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Friday, October 15. 2021

Student Math Grades Vary in UNC System


It is no surprise that some people do not get their brains around math and statistics, but civilization is at the point at which such topics are basic education for understanding the world.


I like the example once used on CNN when they reported that your risk of death from COVID had doubled. True: at some point months ago it had gone from something like 0.01 to 0.02. Something like that. 


 Student Math Grades Vary in UNC System

Posted by The Barrister in Education at 13:26 | Comments (5) | Trackbacks (0)

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A quibble. Would it have been that hard for the author of this piece to define UNC as the University of North Carolina before using it three times? (I give her a pass for the heading) Carry on..
#1 jorz on 2021-10-15 15:33 (Reply)
It is a new 0.2 %, and thus takes on an importance you are obscuring. If we had a half million a year new blindings from people not wearing eye protections while operating a table saw; if we had a half million a year new deaths from people not wearing seat belts or tailgating like a teenager; if we had a half million new deaths a year from falsely labeled food ingredients we would consider those a national emergency.

Pick whatever new form of illness or accident or danger you like for my example. Anything, anything would be a huge issue. You are downplaying the numbers for political and cultural, not logical reasons. I grew up on How To Lie With Statistics. You can't throw these things past me.
#2 Assistant Village Idiot on 2021-10-15 17:39 (Reply)
Doggone it AVI, you are pushing my buttons. You disappoint me. This is a disingenuous argument.

1) COVID exposure is an uncontrollable risk while the accident risks you cite are totally controllable. There is no way to avoid the COVID virus. One can avoid a table saw injury by simply not choosing to operate one.

2) The set of people exposed to COVID is around 300 million. I doubt the set of people running table saws is as high as a half million, but let's assume for the sake of easy math that it is. A hypothetical blindness rate of .01 percent for that set would be 50. doubling it to .02 percent would be 100. That would be very sad but hardly worthy of panicking society over that number.
#2.1 feeblemind on 2021-10-16 13:47 (Reply)
Wait a minute - wasn't he actually pointing that it's wrong to use statistics to misrepresent an actual number? It's just as wrong to artificially inflate a value as it is to artificially deflate it - they are both deceptive practices. A truthful reporter would provide both statistical values as well as absolute numbers, so that important nuance is preserved.
#3 Aggie on 2021-10-15 19:48 (Reply)
30 years ago when was a college student, the Math requirement was Math 201, a basic algebra/trigonometry/calculus course, much the same as what I had learned in high school taking Senior Math, with Math 101 as a introductory prerequisite that taught basic algebra and geometry that could be tested out of. There was also a Math 100, a non-credit course, for students that didn't even know anything about algebra or geometry, basically 8th grade Math and even a Math 099 for students whose ability to multiply and divide two-digit numbers was rather shaky, basically 5th-grade Math. When the time came that the administration wanted to add a Math 098, the faculty put their foot down and insisted they were not going to teach 1st-grade Math, that if a student couldn't pass a basic 5th-grade Math class they had no business being in college. As I said, this was 30 years ago and I can't imagine that things have gotten any better since then. I suspect the Math requirement these days is being able to count how many fingers you have. +/- 2 fingers, of course.
#4 Jerryskids on 2021-10-15 21:11 (Reply)

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