Mildly interesting

Horace

Hm. Difficult to imagine that the intellectual elite would invest their abilities into an opportunity to babysit children in a classroom. Maybe the college of education in Finland is geared toward some other profession.

Horace

chatGPT thinks it's a real thing. i can understand it if primary teaching is really a high status profession within a culture. But the push-back of a life spent tending children would seem inexorable.

That pattern you saw is actually something researchers have noticed in multiple places, and it reflects structural features of how education programs are set up, not just student ability. And yes—Finland is the famous counterexample.

Here’s what’s going on:

Why Colleges of Education Often Have Lower SAT/ACT Averages

Several well-documented factors contribute:

1. Lower admissions selectivity

At many U.S. public universities:

Business, engineering, nursing, and STEM majors tend to have higher quantitative thresholds.
Education programs often emphasize holistic admissions and attract students with strong interpersonal skills but not necessarily high standardized test scores.

This pattern has been stable for decades in the U.S.

2. Self-selection

People who choose teaching are often:

Those passionate about working with children,
Motivated by service professions,
Less drawn to fields where standardized test performance plays a central role.

It’s not an indicator of ability overall, just a different skill distribution.

Why Education Majors Often Have Higher GPAs

This is the part that surprises many people—but it’s extremely well researched.

1. Grade inflation varies by major

Education, humanities, and arts programs typically have:

More subjective grading (written work, reflections, project-based coursework),
A culture of formative feedback and mastery rather than harsh curve-based grading,
Fewer weed-out courses compared to STEM or pre-med.

Large studies across multiple universities show education departments often rank #1 or #2 for highest average GPA.

2. Course structure emphasizes skill mastery over competition

Teacher-training programs prioritize:

Practicums,
Lesson-planning,
Classroom management projects,
Portfolio-based evaluations.

These formats are not graded on curves and tend to reward consistent effort.

3. Students are usually very conscientious

Even if incoming standardized test scores are lower, education majors often score higher on:

Conscientiousness,
Agreeableness,
Empathy,
Collaborative tendencies.

These traits correlate strongly with high college GPA, regardless of SAT/ACT.

Finland: the opposite model

Finland famously demonstrates what happens when the entire system is flipped:

1. Teacher training is elite

Acceptance rates into primary-teacher programs are often below 10%, on par with medical school.

2. Highly academic preparation

Finnish teacher-training programs require:

A research-based master’s degree,
An undergraduate thesis,
A teaching demonstration exam,
Deep subject-matter mastery.

3. High prestige

Teachers are treated as high-status professionals:

Well-paid,
Autonomous,
Trusted,
Highly respected.

Finland’s approach is sometimes summarized as:

“We take the best students and train them longer, then let them teach however they think is best.”

🧭 Why the U.S. and Finland diverge so sharply

U.S.:

Huge system with massive shortages.
Teaching is relatively low-paid.
Low prestige reduces selectivity.
High turnover leads to structural incentives for easier credentialing.

Finland:

Teaching is a competitive, prestigious, well-paid, protected profession.
Cultural trust in teachers is extremely high.
Small national population makes elite selectivity feasible.

🧠 So the paradox you saw isn’t really a paradox

In the U.S., you often see:

Lower SAT/ACT in → Higher GPA out
Because GPA is shaped by:
Variations in grading culture,
Program structure,
Student traits unrelated to standardized tests.

Finland represents what the U.S. might look like if teaching were treated as a highly selective, elite pathway.

If you want, I can also break down:

Why standardized test scores don’t predict teacher effectiveness,
Why GPA does predict teacher classroom performance (it actually does),
Or how different countries structure their teacher-training pipelines.

Just say the word.

jon-nyc

@kluurs said in Mildly interesting:

If you do the simple arithmetic, 60% As and the rest Bs would give an average GPA of 3.6, not 3.8ish as per the graphs. So that other 40% probably contains a lot of A- and/or B+

kluurs

jon-nyc

Interesting demonstration of differentials (autos).

https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1DAekz32rD/?mibextid=wwXIfr

Renauda

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20251117-the-animals-that-can-eat-poisons-and-not-die

Doctor Phibes

@Renauda said in Mildly interesting: