The algorithm didn’t like my essay

As a professor and a parent, I have long dreamed of finding a software program that helps every student learn to write well. It would serve as a kind of tireless instructor, flagging grammatical, punctuation or word-use problems, but also showing the way to greater concision and clarity, says Randall Stross for the New York Times. Now, unexpectedly, the desire to make the grading of tests less labor-intensive may be moving my dream closer to reality. The standardized tests administered by the states at the end of the school year typically have an essay-writing component, requiring the hiring of humans to grade them one by one. This spring, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation sponsored a competition to see how well algorithms submitted by professional data scientists and amateur statistics wizards could predict the scores assigned by human graders. The winners were announced last month — and the predictive algorithms were eerily accurate. The competition was hosted by Kaggle, a Web site that runs predictive-modeling contests for client organizations — thus giving them the benefit of a global crowd of data scientists working on their behalf. The site says it “has never failed to outperform a pre-existing accuracy benchmark, and to do so resoundingly.”

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California cuts threaten the status of universities

Class sizes have increased, courses have been cut and tuition has been raised — repeatedly. Fewer colleges are offering summer classes. Administrators rely increasingly on higher tuition from out-of-staters. And there are signs it could get worse: If a tax increase proposed by Gov. Jerry Brown is not approved this year, officials say they will be forced to consider draconian cuts like eliminating entire schools or programs, the New York Times reports. For generations, the University of California system — home to such globally renowned institutions as Berkeley and U.C.L.A. — has been widely recognized as perhaps the best example of what public universities could be. Along with the California State University system and the state’s vast number of community colleges, higher education options here have long been the envy of other states. But after years, and even decades, of budget cutbacks from the state, that reputation is under increasing threat. University leaders, who had responded typically to earlier budget cuts with assurances that their institutions were still in top form, now are sounding the alarm. In trying to rally support, they openly worry that their schools do not offer the same quality of education as a decade ago…

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A gap in college graduates leaves some cities behind

As cities like this one try to reinvent themselves after losing large swaths of their manufacturing sectors, they are discovering that one of the most critical ingredients for a successful transformation — college graduates — is in perilously short supply, the New York Times reports. Just 24 percent of the adult residents of metropolitan Dayton have four-year degrees, well below the average of 32 percent for American metro areas, and about half the rate of Washington, the country’s most educated metro area, according to a Brookings Institution analysis. Like many Rust Belt cities, it is a captive of its rich manufacturing past, when well-paying jobs were plentiful and landing one without a college degree was easy.  Educational attainment lagged as a result, even as it became more critical to success in the national economy. “We were so wealthy for so long that we got complacent,” said Jane L. Dockery, associate director of the Center for Urban and Public Affairs at Wright State University here. “We saw the writing on the wall, but we didn’t act.”

Dayton sits on one side of a growing divide among American cities, in which a small number of metro areas vacuum up a large number of college graduates, and the rest struggle to keep those they have…

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At CUNY, stricter admissions bring ethnic shift

More than a decade after the City University of New York ended open admissions to its four-year colleges, a marked shift has occurred at its top institutions as freshman classes now enter with far better academic credentials and also a different demographic mix, the New York Times reports. The changes began in 2000, with new minimum requirements for test scores for college admission, continued as academic standards were raised in stages over the years and accelerated sharply with the recent recession, as CUNY’s bargain prices beckoned far more applicants. At the university’s five most competitive four-year colleges — Baruch, Brooklyn, City, Hunter and Queens — nearly 12 percent of freshmen entering in 2001 had SAT scores of 1,200 or more. In 2007, for the last prerecession class, the figure was up to 16 percent, and by last fall, it had jumped to 26 percent. At the same time, black representation among first-time freshmen at those colleges dropped, to 10 percent last fall from 17 percent in 2001…

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New fight on a speaker at a Catholic university

Among politically conservative Roman Catholics, Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, was already at the top of the list of Catholic public officials considered to be traitors to the faith, the New York Times reports. As a two-term governor of Kansas, Ms. Sebelius was told by her bishop that she should be denied communion at Mass because of her support for abortion rights. As health secretary, she has been vilified for upholding the mandate in the health care overhaul that requires even religiously affiliated institutions to provide birth control coverage to their employees. So there was an uproar when it recently became public that Georgetown University, a Jesuit institution, had invited Ms. Sebelius to speak at an awards ceremony this Friday, its commencement day…

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Backer of Common Core school curriculum is chosen to lead College Board

David Coleman, an architect of the common core curriculum standards that are being adopted in nearly all 50 states, will become the president of the College Board, starting in October, the New York Times reports. The College Board, a membership organization of high schools and colleges that administers the SAT, the Advanced Placement program and other standardized tests, helped design the standards — an outline of what students should learn in English and math from kindergarten through high school — meant to ensure that all high school graduates are prepared for college. Mr. Coleman’s new position will involve a continued focus on college readiness. “We have a crisis in education, and over the next few years, the main thing on the College Board’s agenda is to deliver its social mission,” he said in an interview on Tuesday. “The College Board is not just about measuring and testing, but designing high-quality curriculum.”

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Law school plans to offer web courses for master’s

The law school of Washington University announced Tuesday that it would offer, entirely online, a master’s degree in United States law intended for lawyers practicing overseas, in partnership with 2tor, an education technology company, the New York Times reports. Legal education has been slow to move to online classes, and the new master’s program is perhaps the earliest partnership between a top-tier law school and a commercial enterprise.

“We don’t know where the students are going to come from exactly, but we believe there is demand abroad for an online program with the same quality that we deliver in St. Louis, accessible to people who can’t uproot their lives to come to the United States,” said Kent D. Syverud, the dean of the law school, which currently offers students on campus a Master of Law degree, or LL.M., in United States law for foreign lawyers. “It’s not designed to prepare students for the bar exam.”

Nonetheless, graduates of the new program, which will include live discussions via webcam and self-paced online materials, would probably be eligible to take the California bar exam……Read More

California chosen as home for computing institute

The Simons Foundation, which specializes in science and math research, has chosen the University of California, Berkeley, as host for an ambitious new center for computer science, the university plans to announce on Tuesday, the New York Times reports. The foundation’s $60 million grant to establish the center, to be called the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at U.C. Berkeley, underscores the growing influence of computer science on the physical and social sciences. An interdisciplinary array of scientists will explore the mathematical foundations of computer science and attack problems in fields as diverse as health care, astrophysics, genetics and economics.

“We’ve been talking to astronomers, climate scientists, fluid mechanics people, quantum physicists and cognitive scientists,” said Richard M. Karp, a Berkeley computer scientist who will be the institute’s director…

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Computer science for the rest of us

Reading, writing and — refactoring code?  Many professors of computer science say college graduates in every major should understand software fundamentals, the New York Times reports. They don’t argue that everyone needs to be a skilled programmer. Rather, they seek to teach “computational thinking” — the general concepts programming languages employ. In 2006, Jeannette M. Wing, head of the computer science department at Carnegie Mellon University, wrote a manifesto arguing that basic literacy should be redefined to include understanding of computer processes. “Computational thinking is a fundamental skill for everyone, not just for computer scientists,” she wrote. “To reading, writing and arithmetic, we should add computational thinking to every child’s analytical ability.”

There is little agreement within the field, however, about what exactly are the core elements of computational thinking. Nor is there agreement about how much programming students must do, if any, in order to understand it…

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‘Garage universities’ are bracing for school reform

There are no ivy-covered walls at Alfredo Pérez Guerrero University. No quad. No soccer fields. The entire campus fits in four small, rented buildings on the fringes of a modest residential neighborhood. Its main entrance is on a busy street, between a furniture shop and a store that sells remote-controlled toy cars and airplanes, the New York Times reports. But on a recent evening, students lounged out front and debated the question that thousands of their peers are asking about what President Rafael Correa has called Ecuador’s “garage universities”: what do we do if the government shuts our school down?

“There is a lot of anxiety, a lot of uncertainty,” said Carlos Ortega, 27, who is in his fourth year of a five-year law degree course at Alfredo Pérez. The school is one of 24 privately owned universities that have received a failing grade from the Ecuadorean government, meaning that if they do not make major improvements they will be closed. Two government-run schools also received failing grades and may be shut down…

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