Thoughts on business, engineering and higher education

Physics GRE

I found an interesting post about the Physics GRE exam on the Cosmic Variance blog of Discover Magazine, written by someone on the committee that prepares the questions. (The GRE [Graduate Record Examination] is an exam that students applying to graduate school have to take, a bit like the GMAT for business school and the LSAT for law school. The schools most often require the General Test, but some departments also ask candidates to take a Subject Test in one of eight fields: Biochemistry/Cell/Molecular Biology, Biology, Chemistry, Computer Science, Literature in English, Mathematics, Physics and Psychology.)

The post is intended for physics undergraduates who study for the GRE, but the comments it generated also raise interesting questions on whether a multi-answer quiz can correctly assess a candidate's understanding of physics. For instance, the author writes: "My first piece of advice to students studying for this exam is to focus on reviewing the textbook from your freshman introductory physics course. In my years on the GRE committee, when I have needed to consult a text, it is that text at least 80% of the time. [...] I have found that only a small fraction of the items on the GRE are actually from upper-level topics". My first reaction was: isn't it a little sad to test applicants' abilities based on a course they took as freshmen? At the same time, if they don't get the basics, it's unlikely that they will make good researchers.

The post's author explains that students only have an average of 1.7 minute to do each problem and that the GRE penalizes random guessing by substracting 1/4 times the number of incorrect answers, to the number of correct answers. He argues that "the Physics GRE really does test knowledge about basic physics and the ability to analyze physical situations accurately." But he does not comment on the GRE's usefulness in evaluating doctoral candidates beyond the fact that "[his] own observation is that students below about the 30% level have a very hard time attaining a Ph.D., though this is by no means absolute." And if the GRE is 80% based on freshman physics, I can see why that would happen, and I would have quoted a threshold much higher than 30%. His other observation on the test's usefulness is that "[w]e do see a clear correlation between an incoming graduate student’s Physics GRE score and their score on the other dreaded exam in a physics student’s career, the Ph.D. written preliminary exam, which is a very different beast." I guess that is better than no correlation at all with any milestone in a doctoral student's career.

Many commenters touched upon the issue of the test's usefulness. Commenter #4 writes: "It is astonishing and borderline disturbing that, after four years of learning more and more about how to do physics, our academic futures are contingent on recall of material from a class that we were encouraged not to take." (The top students were apparently encouraged to take honor-level physics where they would focus on proofs and derivations instead of learning the formulas by rote.)

Commenter #5 also states: "[T]he emphasis on fast calculations in the physics GRE, especially with numbers, though a reasonable skill for a physicist to have, is not obviously more important in determining success than the ability to formulate a mathematical problem from a set of physical ideas. Nor is it even obviously related to the ability to solve a particularly knotty differential equation. Nor is it obviously related to the ability to design and execute a clever experiment." Also read Comments #6 and 7.

Here are some arguments in favor of the GRE: Commenter #9 points out that it is a lot more objective than GPA, which students can inflate by taking easy courses or by attending an university that sees a lot of grade inflation. (A 2001 Boston Globe story - Harvard's Quiet Secret: Rampant Grade Inflation, October 7, 2001 - reported that 91% of the students in the Harvard Class of 2001 graduated with some type of honors: cum laude, magna cum laude or summa cum laude, in contrast with 51% at Yale and 44% at Princeton. Also see this December 2001 article in the New York Times.)

The post's author, as Commenter #10, makes a similar argument, and points out that letters of recommendation vary wildly. I would add that creating a test which really allows students to demonstrate their understanding of physics would require a real person, as opposed to a computer, to grade the test, and raises issues of time and pay for these people. Commenter #61 points out that the Physics AP test "has both a multiple-choice section and a free-response problem section, and many, many more high school students take that test than take the physics GRE. So if the AP system manages to make it work on a much larger scale, I don’t see why we couldn’t do the same thing as well."

Judging the ability to do research, which should be the purpose of the admission committee, is an impossible task in most circumstances, since graduate research work differs so much from undergraduate coursework and even undergraduate research projects (although a willingness to learn about research as an undergraduate should be a huge plus). Even graduate students who do very well in their first-year or second-year courses sometimes turn out to be below-average researchers, when they no longer have well-defined questions to answer. There might not be enough qualified students applying to doctoral programs; if there were, departments would not need to put together admits' weekends to entice admitted students to enroll. It does say a lot about the perceived lack of importance of doctoral-level work that high school students take a higher-quality test, in the sense that it better lets them demonstrate their understanding of the material they have learned, than doctoral applicants.

"Hollowing Out The Middle"

I recently finished reading "Hollowing out the middle: The rural brain drain and what it means for America" by Patrick Carr and Maria Kefalas. It is a thin book (172 pages without counting the lengthy notes and references at the end) which raises as many questions as it answers, but it provides a fascinating glimpse into the life of small-town America by studying an Iowa town the authors lived in for several months in 2001, using funding provided by the MacArthur Foundation. (Carr and Kefalas are associate professors in sociology at Rutgers and St Joseph's University, respectively.)

The name of the town has been disguised to protect residents' privacy, as the authors say it is customary to do in their field; surprisingly, they have one slip-up toward the middle of the book, although this might simply be another fictitious name they had chosen for the town in an earlier version of the work, which was many years in the making. Suffice it to say that the town, which counts a little over 2,000 residents, is in the middle of nowhere - one hour away from the closest mall and eighty miles from the closest Starbucks. (It seems that many Iowa towns have fewer residents than "Ellis" - if you download the files about cities in the state of Iowa from this US Census Bureau page, and rank cities by increasing order of estimated population in 2006, you will notice there are almost 800 "incorporated places", to use the census bureau's terminology, out of about 950 with population less than 2,000. Only 10 have a population higher than 40,000.) All this to say "Ellis" is not an atypical town by far.

One of the most important contributions of the book is the characterization of residents into four groups:

1. Achievers are A+ high school students who use college as a way to escape small-town life and don't come back, except to visit their family.
2. Stayers don't go to college, and sometimes don't even graduate from high school. They quickly transition into adult life, get married and have children at a young age. They are enticed to work at the nearby factory by wages that their seventeen-year-old selves find quite high, but they fail to realize that there is almost no opportunity for advancement, i.e., they will make little more than that twenty years later. 
3. Seekers either don't have the Achievers' grades or don't have the money to afford a college education, but want to discover the world (or at least the rest of the country) beyond their small town, and use military service to that effect.
4. Returners are either High-Flyers ("twenty-somethings who return to small towns armed with college degrees and entrepreneurial ambitions"), or Boomerangs ("former enlisted men and women who move back to Iowa after leaving the armed forces and the mostly female graduates of community colleges").

The authors spend most of the book describing these four categories in detail, and end with their reflections on what can be done to save rural America. They point out the apparent contradiction of lavishing so many resources on Achiever-type students, who are bound to leave town, while neglecting Stayer-type students, who will make the bulk of the local workforce and therefore play a critical role in small towns' survival. (Small towns die, for instance, when there are no longer enough students to keep the school open.)

The authors comment on some of Richard Florida's theories (the Florida of The Rise of the Creative Class fame) and their applicability to rural America. In particular, they wonder "whether creative towns can be conjured in places that have been largely emptying out." In addition, "most creative-class counties are in metropolitan areas [...] most nonmetro creative counties are found in New England and in the Mountain West states such as Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah." It is "difficult to see how Heartland small towns will compete with areas in the West that have more abundant outdoor amenities such as mountains, hiking trails, and ski resorts." Another issue Carr and Kefalas mention is that some small towns may not have the high-speed Internet access the creative class has come to rely on, and which has become a necessity to compete in a global world. The authors' key recommendation is to revamp the rural educational system to better serve the non-college-bound student population, a recommendation they detail at some length.

Serious PhD Comics

PhD Comics usually makes me laugh, but the latest strips struck a darker note. They are apparently based on the author's real-life experience at the detention facility at Heathrow Airport. Please read for yourself: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3. Thankfully, the story has a happy ending.

For a PhD Comic strip in the usual comic vein, I predict this recent addition ("Vacation relaxation?") will soon become a classic.

Fair Value Accounting

The November 2009 issue of Harvard Business Review has an insightful article by Robert Pozen on fair-value accounting, adapted from his book "Too big to save? How to fix the US financial system," which will be hitting the bookstores early next week. (Pozen chaired the SEC's Advisory Committee on Improvements to Financial Reporting, back in 2008.) For some background on the battle ranging between proponents of fair value and those supporting historical cost accounting, please refer to this old post of mine.

Pozen debunks many myths on both sides of the accounting debate. 

1. It is a myth that historical cost accounting has no connection to current market value. If the "market value [of assets] is likely to remain materially below their historical cost for an extended period," then "the company must write the asset down to its current market value on its balance sheet - and record the resulting loss on its income statement."
2. It is a myth that most assets of financial institutions are marked to market. All loans and securities are divided into three categories:
   • assets that are held - those are carried on the books at historical cost.
     
   • assets that are traded - those are marked to market.
     
   • assets available for sale - those are marked to market but "any unrealized gains or losses on them are reflected in a special account on a bank's income statement" called Other Comprehensive Income, and "do not reduce the bank's net income or its regulatory capital."
   A SEC study found that "the percentage of assets for which marking to market affected the bank's regulatory capital or income was just 22% in 2008 - far from a majority."
3. It is a myth that assets must be valued at current market prices even if the market for them is illiquid. Here, Pozen discusses the Financial Accounting Standard 157 and the three levels it creates, depending on how liquid the asset is. He also quickly mentions the attitude of bankers, who complained loudly about the regulation, although it apparently did not force companies "to use prices from forced or distressed sales to value illiquid assets."

Pozen makes several recommendations: for instance, banks should publish the assumptions they use in their mark-to-market models and capital requirements should be unlinked from accounting (in the same way that assets available for sale are marked to market but unrealized losses, which appear on the bank's income statement, do not affect its regulatory capital); Pozen also advocates "new multidimensional approaches to financial reporting", in particular publishing two versions of the earnings-per-share figures, "one with the assets recorded at fair value and the other without."

The article is both highly informative and easy to read, even for people with a limited knowledge of accounting, and sheds valuable light on a controversial issue.

Teaching science to K-8 students

The September/October 2009 issue of Scientific American Mind has an article on how "recent studies from neuroscience and psychology suggest ways to improve science education in the U.S." ("A new vision for teaching science," by J. Randy McGinnis and Deborah Roberts-Harris) The authors quote the results of the 2006 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), which found that "the average science score of U.S. 15-year-olds dropped below that of teens in 28 out of 57 participating countries." (This Excel file from the OECD website contains much more information on the results, for those of you who are interested.)

The authors summarize the findings of two recent reports, "Taking science to school" and "Ready, Set, Science!", which advocate an absolute (rather than relative to other countries) level of science proficiency based on the following four targets:

1. "students must be able to know, use and interpret scientific explanations of the natural world,"
2. "they must be able to generate and evaluate scientific evidence and explanations,"
3. "they must be able to understand the nature and development of scientific knowledge,"
4. "they must be able to participate meaningfully in scientific activities and discourse."

Two points the authors make particularly resonated with me:

• Science is currently packaged to students as "a collection of unproblematic facts", leading students to believe that "most knowledge results from direct observation." This gives them a distorted image of what scientists do and deprives them of the excitement of discovering knowledge.
• "[T]he most successful route to mastery in any subject follows a spiral path, in which students regularly revisit and refine their conceptual underpinnings [of a topic across grade levels]." This has been called a "spiral curriculum" in the education literature and builds upon the fact that "students master an idea more readily when they have some foundation of knowledge to build on."

According to the authors, even young children can develop abstract thinking skills in an age-appropriate fashion; it was previously believed, because of a 1958 (that is, five decades old!) study, that "no form of instruction could hasten the onset - typically at age 12 - of logical thinking." This led to the current focus on memorization, rather than understanding, for elementary and middle school students. But new studies show that this development really depends on "a child's prior learning experiences."

The article is full of valuable information, including: comments on the weaknesses of the U.S. science curriculum ("the [U.S.] curricula lay out too many discrete pieces of knowledge, with no hierarchy or meaningful sequencing [...] countries that teach fewer topics overall produce higher scores" in the PISA study), an example of how the reports' recommendations can be incorporated into a fifth-grade science class, and potential issues that could slow down the adoption of these groundbreaking ideas.

On reading workshops

The New York Times ran an article in late August about a new trend in education: letting middle school students decide which books they want to read in class ("A new assignment: pick books you like", August 29, 2009, by Motoko Rich). The students do not choose books for the whole group; instead, they select the book they are going to read on their own and discuss it with their teacher. This approach is known as "reading workshop", and predictably generates a wide range of book selections (from young-adult chick-lit to "The Bluest eye" by Nobel-Prize winner Toni Morrison), as well as heated discussions among educators about the dumbing down of reading, in a futile attempt to make it more enjoyable for students who simply do not care.

Opponents say that the tradition of reading a novel as a class "builds a shared literary culture among students, exposes all readers to works of quality and complexity and is the best way to prepare students for standardized tests"; of those three arguments, I found the second one most convincing. (According to the NYT, students' choices in the reading workshop included "James Patterson's adrenaline-fueled “Maximum Ride” books, plenty of young-adult chick-lit novels and even the “Captain Underpants” series of comic-book-style novels.") Proponents of the reading workshop argue that "[l]etting students choose their own books, they say, can help to build a lifelong love of reading." (To which one wants to retort that a lifelong love of reading People is not necessarily better than not reading at all. Thankfully, the rest of the article did an excellent job convincing me that the approach has merit, when students are offered a limited amount of choice in their book selection and the teacher still nudges them toward high-quality works. More on that below.)

While I find myself opposed to students reading comic-book-style novels in English class, I do not care for "the classics". I was never forced to read the American classics, since I only arrived in this country for graduate school, and I've never particularly missed not reading Moby Dick. (Here is what I've picked up about the book from my extensive other readings: (1) it has a famous opening line, "Call me Ishmael", (2) the narrator, Ishmael, is a sailor on Captain Ahab's ship, (3) Captain Ahab is obsessed with finding a whale called Moby Dick, (4) the book is lengthy and full of digressions. Now, do I really need to know more than that?)

In my case, I had to read the French classics, by Balzac, Zola, Hugo, and other luminaries who have left their mark on French literature. I don't remember whether I enjoyed reading them or not, mostly because I was already reading so many books outside school that I didn't pay much attention to what I had to do for French class; fifteen years later, I read almost exclusively nonfiction books written by contemporary authors, and it is hard to tell whether the French classics I was forced to read as a fifteen-year-old have had a measurable influence on my considerable reading in the English language.

I read very little fiction, and I believe high schools should consider a broader range of reading materials, such as inspiring biographies and even articles from the best newspapers and magazines, to help students develop an interest in reading. I am not sure whether English courses would be an appropriate venue for that, but the best biographies have plenty of excellent writing and could provide a wonderful way for teachers to show students how to analyze the facts, ask pertinent questions and not take everything at face value.

But after its somewhat extreme example of reading workshop, the NYT journalist moves on to a more convincing illustration of the approach, in the classroom of the founding director of the Reading and Writing Project at Columbia University. Students and teacher "gave short talks recommending books"; "[d]espite the student freedom, [the teacher] constantly fed suggestions to the children. She was strict about not letting them read what she considered junk. [...] But she acknowledged that certain children needed to be nudged into books by allowing them to read popular titles". Some research studies indicate that "giving children limited choices from a classroom collection of books on a topic helped improve performance on standardized reading comprehension tests."

Then the journalist returns to the teacher introduced at the beginning of the article, showing her in her reading workshop and giving us more details about her work, and we start sharing the woman's enthusiasm for a new approach that could engage her students more deeply and make them lifelong readers. (That woman was so dedicated that she "spent about $1,000 of her own money buying books.") The first few paragraphs of the article brushed over the teacher's efforts, making it easy to dismiss her method as absurd and move on to another news item; by the third page, though, I found myself rooting for her and delighted to read that "[o]f her 18 eighth graders, 15 exceeded requirements, scoring in the highest bracket. When the same students had been in her seventh-gradeclass, only 4 had reached that level." I hope most NYT readers will have stuck with the article to the end, to see what a wonderful, dedicated educator that woman is, and how much potential lies in reading workshops.

Shutting Off Opportunities

Paul Krugman has an insightful op-ed in the October 8 issue of the New York Times, entitled "The Uneducated American." He argues that America's economic success is linked to the quality of its educational system; the funding of public education, however, has suffered from "the view that any and all government spending is a waste of taxpayer dollars."

I did not know that "these days young Americans are considerably less likely than young people in many other countries to graduate from college," but a 2007 article from Inside Higher Ed provides many statistics to support that claim, including: "Although the United States ranks among the top 5 countries in the proportion of young people who enroll in college, it ranks 16th in the proportion who finish college." In 2001, the New York Times wrote: "For the first time, the United States' college graduation rate, now at 33 percent, is not the world's highest. Finland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Britain have surpassed it." (As an aside, that article starts as follows: "Teachers in the United States earn less relative to national income than their counterparts in many industrialized countries, yet they spend far more hours in front of the classroom, according to a major new international study." But I digress.)

Also, 29,000 of the 273,000 jobs lost last month were in state and local education, "bringing the total losses in that category over the past five months to 143,000." This is surprising because education is usually viewed as a safe sector during recessions, on the grounds that children always need to be educated. Krugman points out that "education is mainly the responsibility of state and local governments, which are in dire fiscal straits. [...] As a result, education is on the chopping block." This has had dire consequences for college students from families with limited means, who can't afford to pay thousands of dollars in tuition fees for four years, and sometimes spend two years at community colleges before transferring into a public school for their junior year. (See this October 2009 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education.) More than most, those students rely on education to give them a better future, and are deprived of this opportunity by the current budget crisis.

In related news, BusinessWeek ran an article earlier this month about how the economic crisis is affecting young people's career prospects. It echoes many of the themes we have heard throughout the summer; see these two old posts of mine for more details: Post 1, Post 2. About Post 2 - I wonder how some of the graduates who turned down offers because they believed a better job would come along are faring now. Companies are definitely hiring college students; the first-round interviews at Lehigh are in full swing and some second-round interviews are already taking place. But entry-level hiring is a highly choreographed enterprise, where students submit their resume through the school's career portal and first-round interviews happen on campus. It is not clear whether last year's unemployed graduates looking to fill one of these positions can attract the attention of the human resources departments through any other channel. Hopefully universities, some of which have garnered praise for their efforts to help jobless alumni, let them return to campus for the career fairs and give them access to the same resources they would have if they had stayed in college for a fifth year.

BusinessWeek concludes: "The unemployment crisis among the young is not as dramatic as the financial crisis of a year ago. But it may turn out to have longer-lasting effects."

It's the smart people's fault, stupid!

I read the op-ed "Wall Street Smarts" in the New York Times this morning, where Calvin Trillin recalls a conversation he recently had at a bar with a gentleman who offered to give him the reason "why the financial system nearly collapsed in the fall of 2008." The reason can be stated as follows: "The financial system nearly collapsed because smart guys had started working on Wall Street."

The stranger observed that "income [among attendees of his 25th college reunion] was now precisely in inverse proportion to academic standing in the class" - in part because A+ students tend to go to graduate school and earn, as judges or professors, much less than the average Wall Street employee. (There is a case to be made about enjoying intellectual pursuits and the feeling of contributing to society instead of purely monetary rewards, but Trillin has a point.)

Trillin then provides some reasons as to why smart people started working on Wall Street, as explained to him by this anonymous bar patron. I particularly liked the following quote: "When the smart guys started this business of securitizing things that didn’t even exist in the first place, who was running the firms they worked for? Our guys! The lower third of the class! Guys who didn’t have the foggiest notion of what a credit default swap was. All our guys knew was that they were getting disgustingly rich[.]"

This echoes Felix Salmon's conclusions in his Wired article, "Recipe for disaster: The formula that killed Wall Street," about which I wrote here. While Salmon did not comment on the academic prowess, or lack thereof, of the quants' managers, he did write: "[T]he managers empowered to apply the brakes didn't understand the arguments between various arms of the quant universe. Besides, they were making too much money to stop."

As an academic, I did appreciate the point that the stranger in Trillin's column makes about top students focusing on lesser-paid intellectual endeavors. Most professors like to encourage their star undergraduates to give graduate school a try, although of course, as people who have trodden down the academic path and presumably found satisfaction in that career choice (otherwise we would no longer be there), we might not be the most objective advice-givers.

At the same time, I do feel that super-star students are more at risk of disillusionment than most when they enter the workforce, in part because they have to work with, and sometimes work for, people who are not as "on top of things" as they are. Of course, I have had many outstanding students thrive in industry too (Lehigh students are famously well-rounded), so the situation is a lot more nuanced than "average students can face the real world but top ones can't," but the lack of interference from higher-ups does play a role in the appeal of academia, and maybe of judgeships too. There is certainly a financial price to pay for this greater freedom. I like to think, though, that the greater freedom (flexibility in work hours, autonomy in research topics, choice of research assistants), and of course the feeling of contributing to the greater good, are rewards big enough.

In any case, Trillin's column is wonderfully written and I encourage everyone to read it.

E-learning in high schools: the BLOSSOMS project

(Today's post is a re-run of a post I wrote as a blogger for the INFORMS annual meeting in San Diego.)

I attended the semi-plenary by MIT’s Richard Larson this (Sunday) afternoon, on an initiative, called BLOSSOMS, that he recently started with other educators using funding provided by the Hewlett-Packard Foundation and the Sloan Foundation. BLOSSOMS stands for Blended Learning Science or Math Studies and is spearheaded by MIT LINC (Learning International Networks Consortium).

The idea behind BLOSSOMS is to develop videos about science topics that high school teachers show in the classroom. A key aspect of the videos is that they are cut into well-defined parts (the screen fades to black between segments) to allow teachers to discuss the ideas presented in the footage with their students, before starting the video again. Larson explained that he (and the other people involved with the project) views the videos as “teaching duets” between the educator who is shown on the screen – professor or graduate student – and the teacher & his or her students in the classroom.

I particularly liked Larson’s point that some high school teachers dislike any environment that takes students out of the classroom and in front of a computer for one-on-one interactions. They do not want to be bypassed, for understandable reasons. So while BLOSSOMS’s videos can be downloaded from the Internet, they are also available on CD-ROMs and videotapes. The “teaching duets” are designed to create a high level of engagement in the classroom and keep the teacher in control.

Another interesting aspect of the project is that educators in partner countries – especially Jordan and Pakistan – have also contributed their share of videos. This is important because members of developing countries wanted to take an integral part in creating this online repository, and not just receive videos from the US telling them how to teach this or that subject, no matter how good the videos are. Jordan and Pakistan have some excellent professors too, who have thus been busy creating videos for high school audiences.

Larson treated us to a video showing his former graduate student, Karima Nigmatulina PhD’09, introducing graph theory to an intended high school audience through the famous problems of the seven bridges of Königsberg and the Chinese Postman Problem. It is important to note that the videos are not only aimed at schoolchildren in far-away countries, but also at high school students in the US. Because the Ministries of Education, both in Jordan and Pakistan, have been highly supportive of the project, it has been easier to spread the word about BLOSSOMS there than in the US, where education is not as centralized and curricula are determined at a state level. To quote this afternoon’s slides, the overarching goal is to “give every young person a quality education regardless of his or her place of birth.”

The videos also include teachers’ guides, which explain the activities recommended in the videos in more details; in addition, transcripts are available on the BLOSSOMS website. (I believe that some of the videos, possibly all, are also translated in Arabic.) As a next step, Larson plans to move the site to a Web 2.0 version where viewers would be able to comment on the videos and rate them, to better showcase the videos that are judged outstanding by users. But what he would particularly like is for other INFORMS members to create operations research modules for BLOSSOMS – operations research is a great way to get teenagers interested about math using practical problems. Of course, INFORMS members would not be left to their own devices. For more information in contributing a video, please click here and here.