Chinese clustering

Why do people hang out together? Why do they sit next to each-other?
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The Chinese might give us the answer. In the master program that I am in we are quite few students and about a quarter are Chinese. In most courses there are only the six Chinese colleagues from the master program and in one course there is another Chinese student which is a PhD student I guess.
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I realized that the Chinese always manage to cluster and sit next to each-other in class or, in really bad scenarios they form two groups. In the brakes the same thing occurs. The Chinese stay together in one group and the other students… well mingle around, usually without entering the Chinese circle.
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This might sound like a racist conspiracy or some really impolite remarks from someone that is not very sociable. Well, it’s neither of the two. What’s happening is a normal psychological phenomenon.
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One well known fact is that we tend to prefer things that we’ve already know, that are familiar to us. Another fact is that we tend to like the people that are similar to us. Obviously we tend to do things that we like, like sitting next to a person that we like rather than one that we don’t like. We prefer to talk to people that are similar to us because the hallow effect gives us the impression that we share more than just looks. We think that we share common interests and values. It is not always so, but at least till we realize that it is not so. Another criterion that relationships form is common interests or habits. Have you ever realized that smokers tend to hang out together?
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It’s obvious that race is a very salient characteristic, so it’s no wonder why the Chinese tend to hang around together. But as I said before, in one course there is another Chinese colleague that is a PhD student. He is not hanging around with the other Chinese and doesn’t sit with the Chinese group. Why? A first answer is that the group from the master was already formed when the course started. But this raises another question: why doesn’t he join the group now if it is a Chinese group and he is also Chinese? Well, because it’s not necessarily a Chinese group (although it is formed only of Chinese).
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Now let’s talk about something else called random coherence. It sounds like an oxymoron, but it means that we are coherent in our behavior to some thing that was at first more or less random. Let’s say that on the introduction day there were two separate groups – the research master group and the PhD students group and in each group the people get somehow acquainted. The two groups collide in a course that takes place one week after the introduction day. What do you think it’s going to happened? What has happened is that in the classroom PhD students stood on one side and master students stood on the other side. The next week the same arrangement is in place. Same goes on for the next week. What happens in these weeks is that ties are formed between the members of each of the two groups. Friendships begin inside the groups, but very little contact is made between the groups. All of this is mostly due to a random thing – on which introduction day each was on. People believe that their behavior is coherent to something important, but in fact it’s coherent with something random.
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Coming back to the seventh Chinese (the PhD student) we can say that he’s totally coherent. He sticks with the phd students group and keeps the relationships with the people who he already knows even if they are not Chinese and there are other Chinese in the room that he doesn’t know priory.
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This is a brief explanation of the clustering process with a case study on Chinese.
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Now who gains and who loses? The answer for both questions is everybody. The Chinese (in our case) gain because they get the psychological comfort of being part of a group that is homogenous in many aspects. The other students gain because they get a similar comfort in other clusters. Now everybody loses because one of the main advantages of being in an international environment is the opportunity of interacting with people from other cultures. In our case the Chinese lose the most because the other students get to interact with each other and they are heterogeneous, while the Chinese interact most among themselves.

What do grades measure

The whole school system around the world is dominated by grades. The pupils and students strive to get grades as high as possible (because they need them to get into another school, to make an impression on a potential employee, please the parents etc.). On the other hand educators try to make the grading system as strict and accurate as possible. Corporations or corporation-like NGOs developed world wide accepted standardized tests that are considered to measure all sort of things.

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Grades are, in theory, meant to measure the degree to which a student knows the things related to a subject and has the competences required by the subject. Now we can discuss if a grading system captures all the important dimensions of knowledge and skills in a particular field. In my opinion most of them don’t, but that’s not what I want to discuss now.

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Let’s talk a little about knowledge and skills. Possessing Knowledge in a certain subject means to store in your memory information on that subject. To the day there are debates if we actually forget (ie. Information is deleted or lost from the brain) or can’t remember (ie. The information is still in the brain, but we can’t retrieve it any more). This doesn’t really matter now because the main idea is that with time we can’t access information that was acquired a long time ago.

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There is a solution for (better) remembering: the information must be retrieved frequently making the link to the information in the brain stronger. With skills things are not exactly the same, but there is some similarity: one can lose some skills over time or lose some of the accuracy of performing a certain task if they are not practiced.

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Coming back to grades and school. In my opinion schooling should have the goal of teaching - giving knowledge and skills - young people that will be useful in adult life. Now going back to the earlier paragraph about memory, how much of the knowledge acquired from school do we actually remember when we finished school? Not much would be my answer. How much do we remember 10 years after finishing school? Very little. On the other hand, we carry our grades (from kindergarten to master degree) all our lives and in many cases they receive a rather high importance. Imagine the situation that you have finished high-school or university (college) studies a few years ago (5-10 years) and you decide to make a change in your life and continue your studies and go to college or get a master degree. That makes perfect sense for many people that didn’t have many opportunities in their early years. Even in this situation the institution that you’ll apply at will use grades as a measure for your capabilities. Does it make any sense?

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The answer is yes and no. If we want to measure any kind of possessing knowledge using grades it makes absolutely no sense. Most of the knowledge acquired during school is lost (or we can’t retrieve it). Remember how students study for exams and read hundreds of pages, take the exam, get a high grade and 3 weeks later can’t remember even half of what they read; 3 months later they might remember some general ideas. So it really makes no sense to measure knowledge using grades.

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So what is the reason we use grades? What do grades tell us? Well, they tell us how hard working is (was) that person. We can all agree that there is a direct relationship between the amount of hard work (study) and the level of grades (that is if cheating is eliminated). Another thing that I believe that grades measure is the level of conformity to social norms. If someone has high grades means that s/he wants to be well seen in society. This is only a speculation.

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School should teach young people to work hard and that this is the “solid” way to a good life (although no guarantees are given). Teaching this is very important for any society. But, to be honest why should anyone spend 10-16 years in various education institutions (schools) only to learn hard work. This can be learned working on a farm or on a ship or somewhere else? I’m not saying that people shouldn’t go to school. On the contrary! But why the only metric thing we have when we leave school is a sheet of paper with some figures on it that should tell (at least to a certain degree) how “good” we are?

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I’m not against grades per se. Grades and scores have the big advantage of being metric (1 is smaller than 2 and we know what the difference between 1 and 2 is). What I say is that schools are using a wrong measure, if their goal is to teach. Also there is too much focus on getting high grades and scores for standardized tests and very little focus on actually learning and teaching useful things in a way that will ensure a higher retention rate in later years.

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Many schools and universities are very proud on what they teach that professors are top researchers, on their strict and exclusive admision criteria etc. At least from my experience most of them should not be proud on how they teach.

Proud to be Romanian

Although there are hundreds of reasons for not being proud of belonging to the Romanian people (and we Romanians excel in finding them), there are things that make me proud about my country and my people. Here are some of them:
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1. I am proud of being part of the seventh largest nation in Europe – Romania is the seventh largest country in Europe in terms of surface area and population.
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2. I am proud of belonging to one of the most beautiful countries in Europe – Romania has equal proportions of plains, hills and mountains; also Romania has an opening to the Black Sea and most important we have the Danube Delta which is a unique landscape in all of Europe.
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3. I am proud that we have unique architecture in the “Bucovina” region where are the old medieval orthodox monasteries that are true art wonders.
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4. I am proud that the Romanians preserved our mainly Latin language (Romanian is 60% Latin) in a geographic area dominated by slavish languages (not that there is anything bad about these languages).
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5. I am proud of the Romanian wines (the original old ones) that can’t be compared to any other wine I drank.
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6. I am proud that Romania exists, because somehow we managed to establish an independent country at the crossroads of three big empires (Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian and Russian).
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7. I am proud of the Romanian parties and our party music and the way we always find reasons to celebrate something.
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8. I am proud of the overall Romanian history. There are many things in the Romanian history that make me feel not proud or even ashamed, but overall we have to be proud that the Romanians played their role in many important historical moments.
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9. I am proud of our overall openness and friendliness towards foreigners.
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10. I am proud that Romania had a Royal dynasty that understood that the country needs resources to develop and thus, after the independence, the Romanian kings reigned with a crown made of steel instead of gold. Too bad that the leaders that followed after WW II didn’t have the same attitude.
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11. I am proud that Romanian citizens of any ethnic origin, overall, live in peace and harmony and in Romania there are 18 ethnic minorities.
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12. I am proud of the Romanian movies and movie makers. In the last years Romanian movies wan many prizes at film festivals, including the Palm d’Or for “Four months, three weeks and two days”. Also during the communist regime the Romanian director Sergiu Nicolaescu made superb movies that were blocked from going out to the west. Last year, one of his movies – Michael the Brave – was ranked the third best historical movie of all times worldwide.
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13. I am proud that even if Romania is a rather small and poor country we had top scientists and artists like Eugene Ionesco (drama writer), Constantin Brancusi (sculptor), Petrache Poenaru (the inventor of the fountain pen), Nicolae Paulescu (inventor of the insulin) George Enescu (composer and violinist), Henri Coanda (inventor of the jet engine), Mircea Eliade (philosopher, writer and the author of the first complete history of religions) and many others.
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14. I am proud that Romania gave the sports world many athletes that had a saying in sport’s history. The most known one is Nadia Comaneci that “invented” the perfect 10 in women’s gymnastics. Others are Helmut Duckadam the first goal keeper that defended four consecutives penalty kicks in a football game. His performance brought the European Champions Cup to Bucharest; Leonard Doroftei, Mihai Leu and Lucian Bute all of them world champions in professional boxing, Ștefan Kovács the Romanian football coach that wan the European Champions Cup with Ajax Amsterdam, Mircea Lucescu that wan the UEFA Cup and the Super Cup of Europe with the Ucranian team Sahtior. Also, not to forget the Romanian feminin gimnastics team that ruled the world championships and olimpics for many years and the handball team „Oltchim” that is a big power in european handball competitions. There are many others that deserve to be mentioned...
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15. Last, but not least, I am proud of the Romanian humor. We make jokes and lough at anything, even at bad things. It’s our way of dealing with things. Many people don’t understand our humor, but we love it. Imagine only that Romania has the only Happy Cemitery in the world and you will start to understand.
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Now… I ask my fellow Romanians to write on their blogs, post on their facebook accounts and on tweeter or anywhere why they are proud to be Romanians. Multumesc (Thank you).

What does actually mean to make a choice?

Making a choice means giving up all the other possible options.

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I made one big choice… what’s your choice?

Just passing an exam – differences between the Dutch and Romanian approach

In Romania in order to pass an exam, a student should get a minimum grade of 5 (out of 10). In The Netherlands a student should get a minimum grade of 5.5 (out of 10).

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From the point of view of the minimum grade needed to pass an exam, the two systems are similar.

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The big difference comes from what a minimum grade (5 or 5.5) means. In Romania in most cases (not all, but most) if a student gets a 5 it means that s/he is not totally stupid and incompetent. In The Netherlands if a student gets a 5.5 it means that s/he has the minimum knowledge and skills related to the subject of the exam.

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On the other hand getting a grade of 9 or 10 in the Romanian system is not very difficult (not a piece of cake, but it doesn’t require hundreds of hours of work). In The Netherlands, getting a grade of 9 or 10 is very difficult (10 is extremely rare) and requires a lot of work.

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Well, these are minor differences between two education systems. Yet these differences have enormous consequences in what is the result of education and I don’t mean only the knowledge and skills, but rather social implications.

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In Romania a child or a teenager is taught that in order to just get by (pass an exam) there is no need for hard work. Also s/he learns that being very good or perfect (9 or 10) is rather easy and all that is required is a few extra hours of work. Also, by easily giving high grades the teachers tell students that they should strive for the maximum grade possible and that being normal (getting a grade of 7) is wrong.

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In The Netherlands children and teenagers learn that in order to even get by (pass an exam) they need to work quite hard (not very hard, but hard enough). They also learn that in order to reach high standards (grades of 8, 9 and 10) one must study and work very hard. Also they know that getting an average grade (6 or 7) is not bad, it’s normal and they should not be ashamed of it.

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Now, you judge which system better prepares children for the life in a civilized and reasonable society.

After a lot of team work...

After a lot of team work we finished our assignment for Consumer Behavior. The assignment was to make a brand map (using BCM method) and coming up with an idea for a creative communication campaign to change that brand map.

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We had to choose from 6 brands and due to the fact that we are a very international group we chose Coca Cola Zero. No one from the team liked CCZ, but it was the only one that we could all relate to.
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It was nice work, but it felt kind of weird to work for a brand that I don’t like. At the end of the assignment we had to come up with an idea for creative communication in order to change the brand map.
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As we predicted CCZ is perceived as “healthy” and “helps to stay fit”. Well we didn’t agree. Here’s what we came up with…
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One interesting difference between the Dutch education system and the Romanian one

In Romania after a student finishes his or her bachelor or master program he or she has to support his or her bachelor or master thesis. (in romaneste a sustine lucrarea de diploma sau de dizertatie).
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In the Netherlands when a student finishes his or her studies he or she must defend the thesis…
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A small difference, but I believe it’s more than just semantics.