On Mon, 24 Mar 2003, dennis roberts wrote in part: > At 02:20 PM 3/24/2003, Herman Rubin wrote: > > > We need ... to recognize that many, if not most, entering > > students have not had even the semblance of a decent high school > > education. > > i think you are swooshing your broom much more widely that it is > fair to swoosh ... there are still excellent high schools with > excellent teachers who INSIST on a high level of effort and > performance from their students
Doubtless. But this does not really speak to Herman's claim about "many, if not most, entering students". The excellence of which Dennis speaks may be represented in only a minority, possibly a small minority, of students. (I do not claim that this is so, though I have my suspicions, but that it may well be so.) [Herman Rubin again:] > >It is not that they did not learn what was presented, but > >that not much of any real importance was presented. > > how can you ... or any other person ... really know what is > happening in the thousands and thousand of high schools? Ah. Now, that's the classical question allegedly addressed by statistics, isn't it? So: take a sample, ... Viewing the undergraduate students with whom I have had contact in the past several years, at two colleges and a university, as a sample, I would certainly be tempted to infer that the output of the population of "thousands and thousands of high schools" across the country is (on the average) indeed inferior to the output of the high schools across the country half a century ago. OTOH, possibly the two "outputs" are not comparable: construed as "those admitted to college/university", one suspects that the current population is much less selected-for-excellence, on the whole, than the population in the 1950s; except, as mentioned by some contributors to this thread, in the "elite" universities. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Donald F. Burrill [EMAIL PROTECTED] 56 Sebbins Pond Drive, Bedford, NH 03110 (603) 626-0816 . . ================================================================= Instructions for joining and leaving this list, remarks about the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES, and archives are available at: . http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/ . =================================================================
