Defenestrating Thoughts from the Bivouac

Everyone has been abuzz about the latest research which shows that boys and girls in the US are as good as each other in math. After decades of “girls can’t do math”, it really nice that we’re dispelling this horrible myth.

This news got tons of coverage from the news media. And rightly so. But in their haste to cover the story, almost all the outlets omitted something rather important, which the ScienceNow did pick up on:

Neither boys nor girls get many tough math questions on state tests now required to measure a school district’s progress under the 2002 federal No Child Left Behind law. Using a four-level rating scale, with level one being easiest, the authors said that they found no challenging level-three or -four questions on most state tests. The authors worry that means that teachers may start dropping harder math from their curriculums, because “more teachers are gearing their instruction to the test.”

There are two very important points here:

1. Today’s tests are mostly easy questions.
2. Students aren’t being taught to answer average or above average difficult questions.

Keeping this in mind, let’s revisit the conclusion that boys and girls are getting the same test results. It’s possible there’s a big, important point missing from the study.

Let’s invent a scale of 1 to 10 with which to measure mathematical ability. And for sake of argument, let’s say that the scores used to be as follows, with the boys scoring better than the girls:

• Boys - 8 out of 10
• Girls - 6 out of 10

Now, what if these are the new scores?

• Boys - 3 out of 10
• Girls - 3 out of 10

In this case, boys and girls are equal. Unfortunately, they are equally stupid. :-(

Now re-read the two important points above about students not being tested with hard questions and not be even being taught hard math. Whoa.

So, could this be what happened? Did boys and girls just score worse?

The problem here is that the reporting is relative, not absolute. We were asking, “how good are girls at math compared to boys?”; instead we should be ask “how good are girls at math?”. It’s not like K-12 math has changed that much in the past 100 years. You’d think we could figure out a way to do this objectively.

This reminds me of how SAT scores were re-balanced. The SAT is designed to have a mean score of 500 with a standard deviation of 100. Over time the median started to drop and the SAT was re-centered in 1995.

My older sister took the SAT before the rebalancing and I took it afterward. As a result, my scores are “higher” than hers; though if you convert them to the same base, we scored roughly the same. Yeah for grade inflation! :-)

Speaking of grade inflation, did you know that for a while at Princeton 46% of the grades given were A’s? Now the policy has changed so that “35% of grades in classroom work, and 55% of grades in independent work” are A’s. Yes, this seems more reasonable. :-P

I just wrote about everything that that has happened in the past month and thought I’d blah — I mean, blog — about this:

We checked out of the apartment. I’d lived there for just about 6 years. My rough estimate is that I gave Avalon Redmond Place around $68,000 in rent over that time (plus all the money Chris and Andrew gave them while we were roomies). In return they kindly gave me back my entire deposit of $250 (oh, and a place to live).

$68,000 in rent. Wow. It’s scary when you think about it. The obvious observation is, “shouldn’t you have brought a condo/house instead?” With 20/20 hindsight, sure, that would have been the right thing to do, but only because of a Fed-induced housing bubble.

When I first moved to Seattle, I didn’t have plans to stay that long. Specifically, I had to see if I liked my job and the area before committing. Common sense indicates that you should expect to own an house for 5 years before you recoup closing costs and turn the corner on paying mostly interest.

Of course, the housing bubble artificially caused a lot of temporary house value increases; if I’d bought something when I moved there and then sold it when I left, I could have made some decent money. On the other hand, the bubble could have popped earlier and I could have lost all my appreciation. And you also have to keep in mind that rent/buy ratios are way out of whack in the Puget Sound.

But, of course, the move back to the Boulder area was always in the cards and I did end up changing jobs much sooner than I would have guessed when I moved to Seattle, so who knows. :-)

Update (7/30/08): I just realized I calculated the rent total wrong. It should be ~68K over 6 years (corrected above).

It has been about a month since my last post. And boy, has it been an eventful month:

• Movers came and turned out apartment into boxes. Lots of boxes. I think we had on the order of 140 boxes.
• Movers came and took the boxes and the furniture.
• Car guy came and took our cars.
• We checked out of the apartment. I’d lived there for just about 6 years. My rough estimate is that I gave Avalon Redmond Place around $68,000 in rent over that time (plus whatever Chris and Andrew gave them while we were roomies). In return they kindly gave me back my entire deposit of $250 (oh, and a place to live).
• We flew one-way to Denver on Wednesday.
• Rented a car and stayed with Mom and Dad.
• Looked for houses to rent.
• Had our cars delivered.
• Found a place to rent in Lafayette.
• Rented it.
• Had boxes and furniture delivered (all within 5 days of arriving).
• Unpacked lots of boxes.
• Bought lots of things for the house. (We bought a lot of stuff, Visa loves us right now. Our checking account does not.)
• Had Mom, Dad, and Sri over lots of times.
• Crissy’s family came and visited for a week.
• Went to my high school reunion.

Of course, each of these things has an interesting and fun story behind it. Maybe I’ll write about some of them in later posts. :-)

Update (7/30/08): I just realized I calculated the rent total wrong. It should be ~68K over 6 years (corrected above).