Will we ever catch up with Cuba?

Marginal Revolution, a wonderful economics blog, reproduces this following graph.

I'll take it down if they want me to - it's their work. Two things strike me when I look at this. First, the bulk of the wold is around the gender parity mark for education. Except for one massive exception, which is India. India has a large population, and falls on the left side of the parity line, meaning that females have less than males. You could move all the other outliers over into the main cluster, and you wouldn't budge the world average much.

Secondly, Muslim Countries are at one some of the best and worst nations when it comes to parity. Pakistan isn't some third world nation - it's a major political and economic player. The quality of living is fairly high there. And yet they're very low in terms of parity. On the other hand, Iran is not known for its womens rights (although it is no Afghanistan), and Palestine there are systematic abuses of women in the name of Moral policing. And yet they're both healthily above the parity line.  I wonder if culture is a major cause of variance in this graph... I'd do the analysis myself, but I wouldn't know how to lump the countries.

Grade Inflation meets Grade Deflation

A professor is booted from teaching a course because 90% of her class is getting low grads

"The class in question is an entry-level biology class for non-science majors, and, at mid-term, more than 90 percent of the students in Dr. Homberger's class were failing or had dropped the class. The extreme nature of the grading raised a concern, and we felt it was important to take some action to ensure that our students receive a rigorous, but fair, education. Professor Homberger is not being penalized in any way; her salary has not been decreased nor has any aspect of her appointment been changed."

But, as another professor pointed out,

Stuart Rojstaczer, a former Duke University professor who is the founder of GradeInflation.com, a Web site that publishes research on grading, questioned whether LSU was really trying to help students. "How many times has Dean Carman removed a professor from a class who was giving more than 90 percent As?" he asked.

I've seen courses like that, where the instructor more-or-less phones it in, teaches little or nothing, and gives everyone high marks. One of the students here at UAF remarked that a lab portion of a class was "Hard because you have to do something each week." As opposed to what? Showing up and doing nothing?

In some countries, there is no notion of "extra-credit" Either you've master the material or you haven't. One instructor asked if it was very common here in the United States. He wanted to know if he should automatically dock a bit from each US student's grades (which is an suboptimal solution). There's parallels with public education, where some schools are scoring higher on tests mostly because they made the tests easier.

Gambling on your grades?

I got this link from Marginal Revolutions, an economics blog with multiple authors. There are markets in everything. Including, apparently, gambling on your grade:

While hanging out together one Sunday afternoon, I mentioned to my friend Steven Wolf that I had an exam the following day and that if I were to study I was sure to get an A. (At the time, I was a student at University of Pennsylvania.)  But I was enjoying my Sunday afternoon, and I told Steven that I had no intention of studying. That's when, in order to provide me with motivation, we made the following agreement: If I got an A on the exam, he would give me $100, and if I didn't get an A, I would give him $20. Steven and I quickly realized that lots of other students might like this kind of motivation.  To that end, we began developing what is now Ultrinsic Motivator Inc. - Jeremy Gelbart

 Ultrinsic.com is company that offers you a chance to buy class insurance, speculate on your grades, and other organized and legalized forms of gambling. I'm of mixed feelings on this. I do recognize that college education is a massive investment, and investments deserve insurance (Car, Home, Health...), so why not education? On the other hand, this makes me feel a bit uneasy. What do you all think? I'm curious to hear your two cents.

DIY Science experiments

This was too much fun to pass up. For all of you with children at home (or those of you with an adventurous spirit), I found a neat little science experiment that you can do at home with stuff you'll probably have laying around the house! In this video, this young lady shows you how to extract and see DNA from fruit using nothing but what you have around.

I'd be excited to see if any of you give it a try! What you would be doing at home isn't much different from what I do in the lab.

Not quite the gravy train.

I often read about how science is a cushy job for the fat cats on the gov't dole - usually from people who don't like something a scientist just said. Given most scientists I know (i.e., the employed ones) usually pull 50 hours a week earning less than they would if they went into some other field, I can't help but laugh at this assertion. I bring this up, because I've read two rather contrarian points of view today.

1. Is science a good career? According to this author, not in the least.
2. Penelope Trunk advises college students to not try and dodge the recession with Graduate School.
3. The APS has an essay on how leaving a career in science isn't nessicarily a bad decision.
   

I think Penelope Trunk misses the target just a bit, and I had to laugh at her assertion that `you'll learn in any job,` followed by her story of avoiding killing bunnies. Not all education is created equal!

Woo! We rock!

Woo! Go us! We're not dead last in teacher retention! So long as we keep Maine, Montana, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont in the United States, we'll look slightly less worse!

AK's got some problems in teacher retention. Especially in the bush. The average life expectancy of a teacher out there is somewhere between twenty seconds and a year, as too many teachers go out there from the lower-48, lured by reasonable salaries and a somewhat misplaced sense of adventure, only to find out they're god-awful in over their heads. Most don't hack it. There's rarely anything that passes remotely for continuity in education.

NCLB is just plain stupid to begin with, but is even worse for these sorts of situations. Imagine this: A school fails to make adaquet yearly progress for one too-many years in a row. It now faces having the staff booted to the curb. But of the staff, only a tiiiiny handful have been there the whole time - maybe one, two max. What the heck good is getting rid of an already transient staff? Hint: squat all.

So I, like a frat who crammed all night for a test in a subject they never went to class - feel great about our D- in teacher retention.