Turkish middle school, high school, and university exams are very serious.
Basically everyone takes the same set of long exams (with a few additions you can add to your standard exam sets, for specialized schools) and when the results come out, you are compared to all other students in the nation.
Like, think global leaderboards.
The best universities will outright reject you if your ranking isn’t high enough.
It’s very intense and cut-throat; so much so that - when I was a young’un growing up in Turkey - I just opted to try my hand at the SATs instead. Ended up going to school abroad.
The SATs were so easy, compared to the exam prep we did in our Turkish classes, it almost felt like a joke. Though, college tuition costs definitely made sure I wasn’t the one with the last laugh.
Honestly this just makes me think that schools and universities should be shuffling their staff and teachers to keep one or the other school from becoming “the good one” that becomes a magnet for nepo babies and tomorrow’s burnout cases.
That level of direct competition is just gonna lead to people who are NOT able to work cooperatively or really trust anyone.
Plus breaking up the nepo clubs is important for keeping the social ladder at a reasonable angle to climb, college should be everyone’s chance to make important connections, not just for the Ivy League alums’ kids while everyone else gets told it’s about getting the piece of paper and having lots of free pizza while you’re doing it.
The brutal, national, standardized exam is what you get when you eliminate all the other barriers to going to university. It means every single student is in competition with one another to get accepted.
Shuffling staff around between schools just sounds like a great way to drive all the best researchers to the private sector while driving all the best teachers out of the profession entirely. Forcing people to move around to different cities for their job means you are selecting heavily for a particular “nomadic” type of person without any attachments to the local community. Sounds absolutely awful to foist that on educational institutions who really ought to be in the business of fostering community.
I mean that’s easily fixed by just shuffling teachers within commuting range and also only doing the shuffle every 4 years or so for kids to maintain consistency while reaching the stages of development.
Of course there could also be a higher payed tier that can get shuffled further afield for those fresh faced youngin teachers that haven’t settled down yet.
I think you’re still going to alienate teachers with that kind of shuffling. People form relationships with their colleagues. This is especially the case at universities where your coworker may be one of a handful of people on the planet who actually understands your research.
But also I think you may overrate the impact of teaching skill on student outcomes. Universities barely teach their students at all. Apart from lectures, they assign course work and conduct examinations. By far the majority of learning in university takes place alone, when the student engages with the course work. It’s often the case that students will pass a course with a decent grade having never attended a single lecture.
The truth of the matter is that most of the value of a highly selective university is the selectivity. There’s nothing that makes a teacher look brilliant more than having brilliant students. The top schools like Harvard could honestly eliminate lectures entirely, just keeping coursework and examinations, and their students would still be the most sought after.
Turkish middle school, high school, and university exams are very serious.
Basically everyone takes the same set of long exams (with a few additions you can add to your standard exam sets, for specialized schools) and when the results come out, you are compared to all other students in the nation.
Like, think global leaderboards.
The best universities will outright reject you if your ranking isn’t high enough.
It’s very intense and cut-throat; so much so that - when I was a young’un growing up in Turkey - I just opted to try my hand at the SATs instead. Ended up going to school abroad.
The SATs were so easy, compared to the exam prep we did in our Turkish classes, it almost felt like a joke. Though, college tuition costs definitely made sure I wasn’t the one with the last laugh.
Honestly this just makes me think that schools and universities should be shuffling their staff and teachers to keep one or the other school from becoming “the good one” that becomes a magnet for nepo babies and tomorrow’s burnout cases.
That level of direct competition is just gonna lead to people who are NOT able to work cooperatively or really trust anyone.
Plus breaking up the nepo clubs is important for keeping the social ladder at a reasonable angle to climb, college should be everyone’s chance to make important connections, not just for the Ivy League alums’ kids while everyone else gets told it’s about getting the piece of paper and having lots of free pizza while you’re doing it.
The brutal, national, standardized exam is what you get when you eliminate all the other barriers to going to university. It means every single student is in competition with one another to get accepted.
Shuffling staff around between schools just sounds like a great way to drive all the best researchers to the private sector while driving all the best teachers out of the profession entirely. Forcing people to move around to different cities for their job means you are selecting heavily for a particular “nomadic” type of person without any attachments to the local community. Sounds absolutely awful to foist that on educational institutions who really ought to be in the business of fostering community.
I mean that’s easily fixed by just shuffling teachers within commuting range and also only doing the shuffle every 4 years or so for kids to maintain consistency while reaching the stages of development.
Of course there could also be a higher payed tier that can get shuffled further afield for those fresh faced youngin teachers that haven’t settled down yet.
I think you’re still going to alienate teachers with that kind of shuffling. People form relationships with their colleagues. This is especially the case at universities where your coworker may be one of a handful of people on the planet who actually understands your research.
But also I think you may overrate the impact of teaching skill on student outcomes. Universities barely teach their students at all. Apart from lectures, they assign course work and conduct examinations. By far the majority of learning in university takes place alone, when the student engages with the course work. It’s often the case that students will pass a course with a decent grade having never attended a single lecture.
The truth of the matter is that most of the value of a highly selective university is the selectivity. There’s nothing that makes a teacher look brilliant more than having brilliant students. The top schools like Harvard could honestly eliminate lectures entirely, just keeping coursework and examinations, and their students would still be the most sought after.