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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   35194 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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Hang on a minute - though I think I'm careening off a cliff here - it seems as if age-norming could lead to really weird outcomes if done over large-enough gaps. Could students arbitrarily young be given enough of a norming boost that they can pass a class by "doing well enough for their age," if standards are to be made relative instead of absolute? Could a baby obtain a college degree by dint of being, once you account for his age, at the top of his class?

Obviously it could never get that far, and I share this post mainly because it was an amusing mental image to me, but I do hope that there's some useful illustration in this reductio-ad-absurdum of the idea that absolute standards are often what we really care about. Relative standards are useful for putting people in order, and if you're ideologically opposed to there being such an order as it's inequitable or inegalitarian, then I don't think norming by age or gender or race is going to be enough - you're going to need to norm by everything, that is, abandon the tests.

I think you could largely avoid the weird issues by truncating the algorithm at a 1-year gap, tapering it off, having it conservative, or perhaps best of all (but less practical) try to test over smaller age cohorts.

Could a baby obtain a college degree by dint of being, once you account for his age, at the top of his class?

I doubt it, but there are absolutely people who could intellectually handle college coursework by age ten or twelve. The alternative is sticking smart kids with boring work that is neither challenging nor necessary, just to kill time until they are "old enough" to move on. Which is a great way to build someone who will gut your school because he has nothing but time and is smarter than the administration.

I'm confused by this comment, because it seems to be missing the point. You would still have orderings after age-norming, or after changing the structure of activities and institutions to avoid this phenomenon. They would just not be correlated to what time of year you're born in. To take the reductio-ad-absurdum to the other end, would you directly compare a 3 year old and a 10 year old, and expect to get a meaningful prediction of which of them is more likely to be a professional athlete based on their relative athletic performance now? Of course not. But we do exactly that on a smaller scale when we put 3 year olds and 4 year olds on the same team.

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