Key findings: 1. family income largely predicts and determines the probability of a student to complete university successfully; 1.1 students from high-income families cope better with setbacks and eventually graduate; 1.2 students from disadvantaged, low-income families feel isolated and struggle to graduate, or drop out 3. standardized objective tests (SAT) on give false confidence to students who later fail first university exams 4. the negative effect of (1.2) can be mitigated with ingenious psychological initiatives 5. in NO cases the success of a student in a course seems to depend on the teacher: students from rich families pass, students from poor families fail 6. (Therefore): all the rage quality-assuring testing that ranks professors and universities based on students outcome in some tests, and measuring % of enrolled students that graduate have the only effect of penalizing universities that enroll students from low-income families, and favour universities that exclude them.
Posted on: Sat, 17 May 2014 03:58:10 +0000