Posted on 02/04/2024 3:57:56 PM PST by george76
The continued embrace of diversity, equity and inclusion in STEM combined with a broad decline in academic standards is producing a generation of scientists who are less capable than their predecessors, warned some scientists in recent interviews with The College Fix.
From easier math classes in high school to the elimination of standardized tests to extreme grade-inflation to DEI tropes that elevate lived experiences and ways of knowing over facts and data, the trend represents a pressing problem for science professors working to protect STEM and preserve its standards and meritocracy.
Alex Small, chair of the physics and astronomy department at the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, said it starts early in a student’s education.
“The K-12 system is walking away from standards at all levels,” he told The College Fix in a recent phone interview.
For example, he said while most of his students took some sort of calculus class their senior year of high school, “at least a third of them test into a class that’s lower than calculus because what happens is the schools will push people through the pipeline.”
Even if someone hasn’t mastered algebra, they’ll get some sort of generous grade in their prerequisite math classes and then be put into calculus their senior year,” he said.
Similar trends concerning the inability of college students to do high school math have been reported nationally post-COVID, with educators lamenting how incoming freshmen no longer can be expected to know how to add fractions or subtract a positive number from a negative number.
Yi-Zen Chu, an associate professor of physics at the National Central University in Taiwan, who was educated in the U.S. and has been a harsh critic of DEI, stated in a recent email to The Fix that he believes practices such as “grade inflation and lowering the bar” contribute to the lack of preparation exhibited by American college students.
The concern circles back to the “‘everyone gets a prize’ philosophy that has been around for quite a while now,” he said, referring to what’s sometimes called the “Participation Trophy” phenomenon.
Chu suggested one way to combat these practices at the college level “is to staunchly defend the use of standardized tests like the SAT.”
“Students have to compete on the same test to prove their ability relative to others,” he said. “This way, schools know that hyper-grade-inflation will only count against the integrity of the school in the medium/long run.”
Small said what these students need is supplemental instruction, time, extra problem solving sessions, and extra practice.
“There’s no such thing as too much practice, and that’s especially true when you haven’t yet had enough practice,” said Small.
However, although some educators and institutions have embraced remedial summer programs and additional tutoring services, others work toward ideological goals related to DEI that ultimately may prove detrimental to students, as well as the field of physics more broadly.
Lawrence Krauss, one of the world’s leading theoretical physicists, noted in a 2022 interview with The College Fix, “I have written many articles about the absolutely ludicrous ways in which DEI is … enforcing ridiculous notions about both keeping people out of physics who should be in, and trying to interfere with meritocracy and interfere [with] and take over the appointment process so that merit isn’t the crucial factor.”
Small, in a November 2023 article published by Heterodox STEM, discussed the column “Just Physics?” It appears in the physics education journal The Physics Teacher and regularly features discussions from different physics educators exploring alternative pedagogies and the place of DEI in physics education.
Highlighting one recent article, Small wrote in his critique that it “focused on the putative anti-Blackness of the physics community” but offered little in terms of what “changes can or should be implemented” beyond spending “more time in physics class discussing social issues.”
In December, The College Fix reached out to Deepak Iyer, one of the co-editors of “Just Physics?” for comment. Iyer replied he would need to get approval from his editor-in-chief before formally responding. On Jan. 24, Iyer notified The Fix he had still not received a response.
“Some sort of discussion of wider social issues…in moderate doses has its place,” Small told The Fix. “Oppenheimer got a lot of people asking questions again about one of the sort of pivotal moments of the American physics community.”
“If DEI is brought in just as an occasional discussion topic that doesn’t really crowd out the fundamentals, then I don’t have a fundamental objection to it,” he added.
However, Small said, when too much time is spent discussing social issues in physics classes, the fundamentals get crowded out, which, as he pointed out in his Heterodox STEM article, could “hurt students with weak prior preparation, as they need even more focus on fundamentals.”
Peter McCullough of the physics and astronomy department at Johns Hopkins argues there are times when discussions of DEI topics in STEM may be called for or even beneficial.
In the comments section of Small’s article, McCullough highlighted issues with fingertip pulse oximeters, describing the devices as “a technology that works better on lighter skin than darker skin.”
In an email to The College Fix, McCullough also noted claims that some facial recognition programs have difficulty in accurately identifying black faces or recognizing them as faces at all. According to McCullough, such examples might get students thinking about unintended effects of different technologies on society.
Yet, Small noted, a certain number of instructors spending too much time discussing DEI in physics class is not the biggest threat posed by DEI to physics education.
“Where DEI really comes into a lot of discussion among physics educators,” said Small, “is in discussions about standards.”
“It’s not really … so much a discussion of ‘Oh, should we talk about representation during class time’ and more about what can we reasonably expect and if a student can’t meet the standard, is it unfair of us to nonetheless insist on that standard,” he said. “And that’s a much more complicated and dangerous discussion, because … it just perpetuates under preparation.”
Yup. My P-Chem prof insisted that we develop facility in partial differentials around nearly any measurable characteristic followed by re-integration into something that was "useful". At the time, the only way we could derive protein structures was by purifying, crystallizing, then doing X-ray crystallography. We had to work backwards from the X ray data to the protein structure. We also used nuclear magnetic resonance (NMI) to get a sense of how parts of the protein were assembled. Actual sequencing was so primitive that we had to assemble topological sorts of fragments derived from the application of different proteases known to cut specific types of amino acid intersections.
Roll forward to the present time where bioinformatics has merged automated sequencing, databases and specialized search algorithms using tools like BLAST.
Personal health trackers use red/infrared to sort out oxygenated vs oxygen depleted blood. The morning health stats from my Fitbit Charge 5 often take an hour before the overnight SPO2% appears in the stats.
My favorite tech using this technique is the vein finder for phlebotomists. See Vein finder
The primary difference was state institutions had wide mix of student intelligence and achievement whereas the elite schools have a very high percentage of top level intelligence and achievement students - typically over 80%.
The Profs are generally better at the elite schools but their main advantage is that they are teaching at private institutions and they have more freedom and autonomy in their curriculum.
And really outstanding graduate level research programs helps as well.
But the big advantage of the elite school is the dynamic that there is synergy in having the entire student body made up of very intelligent, high achieving and highly motivated students working at consistently top level standards led and educated with similarly like minded Profs. This allows the student body to focus like a laser beam on academic excellence .
DEI devastates this dynamic by first diluting the talent pool with lower intelligence, low achieving DEI admit students, and then dropping the academic standards to accommodate their less than stellar DEI admits. To put things in perspective, the Stanford University Class of 2027 consists of 1700 freshman admits so it does not take a lot of DEI admits to have a serious negative impact on the rest of the student body, especially when the school is obsessed with accommodating the DEI admits instead of trying to elevate them and hold them to high standards
Back in the day, about 80% of the class would be SELECTED from the top students in the country, about 15% would be legacy admits and 5% would be DEI admits. This mix was sustainable as an academically elite cohort
Now the Stanford mix is reputedly around 50% DEI and the "legacy" admits are running 25% which flips the demographic with 25% of the cream of the crop students as opposed to 80% 40 years ago.
Standards have to be dropped to accommodate the lower functioning students and the entire educational experience is destroyed because the smart people are no longer interacting with similarly outstanding and high achieving classmates. It's actually a worse mix than at state schools since the DEI obsession drags everything down with it.
This is death to academic excellence.
Similar dynamics are taking over the Ivy schools and even MIT.
And consider the numbers.
Stanford has a total of only 1700 entering freshman.
In my high school graduating class we had one student make it into Stanford. She was very smart but she was in no way the top student in her graduating class. We had a couple others go to Ivy schools and the likes of Notre Dame.
Out of the top 20 in our class, 10 of the best of the best , including the valedictorian, went of the local state college.
It had about 50,000 students and about 3-5000 at least of those students were of the same level of smarts and achievement cohort that Stanford, MIT and the Ivy selected from. So our local state school had 2 to 3 times the number of as good if not better students as the entire entering freshman class at Stanford.
Our elite schools are like the military special forces - they draw from the top level talent pool but that does not mean that they are all the best in the service.. They achieve their elite status by virtue of the fact that they are all uniformly outstanding, highly motivated and high achieving individuals focused on excellence.
DEI kills excellence because it destroys all of those signature features of institutional excellence and eventually kills the institution, whether it be an Elite University or an elite branch of our military service.
no sh## sherlock
Does ANYONE want do drive over a bridge designed or constructed by one of these DEI hires?
Remember the Pedestrian Bridge Collapse in Miami ?
He'd be an improvement over what we have now.
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