College admissions and Blair high school courses
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Anonymous
| Lol. Obx kids from obx parents |
Anonymous
Said the bitter poster who bullies kids in magnet programs she doesn’t have a clue about and uses “lol” like a tween. Are you a tween or teen, maybe from a rival school? |
Anonymous
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I think it's time for a DCUM beatdown now. Your whole premise seems to be that the magnet math at Blair is so great that your kid will run out of undergraduate math courses, particularly if he goes to a liberal arts college. Furthermore, you claim that some of his math is in some way equivalent to a "Statistics" course you took in the UPenn grad econ program. Both of these point are laughably absurd.
For the easy part, a quick look at UPenn's website will confirm the obvious point that "Statistics" classes are not taught in Economics programs, but are instead called Econometrics. Let me tell you about myself. I went to a non-magnet public high school. When I ran out of math classes to take, I went to the local state flagship university for math courses. I went to one of the "elite" LACs cited earlier by the math prof. Mathematics was one of my majors. As mentioned earlier, I earned a PhD in Economics with a minor in Econometrics, so I know of what I speak. There is no way in hell that advanced math at Blair is equivalent to a graduate level Econometrics class, much less a graduate level Statistics class. There is no way in hell that a regular math class at Blair is equivalent to the Advanced Statistics class at my LAC. I want to make the following very clear: at no time have I insulted or otherwise demeaned Blair or any other magnet school or student. Congratulations to your DC and I wish him/her luck in the future. He/she will need given your delusion and obnoxiousness as a parent. |
Anonymous
Blair parents would never believe you. Total idiots. |
Anonymous
“Time for a beatdown”? You’ve been acting like a toddler throwing a tantrum since you entered this thread. You’ve fabricated utter bs about me, like I supposedly claimed I never took stats in college (wtf?) or that I’m lying about studying regression in grad school (again, wtf?). You are absurd. 1. It’s ridiculous to claim that an Econ grad student can’t study econometrics because you think these are different departments or something. Econometrics is a requirement of every.econ.grad.school in the country. Somehow, amazingly, Econ grad students across the US are all studying econometrics, regardless of whether you want to quibble about the course name or department, and whether you like it or not. 2. Who the f cares what the class is called, statistics vs. econometrics, or what department it’s in. Thanks for looking up Penn’s econometrics classes for me (WTF? WTF?) but I took my stats classes there a while back (surprise, I now have kids in college) so the names and curricula have undoubtedly changed, which anybody with an IQ over 2 would have guessed. Probably it had some name like “Applied Research Methods.,” but again, nobody cares but you. Shall I give you my graduation date and you can try to dig out the class name and department at that time? As another easy example, my kid doing comp sci in college is taking a 400-level stats class (by your logic he couldn’t be doing this because it’s in a different department, yet it’s a requirement for comp sci majors at competitiveness universities, go figure) and the class has some long-windedname but he refers to it as “stats.” Who cares about your “elite LAC” and Jr PhD. You don’t know how to use “logit” in a sentence, so you’re unqualified to talk about statistics at the high school, grad, or college level. You know less than my kid who is doing . All is which is a DERAILMENT from the actual POINT I originally made. The fact remains that every intro stats class teaches simple econometrics like linear regression, even at the high school level. I’d look up the AP STATs curriculum but you’re not worth my time, but you go ahead and look it up, I’m sure you’ll find linear regression there. So here, to repeat, is my original point: my Blair kid took magnet stats and was doing regression by end-September. Was your stat/econometrics/math/whatever the heck you call it in your “elite LAC” on the same quick pace? |
Anonymous
Yeah, better high school prep is a leg up, but plenty of kids out of ordinary schools hang right in there with them. And, Blair, TJ and the rest, are still high schools. |
Anonymous
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I haven't been part of the recent conversation, but I have to wonder why this poster keeps making a point about regression being taught early?
Regression is not a hard topic (nor is intro-statistics in general). And the curriculum is such that one could choose to put regression early or later depending on preference of the teacher. It has nothing to do with rigor or pace. And the non-major stat courses at UPenn, which you took, are not the courses that math majors would take if they lacked intro stats. So whether or not the UPenn course was similar in format has little to do with a comparison to a math-major based course. Can you tell us what the work looked like? What was the textbook like and what sort of projects were assigned? What software did the students use, if any? |
Anonymous
My textbook at Penn: Johnston’s Econometrics Methods. It’s on my shelf at work. Some of us turned to Maddala when Johnston was too opaque, but Maddala wasn’t assigned. This was in the heyday of Wharton Econometrics, several Wharton Econometrics principals taught in Penn’s Econ Department, and my prof was one of them. Penn’s Econ Department was at the time one of the most quantitative in the country, in econ as well as stats. I should probably clarify, for the bully who doesn’t know what a logit is, that Wharton Econometrics was in its heyday in the 80s and 90s, when it was the #1 econometrics consulting firm in the country. You can’t cover OLS until you’ve covered distributions and basic stats like t and f tests (otherwise r-squared isn’t going to make sense) and things like ANOVA. You also need to know how to invert a matrix, at least for as long as the course lasts. These aren’t actually simple topics for newbies, and lots of colleges take them slow. OK. I have to go back to work. |
Anonymous
Oh, and we used TSP software, which used to be great, but don’t think it exists any more. These days I use SAS and STATA. |
Anonymous
| Pp again. Wikipedia says TSP still exists, but the well-known places I’ve worked don’t use it. STATA didn’t hit the scene in a real way until the late 90s or 2000s, however, and SAS is super expensive. So I’m guessing TSP was the only game in town when I was in grad school. |
Anonymous
| I mean at Blair... |
Anonymous
DC is in college and I’m not going to harass DC and waste my own time with a question from an internet bully and stalker. From memory, though, I’m not sure they had a textbook. If they did, I have no clue what it was. You got me: I can’t time travel back to when DC was in high school. Congrats. Tell yourself you won. For the rest of you, who have been trying to follow this thread through the massive derailment involving weird personal attacks on me, - I stand by my comparison of the Blair magnet statistics class against my highly regarded graduate school course (which I hope the post above makes clear), and - Magnet parents have told you in this thread that magnet classes are indeed comparable to college classes, and also that their kids ran out of classes at their colleges. Every one of you can choose to believe these things, or not believe them and make personal attacks on the parents. It’s your choice. Let me suggest, however, that ignoring actual information from actual parents would be your loss. |
Anonymous
Learn how to use ellipses correctly.... |
Anonymous
| Somebody's kid didn’t get into the Blair or TJ magnet. This isn’t prospective magnet parents trying to figure out if a magnet is worth it for their kid. I mean, nothing else explains the bitterness and refusal to listen. |
Anonymous
??? I've never bullied you here. I'm the poster above who said from experience that covering regression doesn't necessarily imply an accelerated course. I then asked specifics on the Blair course (since you have direct experience with a child who took it) to try to figure it out. I'm not out to get you or anything. It would help to see if the Blair Applied Stats class is an "advanced" AP stats, or if it is modeled after a Stats with Programming course which is the usual course math majors who took AP stats would take in college. |