Question: When somebody wants to follow a carreer as a statistician, according to which criteria it should be decided at the school or the university whether he or she is allowed to complete the required education?
Should somebody answer with “gymnastics” or “economic policy”, he or she must be a member of the ministery of education or the administration of the university. Sounds strange, but is a conclusion out of my experiences:
As a pupil I´ve not been particularly great at sports. With sports I means that what goes under the moniker “physical education”. Especially with gymnastics I could not get along at all. This grew so bad that I´ve been at the risk to flunk a class. There has been a loophole, but hasn´t it existed, I would have not passed the Abitur which had qualified me for university admission.
At the university I first choose economics as my minor field of study because I wanted to apply my statistical knowledge in the fields of economics. At the University of Dortmund to the basic study of economics belonged the subjects microeconomics, macroeconomics and economic policy. To pass the intermedia diploma, you had to write an examen in each subject and pass it. The failure rates were as follows:
- Microeconomics: ca. 1 out of 3,
- macroeconomics: ca. 1 out of 3,
- economic policy: ca. 2 out of 3.
Considering that you have to pass each of the examens, at most one third of the participants had the chance to pass to the main study. When you assume that the performances in the examens are independent from each other, would that mean that only about 15 percent of the students would pass. To make the matter worse, after the third failure would have meant the end of the study. This would have not only applied to the minor field of study but the whole study. By the way, I´ve passed each examen in statistics so far. In economics the situation was that I´ve passed micro- en macroeconomics and flunked twice in economic policy. I had the choice to change my minor field of study or tried the third time an examen in which I had no sigle clue how to pass it. It remains to mention that I´m no fan of Russian roulette.
As a counclusion there remains the question whether somebody who wants (is required) to get knowledge about a certain subject, is to be judged only for the potential for knowing and applying the stuff, so that he or she can put his or her main efforts into learning that subject. In both situations it definitely has not been possible.
February 27, 2009 at 12:34 pm |
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