What's Up Wednesday #25 - Gamed Rankings, Cognitive Load, In Time Learning and what is going to stay?
What's Up Wednesday #25 - Gamed Rankings, Cognitive Load, In Time Learning and what is going to stay?
Happy Wednesday everyone!
Rising all for the rankings
🤓 Some (all?) highly ranked schools and institutions fear losing their status. That's why some game the statistics to keep their high scores.
One comment states that „[his] sister went to an extremely prestigious private school in the UK(basically Eton-level) and they had an easier way around it - they basically wouldn't let students sit exams they knew they would do poorly in, so the school wouldn't lose its great ratings. So [his] sister wasn't allowed to take maths or chemistry in her A-level years because the school didn't think she was good enough in those subjects to score an A or higher on the exam. So in her final year, she only had literally a handful of subjects which weren't a danger to the school's academic rating.“
This behavior is not helping anyone (maybe the salary of the school director) and makes learning worse for pupils. Another commenter reports that his school never let people fail any tests. The teachers were helping struggling pupils during the test. All such a system is teaching you is that you don‘t need to work hard and that you can rely on and can expect help. Exactly the opposite of real life.
I guess the best would be to have an institution visiting schools on an unknown and random day to do the tests and with supervisors from that testing institution. Else it just does not make any sense to do tests at all. They are not comparable if most schools cheat in some way.
And in my opinion, most things that are rated in any way (hotels, online shops) the system is gamed heavily as well. Because it is even easier than in schools. And because you need to stay competitive with others who cheat. So you cheat as well.
Cognitive Load
"Minimize your cognitive load from distracting things that don’t matter. It’s hard to overstate how important this is, and how bad most people are at it. Get rid of distractions in your life. Develop very strong ways to avoid letting crap you don’t like doing pile up and take your mental cycles, especially in your work life." - zakslayback.com
In Time Learning
Most learning is done in advance. You learn it now to apply it later. I don’t know if it makes sense. Here is a good article about In Time Learning. „You just need to know enough to start; the rest you’ll pick up along the way. Just start, and let the challenges guide you towards your next learning needs.“ In my opinion in time learning is great. You can just start some project and learn what you need on the go. This learning „on-demand“ eliminates many struggles with learning I had in school or university. You now know why you learn it and it is purposeful. You apply it while learning and playing with new ideas, making it easier to remember.
What is going to change? And what is going to stay?
“I very frequently get the question: ‘What's going to change in the next 10 years?' And that is a very interesting question; it's a very common one. I almost never get the question: ‘What's not going to change in the next 10 years?' And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two — because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time … In our retail business, we know that customers want low prices, and I know that's going to be true 10 years from now. They want fast delivery; they want vast selection. It's impossible to imagine a future 10 years from now where a customer comes up and says, ‘Jeff I love Amazon; I just wish the prices were a little higher,' [or] ‘I love Amazon; I just wish you'd deliver a little more slowly.' Impossible. […] When you have something that you know is true, even over the long term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it.”
— Jeff Bezos on the importance of what’s not going to change