Getting the Message Board Back in Shape
by rrusczyk, Jun 17, 2006, 3:21 PM
As many of my readers know, we've been engaged in a continual battle on the Forum to fight difficulty creep on the board. I cruised over the middle school, Getting Started, and Intermediate boards today for the first time in a little while (I've been scary busy), and I nearly became apoplectic. Still the material being posted in most of the forums from middle school through Intermediate is 1-3 levels higher than the forum it's posted in. We've taken a lot of little half-measures to remedy this, but now we're going to take more serious action. Our board is tremendously forbidding to new students because we've let this get out of hand. Now we have to fix it.
We started out trying to fix it by understanding the cause. The cause is clear - students learn more math, but don't yet learn perspective to understand that what they think of as Getting Started is really Pre-Olympiad. Also, there's some cultural component, though I think this is really another manifestation of skewed perspective - I don't believe that in all foreign countries, math students are so much better than those in the US that what is Getting Started in the US is Basics Middle School elsewhere. This skewed perspective of international students may be a result of more stringent grouping in foreign countries at earlier ages (i.e. students being separated by ability at an earlier age), and selection bias (we're getting students from the top 0.001% internationally and the top 0.01% in America, as reaching students in the US is simply easier since we have established channels to reach them).
However, understanding the cause didn't give us a good way to fix it - we couldn't try to educate every new user to be aware that their perspective won't change as fast as their knowledge will.
Instead, I think we have to directly educate the users and take a more aggressive approach to enforcement. Here's what I'm thinking of doing now:
1) Post atop each of the earliest 5-6 forums thorough examples of what is acceptable and what is not. This alone is not enough (witness the mess in Getting Started), but it at least gives us something to point to when someone complains about being punished for not following the rules.
2) Have the staff at AoPS review these forums 3 times a day and move posts accordingly. Mark moved posts with 1 yellow card (warning to the poster), 2 yellow cards (second warning that week) or a red card (strike three, banned for one week from posting in the given forum - the user can still post in other forums)
This will be very time consuming for us, but it is becoming a desperate problem that we are not attracting new young students. We need them for thriving continuity on the board. We've tried leading by example by seeding the board with problems, but that failed, in part because it is even more time consuming to do thoroughly than what I suggest above. We tried jacking up the moderators, but I think our moderators are understandably a little trigger-shy in imposing decisions regarding level (I don't blame them - I would be, too.)
We won't be trigger shy. So, we advise our readers - if you're uncertain which forum to post in, post in the 'harder' one.
Please comment on the suggestions above - they're far from set in stone, and suggestions are welcome. We want effective solutions that won't be too burdensome on the admins and moderators. I also want to change the name of Getting Started to be more clear - it's easy to misconstrue it as meaning 'Getting Started at AoPS', whereas we want to convey 'Getting Started with high school-level problem solving', i.e. first 20 problems of the AMC 20 level problem solving.
Also, please help out by paying more attention not only to where you post your problems, but how you respond to posts. We often see perfectly good Getting Started problems answered with Theorems and notation not even fit for the Intermediate board. Consider the source of the question and the level at which it's being asked, and answer accordingly. If you want to answer with something fancy, post the fancy answer in the more advanced forum and link it back to the original question.
We started out trying to fix it by understanding the cause. The cause is clear - students learn more math, but don't yet learn perspective to understand that what they think of as Getting Started is really Pre-Olympiad. Also, there's some cultural component, though I think this is really another manifestation of skewed perspective - I don't believe that in all foreign countries, math students are so much better than those in the US that what is Getting Started in the US is Basics Middle School elsewhere. This skewed perspective of international students may be a result of more stringent grouping in foreign countries at earlier ages (i.e. students being separated by ability at an earlier age), and selection bias (we're getting students from the top 0.001% internationally and the top 0.01% in America, as reaching students in the US is simply easier since we have established channels to reach them).
However, understanding the cause didn't give us a good way to fix it - we couldn't try to educate every new user to be aware that their perspective won't change as fast as their knowledge will.
Instead, I think we have to directly educate the users and take a more aggressive approach to enforcement. Here's what I'm thinking of doing now:
1) Post atop each of the earliest 5-6 forums thorough examples of what is acceptable and what is not. This alone is not enough (witness the mess in Getting Started), but it at least gives us something to point to when someone complains about being punished for not following the rules.
2) Have the staff at AoPS review these forums 3 times a day and move posts accordingly. Mark moved posts with 1 yellow card (warning to the poster), 2 yellow cards (second warning that week) or a red card (strike three, banned for one week from posting in the given forum - the user can still post in other forums)
This will be very time consuming for us, but it is becoming a desperate problem that we are not attracting new young students. We need them for thriving continuity on the board. We've tried leading by example by seeding the board with problems, but that failed, in part because it is even more time consuming to do thoroughly than what I suggest above. We tried jacking up the moderators, but I think our moderators are understandably a little trigger-shy in imposing decisions regarding level (I don't blame them - I would be, too.)
We won't be trigger shy. So, we advise our readers - if you're uncertain which forum to post in, post in the 'harder' one.
Please comment on the suggestions above - they're far from set in stone, and suggestions are welcome. We want effective solutions that won't be too burdensome on the admins and moderators. I also want to change the name of Getting Started to be more clear - it's easy to misconstrue it as meaning 'Getting Started at AoPS', whereas we want to convey 'Getting Started with high school-level problem solving', i.e. first 20 problems of the AMC 20 level problem solving.
Also, please help out by paying more attention not only to where you post your problems, but how you respond to posts. We often see perfectly good Getting Started problems answered with Theorems and notation not even fit for the Intermediate board. Consider the source of the question and the level at which it's being asked, and answer accordingly. If you want to answer with something fancy, post the fancy answer in the more advanced forum and link it back to the original question.
February 2012
January 2012