B. Kliban
This post is motivated by a sub-discussion on another post. Mathematical induction is officially in the VCE curriculum (in Specialist 12), but is not there in a properly meaningful sense. So, if people want to suggest what should be done or, the real purpose of this blog, simply wish to howl at the moon, here’s a place to do it.
We’ve written about MAV’s censorship previously. It seems, unfortunately, that we may have another such incident to write about in the near future. We’ll see.
There is also a third incident that we’ve long planned to write about, but have never gotten around to. It is rather involved, and we won’t give the full story here, but one specific aspect is perhaps worth telling now.
In 2016, we accepted an invitation from the MAV to give a keynote address at their Annual Conference. We chose as our keynote title Same Sermon, New Jokes. We also submitted a “bio pic” – the graphic above – and an abstract. The abstract indicated our contempt for twenty or so organisations and facets of Australian mathematics education.
A couple months later, the Conference organisers emailed to indicate their objection to our abstract. One can argue the merits of and the propriety of this objection, and we will write generally on this at a later date, but one aspect of the objection was particularly notable. The email included the following:
“While we welcome all points of view, we do need to be respectful of the organisations we work with, and with whom we need to maintain good relations … We would like you to re visit the text … without the criticism of formal organisations.”
We pushed back against the criticism, and ended our reply with what we intended as a rhetorical question:
“You wrote that you (plural) welcome all points of view, which I was very reassured to read. Given that, which formal organisations do you consider to be above criticism?”
The email reply from the organisers included a response:
“In regards to the formal organisations with which the MAV has relations, you have stated some of them, e.g. ACARA, VCAA.”
No one at the MAV, including the then President, indicated to us any problem with this request or its clarification.
For now, we’ll leave it there.
The sole comment on this question in the Examination Report is:
“All students were awarded [the] mark for this question.”
Yep, the question is plain stuffed. We think, however, there is more here than the simple wrongness, which is why we’ve made it a WitCH rather than a PoSWW. Happy hunting.UPDATE (11/05) Steve C’s comment below has inspired an addition:
The third greatest issue with the exam question is that it is wrong: none of the available answers is correct. The second greatest issue is that the wrongness is obvious: if 
lies in a sector then the natural guess is that 
will lie in one of three equally spaced sectors of a third the width, so God knows why the alarm bells weren’t ringing. The greatest issue is that VCAA didn’t have the guts or the basic integrity to fess up: not a single word of responsibility or remorse. Assholes.
Those are the elephants stomping through the room but, as commenters as have noted, there is plenty more awfulness in this question:
is sloppy, confusing and pointless; is a single complex number, “the complete set of values for Arg()” will consist of a single number.SACs may not be the greatest problem with VCE mathematics, but they’re right up there. SACs are torture for teachers and torture for students. They teach nothing. As assessment, they are unnecessary, unreliable and phenomenally inefficient. They are a license for VCAA’s unaswerable auditors applying Kafkaesque rules to act either as favour-givers or as little Hitlers, as the mood takes them. These problems are currently amplified to eleven by VCAA’s “We’ll give you some kind of guidance in, oh, a little while” plan for the plague year.
For all of the awfulness of the above, that’s not the worst of it. The worst is that the majority of SACs are monumentally stupid. Literally. A SAC has the imposing presence of a monument, its towering stupidity casting a shadow over everything.
How are SACs so bad? Many contain errors, often subtle although too often not, but, as irritating as that is, that is not the main problem. The main problem is that they are mathematical nonsense. Typically they will present the student with a ridiculous model of a contrived problem, which is then all redone in greater, brain-bludgeoning generality by throwing in a needless parameter in a randomly chosen location. All of this is undertaken, of course, in the nihilistic world of CAS. Finally, somewhere near the end, the poor beleaguered student, who by this stage just wants to escape with their life, will be required to “comment on the model”, to which the usual response is “It’s really nice, please let me go” and to which the only reasonable response is “It’s fucking insane”.
How do we know SACs are this bad? Because we see them. We see the commercial SACs, and the sample SACs, and the past SACs, and the current SACs. Are they all as bad as we suggest? No, of course not. Specialist SACs are typically nowhere near as bad as Methods SACs, and even many Methods SACs will fall short of truly idiotic torture, rising only to the level of being dumb and painful. Then there are the rare few SACs we see that are good, resulting in an exchange:
“This actually makes sense. Who’s your teacher?”
“Oh, it’s Mr. ….”
“Ah. Yes.”
So, yes, the quality and worth of SACs varies widely, but the average is squarely in the neighbourhood of monumental, tortuous stupidity. Which bring us to the “why”. Why are SACs in general so awful? There are two reasons.
The first and fundamental reason is the VCAA and their view of what they imagine is a curriculum. VCE mathematics subjects are so shallow and so lacking in a foundation of solid reason, that almost any attempt at depth and substance in a SAC is destined to be farce. The VCAA has replaced foundation and depth with CAS, which reaches peak awfulness in SACs. The VCAA promotes the fantasy that CAS magically transforms students into mathematical explorers, clever little Lewises and Clarks skilfully navigating the conceptual wilderness. The reality, of course, is much less Lewis and Clark than it is Burke and Wills. To top it off, SACs must follow guidelines that Terry Gilliam would be proud of, giving us Burke and Wills’ Bogus Brazilian Journey. Or, just Eraserhead. Something like that.
The second reason is the teachers. Sort of. Even if the subjects were coherent, even if they were unpoisoned by CAS and were unconstrained by vague and ridiculous conditions, even then writing a good SAC would be a very difficult and massively time-consuming task. Most teachers just don’t have the mathematical background, or the literary skill, to write a coherent, correct and mathematically rich SAC; many cannot even recognise one. And, that’s writing a good SAC for this imaginary good subject; writing a good SAC for these fundamentally flawed subjects with their ridiculous constraints is close to impossible, even for a strong teacher. And which teachers, particularly weaker teachers, have the time to compose such a good SAC? Why bother trying? And so, with the greatest common sense, most teachers do not. Most teachers stick to the audit-proof and meaningless formulaic SAC bullshit that the VCAA expects and effectively demands.
The VCAA’s SAC system is a crime against mathematical humanity.
UPDATE (15/5)
We received the following from a student acquaintance (who hadn’t read this post):
Hi Marty, given the upcoming math SACs approaching soon, the pressure is on to practice and practice. Attached below is last year’s Methods SAC1 (Unit 3/4) for [the student’s school]. I remember many talented friends of mine who were stumped, and didn’t do very well on this SAC. Personally, I thought this SAC was horrifying. In contrast to Specialist, (I actually quite enjoy Specialist!), Methods seems to be a huge prick because of frustrating, ambiguous SACs containing questions seemingly cooked from the pits of hell itself. Are these sort of SACs common across the state?
The student is, of course, correct. The SAC, which comes from a highly respected school, is a nightmare in all of the ways canvassed above. From start to end it is idiotic CAS-driven pseudo-modelling, complete with Magritte nonsense and a pointlessly prissy grading scheme. And, yes, the SAC contains an error.
Of course we won’t reveal the school, much less any teachers involved, which means that we are also unable to critique the SAC in detail. But that is one of the insidious aspects of the SAC system; an entirely proper concern for privacy means that SAC nonsense, although endemic, fails to be exposed to the public critique that is so very much needed.
UPDATE (26/7)
Once again, this time in response to this post, a student from a “good” school has contacted us in regard to their SAC. This was a Specialist SAC, and the student had contacted us because the teachers/writers had screwed up: some tech aspects of the SAC were a mess, and the subsequent clean-up of the mess was clearly disingenuous and clearly insufficient. But, as always, the situation was much worse that the student suggested.
The student’s SAC was ridiculous. From beginning to end it was pointless, CAS-driven pseudo-modelling. It had the idiotic parameters thrown in. It was poorly written. It displayed poor mathematical understanding, leading to ridiculous own goals. It. Was. Not. Mathematics.
And, we can’t write the details of any of this.
Just for a change, we’re asking a non-rhetorical question. So, ignoring the fact that ScoMoFo is a thug, and ignoring the fact that “Dumbo” Dan Tehan is a thug, is it time for schools to reopen?
Our suspicion is that, at least in Victoria, the answer is “no”. We haven’t thought hard about it, however. So, while we (try to find time to) think some more, we’d be interested in what others have to say.
Very quickly, here are the arguments we see for opening schools in Victoria:
Here are the arguments we see for keeping schools in Victoria closed:
VCAA’s corona-compliant study design for 2020 has just appeared, here. We’ve had no chance to look at it yet. We’ll be curious to see the response.