In one of my Berkeley machine learning classes, I spent tens of hours on a class project that was a total flop. For some reason, I couldn't get the model to train correctly, even though I had applied all the techniques we were taught and went over the lectures over and over again to figure out the right way to do the project. A couple hours before the deadline I ended up just writing a ton of notes in the comments explaining what I tried and how it didn't work, and I ended up getting nearly full credit for the project. Not all classes are like that, but I definitely appreciate the profs/TAs who understand this concept. It's unreasonable to hinge your success in a class based on not failing a single project the whole semester. I wasn't ashamed of my failure, but more so just curious what I had done wrong. I ended up coming back to the project later and found out the issue, fixed it, and got everything working. Way more rewarding than getting my grade tanked.
6:50 this is why a lot of teachers / professors drop the lowest grade in certain categories (homework, quizzes, projects, etc.) It's not a perfect solution, but that's how it is oftentimes
Sometimes professors also allow case by case negotiation. Though that only works in smaller classes because I can't exactly blame them for not keeping track of the entire situation for hundreds of students and the teaching assistants don't always know you either. I started my first full time job during this past semester and the professor of the one class I was taking to keep my resume warm was completely fine with me coming in late every day after work because he knows I'm one of the top students in the class.
This is why the point-based system is vastly superior. I went to a junior high which employed it and my university uses it as well and the feeling between those two and other educational institutions in my life are like night and day. In the point based system you start at 0 points and everything you do throughout a semester will add points to your score, usually to a maximum of 100 (sometimes you can also do stuff for extra credit which would push it beyond 100 but that's rare in my experience). That way everything you do turns into a net positive, even if you score 5 points on a test that had a point maximum of 20 which would usually be a failing grade, in this system those 5 points still get added to your total and thus improve your grade overall. An added benefit to this system is that once you go over 50% points in a subject you just pass it and don't have to do any more school work for it, so if you know that you hate it and it won't be useful to your career of choice you can ignore it and instead focus on stuff that's actually important to you (Though personally that's not something I've done, I've always strived to get the best grades possible on all my subjects, but I definitely know people who would benefit from this approach) Also I just realized I'm 3 minutes into this 23 video so maybe you talk about exactly this later on, but I just got too over excited and wanted to talk about this now so I'll just leave this comment as-is with this disclaimer at the bottom. K, bye, love you
i think the point based system is basically the same as the system that cary thinks is flawed. the only difference is that in a point based system you are considering everything you haven't done yet as a zero, so your grade only goes up from zero. If you were to not consider the grades until you do the assignment, then it would be identical. so it has the exact same issues, its not superior.
@@sfpt I think it's part the effect it has on the mentality of the person looking at the system, but I agree with this as well not that it doesn't have the same inherent flaws, but I think a person told that they need to score points to do well vs a person who's told they'll be punished if they don't do well is like telling a person to work for something vs telling somebody to avoid failure. I don't think either are healthy in the long-term though cause in the extreme examples one person becomes a perfectionest who bases themselves off the system who falls appart when their skewed expectations don't match reality, and the other becomes too anxious to try anything because the internal backlash of doing poorly outweighs the a person who sees through the facade might sigh and say "whelp, time to appease the observers", I find this one the most relevant cause my intrests lie outside of school currently and it's just a pain to see I did poorly on things im not invested in (I thought it'd be intresting to do them, didn't drop them cause some stuff scaled up in points) on a side note, I dislike point-based systems which rank you against other people. It's probably eaier for UNIs to judge based off a single number, but said number doesn't represent the person as a whole. ATAR feels kinda BS cause instead of thinking about what im capible of, the system's built to see "but how much did you perform compared to other people in the cohort". Takes the focus away from individual learning/intrinsic motivation/curiosity about the world and shifts it into competing with others to get into higher education where supposedly job prospects and being traditionally successful lie. Could just be the Autism/ADHD talking but motivation is an ass and nobody around me can really see things how I do, so even the more open-ended assignments for STEM subjects can't really capture my process or give meaningful feedback to me, only the fact that I didn't hit the rubric. Part of my process for creative tasks is literally putting things off for months to let ideas flow, so making things in a timely manner with how I work is a pain and last minute motivation doesn't work for me when burnout decides to show its rear end and crap all over the place.
The main problem is not the starting point. What you describe would work just as awfully as the thing in the start of the video, if the points are awarded in the same way and end results are considered in the same way as in the start of the video. You'd be constantly afraid of scoring 5/20 because that would ruin your chance of reaching an arbitrary threshold at the end of semester. The real problem in the US is how grades are awarded and the effect they have on your life in the end.
Grades unfortunately work like this: Say, you hand out an “F” in art, then the message you give that student is “you are terrible at art”. However, the student will additionally think “I will never be good at art” because that grade haunts them for years to come. Note that this is just an example and it applies to all classes and may apply to all grades that aren’t an “A+”, depending on the student’s standards imposed onto them.
Yep, 100%, and its even worse when GPA is such a huge factor for college admissions. Why would someone who is not great at something like Art (an optional subject) ever want to take it if it's just going to hurt their overall grade? There is no opportunity to explore outside people's comfort zone when everything is going on their record. It makes it unecessarily difficult to explore new fields.
@@Sammysapphira The grade has an impact on the person’s experience with art which receives a negative tint While it is certainly just a tendency, if experienced often enough, it becomes certain that they will lose their will to do art.
@@trwn87 It shouldn't be a craft with GPA effecting scores. Unless you want to completely diverge stem and humanities. Then it might make more sense. It would at least help determine where peoples talent path is and allows them to specialize without worrying about mastering every subject outside of the basics
This is so true, especially when u say “they need MONTHS on end” this is just 🎯. Schools never teach long term commitment or effort in one particular thing, it's always just juggling a laundry list of tasks to just finish one after the either which fundamentally encourages mediocrity
Here in the Netherlands, it's really hard to get a 10 (out of 10). A 6 is what's needed to pass something. After primary school we have different levels of middle/high school, to fit your needs. After those you can always continue to study to get to university, but the lower the level you come from the longer you have to study to still end up high. But anyways because of this, combined with the 6 to pass, you can always try to get higher grades to improve your career. It's still not a perfect system, but it's better than whatever the heck you guys are doing.
I was thinking a similar thing about the UK system, where 70% is an A and it's just harder to get a 90+% than in the US, but it gives the possibility of 'recovering' a grade that you had potentially missed out on if you do happen to be an absolute expert in one particular thing. It also says to me that if everyone does get 90+%, it wasn't hard enough to properly distinguish the abilities of everyone taking the exam.
School really stunts the ambitions of young people. I wish I pursued the ideas I had when I was in high school or even earlier, but knowing the environment of school, I couldn't while I was preoccupied with the stresses of testing and grades. If school grading worked like the real world, I'd see a lot more Cary Huangs.
@foxtail286 I would include myself, I have had a game idea that I turned into a prototype but had to leave it to rot for a year basically, because I had so much work and stress building up on me.
Yeah in college I want to do more experimenting in things I am interested in, but it's not worth it when I have to get assignments done all the time (and go to work I guess but at least I like working)
7:39 The claim that “many students wait for the last minute” is true, yet avoidable: If you give students a personal reason to work on something they haven’t dealt with before, you can activate their motivation from the start., And even if it doesn’t click, it just doesn’t click. Would you really make a student “fail” (in the traditional sense, as in repeating the class or not succeeding in the future) because they don’t show much interest in biology? When maybe they really like math and art and perhaps even PE? I am aware that you didn’t inform yourself particularly much about this topic but it’s really worth a thought.
Ever since the last century, our education system has valued test grades over creativity and potential. But, if you judge a student over how well they do on exams, they will have the mindset that they are not as good as they thought. My point is, that we as students should be given a second chance at the subjects we are actually good at, and discuss them with peers. Sitting at home pulling all-nighters studying for things we're probably gonna forget after the exam, isn't the natural way we learn Thank you, Cary, for the message 🙏🙏
My understanding has always been that schools value "consistency," so ever getting a bad grade is unacceptable. I wish schools would emphasize endeavors other than just...grades. Same with standardized testing. One of my English teachers was very lenient on end of the year grades, and valued and emphasized growth over consistency. If you got all F's in the first half of the semester and then rose through the grades, he would end up giving you a much higher grade by the end. I don't know much about positive vs negative reinforcement literature, and I like to think I would prefer to give positive reinforcement...But logically negative reinforcement seems more effective to me in many aspects. Our strongest motivation comes from negative emotions after all, and it's often the negative experiences that occur which can more commonly shape our views and lives (unfortunately). Fear is such a strong motivator.
Both positive and negative reinforcement is important, but the problem with your English Teacher is that the grade is not supposed to show growth, but your competency. If he rated people higher because of high growth, then the most effective strategy is start by tanking, then followed by growth, and you'll create very perverse incentives for the students that knows this. And actually, negative experiences tends to have a VERY high level of demotivation for most people.
I think you’re misinterpreting my English teacher a bit. There’s more nuance to his grading than just “growth.” If he could tell you were participating and effortful, he would be more willing to increase your grade. Tanking your grade is not an effective strategy because the grade is also based on effort. Additionally, if you get all A’s the second half of the semester, in this case, you still might end up with a B. Therefore, it’s most prudent to try to get the best grade possible from the start. No, negative emotion creates the most motivation. This is scientific fact. Animals are motivated biologically by fear. It is how they survive and adapt. Negative experiences actually don’t demotivate us at all. That is a misconception about motivation. They actually motivate us to such an extreme extent that we decide to avoid certain situations. We are extremely motivated to not do something. For example, procrastination. In this case we are extremely motivated to avoid the fear and discomfort of doing work. So we are motivated to not do any work. It’s not an absence of motivation.
@@motimusjav luckily for us, we’re pretty intelligent animals. ethics standards are much more rigorous today, especially for children (at least in studies). what works for a wolf in the wilderness is not going to be what works for your little cousin in the 2nd grade. personally speaking, keeping someone’s mental health intact throughout development and education will only have positive influences on their success, happiness, relationships, outlook on life, etc. this isn’t to say that stress/fear should not exist at all in school, but like cary was saying, we should encourage calculated risk-taking and positive reinforcement throughout schooling.
@@rlckyrlcardo I'm sorry if it came across as though I am advocating for negative reinforcement. I definitely am not and strive to advocate for positive reinforcement. I am just reflecting on this logical perspective I have. I think it's important to be realistic about why people fall into this idea that negative reinforcement is better. Because it seems more effective. Or maybe it's because we aren't taught any other way. I am not saying negative reinforcement is better because of efficiency or is right. I am just pointing it out despite me not agreeing with it morally. My point is that negative emotion is a strong motivator, and if we can both agree on that then we're not disagreeing.
If your first job brought in $8k and your next job brought in $0 your average is going down. Its the same thing in both charts. Take the highest amount you could ever make and assign 100% to that and then assign 0% to $0 and you have the exact same scale. If you start a class by failing the first assignment your grade average is an F. It can only go up from there. Moral of the story: fail your first assignment in every class?
@@marc_frank But, according to the law of capitalism, the tasks would be real projects, otherwise nb would pay. After thinking more: that is just en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apprenticeship
@@kongolandwalker apprentices get a regular wage. no incentive to do better than passing grade. was a cool system for villages, with every profession accounted for, but not really fun in corporations. if school paid you more the better your work was, there would be more motivation to perform well. also no need for side businesses, cutting hair in the toilet or whatever. also incentive for poor families to send their kids to school.
This is why I decided in middleschool that grades can smd and I'd focus on the actual content of the classes more than the homework and tests. I still don't even know what my graduating GPA was at this point, because I never checked it.
if you are allowed to fail some stuff you could also fail to learn some stuff, part of the point of school is actually making you learn the material, not just teaching you good work habits (though that is/should be part of it too). Some of this stuff is stuff you don't actually need to learn for your main goals in life, but that some people think it's important for you to learn, for example history. Some stuff might be important foundational knowledge for stuff you do want to learn even if you are not self motivated enough to learn the foundation without being forced to, eg maybe recursion (idk if you really need that or not) That said agree with this video in regards to the habits / models of the world it is teaching you. I also feel like the negative reinforcement of school teaches kids to not be self motivated or come up with stuff to do themselves, which is sad. I also feel like when the kids are forced to worry about their grades a lot of them turn to cheating, and the whole point of the class is wasted. Also not fully cheating but cutting corners eg reading sparknotes, maybe that's ok though
The thing that jumps out at me about the two distributions you're showing is that they're an example of the contrast between a Type I and a Type III survivorship curve in biology. School assumes your performance is Type I (i.e. that most people will do well except for a few failures), while tournament professions like art and game development are Type III (almost everyone will fizzle out early except for a few people who make it big). It's this distribution, and not anything inherent in school or the real world, that causes the averages to skew up or down in the way you observe. If instead of art, you thought of a more regulated profession such as working as an employee in an engineering firm (which most of your STEM friends probably had as a goal) - then your compensation curve starts to look more like the one at the top, where you continue to do acceptable work until maybe one egregious failure causes you to lose your job. As somebody who's worked in one of the big tech companies, this sort of risk aversion also permeates the employee culture there, and most people are just working to maintain their income stream, not to do anything groundbreaking for the company. Even for those people, though, that risk curve only extends _in reality_ to the work they actually do as part of their job - the moment you start talking about personal projects, the survivorship curve flips and your point is true again. Many people don't want to post their incomplete and low-quality works because they fear that it'll drag down their image as a creator - and there's one case where that's true: maybe don't include any incomplete work in your promotional portfolio, once you've started building one. But that's no reason to avoid showing it to anyone at all.
6:30 it makes sense to talk about counting successes when you consider the real world, Because the real world doesn't have assignments. A class is meant to test your particular proficiency. In a fighting game match, you indeed get positive reinforcement by Landing more hits. But if you're practicing a combo your degree of success is measured by your failures
When i finished a semester, I had my own set of grades (each from 0 to 100). One is given by a teacher as a final. One is my own evaluation, how much of a study program i understood. One is how many % of other students I understand the subject better than. Sometimes i got a B, but it was obvious I was best in the class, so i gave myself 100% in the third category. Sometimes I got lucky questions at the exam, got A, but gave myself 60% in the second category. It is usually not possible to optimise all 3. More you spend time learning exact phrases from the book - less time you have to experiment and understand and extrapolate. So I optimised one of the three categories, depending on the subject, its difficulty and usefullness.
Starting at 100% assumes that you aren't failing your first assignments. If you are, then your grades can only improve over the year/semester, not get worse.
in the UK I think 70% at university is a 1st, highest possible grade lol 40% is a pass and 50% is a "C" I just think you should get a percentile, maybe if it's 25 percentile or lower then just give them a "sub 25 percentile" to save the poor student with the worst grade's mental health, getting a 1 or 0 percentile grade would SUCK
If you tank an asignment in an unusual way in Uni, just go to the professor. It's actually even better if you already talk to the professor before that happens. Showing them you care will make them empathize with your struggle more often than not and it will bail you out.
I think that schools should have a star system. If a student completes an assignment in any class that is exeptional in any regard they get a star for that. However a student can't get two stars for the same aspect per year. Stars contribute towards GPA but not for specific class. I feel like that be a nice balance towards both incentives. Make something extra cool so you get a star, but still you classss good enough such that you learn general topics.
When you were first giving the example I was thinking about an entrepreneurship class I just took and how at some point it was mentioned the idea that investors invest into a lot of things and then the one that makes it big pays for everything else, although I hadn't heard it called by the fail faster thing, however I have heard of fail faster before and it was exactly another thing you talked about. I have taken many game development classes as it is my major, and that was where I was introduced to the "fail faster" mentality, and rather than in being put in the context of making money, it was in the context of making games people enjoy. By failing faster you get not only get more shots at hitting the jack pot, but youre able to scope out the interest to know to put in the effort to develop it further, but even more importantly, you will learn from making it, the faster you fail, the faster you learn from your failures, and this idea of failing faster in order to learn more makes the idea of it even more applicable and meaningful compared to the investment strategy its all about your one success making up for your failures. With the motivational speeches, school are drilling an awful system of beliefs into students, and then think occasionally slapping a good system of beliefs in their face will just fix it. Its drilled into them for more than just a year, its drilled into their heads since the moment they enter a school and until decades later when they graduate during the most developmental years of life. And not only is this mentality itself bad, but another mentality that gets drilled in is that their worth as a human is entirely based on those grades, in the best case giving students with good grades a whole lot of extra stress, and in the worst case giving students without good grades an awful self image. And then when high school starts to finish up, and they are deciding to go to college, these mindsets also make it seem like college is the only viable option when in reality it has been less and less useful, but more and more expensive, and the main effect will be that most people go into crippling debt to try to prove their self worth because if they don't go to college, they'll never get a job that can afford the bills, theyll never be happy, and that they will be considered a worthless excuse for a human that will die sad and alone. And the fact that people will go to college not knowing what they want to do enough for being undecided to be a concept people know about is a massive red flag that people aren't going to college because it will help their career path when its a massive investment that will only help certain career paths but will be nothing more than a massive financial and mental burden for anyone else
"Schools are drilling an awful system of beliefs into students" You say that as if it's a failure of the system. I think it happens by design - risk aversion produces compliance, obedience, and orderliness. Big companies (and governments) want unquestioning workers like that because they're easy to control.
Success/failure of a student should be relative to the median and not some fixed score. 90% is high is 10% of students get it. 50% is low if 10% of students get it. Doesn't really make sense otherwise. Difficulty obviously varies from test to test and class to class.
Reminds me of one thing I really disliked in Norway'S senior hs equivalent - at the end of each year we had two tests judged by externals that were added to our grade average of all subjects we had. But the subject it was in was random, so if you got a subject you're bad in that could drag your average down, which might affect what universities you can go to.
I don't think that this is accurate. In the places where my grade went down over time is because over time I got lazy and I didn't do my homework properly anymore. And if we look at the whole of my education, each new level got more difficult and towards the end I was at my capacity, which obviously means my grades are lower. When it comes to your graph then there is an entirely different problem. You assume this 8k is capable of supporting you. But usually those are one offs. And usually they don't sell as well as Minecraft did. Instead they are like gambling where you have enough success every now and then that you keep going while you don't make enough to support yourself. At least for the average independent artist.
I dont know if this was the solution you were thinking of, but some classes have you take a certain number of quizzes or assignments and drop the lowest grade. Then, your grade isn't as dependent on failure
What you say at the end is that institutions incentivise what they _actually_ incentivise, which may well not be what they _say_ they incentivise. So schools may talk a good game about not stressing over exam scores, but they also frequently emphasise the importance of exams.
This probably gets addressed, but the starting argument is so bad I don’t want to watch the rest because it upsets me too much. To make it match lets change the money situation to “You are earning enough income to keep yourself alive, and getting a little bit extra on top of that for 3 weeks, then one week you can’t work at all and earn almost no money. That will be pretty bad, but because your previous weeks were good you will be fine.” I think that matches a C pretty well. You just picked to completely different scenarios, with entirely different scales, and said “look, they are different”. Like obviously they are different.
if I wanted to change the school scenario to match the money one it would be: You are doing really poorly on the tests for the class, but the final test accounts for 99.9000999% of your grade and you ace it, giving you an overall A
TL;DR: This vid was an unscripted rant, so his example could be better, but mathematically they are similar. Having one be a percentage and the other a dollar amount is confusing, so just imagine $1000 is a 10% grade and look at them both as percent. He wants to lower the usual minimum grade to pass for reasons he elaborates on in the video. I believe the point he's trying to make here is that having an overall 70-79 C in a class being a mediocre or even undersirable result *forces* the student to max out their grades, because even one failure will make their entire performance subpar. This leads to stress, bad learning habits, and generally no actual drive toward the material at hand, only towards a number and a "you pass, congrats." And this model is not representative of all career paths, only risk-averse ones like STEM feilds. In the bottom graph, imagine instead of $8k it's 80% on a grade, and the average performance is thus about 20% ($2k). This would be considered abysmal by typical school standards, but as an alternative grading system, he describes, it'd be an acceptable model of risk-attracted career paths like artistry. It'd also lead to less stress on the students behalf --- they can focus on the grade for one assignment and then care about the course material itself for the rest of the semester, not necessarily the grind. Obviously there's a balance here. The system with an 80% minimum acceptable avg. has real flaws that affect the student's learning ability, but the 20% system clearly has much lower standards and will let just about anyone pass. Maybe we as americans should adopt the systems most of the developed world uses and aim for 50-60% average. Not too stressful, but not effortless either.
As a piano teacher, this was kind of my mind. Performing music sits in a strange place when it comes to perfectionism vs. moving on and making progress. On one hand, one obviously wrong note can really stick out; hitting 95% of the correct notes can still sound like an awful performance if those 5% are really out of time and out of key. However, because of that, it's very easy to go overboard on perfectionism. It's easy to forget that not all mistakes are equal, especially in the ears of the average listener. Playing 4 obviously wrong notes is not the same as playing notes that weren't in the sheet music but still sounded good anyway, or playing just a little out of time or just a little too loudly or quietly at one part. It's easy to treat those all as errors that prevent you from saying you "completed" or "mastered" the song. However, you do want to nip bad habits in the bud when you can. At the beginning, correcting all the bad habits can feel like a huge hurdle that prevents you from making progress. But if you don't, it really slows you down in the long run. But on top of all of this, it is true that music isn't like food or medicine where being risk-averse is crucial for safety reasons; nobody's ever died from listening to a bad performance. So all the time, I'll have a student who will technically play all the notes in the right order, but their rhythm will be off, and their fingering will be terrible, but they'll ask me, "Did I play it right? Can I go on to the next song?" and I always have to wonder if I really should say yes and not discourage them, or should I say no, let's try to clean this up before we move on.
I feel like one of the core reasons why school can't work like life is because school has assignments. For a thing to blow up in real life, you have to make it reeeeally good, compared to what you did before. In school though, no matter how much you study you can't improve after 100%-ing the test. The grades are capped from above while life isn't. Maybe it's different in art-like majors and you actually have an ability to produce extremely good art, it doesn't work in STEM fields: there is no such thing as extremely good code or extremely good physics calculation, there is only "code that works" and "calculation that is correct" and an innumerable amount of ways you can fail at it. Actually, that's kinda how life works too in those fields! You can only get an extreme success if you're trying to be creative and out of the box, but if you're simply working a regular engineering job, you can't get more than your paycheck no matter what you do, but there are tons of ways you can fail and get fired. So, this is simply the difference between creative and task-based workload, and regular school is only suited for the latter.
this reminded me of the one class where I had a 95% going into the last test in a class with 7 tests and I was terrified I wouldn't get an A(90%) even though I got a 95% because I was terrified I would fuck up on this one last test because I couldn't use the drop the lowest test grade policy on this one test. worst part is that that last test wasn't a final either, it was just like every other test, so IDK why that policy didn't work on it either
I know I've heard of a grading scale that works a little better than this. In a class, you have a certain number of skills or proficiency and then you get graded based on how well you can do each of those skills instead of being graded for each project. This means that if you can do really well on all of those and show that you are capable of doing well, you can still get full credit on all of the skills, even if you do poorly on an individual project since you were able to show on other projects that you learned those skills. This also has the benefit that you can easily implement it into a pre-existing system.
Only 8 minutes in, but so far you're describing 2 things. the first is extra credit. That massive amount of extra money is more than you need. But the 2nd thing is that you can _use_ the money. If you do well and get extra point in school, it's just preparing for next time you mess up. As others said, either grade hard and the prof drops the lowest bunch, or only takes the best, or have a low point threshold for the class. The latter is the equivalent to the 2nd diagram. You only need a small amount to live or get by, but a big amount can set you.
Imagine it's the 1950s and you want to teach yourself math. Your options for information are either to go to the library and teach yourself from a textbook, or to get someone to teach you. The issue with textbooks is that they cannot answer our questions, so when there's somebody who doesn't understand something, their only other option is to seek a teacher anyway. With the invention of the internet, we can get answers for whatever we need, explained by many different people in many different ways. We can ask an AI to explain the problem to us, addressing exactly what it is that we don't understand. The value of education suddenly plummeted, threatening the value of universities. Instead of staying competitive by increasing the quality of education, universities instead monopolized the certification that comes with their education program. In our modern world it is entirely possible for someone to teach themself programming, but if a hiring firm looks at the resume of a self taught coding prodigy and sees that they've been working at mcdonalds for the past five years, they're just never going to have a single chance.
school isnt even trying to get to ready for the real world/make loads of money its getting u prepared for a docile cuckhold job where u r meant to be risk-averse 😂
I'll also say an annoying part of the grading system is that pretty much all high schools have a grade range from F to A+, but then some colleges/universities (including my own) go from F to A instead, which slightly shifts everything.
I agree with a lot of of this and it’s how I would want to teach if I was actually trying to help someone learn something, however, part of what grades and scoring systems that schools do, is for, is to communicate how well the student is able to satisfy all the requirements they’re given under pressure, you might want to read a book called The Case Against Education by Bryan Caplan to understand more of why educational systems can be so brutal and anti creativity
I think one misleading part is that failing in real world makes it harder to have a second attempt. So, if you fail on first project, you might not have enough money to start a new project.
Thinking more about it, it would honestly probably be better if we did regular averages for individual classes but used the Root mean square for calculating GPA. In order to be good at a specific subject you should be competant at most aspects of it, but in order to succeed in life you only really need to be good at one subject.
In general I think exams are dumb, because they don't at all measure how well you will do in your chosen industry unless you happen to become an exam adjudicator of some kind. Their purpose is to be easy to mark, but what does that say about society that we prioritise the paid adults having an easier time over the quality of a childs education? Also the idea that 77% is a C in the American system is crazy to me. Of course any bad test will hugely affect your grade if theres only a few % buffer between each one. Expecting someone to be getting 100% in everything they do is setting them up for failure in the real world, because no one will be able to solve absolutely everything. Especially if that average has to be kept up over multiple exams, it just seems unrealistic like this video is saying. Imagine if a guy who could potentially find the cure for cancer got 70% of the way there on his first attempt and thought "man I'm so below average, I'll never complete this cure". Or for a more realistic example, imagine if a football (this applies to both real football and handegg) team won 70% of their matches. You'd say they're the best team out there, or maybe that they're just choosing opponents they can win against and if they were to go against the entire world (less applicable to handegg) you'd expect that win rate to drop.
I see what you’re saying but the effect is the same with either graph. What changes is how you weigh each thing that is graded, so just give more weight to more important assignments instead of trying to reinvent the wheel
Okay, I see what you mean, but I only somewhat agree. School has made me more failure averse and that has been holding me back, but this idea seems too much like a lottery for my liking where students would be too encouraged to fully focus on a single project without learning any of the fundamentals that school is supposed to teach.
Hey Cary! I just wanted to correct an assumption you keep making. The difference between Positive Reinforcement and Negative Reinforcement. Positive and Negative in this case aren't about the ways they make someone feel, but in the literal definition of giving or taking. For example, positive reinforcement could be to give a child an ice cream cone when they pass a class, but positive reinforcement is also giving the child a spanking if they did something bad. Both of those are "giving" the child something, and thus are positive. Negative reinforcement on the other hand is when something is taken away. For example, if a child is bad, they might lose their TV-watching privileges, which is negative reinforcement. But if a child is being bullied and tells a teacher, they have the negative reinforcement of the bully being removed from the situation and put in time-out. So in conclusion, positive reinforcement can be both good OR bad, and negative reinforcement can also be good or bad. In the case of grades, a good grade and a bad grade are all positive, because it's something you're receiving, and not something that's being taken away from you.
I've usually heard that with the distinction between punishment and reinforcement. That is, your examples of spanking and removal of privileges would be positive and negative *punishment* respectively.
This comes from a good place, but you're comparing two different structural things. Imo this comes from your experience in the social media space where you can legit have 999 "failures" and then randomly quite literally as a joke you can have 1 success from something you did 4 years ago. I've seen that happen enough times to just laugh when it happens. Nobody will see those 999 failures simply because the algorithms don't show them. I've done extensive research on this. That occurring is actually bad generally speaking because you don't know why that one success occurred but I do suppose you can draw trendlines. After everything you'll observe that the only thing that seems to matter once you pass a rather low competency bar is marketing. I see so so so many content creators trying and copying things they see other successful people do with "poor marketing" and... Still at sub 100 viewers and 0 views on videos. That's no joke at least 95% of them. Imo the only 5 things I've seen that matter if you compare two folks at the start. "Hunger" to succeed, ruthlessness, ability to put in hours, and a high degree of being able to convince people that you are correct (aka charisma, rizz) and then all of those multiplied by time assuming you clear a some basic competency checks. The overwhelming majority will be able to clear those competency checks. Aside from those no other variable seems to matter all that much in the long run. If you're missing one of those 5 things, your max "potential" to succeed shrinks dramatically. There are outliers with the time component but typically that's an illusion. What you stated with the "real world" matches what I just described. How do you measure that in an easy to understand, mass distributable mechanism, ensuring reasonable equity for everybody? You can measure it by the same capitalist methods people typically measure but I hope you can see some issues that would arise. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't really force it to drink.
In one of my Berkeley machine learning classes, I spent tens of hours on a class project that was a total flop. For some reason, I couldn't get the model to train correctly, even though I had applied all the techniques we were taught and went over the lectures over and over again to figure out the right way to do the project. A couple hours before the deadline I ended up just writing a ton of notes in the comments explaining what I tried and how it didn't work, and I ended up getting nearly full credit for the project. Not all classes are like that, but I definitely appreciate the profs/TAs who understand this concept. It's unreasonable to hinge your success in a class based on not failing a single project the whole semester. I wasn't ashamed of my failure, but more so just curious what I had done wrong. I ended up coming back to the project later and found out the issue, fixed it, and got everything working. Way more rewarding than getting my grade tanked.
6:50 this is why a lot of teachers / professors drop the lowest grade in certain categories (homework, quizzes, projects, etc.) It's not a perfect solution, but that's how it is oftentimes
Sometimes professors also allow case by case negotiation. Though that only works in smaller classes because I can't exactly blame them for not keeping track of the entire situation for hundreds of students and the teaching assistants don't always know you either. I started my first full time job during this past semester and the professor of the one class I was taking to keep my resume warm was completely fine with me coming in late every day after work because he knows I'm one of the top students in the class.
I think taking the median score is better than the average.. if someone gets 97%, 96%, 94%, 89%, 0% the 94% is more representative of them than 75%.
@@zerotwoisrealdefinitely even more issues with that...
@@zerotwoisrealwhat if someone gets 97%, 96%, 94%, 89%, 0%, 0%, 0%? Is 89% representative of their grade?
This is why the point-based system is vastly superior. I went to a junior high which employed it and my university uses it as well and the feeling between those two and other educational institutions in my life are like night and day. In the point based system you start at 0 points and everything you do throughout a semester will add points to your score, usually to a maximum of 100 (sometimes you can also do stuff for extra credit which would push it beyond 100 but that's rare in my experience). That way everything you do turns into a net positive, even if you score 5 points on a test that had a point maximum of 20 which would usually be a failing grade, in this system those 5 points still get added to your total and thus improve your grade overall. An added benefit to this system is that once you go over 50% points in a subject you just pass it and don't have to do any more school work for it, so if you know that you hate it and it won't be useful to your career of choice you can ignore it and instead focus on stuff that's actually important to you (Though personally that's not something I've done, I've always strived to get the best grades possible on all my subjects, but I definitely know people who would benefit from this approach)
Also I just realized I'm 3 minutes into this 23 video so maybe you talk about exactly this later on, but I just got too over excited and wanted to talk about this now so I'll just leave this comment as-is with this disclaimer at the bottom. K, bye, love you
i think the point based system is basically the same as the system that cary thinks is flawed. the only difference is that in a point based system you are considering everything you haven't done yet as a zero, so your grade only goes up from zero. If you were to not consider the grades until you do the assignment, then it would be identical. so it has the exact same issues, its not superior.
@@sfpt I think it's part the effect it has on the mentality of the person looking at the system, but I agree with this as well
not that it doesn't have the same inherent flaws, but I think a person told that they need to score points to do well vs a person who's told they'll be punished if they don't do well is like telling a person to work for something vs telling somebody to avoid failure. I don't think either are healthy in the long-term though cause in the extreme examples one person becomes a perfectionest who bases themselves off the system who falls appart when their skewed expectations don't match reality, and the other becomes too anxious to try anything because the internal backlash of doing poorly outweighs the
a person who sees through the facade might sigh and say "whelp, time to appease the observers", I find this one the most relevant cause my intrests lie outside of school currently and it's just a pain to see I did poorly on things im not invested in (I thought it'd be intresting to do them, didn't drop them cause some stuff scaled up in points)
on a side note, I dislike point-based systems which rank you against other people. It's probably eaier for UNIs to judge based off a single number, but said number doesn't represent the person as a whole. ATAR feels kinda BS cause instead of thinking about what im capible of, the system's built to see "but how much did you perform compared to other people in the cohort". Takes the focus away from individual learning/intrinsic motivation/curiosity about the world and shifts it into competing with others to get into higher education where supposedly job prospects and being traditionally successful lie. Could just be the Autism/ADHD talking but motivation is an ass and nobody around me can really see things how I do, so even the more open-ended assignments for STEM subjects can't really capture my process or give meaningful feedback to me, only the fact that I didn't hit the rubric. Part of my process for creative tasks is literally putting things off for months to let ideas flow, so making things in a timely manner with how I work is a pain and last minute motivation doesn't work for me when burnout decides to show its rear end and crap all over the place.
The main problem is not the starting point. What you describe would work just as awfully as the thing in the start of the video, if the points are awarded in the same way and end results are considered in the same way as in the start of the video. You'd be constantly afraid of scoring 5/20 because that would ruin your chance of reaching an arbitrary threshold at the end of semester.
The real problem in the US is how grades are awarded and the effect they have on your life in the end.
Grades unfortunately work like this: Say, you hand out an “F” in art, then the message you give that student is “you are terrible at art”. However, the student will additionally think “I will never be good at art” because that grade haunts them for years to come. Note that this is just an example and it applies to all classes and may apply to all grades that aren’t an “A+”, depending on the student’s standards imposed onto them.
Yep, 100%, and its even worse when GPA is such a huge factor for college admissions. Why would someone who is not great at something like Art (an optional subject) ever want to take it if it's just going to hurt their overall grade? There is no opportunity to explore outside people's comfort zone when everything is going on their record. It makes it unecessarily difficult to explore new fields.
an f in art is fart lol
That is an absolutely ridiculous notion. Its not a grades fault that somebody gets an objectively bad grade on art and decides to not do it anymore.
@@Sammysapphira The grade has an impact on the person’s experience with art which receives a negative tint While it is certainly just a tendency, if experienced often enough, it becomes certain that they will lose their will to do art.
@@trwn87 It shouldn't be a craft with GPA effecting scores. Unless you want to completely diverge stem and humanities. Then it might make more sense. It would at least help determine where peoples talent path is and allows them to specialize without worrying about mastering every subject outside of the basics
This is so true, especially when u say “they need MONTHS on end” this is just 🎯. Schools never teach long term commitment or effort in one particular thing, it's always just juggling a laundry list of tasks to just finish one after the either which fundamentally encourages mediocrity
Here in the Netherlands, it's really hard to get a 10 (out of 10). A 6 is what's needed to pass something. After primary school we have different levels of middle/high school, to fit your needs. After those you can always continue to study to get to university, but the lower the level you come from the longer you have to study to still end up high. But anyways because of this, combined with the 6 to pass, you can always try to get higher grades to improve your career. It's still not a perfect system, but it's better than whatever the heck you guys are doing.
Also I really recommend looking into the school system in Finland and Denmark
I was thinking a similar thing about the UK system, where 70% is an A and it's just harder to get a 90+% than in the US, but it gives the possibility of 'recovering' a grade that you had potentially missed out on if you do happen to be an absolute expert in one particular thing. It also says to me that if everyone does get 90+%, it wasn't hard enough to properly distinguish the abilities of everyone taking the exam.
In italy it's the same thing,6/10 is passing and 10/10 is almost impossible. Our system sucks ass but somehow the american one is even worse
@Regian real
School really stunts the ambitions of young people. I wish I pursued the ideas I had when I was in high school or even earlier, but knowing the environment of school, I couldn't while I was preoccupied with the stresses of testing and grades. If school grading worked like the real world, I'd see a lot more Cary Huangs.
Don't blame school. That's on you.
@@tbird-z1rbit harsh
@@tbird-z1r Many people don't have time to start and finish new projects while studying
@foxtail286 I would include myself, I have had a game idea that I turned into a prototype but had to leave it to rot for a year basically, because I had so much work and stress building up on me.
Yeah in college I want to do more experimenting in things I am interested in, but it's not worth it when I have to get assignments done all the time (and go to work I guess but at least I like working)
I never realized how this was affecting my projects until you laid it out so plainly. Damn, thanks for sharing.
7:39 The claim that “many students wait for the last minute” is true, yet avoidable: If you give students a personal reason to work on something they haven’t dealt with before, you can activate their motivation from the start., And even if it doesn’t click, it just doesn’t click. Would you really make a student “fail” (in the traditional sense, as in repeating the class or not succeeding in the future) because they don’t show much interest in biology? When maybe they really like math and art and perhaps even PE? I am aware that you didn’t inform yourself particularly much about this topic but it’s really worth a thought.
Ever since the last century, our education system has valued test grades over creativity and potential. But, if you judge a student over how well they do on exams, they will have the mindset that they are not as good as they thought.
My point is, that we as students should be given a second chance at the subjects we are actually good at, and discuss them with peers. Sitting at home pulling all-nighters studying for things we're probably gonna forget after the exam, isn't the natural way we learn
Thank you, Cary, for the message 🙏🙏
My understanding has always been that schools value "consistency," so ever getting a bad grade is unacceptable. I wish schools would emphasize endeavors other than just...grades. Same with standardized testing. One of my English teachers was very lenient on end of the year grades, and valued and emphasized growth over consistency. If you got all F's in the first half of the semester and then rose through the grades, he would end up giving you a much higher grade by the end.
I don't know much about positive vs negative reinforcement literature, and I like to think I would prefer to give positive reinforcement...But logically negative reinforcement seems more effective to me in many aspects. Our strongest motivation comes from negative emotions after all, and it's often the negative experiences that occur which can more commonly shape our views and lives (unfortunately). Fear is such a strong motivator.
Both positive and negative reinforcement is important, but the problem with your English Teacher is that the grade is not supposed to show growth, but your competency. If he rated people higher because of high growth, then the most effective strategy is start by tanking, then followed by growth, and you'll create very perverse incentives for the students that knows this.
And actually, negative experiences tends to have a VERY high level of demotivation for most people.
I think you’re misinterpreting my English teacher a bit. There’s more nuance to his grading than just “growth.” If he could tell you were participating and effortful, he would be more willing to increase your grade. Tanking your grade is not an effective strategy because the grade is also based on effort. Additionally, if you get all A’s the second half of the semester, in this case, you still might end up with a B. Therefore, it’s most prudent to try to get the best grade possible from the start.
No, negative emotion creates the most motivation. This is scientific fact. Animals are motivated biologically by fear. It is how they survive and adapt.
Negative experiences actually don’t demotivate us at all. That is a misconception about motivation. They actually motivate us to such an extreme extent that we decide to avoid certain situations. We are extremely motivated to not do something. For example, procrastination. In this case we are extremely motivated to avoid the fear and discomfort of doing work. So we are motivated to not do any work. It’s not an absence of motivation.
@@motimusjav luckily for us, we’re pretty intelligent animals. ethics standards are much more rigorous today, especially for children (at least in studies). what works for a wolf in the wilderness is not going to be what works for your little cousin in the 2nd grade. personally speaking, keeping someone’s mental health intact throughout development and education will only have positive influences on their success, happiness, relationships, outlook on life, etc. this isn’t to say that stress/fear should not exist at all in school, but like cary was saying, we should encourage calculated risk-taking and positive reinforcement throughout schooling.
@@rlckyrlcardo I'm sorry if it came across as though I am advocating for negative reinforcement. I definitely am not and strive to advocate for positive reinforcement. I am just reflecting on this logical perspective I have. I think it's important to be realistic about why people fall into this idea that negative reinforcement is better. Because it seems more effective. Or maybe it's because we aren't taught any other way. I am not saying negative reinforcement is better because of efficiency or is right. I am just pointing it out despite me not agreeing with it morally.
My point is that negative emotion is a strong motivator, and if we can both agree on that then we're not disagreeing.
If your first job brought in $8k and your next job brought in $0 your average is going down. Its the same thing in both charts. Take the highest amount you could ever make and assign 100% to that and then assign 0% to $0 and you have the exact same scale. If you start a class by failing the first assignment your grade average is an F. It can only go up from there. Moral of the story: fail your first assignment in every class?
Or evaluate homework quality in dollars, uncapped.
@@kongolandwalker and pay students? would be kinda cool
@@marc_frank But, according to the law of capitalism, the tasks would be real projects, otherwise nb would pay. After thinking more: that is just en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apprenticeship
@@kongolandwalker apprentices get a regular wage. no incentive to do better than passing grade. was a cool system for villages, with every profession accounted for, but not really fun in corporations. if school paid you more the better your work was, there would be more motivation to perform well. also no need for side businesses, cutting hair in the toilet or whatever. also incentive for poor families to send their kids to school.
@@marc_frank *apprenticeship with payment proportional to the market value of their product. I feel such things already exist.
This is why I decided in middleschool that grades can smd and I'd focus on the actual content of the classes more than the homework and tests. I still don't even know what my graduating GPA was at this point, because I never checked it.
In situations where you sucesses are weighted more than your failures, you don't need to have the same risk adverse or perfectionate mindset
It’s really important to get this to a broader audience. You did just that, Cary, congrats!
School isn't really built for learning so much as it's built for qualifying.
if you are allowed to fail some stuff you could also fail to learn some stuff, part of the point of school is actually making you learn the material, not just teaching you good work habits (though that is/should be part of it too). Some of this stuff is stuff you don't actually need to learn for your main goals in life, but that some people think it's important for you to learn, for example history. Some stuff might be important foundational knowledge for stuff you do want to learn even if you are not self motivated enough to learn the foundation without being forced to, eg maybe recursion (idk if you really need that or not)
That said agree with this video in regards to the habits / models of the world it is teaching you. I also feel like the negative reinforcement of school teaches kids to not be self motivated or come up with stuff to do themselves, which is sad. I also feel like when the kids are forced to worry about their grades a lot of them turn to cheating, and the whole point of the class is wasted. Also not fully cheating but cutting corners eg reading sparknotes, maybe that's ok though
The thing that jumps out at me about the two distributions you're showing is that they're an example of the contrast between a Type I and a Type III survivorship curve in biology.
School assumes your performance is Type I (i.e. that most people will do well except for a few failures), while tournament professions like art and game development are Type III (almost everyone will fizzle out early except for a few people who make it big).
It's this distribution, and not anything inherent in school or the real world, that causes the averages to skew up or down in the way you observe. If instead of art, you thought of a more regulated profession such as working as an employee in an engineering firm (which most of your STEM friends probably had as a goal) - then your compensation curve starts to look more like the one at the top, where you continue to do acceptable work until maybe one egregious failure causes you to lose your job. As somebody who's worked in one of the big tech companies, this sort of risk aversion also permeates the employee culture there, and most people are just working to maintain their income stream, not to do anything groundbreaking for the company.
Even for those people, though, that risk curve only extends _in reality_ to the work they actually do as part of their job - the moment you start talking about personal projects, the survivorship curve flips and your point is true again.
Many people don't want to post their incomplete and low-quality works because they fear that it'll drag down their image as a creator - and there's one case where that's true: maybe don't include any incomplete work in your promotional portfolio, once you've started building one. But that's no reason to avoid showing it to anyone at all.
6:30 it makes sense to talk about counting successes when you consider the real world, Because the real world doesn't have assignments. A class is meant to test your particular proficiency.
In a fighting game match, you indeed get positive reinforcement by Landing more hits. But if you're practicing a combo your degree of success is measured by your failures
When i finished a semester, I had my own set of grades (each from 0 to 100).
One is given by a teacher as a final.
One is my own evaluation, how much of a study program i understood.
One is how many % of other students I understand the subject better than.
Sometimes i got a B, but it was obvious I was best in the class, so i gave myself 100% in the third category.
Sometimes I got lucky questions at the exam, got A, but gave myself 60% in the second category.
It is usually not possible to optimise all 3. More you spend time learning exact phrases from the book - less time you have to experiment and understand and extrapolate. So I optimised one of the three categories, depending on the subject, its difficulty and usefullness.
My mental model basically, that rocks bro
I love these, Cary. We're listening and enjoying the ideas!
Starting at 100% assumes that you aren't failing your first assignments. If you are, then your grades can only improve over the year/semester, not get worse.
@@flarflecakes reread my comment
@@sethbettwieser ohhhh mb mb
C should NOT be 70-79
ikr it should be almost B
in the UK I think 70% at university is a 1st, highest possible grade lol
40% is a pass and 50% is a "C"
I just think you should get a percentile, maybe if it's 25 percentile or lower then just give them a "sub 25 percentile" to save the poor student with the worst grade's mental health, getting a 1 or 0 percentile grade would SUCK
@@Joel2Million That's how it used to work here in India as well. I think 60% or above was 1st class.
23:05 Traumatising, it truly is, Cary!
Crazy that you posted this on the day I got a C in my AP pre-calculus test.
I’m in calc bc rn, but I heard a ton of people in precalc at my school failed the test on logs.
this video is about to change my life i think
If you tank an asignment in an unusual way in Uni, just go to the professor. It's actually even better if you already talk to the professor before that happens. Showing them you care will make them empathize with your struggle more often than not and it will bail you out.
4.0 can confirm
I think that schools should have a star system.
If a student completes an assignment in any class that is exeptional in any regard they get a star for that. However a student can't get two stars for the same aspect per year.
Stars contribute towards GPA but not for specific class.
I feel like that be a nice balance towards both incentives. Make something extra cool so you get a star, but still you classss good enough such that you learn general topics.
When you were first giving the example I was thinking about an entrepreneurship class I just took and how at some point it was mentioned the idea that investors invest into a lot of things and then the one that makes it big pays for everything else, although I hadn't heard it called by the fail faster thing, however I have heard of fail faster before and it was exactly another thing you talked about. I have taken many game development classes as it is my major, and that was where I was introduced to the "fail faster" mentality, and rather than in being put in the context of making money, it was in the context of making games people enjoy. By failing faster you get not only get more shots at hitting the jack pot, but youre able to scope out the interest to know to put in the effort to develop it further, but even more importantly, you will learn from making it, the faster you fail, the faster you learn from your failures, and this idea of failing faster in order to learn more makes the idea of it even more applicable and meaningful compared to the investment strategy its all about your one success making up for your failures.
With the motivational speeches, school are drilling an awful system of beliefs into students, and then think occasionally slapping a good system of beliefs in their face will just fix it. Its drilled into them for more than just a year, its drilled into their heads since the moment they enter a school and until decades later when they graduate during the most developmental years of life. And not only is this mentality itself bad, but another mentality that gets drilled in is that their worth as a human is entirely based on those grades, in the best case giving students with good grades a whole lot of extra stress, and in the worst case giving students without good grades an awful self image. And then when high school starts to finish up, and they are deciding to go to college, these mindsets also make it seem like college is the only viable option when in reality it has been less and less useful, but more and more expensive, and the main effect will be that most people go into crippling debt to try to prove their self worth because if they don't go to college, they'll never get a job that can afford the bills, theyll never be happy, and that they will be considered a worthless excuse for a human that will die sad and alone. And the fact that people will go to college not knowing what they want to do enough for being undecided to be a concept people know about is a massive red flag that people aren't going to college because it will help their career path when its a massive investment that will only help certain career paths but will be nothing more than a massive financial and mental burden for anyone else
"Schools are drilling an awful system of beliefs into students"
You say that as if it's a failure of the system. I think it happens by design - risk aversion produces compliance, obedience, and orderliness. Big companies (and governments) want unquestioning workers like that because they're easy to control.
@ its a failure of the system regardless of whether or not its intentional
so all it takes is one success (jackpot) to win big?,
Always keep gambling
Are all of the GttTATiNT variants on flashpoint? If not then you should try to get all of them put in a collection so that they can be played again.
wait um
my country, A was 80-100
and now it's 82-100
In my country A is 90-100 😭
Success/failure of a student should be relative to the median and not some fixed score. 90% is high is 10% of students get it. 50% is low if 10% of students get it. Doesn't really make sense otherwise. Difficulty obviously varies from test to test and class to class.
Here in Chile we dont even use letters
Is just 1.0 to 7.0 with 4.0 being sufficient
here in australia:
A's/HD's are between 85-100
Reminds me of one thing I really disliked in Norway'S senior hs equivalent - at the end of each year we had two tests judged by externals that were added to our grade average of all subjects we had. But the subject it was in was random, so if you got a subject you're bad in that could drag your average down, which might affect what universities you can go to.
I don't think that this is accurate. In the places where my grade went down over time is because over time I got lazy and I didn't do my homework properly anymore. And if we look at the whole of my education, each new level got more difficult and towards the end I was at my capacity, which obviously means my grades are lower.
When it comes to your graph then there is an entirely different problem. You assume this 8k is capable of supporting you. But usually those are one offs. And usually they don't sell as well as Minecraft did. Instead they are like gambling where you have enough success every now and then that you keep going while you don't make enough to support yourself. At least for the average independent artist.
so, does this "fractal" art has paws and tails?
I dont know if this was the solution you were thinking of, but some classes have you take a certain number of quizzes or assignments and drop the lowest grade. Then, your grade isn't as dependent on failure
What you say at the end is that institutions incentivise what they _actually_ incentivise, which may well not be what they _say_ they incentivise. So schools may talk a good game about not stressing over exam scores, but they also frequently emphasise the importance of exams.
This probably gets addressed, but the starting argument is so bad I don’t want to watch the rest because it upsets me too much.
To make it match lets change the money situation to “You are earning enough income to keep yourself alive, and getting a little bit extra on top of that for 3 weeks, then one week you can’t work at all and earn almost no money. That will be pretty bad, but because your previous weeks were good you will be fine.” I think that matches a C pretty well. You just picked to completely different scenarios, with entirely different scales, and said “look, they are different”. Like obviously they are different.
if I wanted to change the school scenario to match the money one it would be:
You are doing really poorly on the tests for the class, but the final test accounts for 99.9000999% of your grade and you ace it, giving you an overall A
TL;DR: This vid was an unscripted rant, so his example could be better, but mathematically they are similar. Having one be a percentage and the other a dollar amount is confusing, so just imagine $1000 is a 10% grade and look at them both as percent. He wants to lower the usual minimum grade to pass for reasons he elaborates on in the video.
I believe the point he's trying to make here is that having an overall 70-79 C in a class being a mediocre or even undersirable result *forces* the student to max out their grades, because even one failure will make their entire performance subpar. This leads to stress, bad learning habits, and generally no actual drive toward the material at hand, only towards a number and a "you pass, congrats." And this model is not representative of all career paths, only risk-averse ones like STEM feilds.
In the bottom graph, imagine instead of $8k it's 80% on a grade, and the average performance is thus about 20% ($2k). This would be considered abysmal by typical school standards, but as an alternative grading system, he describes, it'd be an acceptable model of risk-attracted career paths like artistry. It'd also lead to less stress on the students behalf --- they can focus on the grade for one assignment and then care about the course material itself for the rest of the semester, not necessarily the grind.
Obviously there's a balance here. The system with an 80% minimum acceptable avg. has real flaws that affect the student's learning ability, but the 20% system clearly has much lower standards and will let just about anyone pass. Maybe we as americans should adopt the systems most of the developed world uses and aim for 50-60% average. Not too stressful, but not effortless either.
As a piano teacher, this was kind of my mind. Performing music sits in a strange place when it comes to perfectionism vs. moving on and making progress.
On one hand, one obviously wrong note can really stick out; hitting 95% of the correct notes can still sound like an awful performance if those 5% are really out of time and out of key.
However, because of that, it's very easy to go overboard on perfectionism. It's easy to forget that not all mistakes are equal, especially in the ears of the average listener. Playing 4 obviously wrong notes is not the same as playing notes that weren't in the sheet music but still sounded good anyway, or playing just a little out of time or just a little too loudly or quietly at one part. It's easy to treat those all as errors that prevent you from saying you "completed" or "mastered" the song.
However, you do want to nip bad habits in the bud when you can. At the beginning, correcting all the bad habits can feel like a huge hurdle that prevents you from making progress. But if you don't, it really slows you down in the long run.
But on top of all of this, it is true that music isn't like food or medicine where being risk-averse is crucial for safety reasons; nobody's ever died from listening to a bad performance.
So all the time, I'll have a student who will technically play all the notes in the right order, but their rhythm will be off, and their fingering will be terrible, but they'll ask me, "Did I play it right? Can I go on to the next song?" and I always have to wonder if I really should say yes and not discourage them, or should I say no, let's try to clean this up before we move on.
I feel like one of the core reasons why school can't work like life is because school has assignments. For a thing to blow up in real life, you have to make it reeeeally good, compared to what you did before. In school though, no matter how much you study you can't improve after 100%-ing the test. The grades are capped from above while life isn't. Maybe it's different in art-like majors and you actually have an ability to produce extremely good art, it doesn't work in STEM fields: there is no such thing as extremely good code or extremely good physics calculation, there is only "code that works" and "calculation that is correct" and an innumerable amount of ways you can fail at it. Actually, that's kinda how life works too in those fields! You can only get an extreme success if you're trying to be creative and out of the box, but if you're simply working a regular engineering job, you can't get more than your paycheck no matter what you do, but there are tons of ways you can fail and get fired. So, this is simply the difference between creative and task-based workload, and regular school is only suited for the latter.
this reminded me of the one class where I had a 95% going into the last test in a class with 7 tests and I was terrified I wouldn't get an A(90%) even though I got a 95% because I was terrified I would fuck up on this one last test because I couldn't use the drop the lowest test grade policy on this one test. worst part is that that last test wasn't a final either, it was just like every other test, so IDK why that policy didn't work on it either
I know I've heard of a grading scale that works a little better than this. In a class, you have a certain number of skills or proficiency and then you get graded based on how well you can do each of those skills instead of being graded for each project. This means that if you can do really well on all of those and show that you are capable of doing well, you can still get full credit on all of the skills, even if you do poorly on an individual project since you were able to show on other projects that you learned those skills. This also has the benefit that you can easily implement it into a pre-existing system.
Only 8 minutes in, but so far you're describing 2 things. the first is extra credit. That massive amount of extra money is more than you need. But the 2nd thing is that you can _use_ the money. If you do well and get extra point in school, it's just preparing for next time you mess up.
As others said, either grade hard and the prof drops the lowest bunch, or only takes the best, or have a low point threshold for the class. The latter is the equivalent to the 2nd diagram. You only need a small amount to live or get by, but a big amount can set you.
Imagine it's the 1950s and you want to teach yourself math. Your options for information are either to go to the library and teach yourself from a textbook, or to get someone to teach you. The issue with textbooks is that they cannot answer our questions, so when there's somebody who doesn't understand something, their only other option is to seek a teacher anyway.
With the invention of the internet, we can get answers for whatever we need, explained by many different people in many different ways. We can ask an AI to explain the problem to us, addressing exactly what it is that we don't understand. The value of education suddenly plummeted, threatening the value of universities. Instead of staying competitive by increasing the quality of education, universities instead monopolized the certification that comes with their education program.
In our modern world it is entirely possible for someone to teach themself programming, but if a hiring firm looks at the resume of a self taught coding prodigy and sees that they've been working at mcdonalds for the past five years, they're just never going to have a single chance.
I didn't even know that.
Without grade inflation this wouldn't be the case. If D-C was average, failing once wouldn't be that bad but getting one A could get you far.
Yeah, the Montessori system doesn't have grades, instead it has the stages of Introduced, Working, and Mastered.
school isnt even trying to get to ready for the real world/make loads of money
its getting u prepared for a docile cuckhold job where u r meant to be risk-averse 😂
Most of people are pretty much risk averse in the first place. Not everyone can be Bill Gates, or world altering.
I'll also say an annoying part of the grading system is that pretty much all high schools have a grade range from F to A+, but then some colleges/universities (including my own) go from F to A instead, which slightly shifts everything.
I agree with a lot of of this and it’s how I would want to teach if I was actually trying to help someone learn something, however, part of what grades and scoring systems that schools do, is for, is to communicate how well the student is able to satisfy all the requirements they’re given under pressure, you might want to read a book called The Case Against Education by Bryan Caplan to understand more of why educational systems can be so brutal and anti creativity
we have a1 and a2 grades
a1 is 91-100
a2 is 81-90
I think one misleading part is that failing in real world makes it harder to have a second attempt. So, if you fail on first project, you might not have enough money to start a new project.
What do you think about taking the Root-mean-square of each assignment rather than just a regular arithmetic mean?
Thinking more about it, it would honestly probably be better if we did regular averages for individual classes but used the Root mean square for calculating GPA. In order to be good at a specific subject you should be competant at most aspects of it, but in order to succeed in life you only really need to be good at one subject.
needed to hear this, i think
In general I think exams are dumb, because they don't at all measure how well you will do in your chosen industry unless you happen to become an exam adjudicator of some kind. Their purpose is to be easy to mark, but what does that say about society that we prioritise the paid adults having an easier time over the quality of a childs education?
Also the idea that 77% is a C in the American system is crazy to me. Of course any bad test will hugely affect your grade if theres only a few % buffer between each one. Expecting someone to be getting 100% in everything they do is setting them up for failure in the real world, because no one will be able to solve absolutely everything. Especially if that average has to be kept up over multiple exams, it just seems unrealistic like this video is saying.
Imagine if a guy who could potentially find the cure for cancer got 70% of the way there on his first attempt and thought "man I'm so below average, I'll never complete this cure". Or for a more realistic example, imagine if a football (this applies to both real football and handegg) team won 70% of their matches. You'd say they're the best team out there, or maybe that they're just choosing opponents they can win against and if they were to go against the entire world (less applicable to handegg) you'd expect that win rate to drop.
I see what you’re saying but the effect is the same with either graph. What changes is how you weigh each thing that is graded, so just give more weight to more important assignments instead of trying to reinvent the wheel
Okay, I see what you mean, but I only somewhat agree. School has made me more failure averse and that has been holding me back, but this idea seems too much like a lottery for my liking where students would be too encouraged to fully focus on a single project without learning any of the fundamentals that school is supposed to teach.
0:44 unless you're taking spanish and your teacher gives hella extra credit (I finished with a 110)
school also doesn't teach you the right stuff at all.
what the hell is this why does - think this way 😂😂
Hey Cary! I just wanted to correct an assumption you keep making. The difference between Positive Reinforcement and Negative Reinforcement. Positive and Negative in this case aren't about the ways they make someone feel, but in the literal definition of giving or taking.
For example, positive reinforcement could be to give a child an ice cream cone when they pass a class, but positive reinforcement is also giving the child a spanking if they did something bad. Both of those are "giving" the child something, and thus are positive.
Negative reinforcement on the other hand is when something is taken away. For example, if a child is bad, they might lose their TV-watching privileges, which is negative reinforcement. But if a child is being bullied and tells a teacher, they have the negative reinforcement of the bully being removed from the situation and put in time-out.
So in conclusion, positive reinforcement can be both good OR bad, and negative reinforcement can also be good or bad. In the case of grades, a good grade and a bad grade are all positive, because it's something you're receiving, and not something that's being taken away from you.
Who uses that definition?
I've usually heard that with the distinction between punishment and reinforcement. That is, your examples of spanking and removal of privileges would be positive and negative *punishment* respectively.
what about z score?
Neurolink for neuro when?
Yo cary, did you know claire wu from campo? She’s my sister
Ok
You forgot to turn off the bighead mode cheat brotha
This comes from a good place, but you're comparing two different structural things. Imo this comes from your experience in the social media space where you can legit have 999 "failures" and then randomly quite literally as a joke you can have 1 success from something you did 4 years ago. I've seen that happen enough times to just laugh when it happens. Nobody will see those 999 failures simply because the algorithms don't show them. I've done extensive research on this. That occurring is actually bad generally speaking because you don't know why that one success occurred but I do suppose you can draw trendlines. After everything you'll observe that the only thing that seems to matter once you pass a rather low competency bar is marketing. I see so so so many content creators trying and copying things they see other successful people do with "poor marketing" and... Still at sub 100 viewers and 0 views on videos. That's no joke at least 95% of them.
Imo the only 5 things I've seen that matter if you compare two folks at the start. "Hunger" to succeed, ruthlessness, ability to put in hours, and a high degree of being able to convince people that you are correct (aka charisma, rizz) and then all of those multiplied by time assuming you clear a some basic competency checks. The overwhelming majority will be able to clear those competency checks. Aside from those no other variable seems to matter all that much in the long run. If you're missing one of those 5 things, your max "potential" to succeed shrinks dramatically. There are outliers with the time component but typically that's an illusion.
What you stated with the "real world" matches what I just described. How do you measure that in an easy to understand, mass distributable mechanism, ensuring reasonable equity for everybody? You can measure it by the same capitalist methods people typically measure but I hope you can see some issues that would arise.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't really force it to drink.
Hold up, one 70% gave you a b? America sucks
i think i was the first one to like