James Lu should be happy he got 99.95 and stop dishing out on the VCE

[zzdfa]

did you read the thread nova, 5th post down. he wrote a letter to the age.

i want to see his original letter.

[enwiabe]

His points are salient, and he does highlight much of what is wrong with the curriculum.

Sadly, the politicians making our curriculum and designing our system haven't the faintest idea of how to do this adequately. And, to be fair, it is an enormous and extremely difficult undertaking.

When their creations fail, we see a lot of finger-pointing and blaming. But then we have to ask, if they won't, then who will come up with the solutions? James Lu certainly hasn't, and nor have I (Don't count this site, this site is a band-aid-effect to the current system) and, it seems, nor have most who have complained. Or anyone! Anybody could look at the VCE system and tell you that it's mired in controversial and ineffective teaching/assessment methods.

I'm yet to see the proposal of a better system. If you look overseas, some of these problems and other entirely different ones spring up all across the developed world.

No system will be perfect, and we won't near perfection for a very long time. I believe this letter serves a great purpose in once again bringing to the fore the dangers of being complacent with our current system. However, from here, we should consider solutions. I think the best way of doing this is opening up the debate to more people. Perhaps we need a real thinktank on this consisting of students, education researchers, teachers and politicians etc. to thrash out a better system.

Let's hope people start making the connection between this letter which highlights the problem, and now springing into action to effect positive change. That is the real problem, here. There is no shortage of complaints. No real intelligence is required to realise that our system favours the socio-economically advantaged and the mathematically able. Anyone can tell you that the VCE system, when executed at its worst, can stifle creativity and the intellectual thought process. But I ask, who will have the intellectual brilliance to invent the solution?

[xXNovaxX]

did you read the thread nova, 5th post down. he wrote a letter to the age.

i want to see his original letter.

err I tried to decipher it >< it used so many words beyond my daily word usage LOL.

But I gathered the jist of it, but like I dont see much wrong with what he said

please don't hurt me, I could be missing a LARGE point he is making, but yeah

[Tashi]

^ Bahaha, I agree - I hardly understood what he was talking about.

[kyzoo]

Hmm...what problems are created by stopping scaling past 50 for LOTE?

[m@tty]

Isn't the scaling past 50 a result of the governments incentive for LOTE's ?

[IntoTheNewWorld]

Isn't the scaling past 50 a result of the governments incentive for LOTE's ?

yes I love the government

[EvangelionZeta]

jqlu says (12:07 AM):
 u might like to point out
jqlu says (12:08 AM):
 that letters to the editors
 have 200 words
 and next year
 b4 i head off to college
 i fully intend
 to help pursue what education reform i can
jqlu says (12:09 AM):
 in particular to quantum JG
 that line
 that he points to
 i agree
 SHOULD NOT BE THERE
 coz it wasn't there
 it ended a much later para
 about the tertiary system
 in fact now i don't think it makes sense
jqlu says (12:10 AM):
 coz it goes from something on
 the scores
 to that
 rather than having anything ont eh tertiary system

[lynt.br]

Did anyone read the letter in today's Age replying to James' letter (I'm not sure if it was in reply to the same letter that this thread is centred around but it was replying to something written by James Lu)? The writer pretty much gave the generic "scaling is done to make everything fair" spiel while ignoring what I think is the central point of complain; how the current VCE education system stifles a sense of wonderment and discourages independent learning in favour of wrote learning the subject syllabus.

But really I think the core of the problem lies with the ENTER score. Anything which essentially attempts to quantify intelligence will ultimately be flawed. Unfortunately, the ENTER happens to be a convenient and easy way to rank people and has thus endured for so long despite its clear short comings.

[physics]

james lu is evil

[QuantumJG]

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?v=wall&gid=108791706666

rofl

lol

Sounds like Chuck Norris Stories.

Did anyone read the letter in today's Age replying to James' letter (I'm not sure if it was in reply to the same letter that this thread is centred around but it was replying to something written by James Lu)? The writer pretty much gave the generic "scaling is done to make everything fair" spiel while ignoring what I think is the central point of complain; how the current VCE education system stifles a sense of wonderment and discourages independent learning in favour of wrote learning the subject syllabus.

But really I think the core of the problem lies with the ENTER score. Anything which essentially attempts to quantify intelligence will ultimately be flawed. Unfortunately, the ENTER happens to be a convenient and easy way to rank people and has thus endured for so long despite its clear short comings.

Could someone post this up?

[NE2000]

So what's his alternative? Something like the A levels, or the SATs?

Get over the fact that he used large words, some people do simply have a large vocabulary, although he could have moulded his language to be more tailored towards the people who would be interested to read it. But anyway....

I think in a system which will rank students, scaling is very important. One of my teachers told me of back in his day when he took the hardest maths subject knowing it would negatively impact his final result because there was no scaling and he wasn't likely to get a very high result in it. You need a balance. On the one hand you have a large number of people picking spesh and languages for the scaling. On the other end of the scale you have even the highly intelligent and highly interested turning away from them because of the external and internal pressures that force you to strive towards the highest four digit number you can possibly get. However, there is a sort of self-correction mechanism in the system. A few years ago, specialist math scaled from 50 to 55 (40 to 50), this year only 50 to 52 (45 to 50). Why? Scaling is determined by how the specialist math cohort on average performs in the other subject that judges their mathematical ability: methods. The steady trend down from 55, to 54, to 53, to 52, suggests to me that there is more at work than simply yearly variation in cohort. I think people do take spesh for the sake of the scaling even if they don't feel they are entirely capable of doing well in the subject, but the result is the overall strength of the cohort weakens and the scaling decreases. I think with the gradually decreasing scaling people will be less attracted to spesh, creating a cohort filled with a larger proportion of people who do spesh because they enjoy it or are very good at maths which in turn creates greater scaling.

The other aspect of his argument is how the system appears to stifle continuous learning. This is not a simple problem to fix. First of all, this argument is probably focussed on the behaviour of the high ENTER score achievers. It is important to remember that a large proportion of the state will complete VCE simply because they want to go to university. You might lose sight of this in the inner city private schools but there are people who work very hard to try and understand the course materials in the first place. You can't create a system that steams ahead and leaves these people behind, because that would be more broken than anything we've got currently. But at the same time I did feel at times that I wanted to extend but I knew that the time would be better spent revising; a feeling probably felt by a lot of other users on this site. I had the most fun with open ended SACs. I only had a few of these for biology and physics and basically none with any other subjects, but these were SACs where you had to do most of the research yourself. I learnt things that never would have turned up on the exam. But they took ages, so you couldn't have too many of them. So I'm not sure where the solution to this issue lies.

James Lu perhaps lacked a bit of tact in that he started criticizing the system at a time when the system was rewarding him. But that doesn't mean his points should be ignored.

[lolbox]

James Lu perhaps lacked a bit of tact in that he started criticizing the system at a time when the system was rewarding him

When else could he get his point across? The media wouldn't give a fuck if he wasn't in that situation

[NE2000]

James Lu perhaps lacked a bit of tact in that he started criticizing the system at a time when the system was rewarding him

When else could he get his point across? The media wouldn't give a fuck if he wasn't in that situation

Yes that's true.

[Tashi]

This is the letter?

"Keeping it even
JAMES Lu's critique of VCE scaling (Letters, 15/12) demonstrates a glaring misunderstanding of how and why subjects are scaled. Scaling exists to ensure a level playing field, so that no one subject poses an advantage over another in the allocation of marks.

Distribution of scores across subjects can differ greatly, with many not representing a normal distribution. Scaling fixes this problem. If scaling didn't exist, then students would gravitate towards subjects perceived to be conceptually easier. That would foster real exploitation of the system.

Tristan Gooey, Dingley"

http://www.theage.com.au/national/letters/a-public-treasure-we-must-retain-20091215-kufs.html