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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32806 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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Ah, thanks for clarifying. I appreciate your points. All I have is my intuitive sense of why people choose honors classes. It sounds like my intuitive model of those people is different than yours. That's fine.

Edit: actually this wasn't your initial post, it was someone else. Apologies.

I went and re-read your initial post. My claim was that:

it’s okay to allow students to self-select (or students and whoever is telling them what to do) and decide how much schoolwork they want to do.

I went to American (US) public high school, and my recollection is that the main differentiator for the honors classes was that there was more schoolwork (more note-taking in english, more books to read) and the kids who took the classes were "better." Maybe that's not true across all high schools. I think that maybe International Baccalaureate (IB) or Advanced Placement (AP) would be better examples of places where true high-performers go.

I'm just saying that, due to the filtering effect of honors classes, they're generally going to consist of students who are higher in general intelligence than the broader student population at the given school and grade.

I'm inclined to agree, as long as you're saying that the average intelligence is higher. Maybe that's too much of a nitpick, but certainly there would be overlap in the distributions of general intelligence in honors and regular classes.

Teachers aren't perfect at gauging a student's potential ability to make use of honors classes, but I believe they're better than chance.

I'd rather use standardized tests for this, wouldn't you? Or a combination of standardized tests and nomination by teachers of students with merit? Teachers have all kinds of biases, and some teachers are terrible (many teachers awesome).

Edit: clarification in last paragraph

I'm just saying that, due to the filtering effect of honors classes, they're generally going to consist of students who are higher in general intelligence than the broader student population at the given school and grade.

I'm inclined to agree, as long as you're saying that the average intelligence is higher. Maybe that's too much of a nitpick, but certainly there would be overlap in the distributions of general intelligence in honors and regular classes.

100% agreed, and I don't think you're nitpicking at all, only clarifying. I probably should have written it out like that myself, but I generally take it for granted, because generally it's taken as a given when talking about intelligence - or more broadly any sort of traits with differences between groups - that the claim is only about differences in averages, with almost always large overlap between groups. It's not bad to write it out explicitly, though.

I'd rather use standardized tests for this, wouldn't you? Or a combination of standardized tests and nomination by teachers of students with merit? Teachers have all kinds of biases, and some teachers are terrible (many teachers awesome).

Also 100% agreed. Teachers are better than nothing, but that's a low bar. Standardized tests certainly have their own issues as well, but IMHO those issues are typically lesser than the issues with teachers and their biases (and/or plain incompetence), and schooling in general would be improved with a greater emphasis on standardized testing for figuring out where to place students.

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