Conference Realignment

cpf2001

Ramblin' Wreck
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818
Yeah, if you're measuring how good you have to be to get out, low retention can be a positive sign. "It takes a real genius to make it through this."

But if you're measuring how good the school is at being a school, it's a negative. "Wow, unless you're already a genius, this place sucks at teaching."

The ideal school would admit broadly and graduate broadly at a high bar. Students would come out better than they came in. That's really what I meant about "don't try to be Stanford" to open this whole can of worms. Stanford is rich as hell and private and can be snobs all day long. But I think a public institution of education should aim higher for serving a broader base of citizens. An institute of the state saying "hah most of you just aren't good enough" is a bad look, especially when they aren't known for - or even hired for - their teaching acumen in the first place. Problem is that "effective at teaching" is hard to measure, so we largely substitute "selective" for "good" instead of "effective."
 
Vespidae

Vespidae

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Northeast Stinger said:
Yes. It’s different now. This is more “passive” cheating.

From several sources, the administration is giddy about the positive attention the football program brings, the large number of applications this brings, and the money provided for other programs. This translates into spoken and unspoken pressures on faculty to “go easy” on students during football season. One of my friends who teaches there (and recently tried to quit, but that’s a different story) has seen the seriousness of the students decline over the last decade. He attributes that to the party atmosphere that is widely tolerated coupled with being told to let his athletes skip as many classes as they “need to.” Over all what has been communicated to the students, inadvertently or not, is that football is more important than the classroom.

I think a lot of our debates on this site revolve around an uneasiness with the reality at uga, that this is the atmosphere that is necessary to win in big time football.
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If it helps, I failed two starters. That mentality is unfortunate.
 

yoshiki2

Georgia Tech Fan
Messages
91
cpf2001 said:
I think I could count the ones who didn’t on one hand.

I didn’t and still don’t think GT is a good place to learn, but it has a long-standing reputation for high standards and so it just feeds itself since employers go there to hire and so you gotta play the game if you’re looking for a good job.

Though I think not washing out nearly as many of the admitted students is a big improvement.

But now that I’m in the hiring seat, I generally find folks from places like the UCSDs of the world to be every bit as capable but without as frequently having a weird Shaft-induced combination of ego+self-doubt. (Not that the UCs don’t play the research game, but the ones down the ladder a bit from Cal tend to be less … intense … about it.)
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The reputation helps to attract better students, and each year is getting hard to get in. I graduated in 2020, not sure if I would be accepted now as I was lucky to get accepted. Something I learned at tech after my first semester (was bad) is to copy habits from successful people. I started staying late at the library, started studying in advance for a test, started reaching out to my TAs, became friends with Asian people as they were the ones "sleeping" in the libraries. Most of my professors were worthless, except for the really old ones. Most of my TAs were good though.
 

yoshiki2

Georgia Tech Fan
Messages
91
g0lftime said:
Recent statement by our current president to several alums this summer. GT was easier to get into back then, but harder to get out of. It's harder to get in now, but easier to get out.
Retention is one of the key metrics on college rankings. We didn't do well in that category back in the day.
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Most of people I met who were not cut for engineering or CS are still changing to Business.
 
forensicbuzz

forensicbuzz

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Northeast Stinger said:
Healthy learning environments foster retention. That’s been a SACS metric for as long as I can remember. It also suggests having a coherent admissions policy.
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Part of the low retention rate was mandatory 60% acceptance of Georgia HS students. Prior to Hope, many of the students from Georgia were not prepared to achieve at Tech, but had to be admitted. With Hope, better students staying instate and Georgia HS are getting better too. This is also helping uga.
 

takethepoints

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5,917
Being effective at teaching is different at post-secondary institutions. It has to do with what the place is trying to do with students.

In high school, teachers work very hard to getting students to learn the basics. This means they do a lot to try to "engage" the students and get them through a curriculum. Indeed, they are responsible for turning out students - and the more the better - who can be called high school grads and recognized as such. This means that the students are pushed through classes where they are dragooned into learning. This works, sorta.

In post-secondary institutions, teachers have a different responsibility. They must credential students as having mastered a particular field of study in a manner consistent with professional standards. Doing this is largely up to the students themselves, as it will be for the rest of their lives. This means that the teaching has an element of "sink or swim" to it; if the students aren't going to study the subject closely on their own there's no way that the faculty can certify their credentials for society as a whole. (Btw, think of this as a method for decreasing information costs for society; those interested in hiring the students know the set of skills they are presumed to have.) Most faculty, even at an R1 school like Tech, are quite willing to help students learn, but it is up to them, just like it will be when they get out. I taught at a small liberal arts college that touted itself as a "teaching institution" and that's definitively the way we all felt about and treated the students. I sorta specialized in "engaging" my students and, believe me, they often weren't at all happy about the responsibility I placed on their shoulders when I did.
 

cpf2001

Ramblin' Wreck
Messages
818
takethepoints said:
Being effective at teaching is different at post-secondary institutions. It has to do with what the place is trying to do with students.

In high school, teachers work very hard to getting students to learn the basics. This means they do a lot to try to "engage" the students and get them through a curriculum. Indeed, they are responsible for turning out students - and the more the better - who can be called high school grads and recognized as such. This means that the students are pushed through classes where they are dragooned into learning. This works, sorta.

In post-secondary institutions, teachers have a different responsibility. They must credential students as having mastered a particular field of study in a manner consistent with professional standards. Doing this is largely up to the students themselves, as it will be for the rest of their lives. This means that the teaching has an element of "sink or swim" to it; if the students aren't going to study the subject closely on their own there's no way that the faculty can certify their credentials for society as a whole. (Btw, think of this as a method for decreasing information costs for society; those interested in hiring the students know the set of skills they are presumed to have.) Most faculty, even at an R1 school like Tech, are quite willing to help students learn, but it is up to them, just like it will be when they get out. I taught at a small liberal arts college that touted itself as a "teaching institution" and that's definitively the way we all felt about and treated the students. I sorta specialized in "engaging" my students and, believe me, they often weren't at all happy about the responsibility I placed on their shoulders when I did.
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I think the first-year grading at MIT is a good example of how it's not just a "are the teachers good" thing but also an institutional attitude. There's too many students for any given professor to help all the ones who don't have the tools yet, but at a school level you can do things. Don't expect people to be ready in year 1? If you set them up to fail softly without too many long-term consequences, with opportunities and nudging to correct course, then you're doing a huge service to the ones who can master the material but don't know how yet, but who are capable of learning from their mistakes.
 

takethepoints

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cpf2001 said:
Don't expect people to be ready in year 1? If you set them up to fail softly without too many long-term consequences, with opportunities and nudging to correct course, then you're doing a huge service to the ones who can master the material but don't know how yet, but who are capable of learning from their mistakes.
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To quote my research methods syllabus: "If you are diligent, you cannot fail htis course! There will be many opportunities to recover from an occasional poor performance (there were, btw). If you are not diligent, you had better be ready to have your friends butter you up because YOU WILL BE TOAST!" This approach worked just fine once the students saw I was serious and that they actually had a chance to recover from a bad grade.

But that was an advanced course (junior/senior) major course. In the basic courses in the common curriculum and in the majors, there was a lot of review and explanation of how the courses fit together and what the students should get out of them. Lots of review of basic tools as well; I had my students on the machines from the basic courses on. (I'm a political scientist so that was required out of the gate.) Even R1 schools do this, though in different ways. At Georgia State, there's a whole floor in one of the buildings dedicated to study centers, one for Americans, one for Asians, one for the Middle East, one for Eastern Europe, and so on. I don't know what they have at Tech alkomng these lines.
 

billga99

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Messages
653
It is interesting to read the Clemson, FSU and UNC blogs. They clearly have no interest in any other thing than getting to the SEC or Big Ten. All are saying they are looking at ways to get out of the GOR. If that was feasible, I would have thought USC, UCLA, Texas or Oklahoma would have gone down that route. Obviously they didn't have to wait very long in comparison to ACC schools. Without beating the GOR clause, I don't think this is financially feasible for Public Universities until 2030 or later based on the money they would have to pay and a lot less appeal to whatever conference they would be going to. With ESPN's current financial issues and their commitment to the SEC, the money gap is large but I don't see it closing without a major disruptive occurrence (meaning Notre Dame joining the ACC for football or ESPN/parent declaring bankruptcy...not likely in either case).
 
IEEEWreck

IEEEWreck

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cpf2001 said:
Yeah, if you're measuring how good you have to be to get out, low retention can be a positive sign. "It takes a real genius to make it through this."

But if you're measuring how good the school is at being a school, it's a negative. "Wow, unless you're already a genius, this place sucks at teaching."

The ideal school would admit broadly and graduate broadly at a high bar. Students would come out better than they came in. That's really what I meant about "don't try to be Stanford" to open this whole can of worms. Stanford is rich as hell and private and can be snobs all day long. But I think a public institution of education should aim higher for serving a broader base of citizens. An institute of the state saying "hah most of you just aren't good enough" is a bad look, especially when they aren't known for - or even hired for - their teaching acumen in the first place. Problem is that "effective at teaching" is hard to measure, so we largely substitute "selective" for "good" instead of "effective."
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You're right about substituting selective for effective, but you've arranged things backwards. The closer a school is to a 100% graduation rate the more the school is not teaching precisely because it is hard to define "effective at teaching". Let me propose the following system of android schools that has students that behave like materials in a factory:
Application -> admissions -> teaching ->testing -> graduation.

You can either impose controls on the throughput at the admissions stage or the testing stage (although it may be amusing to imagine constructing an application that is itself a throughput control). The ideal school might be so good at teaching that it can take in lawn clippings and u(sic)Ga fans in ever increasing quantities and turn out infinitely many engineerbots and architectrons, but real schools face limited time and resources. That's not to say that there aren't real, quantifiable ways to improve teaching, but let's leave that aside for right now because we're actually talking about is trying to use real, actually available measurements to quantify quality, especially graduation rate.

So let's imagine two schools of precisely the same quality of teaching and all other things being equal, except that one takes in twice the number of Freshmen as it intends to have Juniors in 2 years and aims for a 50% graduation rate and the other uses admissions criteria to try to control quality with a 100% graduation rate.

The 50% school has near total control over the construction of the quality control system, and can closely control both the precision of the test phase (as in how well the test differentiates the point you care about and follows a gaussian distribution, etc.) and also the accuracy of the tests (as in how well the tests measure whether the architectron can create blueprints of a structurally stable mirrored glass high rise). The danger is that because the resource constraint is the teaching step, there's incentives to cheat on the accuracy of the tests to achieve better precision specifically in terms of coming out with a 50% graduation rate with the available resources).

The admissions school has a much harder problem because although there are measurements of the application stage inputs, most of them are from the the suppliers of raw material and there's no standardization between manufacturers of what constitutes grade A sheet steel or silicon wafers and grade D. There are some standard quality tests, but they're so profoundly broad that while they have decent precision, their accuracy is terrible. I mean, it has to be, because what test meaningfully describes both sheet steel and silicon wafers? And that's before we talk about how those tests are designed by industry groups that have their own agenda that may or may not fit the school's goals. So admissions does it's best to try to quantify how the different manufacturer's gradings compare to each other and even impose as much independent testing as they can given their limited resources.

The danger for the 100% graduation school is that when the teaching step is a bottleneck and isn't getting more resources but the bosses demand better graduation rates the perverse incentive is to either artifically restrict the admissions or start dialing back the effectiveness of the testing step. In reality, that means pressure to do both. Moreover, since the admissions school can't directly test for the actual relevant properties like corrosion resistance, they start going further and further down ranking sheet metal applicants in terms of chromium content because they've always had success with stainless steel. Unfortunately, that means they turn away aluminum sheet metal with equal or better performance in direct corrosion tests.

Now, human beings are not architectrons and the real picture is much, much more complicated, but the incentives and dynamics at the school factory are present in an actual school.

So the 1% graduation rate school might be bad at teaching, but at least you can demonstrate that the graduates did learn things and that the people who did graduate graduated because they could pass a set of tests with known accuracy and precision. At least with erring in that direction "elite" education doesn't just enforce societal power structures.
 
stech81

stech81

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billga99 said:
It is interesting to read the Clemson, FSU and UNC blogs. They clearly have no interest in any other thing than getting to the SEC or Big Ten. All are saying they are looking at ways to get out of the GOR. If that was feasible, I would have thought USC, UCLA, Texas or Oklahoma would have gone down that route. Obviously they didn't have to wait very long in comparison to ACC schools. Without beating the GOR clause, I don't think this is financially feasible for Public Universities until 2030 or later based on the money they would have to pay and a lot less appeal to whatever conference they would be going to. With ESPN's current financial issues and their commitment to the SEC, the money gap is large but I don't see it closing without a major disruptive occurrence (meaning Notre Dame joining the ACC for football or ESPN/parent declaring bankruptcy...not likely in either case).
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All I can say is go LSU show FSU why they have had 4 losing seasons the past 5 years
 

LT 1967

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231
billga99 said:
the next questions is how to configure football with 17 teams..weird number particularly if you keep permanent opponents like the 3 we have today. Off the wall thoughr would be to pickup UConn for football only (would obviously need to fill in money from ESPN). Then split into 3 pods of 6 teams and go to 9 games. That means you play every team in 3 years.
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One other way would be to reduce the permanent teams to two. If GT played Clemson and Louisville as permanent opponents, you would then rotate 7 teams each year (9 conference games). Using the published opponents for GT in 2024 and 2025, GT schedule would look something like the following:

2024--------------------2025

Clemson(P)-----------Clemson(P)
Louisville(P)-----------Louisville(P)
Stanford---------------CAL
FSU--------------------SMU
NCS--------------------DUKE
PITT--------------------BC
SYR---------------------MIAMI
WF---------------------UNC
VT----------------------UVA

I also read an article in which the AD from Syracuse said, "It could be as simple as dropping from three to two permanent Opponents". Sounds like the conference has been discussing this option.

This will really pin down the GT schedule due to the fact we have UGA every year. That pretty much restricts the GT schedule to 9 ACC teams plus UGA (10 Power 4 teams) If we want 7 home games every year, we will schedule 9 ACC Plus UGA and 2 G5 teams. On the Notre years, we will have 11 Power 4 teams on the schedule Likely only 6 home games in those years.

Pretty Strong!
 

Root4GT

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LT 1967 said:
One other way would be to reduce the permanent teams to two. If GT played Clemson and Louisville as permanent opponents, you would then rotate 7 teams each year (9 conference games). Using the published opponents for GT in 2024 and 2025, GT schedule would look something like the following:

2024--------------------2025

Clemson(P)-----------Clemson(P)
Louisville(P)-----------Louisville(P)
Stanford---------------CAL
FSU--------------------SMU
NCS--------------------DUKE
PITT--------------------BC
SYR---------------------MIAMI
WF---------------------UNC
VT----------------------UVA

I also read an article in which the AD from Syracuse said, "It could be as simple as dropping from three to two permanent Opponents". Sounds like the conference has been discussing this option.

This will really pin down the GT schedule due to the fact we have UGA every year. That pretty much restricts the GT schedule to 9 ACC teams plus UGA (10 Power 4 teams) If we want 7 home games every year, we will schedule 9 ACC Plus UGA and 2 G5 teams. On the Notre years, we will have 11 Power 4 teams on the schedule Likely only 6 home games in those years.

Pretty Strong!
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I really don’t like Louisville as a permanent opponent. Clemson is fine but sucks as they are so good.
 
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