What's worse is that half of the students are performing worse than the median.
this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2026
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Reminds me of an old Carlin joke:
"Think about how stupid the average person you meet in a day is. Think about it, think about it.
HALF OF THEM ARE EVEN STUPIDER THAN THAT!"
Now if only we could judge people on actual intelligence instead of just how much we disagree with them...
I mean, wouldnt that be a worse basis for judgement though? Like, a significant amount a person's intelligence is based on non-voluntary factors, so judging someone for a lower than average intelligence seems unfair in the same way that judging them for being short or looking unattractive or such would be. Further, while a lower intelligence might make it harder for someone to understand more complicated ideas, it isnt a guarantee of them being wrong either, so one cant dismiss the contributions of a less intelligent person as always useless just because of their intelligence. Meanwhile, a person's views are comparatively more changeable, more influenced by that person's decisions, and an incorrect or morally repugnant idea is going to be wrong regardless of how intelligent the person holding it is.
People aren't judging others they meet on a day to day basis on "repugnant ideals" or moral absolutes. They're judging people based on those people doing something that they don't like. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred people are just going about their day, they're not trying to push their agenda or make you live the way they prefer.
Really, my criticism was of the basis of the quote, that someone is stupid because of how you met them during the day rather than their actual intelligence level. That someone is dumb because they don't agree with you, or do something in a way you don't like. Which, kind of, is what you're saying. The problem is they're quantifying it as stupidity instead of moral repugnance.
There are a ton of intelligent people who are absolutely abhorrent. Just because they disagree with you doesn't mean they're dumb... they just don't share your values.
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But it's an average, there's chance of more than a half (although with normal distribution we should expect average and median to be the same)
A median is specifically a method of taking an average that always results in half above and half below. Take the total number of participants, divide it by two, then count that number from either end. The middle is the median. It's a more accurate form of averages for statistical analysis.
Mean is where you add all of the scores and divide by the total number of participants. It's more liable to be skewed by outliers, so not necessarily in the dead center of the list. It's often avoided in statistical analysis for that reason.
Edit: I just reread your comment and on second glance it seems we're saying the same thing. I should have replied to the commenter below you...
Given that average can refer to median, and he's saying that half of people are stupider than the average, we can conclude he probably meant the median :)
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I actually went and investigated this at some point out of curiosity and came across a paper showing that intelligence is not a normal distribution but a sum of TWO normal distributions, the second one much smaller than the first and slightly offset (towards the lower values if I remember it correctly).
That being so, for the distribution of intelligence in humans the median is not the same as the mean (which is what's commonly meant by "average") so it's slightly incorrect to say that half of people are below average intelligence.
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Did they stop teaching the difference between mean, median, and mode the year after I left elementary school? It seems like nobody knows that those are all three types of average anymore
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I have unironically seen rich people say that everyone can be above average as an excuse of why things are the way they are.
While the median is hard to believe, I think it's worse in some ways that half of the students are performing worse than the mean.
we need more students to fail harder to bring the mean down then?
25%
Bottom quartile
Hey, wait a second...
I also get jokes sometimes.
Look man, my NAS is acting up, my kid is acting up, my work... is acting up, if I gotta take a break and leave a cozy little dumb comment on a Lemmy post to feel something non-negative for a fraction of a second I feel I should have that right.
And besides, Lemmy needs engagement, right? Look at us, we're doing it!
when everything is acting up
the server, kid, and stage
sometimes the bravest thing to do
is turn a single page
not every bit needs pushing through
not every load needs borne
a rest is not a missing note —
it’s how the song is formed
you left a little comment here
a small and cozy light
and someone read it, felt it land,
and held it through the night
so post your little posts, my friend
the network needs the thread
a system with no idle time
is one that’s nearly dead
uwu
In China, 25% are in the top quartile!!! check mate USA.
There's are quartile filled with bottoms?
They prefer to be called power bottoms
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Clearly the education system failed this man, he has no critical thinking skills and is confident enough about himself to post stupid shit like this.
Is this a woosh or satireception?
I assumed he was serious, I've seen worse from reps in my state
It's satire. But damning that it's pretty indistinguishable from real reps.
Reminds me of that time a rep near me (thankfully, not mine!) talked about Guam tipping over.
Oh god.
IIRC, they had to explain that the island would not sink due to putting the weight of more troops and equipment on it.
I think the general said something like "No sir, we do not... forsee that happening, no."
I also assumed this was serious, untill I read these comments.
Yep, the bar is in hell.
It's Poe's Law. Nothing is too stupid for MAGA.
Funnily enough, the account's bio reads "Republican Representing CA's 54th Dist. & co-sponsor of Poe's Law."
Unfortunately, in order to read that I'd have to use a nazi social media platform. Thanks for informing me!
xcancel is your friend! It's what I used
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That's what dihydrogen monoxide poisoning does to average IQs.
I'm not a big fan of standardized testing, they evolved from a simple tool of measurement quickly into an industry and a political weapon (teaching for the test). But they do provide a glimpse still of the status of education.
If he wanted to show the reality of things, he would have quoted the actual percentages, which show how bad it is. In the SAT 41% are ready for university-level math, 64% for reading and writing (only 13% of them completed the essay part), and the ACT is a huge 29% and 39%, respectively. And that's just the kids who took these tests.
It's always been bad. I remember being surprised when I went to college decades ago and there were remedial classes to get students up to university standards because they were coming out of high school not ready.
And a quote from a test provider, Brighterly:
"According to standardized math testing statistics PDF files researched, student performance has worsened since the pandemic and is not improving dramatically."
https://brighterly.com/blog/standardized-testing-statistics/
We've failed our kids. Many times over. All generations.
Standardised tests started as tools to do racism without directly doing racism.
Low test scores in the U.S. actually just measure the fact that it provides roughly the same education to every student instead of what most other countries do and filter students out if their scores aren't high enough in elementary school.
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I had a hard time getting the joke. They mean, "... students are in the bottom quartile," right?
A whopping 25%!
Twitter... Jack Kimble is a fictional, satirical account.
The first "sentence" starts with a preposition; and, yes, the second isn't a sentence. It's more like an interjection, as in, "Behold! 25% of students in the bottom quartile!"
I'm OOTL, is @RepJackKimble a satire account? Or an elected fool?
Sad that we can’t tell anymore.
Poe's Law has been active for a while, at least in the U.S.
Yes
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Humanity is doomed, but he'll never figure out why
We don't know where else we should put them
Can't really argue against that.
Shit, we're on par with Antarcticans.
...which they would take offense to if they could read! Oooooooooo, Antarctica burn!(Sorry McMurdough.)
The penguins took much offense to that
Okay shit poster
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