Good grief. On the same day that the BBC published a story on the seemingly embarrasing difference between Chinese and English math comprehension requirements (which I mentioned earlier here), they report that students are actually being encouraged to drop higher math courses in order to inflate the university’s standing on league tables.

Update: the link to sztywny’s blog entry has been fixed. Use the link in this summary rather than the one on Slashdot, which is outdated

My summary of a great blog post by “sztywny”, a young Polish computer science blogger, that made it to the frontpage of Slashdot.

Many of the questions that make it to the Ask Slashdot pages come from young and aspiring programmers wanting to know the role math and education play in the profession, or what makes certain programmers so much more productive than others, or what the future of the craft will look like. One young programmer by the name of Jarosaw “sztywny” Rzeszótko decided to ask these types of questions (and more) to the programmers he admired the most who also, it turns out, happen to be some of the most influential computer scientists and programmers of the last several decades. The result? Most of them happily responded. The results include the following: Linus Torvalds (Linux), Bjarne Stroustrup (C++), James Gosling (Java), Tim Bray (XML, Atom), Guido Van Rossum (Python), Dave Thomas (Pragmatic Programmer), David Heinemeier Hansson (Rails Framework), and Googlers Steve Yegge and Peter Norvig.

You can either be glad that you didn’t take math in China, or lament the waning educational systems of the West. This BBC article shows the stunning difference between a Chinese undergraduate entrance exam question and an English university’s exam question for first year students. Ouch.

George Mason University recently announced that it’s dropping the requirement for some undergraduate applicants to submit their SAT scores.

The school, after a three-year review, concluded that SAT scores are a poor indicator of collegiate success for high-achieving high school students.

Three years to figure that out, really?

Dozens of private schools have stopped requiring applicants to take the SAT or ACT amid concerns the tests are not accurate gauges of an applicant’s potential for success. Among public schools, however, George Mason’s stance is somewhat unique.

It’s been disappointing to me that, after all these years since I first became disillusioned with these silly numerical grading systems, I haven’t heard of any innovations in evaluating student performance or potential. How ridiculous is it to reduce a person’s potential to contribute and succeed in an academic environment to just a single numerical metric (or even two, or three)? It gives me a warm fuzzy feeling inside to know that there appears to be some reevaluation going on from within academia (however slowly), and I’m not at all surprised that private instutions are the ones taking the lead. Plus, at this rate, who knows?! In the future, they might even figure out a metric slightly more informative than the GPA. Just give it a few more decades ;o)