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Relative integrity of educational systems. How trustworthy are degrees?
Posted by
cdev
on 19 Nov, 2017 20:49
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How free from corruption are educational systems in your country? Can a graduate degree in a field or multiple degrees be trusted to be a good enough indication of somebody's skill that it can truly be called an objective measure of their skills?
(as opposed to other means of demonstrating their skill, which might rely on recommendations or a portfolio of work they had done.)
Are there any better means of determining professional qualifications that are based on objective and transparent criteria, such as competence and the ability to supply the service?
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#1 Reply
Posted by
T3sl4co1l
on 19 Nov, 2017 21:12
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A degree or certification just means that the student was capable of answering the test questions.
Sometimes that's applicable in real-world duties. Often it is not.
I don't think this property varies from country to country, though the strength and rigor of the questions and answers may vary.
Tim
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#2 Reply
Posted by
Kremmen
on 19 Nov, 2017 21:20
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How free from corruption are educational systems in your country? Can a degree or multiple degrees be trusted to be a good enough indication of somebody's skill that it can truly be called an objective measure of their skill level?
(as opposed to other means of demonstrating their skill, which might rely on recommendations or a portfolio of work they had done.)
Very. Yes, though for employment purposes individual qualities of course play a role as they do anywhere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Finland
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#3 Reply
Posted by
cdev
on 19 Nov, 2017 21:36
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If you have two firms from completely different parts of the world which have both put forward similar proposals for a government contract, involving professional work delivering some service, and its required that the contract only go to one of them, how can their relative merits be weighed in a manner that will survive a dispute if its challenged to an international trade body?
They may both be comparable in terms of the professional qualifications of their workforces. Its presumed they will all have advanced degrees.
A lot of the ways people have determined who to hire in the past may not be allowed. Just pick the one with the lower bid, even if they are close?
There might be preferences - requiring that under some circumstances preference be given to some countries firms, countries that have particularly low levels of development.
Paradoxically, it may even turn out that those service providers staffs have more degrees from more prestigious internationally known universities (Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, Princeton, etc.) than the staffs of firms from countries without the "Least Developed" label attached to them.
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#4 Reply
Posted by
Someone
on 20 Nov, 2017 00:13
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A degree or certification just means that the student was capable of answering the test questions.
Or a student/stooge standing in for them... yes it happens, more so for submitted works but also for examinations.
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#5 Reply
Posted by
aargee
on 20 Nov, 2017 02:09
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Or this...
"A degree or certification just means that the student was capable of answering the test questions paying a fee."
Cynical not. There has been so much dilution of education as opposed to financial gain for an institution (at least here in Australia).
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#6 Reply
Posted by
cdev
on 20 Nov, 2017 02:47
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Universities are only too happy to accept their money.
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A degree from an accredited institution means that the person was able to have the patience and dedication to stick to something long term - on the order of years - in order to reach an end goal. Anything extra (such as actual pertinent skills or useful knowledge) is a plus.
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#8 Reply
Posted by
tggzzz
on 20 Nov, 2017 09:59
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You need to know the institution; some are much better than others. In the UK, the "Russell Group" of universities is a good starting point, followed by universities with towns in their name, and be suspicious of universities with vague regions in their names (South Bank, Thames Valley spring to mind). There are, of course, honourable exceptions (West of England springs to mind).
Beyond that a decent degree or lack of a degree is a strong bias in certain aspects of competence. Whether those aspects of competence are relevant to any particular job is for a company to decide. Whether any particular candidate has the necessary skills needs to be assessed at interview.
Summary: a good degree is a sensible bias, and the lack of a degree another bias. But neither are absolute.
Analogy: if someone is choosing your course of medical treatment, you really want them to have a relevant degree. Similarly, if someone is sticking a needle in your vein to take blood, you want them to have relevant (but different) qualifications. Even then, you get notably bad doctors and notably good nurses.
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#9 Reply
Posted by
tszaboo
on 20 Nov, 2017 10:16
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There was this student, when I was graduating. He revived Summa Cum Laude. And I know he was a complete idiot. Absolute 0 logical thinking skill, and common sense. Which I believe is more important in this field than anything.
But, he knew how to study for tests. There wasn't too much variety in the types of the test questions, he learned how to answer them. Now he is working at a big corporation, pushing buttons on the computer. I guess they told him how to do it, and he is good at it. Good thing about established big corporations, is that they are more tolerant to the individual idiots.
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#10 Reply
Posted by
bd139
on 20 Nov, 2017 10:40
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Some good points in this thread.
Education isn't a sign of competence, merely of hoop jumping and available funding. That's something you can only evaluate by employing someone and waiting to see what happens. Usually interest in the subject matter is of more significance than education as well.
I could write a long rant about the state of graduates these days but Russel Group universities (one of which I'm a grad from, just to quell any bias fears) turn out some of the lowest utility graduates into the computer science side of things. Education is supposed to equip you for the real world but none of the faculty or course designers appear to have actually worked in the real world past research collaboration so there is a large disparity between graduates and the industry. Now I don't expect people to sit down from day one and be productive but after 6 months trial period and hand holding and training on a daily basis I expect them to be able to trace a relatively simple defect or fill in the gaps in an implementation without leaving us in O(n!) complexity problems. Guys from supposed UK B-rate universities, unqualified from a Sainsburys car park (yes we recruited someone there), or some university in the former Eastern Bloc that no one has ever heard of and probably no longer exists, straight in there, done and dusted - good people!
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#11 Reply
Posted by
tggzzz
on 20 Nov, 2017 10:43
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There was this student, when I was graduating. He revived Summa Cum Laude. And I know he was a complete idiot. Absolute 0 logical thinking skill, and common sense. Which I believe is more important in this field than anything.
But, he knew how to study for tests. There wasn't too much variety in the types of the test questions, he learned how to answer them. Now he is working at a big corporation, pushing buttons on the computer. I guess they told him how to do it, and he is good at it. Good thing about established big corporations, is that they are more tolerant to the individual idiots.
Shrug. So what.
That's the kind of thing that can and should be found at interview. Bits of paper aren't guarantees; neither are interviews - but they are both indicative and have complementary advantages and disadvantages.
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#12 Reply
Posted by
cdev
on 20 Nov, 2017 13:30
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I became interested in this issue some years ago when I noticed that when sometimes when I brought up some research thing I have read, sometimes it would elicit cynical remarks of unusual "something" maybe "fervor"?
When I've gotten the occasional cynical comment like "don't believe all the research you read", my ears always perk up, and I really want to know, why did this person say that?
I would have expected the cynicism about research in guests who were born outside of the US to be inversely proportionate to their educational levels, With US born people, that's been my experience. Some less educated Americans are very cynical about scientific research generally.
I don't know. The group of people is not a representative one at all.
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#13 Reply
Posted by
Mjolinor
on 20 Nov, 2017 13:49
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Verifying research papers is extremely dull and extremely difficult. Thankfully organisations such as the IEEE and others do a really good job of removing the dros before it is published.
Verification is also now a lot easier than it used to be before Internet. I once needed a specific book on electromagnetic theory that was last published in 1947. One copy only at the British library on long term loan to a UK university. It took me four months to get the book and I could only have it for a few weeks. That was absolutely normal pre 1990 ish. It was months of work and a lot of travelling. Now we have Internet and you can answer most questions within minutes. Is it an improvement? The longer we have Internet the less I think that it is.
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#14 Reply
Posted by
T3sl4co1l
on 20 Nov, 2017 13:50
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Research is almost wholly incremental; any article claiming something revolutionary is, at best, trying to sell you something.
Academic reporting is almost uniformly bad. Anything to do with quantum physics is bad without exception.
This is probably more cynicism about reporting in general, rather than research itself (which does have its own, internally recognized problems). It goes hand-in-hand with the phrase, "the answer to any headline asking a question is 'no'".
Tim
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#15 Reply
Posted by
cdev
on 20 Nov, 2017 15:02
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Research is almost wholly incremental; any article claiming something revolutionary is, at best, trying to sell you something.
Well, an example of research I think is interesting is a paper I've tried to explain here about toxicology, that glutathione levels change expression of two genes (fyn and c-cbl) that seriously impact unborn children, and showing that the effect of multiple quite chemically diverse toxicants can be modulated by dietary availability of cysteine, glutathione's precursor, showing that any of literally thousands of pro-oxidant substances and other processes (of all kinds) that impact cells by creating reactive oxygen species, should be considered to be additive in that context.
It didn't claim to be revolutionary, I thought it was.
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#16 Reply
Posted by
T3sl4co1l
on 20 Nov, 2017 15:11
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Hmm, interesting.
Tim
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#17 Reply
Posted by
HalFET
on 20 Nov, 2017 21:40
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Stupidity is a universal constant, and I include myself in that one. Nothing quite as frustrating as teaching labs to master students in engineering, something I can attest to...
Half of them you feel like taking out back and shooting after they asked for the 5th time how a lock-in amplifier works. But you do it for the two to three folks per group who do get it, who do understand. And sure, a few more of them will understand later on. But you can be rest assured that the rest of them will be shoved onto a management or sales track most likely
That being said, there are some universities which put out so many crappy papers which are either copied or just plain wrong that it gets silly. Bonus points if you pay to get published in Nature Scientific Reports I suppose?
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#18 Reply
Posted by
cdev
on 20 Nov, 2017 21:49
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I think its quite stupid to expect that one is going to be able to get a job in a field in the future if you don't like it enough to immerse one's self in it, i.e. do it for fun in your spare time.
Thanks to globalization, we'll each be competing with seven billion other people instead of just a few hundred million (or in the case of India and China 1.7 billion and 1.3 billion respectively.)
Short term, we may see a lot of skilled workers trading places with those on the other side of the world, for much lower wages, just so they can keep working.
(See "Rising powers' venue-shopping on international mobility" NCCR (Swiss think tank) Working Paper No 2014/3, March 2014 by Flavia Jurje and Sandra Lavenex
And then after a few years, if current trends continue, machines will just do more and more of everything. People will just say what they want and the computers will show them examples of it.
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#19 Reply
Posted by
HalFET
on 20 Nov, 2017 23:07
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I think its quite stupid to expect that one is going to be able to get a job in a field in the future if you don't like it enough to immerse one's self in it, i.e. do it for fun in your spare time.
Thanks to globalization, we'll each be competing with seven billion other people instead of just a few hundred million (or in the case of India and China 1.7 billion and 1.3 billion respectively.)
And then after a few years, if current trends continue, machines will just do more and more of everything.
Depends a bit on the field I'd say, but for electronics the non-theoretical part requires a certain degree of passion for the subject. You're not going to get good sitting at your desk from 9 to 5 looking at SPICE outputs.
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#20 Reply
Posted by
razberik
on 20 Nov, 2017 23:11
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PhD degree from CZ or SK university in technical field is a red light for me.
The most unsuccessful and lazy master graduates who are unable to find job goes for PhD to waste taxpayers money.
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#21 Reply
Posted by
floobydust
on 20 Nov, 2017 23:11
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Fake university degrees are not too expensive, there are diploma mills in pakistan
"Ezell, who co-wrote the book Degree Mills: The Billion-Dollar Industry That Has Sold Over a Million Fake Diplomas, estimates half of new PhDs issued every year in the U.S. are fake."
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#22 Reply
Posted by
cdev
on 20 Nov, 2017 23:17
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#23 Reply
Posted by
IanB
on 20 Nov, 2017 23:44
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How free from corruption are educational systems in your country? Can a graduate degree in a field or multiple degrees be trusted to be a good enough indication of somebody's skill that it can truly be called an objective measure of their skills?
At degree level it is less about skills and more about professional competence. (Skill = able to perform defined tasks efficiently. Professional competence = able to solve previously unseen problems using general knowledge of the field.)
Completing a degree course or program means someone has been given the opportunity to learn and develop competence. The task of the hiring process is to assess whether a candidate has taken advantage of that opportunity to acquire the competence desired. No one ever should just rely on a piece of paper as an objective measure.
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#24 Reply
Posted by
cdev
on 20 Nov, 2017 23:50
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