Posted by Gaishan 10/28/2024
Well that question didn’t age well…
In college anything below a C put you on academic probation. In graduate school anything lower than a B put you on academic probation.
A memorable classes being Electromagnetism 4 where the passing grade in my year was 8% and Quantum Mechanics 3 with 15%.
For most classes: say E&M or classical mechanics there are a finite number of problems that you can work out in a 3 hour exam. So you can study accordingly.
For harder classes, we usually had take home exams. The take home exams were extremely demanding but doable. There was no way you could pass in class or take home exams with a 25% grade.
Passing grade, 2, in most schools would be from around 30% to 50%. It's teacher choice.
Using Pythagoras, it's the square root of 30*2 + 40*2. It effectively a 3, 4, 5 right angle triangle.
A2 + b2 = c2
And this is pre-calculator so the number is one of the squares that the kids would have memorized. 4^2 + 3^2 = 25 = 50 feet.
Yeah, but the vast majority wouldn't, so isn't this contradictory? Is he trying to say 8th graders could pass if they studied or had the identical question in advance? That, too, I am skeptical of. Maybe some could, but most would not.
The reason is because the corpus of knowledge is so large. It's not like those are the only questions, but rather drawn from much larger reading. This is why even well-educated adults do poorly on general knowledge tests--what is considered 'general knowledge' is quite vast.
The difference now vs. 1912:
Emphasis on specialization for gifted kids, but also considerable intra-classroom variability of skill, so you have some kids learning multi-variable calc at 9th grade (not at school, but rather at local college, private tutoring , or self-study such as online with apps), and on the other extreme, others still struggling with fractions.
In 1912, the strugglers would have been weeded out by either dropping out of school or learning a trade. Mandatory k-12 school was not yet a thing. So there are selection biases here. Same for demographic change.