Better Education?

1. Jay Mathews writes,

The dollars involved are astonishing, at least to me. Every English, math or science AP test at the three Stafford schools with a passing grade from independent College Board readers meant a $100 check for the student and another for the teacher. Checks totaling $90,800 went to students and $145,370 to teachers.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen. Mathews reports that this resulted in a big increase in AP tests taken and passed at the affected schools.

On the one hand, I find this plausible. These days, high school seniors are much less motivated about AP tests. I tell my students that when I was in high school, we were much less well behaved and less deferent to authority than today’s students. But it would never have occurred to us to slack off for an AP exam. I even remember a student who spent most of the year getting high still pulled it together for his AP tests.

I teach AP courses, and I have seen motivation trump ability in terms of scores. So if money motivates students to do well on the tests, then I can imagine a significant effect. Whether this means anything in terms of overall long-term learning is less clear, I suppose. And I am not sure why a $100 check for a student is any more motivating than the value of replacing a college credit. If it is, then parents who are paying for college tuition should offer their kids very large checks for passing AP courses.

2. John Cochrane and Russ Roberts discuss John’s Ph.D-level MOOC course on asset pricing. Cochrane says,

One thing I learned was there is a larger demand to watch the videos and take some quizzes than there is to do 15 hours a week of hard problem sets.

Later,

the MOOC experience is not just a complete substitute for taking a class. It is also a set of tools and materials that are the foundation for somebody else teaching class. Much the same way a textbook is.

Much later,

one thing this might do is to give us classes that are both more specialized in a topic and more specialized to the person. There could be–there are already 100 Introduction to Finance classes. And there is one out there that is exactly right for your interest and your level. So to some extent the MOOC is going to do that. The thing it’s not going to do, which I would do with you for a 1-on-1, is of course, I would not give a lecture. We would talk and it would be a lot more of me listening. In my other instruction life, I’m a flight instructor. Which is done one on one, and where assessing the student’s competence is really important. And where assessing the student’s misconceptions about how things work is really important. And that’s what you do when you are one-on-one and the guy needs to learn how to fly the plane. And by 1-on-1 sort of quizzing, I’ll pose a puzzle; you tell me the answer; I’ll go, is that really how it works? We really explore what you understand and what you misunderstand. That’s the way you teach 1-on-1 classes, and that’s the thing that’s hard to do on a MOOC. Would you really trust a pilot of your plane who said, I learned to fly on a MOOC and a simulator? He might be darned good. And he would certainly have run through all sorts of accident scenarios that the MOOC and the simulator did, but there might be a few remaining misconceptions about things that had gotten through the process that you might worry about.

8 thoughts on “Better Education?

  1. Lots of schools won’t give credit for various AP courses even if the student gets the highest possible score. AP exams are in May. Most seniors know where they’re going by then and whether their school will give them credit. If it won’t, many reasonably decide not to take the test (the College Board charges almost $100) or, if they are pressured to take it, they don’t try very hard to do well.

  2. YMMV, but I had some 40 hours of AP hours. The only 3 that worked for my major allowed me to skip to the second semester of college calculus which kicked my butt, which I then dropped and then had to retake without the ability to pick up the pre-req without hosing my whole schedule. So, I’ll encourage my kids to do AP courses, but not because of college credit.

    • “One thing I learned was there is a larger demand to watch the videos and take some quizzes than there is to do 15 hours a week of hard problem sets.”

      I hope this was delivered with some humor. College is more than anything a personality and lifestyle test. I love basketball and haven’t watched a single NCAA game. Who, once they leave the sheltered enclave of their dorm and resumes life, has time for problem sets?

      • In other breaking news, adults who don’t have a shot at the big leagues don’t spend 8 hours a day honing their curve ball.

        (as in where they get compensated for over-specialization in an esoteric non-general skill such as how doing academic economics only…barely…sometimes…compensates (some) academic economists)

        There is going to be this hump that MOOCs have to get over where people wrestle with the fact that college courses are largely useless except to achieve the degree requirements. That comes off as a horrible accusation but it’s not.

  3. The problem with discussing education is that there is no clear consensus about what it even means.

    To me, education isn’t so much about “learning” as it is practice and rigor. Learning is a fairly temporary thing. If you don’t keep doing something complex, the skill and deep understanding fades. Since college is mostly segregated from the rest of our lives, it is foolish to put too much value on learning. We are mostly practicing and developing habits. The details don’t matter so much. We will have to relearn them later.

    Repeatedly diving into complex topics and going through a regime of proving command of them is something we need to practice. After cycling through increasingly difficult stuff for many years, we don’t remeber all the things we worked on, but we have developed the capacity to pick something up and figure it out.

    Paying students seems wrong because it undermines the natural value proposition in practice. Practice doesn’t pay off immediately. The ability to defer gratification is one of the toughest and most important disciplines a person can have.

  4. It only makes sense for parents to pay for high AP scores if they expect those scores to translate to lower college expenditures. Case in point: I had a lot of AP and IB tests that let me skip college classes (a very highly ranked private university). Perhaps to my parents’ chagrin, this shifted rather than reduced my consumption of college classes: I had a definite mindset of “college takes four years”, and instead of graduating a semester or a year earlier than my friends and floormates, I took more advanced classes and got a minor and a second BS in the process. I certainly learned more, but I don’t know that it improved my job prospects or productivity.

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