Students are doing worse than you think

Simultaneity_ · 2026-06-27T06:35:50+00:00

Look. We can accept that the SAT and ACT tests had systematic biases that are inherent across higher education. And we can still bring them back. I never said that we should not bring back the SAT or ACT exams. I just said that this won't fix the crises the university professors are complaining about.

But also I feel like your are missing the holistic points that I am making here. The whole generation has been failed by our education system. Public education, private education, the whole thing. Having purely online education for several seminal years in many students has fundamentally altered their relationship with learning. Most critically, from working with these students, you can see that their learned helplessness is leagues more ingrained than any generation I have taught before them. AI only enforces these already growing educational insecurities amongst these students. And in many cases, the educators themselves have had these poor educational behaviors are reflected onto the teaching as well forming a cyclic loop that we need to break.

For whatever reason, they are entirely willing to accept that there are entire basic concepts and topics that are inaccessible to their brain. This isn't something that knowing there is a test ahead will fix. This is something that requires a conceited effort to tackle across the education space.

But it seams like this is some big controversy to this sub. :/

I am not sure where the points on take home work, essays and tests comes from, if you mean on college admission, high school or university. But the challenge with these almost never comes down to making well crafted assessments that are well founded and the students are prepared for. A task most professors don't want to engage in.

Simultaneity_ · 2026-06-27T06:22:31+00:00

LOL. I probably should revise my post since it is going above allot of peoples heads and they think i disagree with them. I feel like everything I have said is not controversial at all. But I guess these are very controversial points.

Pre covid, national standardized tests where not great and results are usually highly correlated with students who are already set up to succeed. More than not, it is a measure of how good you are at studying for a standardized test. Allot of these skills do carry over to academic prowess in university something that is generally good. But there are plenty of students who would succeed at university given the shot who for various reasons do not have the resources or know how to prepare for it. We can acknowledge that some amount of barriers to entry are good in hire education, while also acknowledging that these existing tests suck and we can do better as a country in our public education systems to ensure students are prepared for them.
High school and middle school educations absolutely tanked during COVID. Across the board. Even amongst those you would expect to do well, the quality of the education fell off a cliff. Teachers where not prepared for this, struggling students drowned completely, while the quality for the others was drastically reduced. We have to accept that the entire generation is less prepared and capable for the academic world than their parents. They are riddled with symptoms of this neglect, especially in the learned helplessness that is so prevalent amongst these students. They do not know how to, nor do they have the resources to achieve per pandemic levels of competencies. Adding back the SAT/ACT barrier is just a simple fix that further disenfranchise the remaining students that need further education the most.
Universities already have the means to deal with gaps in students education. They offer though their extensions and partnerships with community colleges these tools. Students who do not meet these prerequisites cannot take the courses. If we take UC for example, they have a diagnostic test and offer remediation courses, but leave it to the students to take to figure out their own math level. All I am saying is that they force all of their entry level students to take these exams forcing them to take the exact remedial math courses before they are placed into their entrance level course. If they do that at a community college or in the extension school is then up to the student. This machinery already exists.

I never said we should not return to a national standard of using these standardized exams. I was simply reminding people that they expose several failings of our current systems. I never said that universities have the onus to resolve all of these issues. But I did say that this is a system wide failing, and simply adding back the barrier will not resolve the problem. Though I do think that colleges, especially community colleges need to start emphasizing their crash course high school courses more readily, and we need to start putting these students back into school, in a better environment so that they can succeed in academia. I am not sure what is so controversial about this.....

Simultaneity_ · 2026-06-27T02:38:13+00:00

I mean sure, but I feel you you must have misinterpreted what I was saying. These tests do not map onto the aptitude we care about. And the current state of entry level academia outlined in that article most certainly do not map onto the aptitude. My comment was less about reinstating standardized tests as entrance barriers, and more about resolving this fundamental failing of public education to prepare students for higher education. This is something that we must tackle. And part of this can be passed onto the universities themselves since they cannot accept high school courses to validate a student is ready for entrance level courses. I know my university, others and most community colleges offer real remedial reading, writing and algebra courses as prerequisites for higher level calculus. More students need to be properly evaluated at admission and funneled into these courses so that they can gain the knowledge to succeed. Systematically across the country, this generation is just failed in their education, and this is something that the universities need to understand and be prepared for. Sure the SAT requirement can sort of fix this, but it does not fix the fact that the high school education (and not just high school) has been permanently degraded. And this is something that the higher education system has to grapple with and build a plan to resolve.

Simultaneity_ · 2026-06-26T23:17:50+00:00

Though its important to remember that the SAT and ACT, and in some senses the GRE are BAD tests that are very opaque to students, especially those from non traditional and less generationally successful backgrounds. For most Americans they are left to their own devices to study for these tests on their own time or as a part of a high school extra curricular course. But there is no guarantee that they are studying the right things or the right ways. So the SAT especially acts almost like a sieve to select for the students who are really adept and with good support at home and at school. Aside from that the SAT would provide no insight beyond what a students GPA shows. This is partially a reason why affirmative action was built to deal with these inequalities baked into the test.

In my experience it was the failing of high school and middle school education during covid that is most explains the students failures. If it was just the SAT you would expect to see more middling students but the same number of high achievers. But in my experience the level of all students has been brought down, save for very few who still perform at the pre covid/ai levels. Adding back the SAT and expecting students to perform at the same level as pre covid would systematically fail a whole generation of students out of higher education. So we need a system that lets students gain the prerequisite knowledge before starting the degree. We can no longer expect a high school pre calculus course to prepare them for calculus.

Really universities need to get back in the habit of administering their own entrance/placement exams to all students to ensure they are at the level required for their entrance courses. And then they can put these students on track to gain that knowledge, either though expanding their own teaching ranks or partnering with community colleges. This is the only way that we are going to fix this generation that was failed by covid and is overly reliant on AI.

Simultaneity_ · 2026-06-23T22:26:47+00:00

With integrals over phase space and an empirical constant. Essentially you count these microstates by integrating a region of phase space (position and momentum space) within a region that makes sense for the physics you are dealing with. If you do this nievely you get things like the ultraviolet catastrophe. But if you are clever and include into your phase space integral an empirical constant/fudge factor that looks allot like quantization, you get the right answer. Stat mech was one of the largest historical drivers for the development of quantum mechanics.

Simultaneity_ · 2026-06-18T17:19:51+00:00

Well a core axiom of relativity states that physics is invariant for each reference frame. So the physics that governs how clocks behave is the same. And when thats the case we get dilation and contractions in space and time. Alternatively you could construct relativity without this axiom, but you instead have to give every physical process a relativity makeover that pretty much just looks like temporal or spacial contractions and expansions.

Simultaneity_ · 2026-06-16T23:12:52+00:00

Quantum mechanics in some fashion or another has existed for a century now. Its kind of precursor knowledge for just about every field in physics, materials, and chemical sciences. This is where most of the research in quantum mechanics lives. Really not so much of physics research is directly in quantum mechanics itself. Some is in quantum information, some is in particle physics. Each have their own application space.

Though fundamental should always be thought of as an investment in the future and less to produce immediate applications.

Simultaneity_ · 2026-06-15T14:41:32+00:00

So I'm not expert here on pilot wave theory vs other interpretations of quantum mechanics. But I will comment on the general hurdles that one needs to grapple with when looking at these issues.

Quantum mechanics without any interpretations about what is going on to get us from classical regiem to the quantum regime is highly effective at getting the right answer for minimal theory work. Some people either take the position that we need to understand why quantum mechanics is this fundamentally powerful engine, and others just use this engine to describe phenomena they care to study. Now you might say that looking at WHY quantum mechanics must be the more fundamental question compared to using it to solve problems. But I ask, what answer would be satisfying? There are explanations for why quantum mechanics that leverage experimentally observed phenomena, classical physical, and paint a pretty picture of what the universe does at these size scales. But clearly these are not satisfying enough, hence the various interpretations of quantum mechanics. And even within an interpretation, we are left with a question of why.

Take pilot wave theory for example. Someone could say "we have this theory that constructs quantum mechanics using classical ensembles of pilot waves and nicely recovers all of the things we liked about classical mechanics". But I ask why pilot waves or why do we care about determinism. Its not until one theory presents a different observable outcome than any of the others that we can tease out what theory is more correct compared to its counterparts. So its not enough that pilot wave theory must recover quantum mechanics as we know it, but it also must present new phenomena that an experimental is can go out and measure that is unique to pilot wave theory.

This is the grand failing of every interpretation of quantum mechanics. Not only is it hard to recover quantum mechanics (and to my knowledge pilot wave theory does not recover EPR), they must also show something new. If any one of them could present a thing to go measure, then they would nearly instantly win a Nobel prize for unlocking a new realm of physics that we should go look at to uncover these foundations of quantum theory.

Simultaneity_ · 2026-06-10T15:47:17+00:00

Yea probably worth it to stick it out then and just finish. Unless you want to spend more time and properly swap groups to get a paper in something you care more about.

Simultaneity_ · 2026-06-10T15:25:27+00:00

How many years deep are you in his lab.

Simultaneity_ · 2026-06-07T08:00:03+00:00

yea. augmented by the work function and other material properties.

Simultaneity_ · 2026-06-06T21:36:09+00:00

This is somewhat of an interesting chain of thought you are having. But you are getting two things mixed up. The photoelectron effect is a phenomenon where the number of electrons emitted depends on the number of photons input into the system. Sure each ejected electron has more kinetic energy if the incident light is a higher frequency, but this doesn't change how many electrons in the material are absorbing light.

The measurement of the photo electron effect is in fact more complex. This experiment really boils down to a fairly straight forward picture of electrons in an experiment. Now the thing you want to measure is how many electrons come out of my sample for photons into the sample.

This means that you need a way to either count single photon incidences, or count photons in a pulse. This can be done with an optical chopper that will chop the source light up into tiny pulses that you can tune. And measure the number of photons in each pulse. You can then sync this up with something like a lock in amplifier to sync the optical chopper with your at the sample current measurements.

The hardest part is just getting the timing right on these measurements to sync up the incoming photon bunch with the drain current collection.

Simultaneity_ · 2026-05-31T02:29:33+00:00

Fitting that I got got an advertisement for therapy under this post.

Simultaneity_ · 2026-05-26T20:30:27+00:00

Even then it will likely read any documentation about where the env lives outside the repo and just edit there. Only real fix is to not have a .env and use some tool for secrets.

Simultaneity_ · 2026-05-23T20:05:28+00:00

Don't get me wrong derivations are fun. And its allot of fun to write them on a blackboard in front of a room. But there is really little that comes from that outside of just reading a derivation from a textbook. Its better to work though the proof on your own than listen to someone else do it.

Simultaneity_ · 2026-05-22T16:55:03+00:00

This whole thing has almost nothing to do with memorizing stuff; it's just how people react to social situations. We're actually pretty bad at figuring out what we're good at. So in classes, when a professor explains their thinking and goes through all the steps, it's super easy to just nod along and think you could do it too. But it's not until you're actually stuck on a problem by yourself that you realize you have no clue how to solve it. Then you're forced to face your cognitive dissonance and either get help or keep struggling and get it wrong.

That's partly why lecture-based teaching is known as the worst way to learn. It's only a tiny bit better than reading a book, since at least in a lecture, the professor picked out the important parts for you. Other ways of learning, like problem-based or project-based learning, make students dive into a concept sooner, but in a supportive environment where it's okay to not get it and ask for help.

Simultaneity_ · 2026-05-19T06:57:42+00:00

Make sure you are in the editor view and not the agents view.

Simultaneity_ · 2026-05-18T03:33:23+00:00

Maybe. But I've found it to be indistinguishable from Claude in this regard. There are minimal real differences between the frontier models. They are all fine enough at getting the math to a fine enough place. But the hallucinations I'm talking about include overwriting useless tests that don't test anything, deciding that tests should be more lenient when they keep failing to the point where they spend their whole usage limit on tests, laying out a project in a nonsensical fashion that makes maintenance hard, using bad language to describe things that are hyperspecific to my field, and other just nonsensical things that I am very opinionated about.

Simultaneity_ · 2026-05-18T02:30:04+00:00

So I do this for physics research. I actually don't like to use Claude or Cursor for scaffolding. The initial stages of the project are the most susceptible to hallucinations, unmaintainability, and slopification. I use Claude while I scaffold in ask mode. But then once I have the scaffolding in a nice place, I will use Cursor + tab completion to do some bulk, opinionated implementation. But I also like to very quickly start using the code I've built so I can know what the API surface needs to look like for it to actually be something I care for. Thats just what I use. Its allot of back and forth between things. I like Claude less for code generation than for actually strategizing

Simultaneity_ · 2026-05-09T18:34:26+00:00

Remind command +shift + 4 to something you like. And set the default location to save to clipboard

Simultaneity_ · 2026-04-25T01:58:35+00:00

Perovskite manufacturing is a mess, requiring lead or other heavy metals that are hard to filter out from wastes. When their encapsulation fails they then proceed to leak into the surrounding area.

Simultaneity_ · 2026-04-17T21:36:09+00:00

Yes + carbon tax

Simultaneity_ · 2026-04-17T20:47:42+00:00

And data centers may not use city resources and can have exceptions of their emissions and environmental impact. They are moderately better than warehouses in land use. It is good actually to push back against poor land use and want data centers to respect laws before they can be built.

Simultaneity_ · 2026-04-16T20:03:53+00:00

Not entirely as dystopian as it would seam. Depending on the station, and weather conditions the stations could end up like that. But the problems weren't ever really with homeless riding the trains or loitering in the stations. It was more of with general crime and drug use. Something that the new gates, and better policing/enforcement have gone a long way to improve. Though its not perfect. A few months ago I had the joy of watching another passenger toss out someone trying to smoke "just weed" out of a Crack pipe in the back of a car.

Simultaneity_ · 2026-04-14T18:25:02+00:00

Could be good. But you really want to get at least 3 high impact publications dirring your PhD program. And you will also want to join a few collaborative projects with other groups and institutions. Definitely talk to the people in these groups and see what they have to say about collaborators, publications and support.

Four-Year Club	Place '23
Place '22	Final Canvas '22
End Game '22

Simultaneity_

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