who intend to later study non-scientific specialities like law or business take it.

Interesting premise, questionable conclusion. Kids can't do simple concept problems, so they need more drilling? Failure to calculate 1/.1 is not due to lack of practice, it is due to fundamental lack of understanding of fraction division. This is not a problem you fix via repeated long division of 4 digit numbers. This is a problem stemming from the fact that these students were never given a good idea of what the symbols they are being forced to move around really mean.<p>And who cares that they don't know the definition of cosine, or the formula for the area of a circle? These are not fundamental ideas for non engineers.

In UW's defense, "Weather 101" is pretty commonly known as an easy class to fill up General Education requirements.

Another lament of what's wrong with mathematics, by mathematician Paul Lockhart:<p><a href="http://www.maa.org/devlin/devlin_03_08.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.maa.org/devlin/devlin_03_08.html</a><p>He doesn't quite agree with this article.

Actually, I'm pretty sure this problem is exclusive to Washington. Go here<p><a href="http://www.wheresthemath.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.wheresthemath.com/</a><p>and scroll down to 'Washington State Facts'. Anecdote: I attend a community college in California, found the problems laughably easy, and have met tons of people in my classes who would feel much the same way.

I would bet these students got excellent grades in math.<p>EDIT: As in, I'm sure that during high school they got high marks in math class without actually understanding the fundamentals of what they were 'learning'.