[extropy-chat] Re: Home-schooling

[Alan Eliasen]

Brent Neal wrote:
> As a case in point,
> I will give you the University of North Carolina-Pembroke, which trains
> people with average entrance SAT scores of less than 800 combined to be
> teachers.

    I remember getting back my GRE score report around 1993 and looking
through some of the included analysis.  They had a breakdown of GRE
scores by intended major and, by far, the lowest-scoring group was
education.  That was sad, and indeed creates a self-defeating cycle.  In fact,
the lowest 4 out of 5 scores went to education fields.

    You can get a detailed breakdown of GRE scores by major at:
ftp://ftp.ets.org/pub/gre/guidtbl4.pdf

    I cut-n-pasted this data into a spreadsheet and sorted majors
from dumbest to smartest (based on summing Verbal + Quantitative +
Analytical.)

    Dumbest:  Pre-Elementary Education
    Smartest: Physics

    You can take a look at the (sloppy) output and manipulate it
yourself in one of three ways:

Tab delimited text:
http://futureboy.homeip.net/temp/gretab.txt

Excel Spreadsheet:
http://futureboy.homeip.net/temp/gretab.xls

Godawful HTML produced by Excel:
http://futureboy.homeip.net/temp/gretab.html

   I don't think our education system can be saved without enforcing higher
standards for teachers.

   So where does *your* major stack up?  :)

-- 
  Alan Eliasen                 | "You cannot reason a person out of a
  eliasen at mindspring.com       |  position he did not reason himself
  http://futureboy.homeip.net/ |  into in the first place."
                               |     --Jonathan Swift