Q&A: Two Haredi young men finished in first and second place nationwide in accounting studies
Two Haredi young men finished in first and second place nationwide in accounting studies
Question
https://www.kikar.co.il/333/szqk9y
How is it possible that two Haredi young men, without a matriculation certificate, from a Haredi society that sanctifies success in Torah study, and where someone who does not succeed at it is considered among us the bottom of the bottom, category D, manage to capture first and second place in national academic accounting exams—a field that is entirely an exact science of numbers—when the one who came in first says he did not know he was good with numbers, had actually wanted to go into law, and only in the preparatory program discovered that he was good at mathematics, and then went on to place first in the country, as opposed to secular students, among whom the learners are the top of the top? (I also know several dozen such cases in other fields, but I did not bring them up because those are not in numbers, not an exact science, and therefore I did not attach importance to them.)
Answer
It’s obvious that you too are a product of Haredi education. A ridiculous collection of inferences built on baseless assumptions. A glorious product of Haredi education.
So here is a bit of education for you, my contribution to closing the gaps:
1. There is not the slightest connection between accountancy and mathematics, and even less so to an exact science.
2. Two examples do not constitute a sample from which one can infer anything.
3. Someone who does not succeed in yeshiva, or does not want to continue there, is not necessarily lacking talent.
4. In the broader world, people also go into fields that pose an intellectual challenge, and not only accountancy and law. Not so in the Haredi world. The most talented people there would never dream of showing even the tip of their nose in such an uninspired and unaspiring field.
5. You remind me of the arrogant myth common in yeshivas, according to which if I got through tractate Yevamot, then physics and mathematics are a joke for me. This feeling that geniuses exist only in yeshivas (the Haredi ones, of course), and everyone else is just playing marbles. That can be said only by arrogant ignoramuses whose whole world has been tractate Yevamot, who have never encountered any real difficulty like what one meets in physics and mathematics, and have never met the geniuses walking around in those fields. And when they reach academia—almost never in truly challenging fields—they of course drop out.
6. Tendentious thinking brings out the worst even in people who do have knowledge and logical skill, all the more so in those who do not.
Discussion on Answer
Point 4 is an instance of Michi’s first laws: when comparing societies, you have to compare top to top and bottom to bottom. I once also saw someone argue that there is no discrimination against Sephardim in this country because although at every level (academic and otherwise) there are fewer Sephardim, at each level they earn more on average than their peers. Quite apart from the claim itself, the argument is dubious because an alternative explanation is that there is a shift in levels. And that is also my impression regarding Palestinian colleagues who are citizens of Israel. In the army, a captain appointed head of a section (usually a major’s rank) was better than the other section heads. And so on.
And we haven’t even mentioned the scholarships and close academic support that usually are not given to non-Haredi students.
That’s enough. You can continue writing for Yated Ne’eman.
It is not true that “there is not the slightest connection between accountancy and mathematics.”
CPAs indeed deal almost only with calculations (and legal rules), but woe to the CPA who does not understand calculus and statistics at the level of basic mathematics.
So it is true that to be a CPA you do not need to pass advanced calculus at the Technion or at MIT, and you do not need to deeply understand, for example, limit theorems, but it is still not correct to say there is not the slightest connection to mathematics.
Woe to the CPA who doesn’t understand calculus, absolutely. All the position papers of the professional association are bursting with limit calculations.
Yes, at the high-school level.
I’m joking. CPAs really do study a calculus course, but that is mainly in order to understand certain models in economics (marginal outputs and so on). In classic accounting work it has no use.
That is not meant to detract from the difficulty of the studies; accounting is, in my opinion, one of the hardest degrees outside the exact sciences. But the difficulty lies elsewhere, not in mathematics.
Avi, I wrote mathematics at a basic level.
I did not write that one has to complete an advanced calculus course at the Technion. A CPA knows mathematics at a higher level than high school (in the overlapping topics).
You are trying to make what I wrote sound ridiculous, but you are welcome to check the mathematical knowledge of an average CPA who has just finished the exams, and see that they know basic mathematics (beyond high school), and not just arithmetic.
And one more thing—better to be a CPA who knows the material well than to be a “mathematician” who finished, at best, at a mediocre university (mediocre = Bar-Ilan, Ben-Gurion, and Ariel, according to the objective data) with a mathematics degree and an average of 60+, or even up to 70, and who mostly got there because of grade boosts, submitting assignments, not especially difficult electives, money poured into private tutors, many hours of memorizing formulas (without really understanding them), and lots of crying in front of lecturers.
Truly great “mathematicians.”
And as for the “mathematicians” who crossed 70 (and even among them there are plenty who mainly memorized formulas instead of understanding)—you’d think they were at least Gauss, Turing, or Newton… They really are not.
Heh heh.
Ruach, I was responding only to the words “woe to the CPA who doesn’t understand calculus (basic).” That is simply not true—there is no connection at all between accounting work and calculus. All these notions of what is “better” do not speak to me, certainly not when they are based on grades or educational institution. Better to study a profession that gives the person engaged in it the right balance between livelihood and enjoyment. Nothing more.
A friend of mine took vocational counseling tests. They told him: you are good at arithmetic and average in mathematics. Go study accounting. He studied accounting and economics at university. Afterward he said that in all the accounting courses he did very well, and in all the mathematical economics courses he was average.
Avi, CPA is a title for a profession. The discussion here was about the certification exams, and in any case almost everyone who takes the certification exams first goes through a degree in economics that includes courses with basic mathematics (beyond high-school level)—for example, mathematics for economists, statistics, econometrics, pricing, and more. So apparently accountants, while going through the certification exams, also know basic mathematics.
A great many certified accountants do not deal only with accounting, but serve as economists, and there are those who are accountants in title but in practice are economists.
They know how to do integration (in the mathematical sense), statistics, combinatorics. They know how to read graphs, know how to measure rates of change and slopes, and so on.
And to the best of my familiarity, even accountants who deal only with accounting would know how to do these operations (and anyone who truly has not touched them for years could probably refresh a bit on Google).
I do not know exactly what they test on the association’s exams, but I have almost no doubt that the mathematics required there is roughly at the high-school level. I know people who passed, and that is what they know. As for the academic courses along the way, indeed there is also mathematics for economists and so on, not a big deal at all, but that is not the association’s exam. I allow myself to wager, as someone who once taught at Kiryat Ono, that graduates there—even those who pass the association’s exams—know mathematics at about the level of four-unit high-school math, at most. If that is what you call mathematics, enjoy. And if excellence in that indicates to you intellectual abilities, and scientific ones in particular, then again, enjoy.
Really a pointless discussion.
Michi, as I wrote, my basic assumption is that in any case almost all those who pass the association’s exams first passed courses in mathematics for economists and so on, and I do not completely know what these courses are like in the colleges, but regarding the universities my assessment is that it is beyond the high-school level of four or five units; you can see this in exams online.
Besides that, admission to economics studies requires a higher psychometric score (at universities) than mathematics and physics studies. That is of course not because of intellectual ability, but more because of demand. There is no doubt that someone admitted to study economics at a university is definitely considered a powerhouse.
In any case there is no obligation to study economics together with accounting, so even if there are such people who do study it, that says nothing about these two.
As it happens, I’m a CPA, and as it happens I’m a good friend of the two guys who studied together with him 🙂
I don’t know how much connection there is between mathematics in the usual sense of the field and accounting. In general, if you know addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, you’re set computationally (and even for that there’s Excel). Financial accounting (the field they are tested on, and which is considered the hardest exam in the field) is basically problem-solving: you study the international standards that give you a set of rules, and in the exam you get an event and are supposed to answer, in accordance with the set of rules you learned, what the proper accounting treatment is. The exam really is not simple and requires a fairly broad understanding of the accounting rules. As a personal testimony, we did not study calculus at all, and the mathematics we did study was shockingly low-level, in my opinion even less than three-unit high-school math (but again, because it is not really needed for the field). But in fairness, the two guys really are talented and studied unbelievably hard, and did not receive special benefits or accommodations (not even extra time :)).
Small correction: we did study calculus, but at a completely basic level.
And I have a relative who, in yeshiva, was considered the absolute sharpest of the sharp in terms of his ability in “learning,” and because of hard times and a small dose of sanity, considered leaving for a different kind of working life. In the various courses and preparatory programs for acquiring professions, where basic knowledge in general studies is required, he felt—by his own account—that he did not understand a word of what was being said, dropped out, and continued to drift along with everyone else in the kollel model, marrying off children through free-loan funds and begging and so on. And all the rest is written in the ledgers of the Etznik community: they will die rather than enlist.