It’s NHT, and I don’t teach for an inner sanctum edu-empire, so I don’t really care. But, others might, so here you go.
General Mathematics: Exam 1, Exam 2 (28/6 marking guides here and here (W,I))
Mathematical Methods: Exam 1, Exam 2 (28/6 marking guides here and here (W,I))
Specialist Mathematics: Exam 1, Exam 2 (28/6 marking guides here and here (W,I))
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What is it that bothers me about these dry questions? I think it is the feeling that this sort of stuff should not be part of a state examination, that it breaks the subject into little discrete pieces. These are the sort of questions that a teacher might give in class to check how will students can do certain procedures. When done in class, the examiner is in a position to gauge what is necessary and gauge the questions accordingly as well as the type of testing.
In a traditional examination, questions are designed to have nuts-and-bolts part followed by some kind of application, so there is better cohesion.
In the 1950s when I was in school there was exactly one set of provincial examinations at the very end of high school. These were quite substantial (you had to write nine of them to get your certificate). All the other testing was done in the schools, sometimes under quite formal conditions. With properly qualified teachers, there is not reason this should not suffice, and it does a lot to allay student anxiety and interruptions to the delivery of the curriculum. The final external exams are there just to keep everyone honest (they were also marked by corps of teachers who got to understand the expectations and the province issued annual reports on how the questions were answered).
With fashionable “scaffolding of proble ms” – no chance.
Thanks, Ed, but I don’t think you appreciate the nature and the extent of the battle to improve these exams.
The exams, and all Victorian senior education, have been under the control of ideological halfwits for decades. They know nothing, are too stupid to know that they know nothing, and are too arrogant and too stubborn to ever learn that they know nothing. They have perverted mathematics education for more than a generation. It has reached the stage where the vast majority of Victorian teachers were themselves taught under this mad regime and thus know nothing else. The insanity is now self-perpetuating and almost impossible to arrest.
You complain about the exams being too much nuts and bolts, and of course you are correct, but that way understates all that has been wrong with these exams. Yes, the exam questions are too often too much nuts and bolts, but they have also generally been appallingly worded, and, every damn year, they have contained blatant errors, with the grading of all this half-baked trivia then administered by clueless and nasty fusspots who wouldn’t know a proper mathematical argument if you hit them in the face with it.
You rightly want to lessen the nuts and bolts, but at the moment I’m happy if the damn nuts actually fit the damn bolts. VCAA hasn’t even been able to get that right. Is this the end goal? Of course not. But it is a good and necessary first step to get VCAA to understand the concept and the importance of mathematical truth. If we can get over that hurdle, and it’s no gimme, then and only then we can get on to step two.
Methods Paper 1 Q6ai:
The question says this is a probability distribution. This means the probabilities sum to 1.
But that also means, in the context of the question, that the high jumper clears the bar within 3 attempts which is not written in the question.
I feel that there are different ways to interpret this question and that makes it problematic.
Thanks, RF. I’ll look.
The question is OK in some ways but I think the wording could be much improved.
My guess is most students will just use the “sum to one” idea and think nothing more of it.
So maybe more of a nit-pick than an error?
Hi, RF. I’m not sure what your issue with the question is. N is the distribution of the number of attempts, and the problem states that the jumper has up to three attempts.
My concern was/is that students may use the conditional probability for A and B to get the wrong value for n=3. I can see this happening and felt upon a first read through that the wording was a bit clunky.
The rest of the paper was pretty mundane, nicer than previous years but still largely boring.
I dunno. Seems fine to me.
And it may well be. I will admit I misread the question at first, my answer made no sense, so I re-read and re-calculated. Does this mean the question is problematic? Probably not.
I do like these papers much more than the 2006 to 2023 offerings though, so well done to the new paper setters if they are reading…
Spec Maths Q7bi.
Not sure if there is any quicker methods – but it takes quite a few steps to show
And…it’s just one mark.
Thanks, Sentinel. Isn’t the question simply expecting the student to add up the acceleration and deceleration times? Deceleration is for 3 seconds (to go from 10 to -2), and we’re told the acceleration is twice that, so 6 seconds.
Geez. I knew I must have missed something!
True. Students must realise that
and use the change in velocity -12 m/s to get the deceleration three seconds…
Then 3+6 = 9.
SM Paper 1 Q6 – not a mistake, but a question… if a student does part b first, can this answer be used in part a to say the lines do not intersect? Since showing the shortest distance is greater than zero, surely that is proof they do not intersect..?
Well spotted!
Some colleagues spotted a similar issue that occurs in MM exam 1, Q8.
It is totally possible for one to complete part b first then they can go back to Q8aii and sub in k=6, which sort of trivialized the three marks.
This one seems sort of ok, or at least sort of standard. (a)(i) is pointless and hand-holding, so I’d be a lot happier without it, but MM often seems to have such stuff.
Yes, a little wonky.
Methods paper 2 – generally OK, no real surprises.
Some of the MCQs were nice – showed a bit more thought on the part of the paper setter(s) than in the past. MCQ10, MCQ17, MCQ 19 and MCQ20 I thought were the best from a “you need to think rather than push buttons” point of view.
Thanks, RF. I’ll look.
There is nothing wrong with the questions – quite the opposite. Although I’ve now seen another teacher wreck my impression of one of them by doing it really quickly on the CAS. Oh well, I like the rest of them.
Section B is all a bit meh – the obsession with 1 mark questions that are button-pushing time-trials undoes what felt like an effort on Paper 1 to actually make some thinking happen.
Haven’t found any errors yet, that doesn’t mean they aren’t there though.
Yeah I got that. I look at anything that people suggest is worth the look. Which question turned out to be CAS crap?
MCQ14 can be done in 1 line with CAS and the command domain.
Until I realised this, it was a nice question.
CAS poisons everything.
Yeah, I like these questions (modulo the possibility that CAS may torpedo the niceness).
Upon re-reading my answers, I have another nit-pick with MM P2 Section B Q3c.
The water level is above 1.4 meters from
to 
which is a bit more than 30 minutes.
How long does it actually take to launch a boat? I have no idea. So maybe this is reasonable.
I don’t look at MM2 crap unless absolutely necessary. What exactly is your nitpick?
There is a time interval of 30 minutes when the depth of water is greater than 1.4 meters. Is this realistic (in VCAA world such things do not matter)?
Not necessary for anyone to check.
Oh, I see. I cannot tell you how little I care.
Hi RF,
A really good question and terrific observation!
I find it interesting too…!
For your reference.
Also, if it was a liner or yacht…I would say it takes longer to ignite and launch the engine…
But you definitely won’t choose the small chunk of time period to launch it. You could argue either way.
Spec exam 2, q9b
Am I missing something or is this part a lot of work for 2 marks?
Use the answer from part a, then do a U-substitution, then integrate correctly, input the terminals and simplify correctly.
Thanks, Wilba. I’m not the one to judge these things, and I hate the whole game, but yes it seems like a lot of work.
(I know most people here don’t care about the GM papers, but…)
GM Paper 1 Q32 is problematic in a few ways.
1. There is an implication that k is a fixed value.
2. Can a student repeat a year more than once? The given answer seems to suggest the answer is no, but this is not clear anywhere in the question.
3. It is moderately clear but not explicitly clear that the 5000 is the total of all previous years, not the immediately previous year.
Thanks, RF. I’ll look.
To clarify, in order to get the answer given by VCAA you need to assume the following (answers to above questions):
1. k is fixed.
2. No, students cannot repeat a year more than once.
3. 5000 is the number graduating in that year, not the sum total of graduates over the preceding years.
From these assumptions it is all a cas-button-pushing-exercise, but I do not see these assumptions as necessarily obvious, nor valid the way the question is written. Then again… does it really matter? Maybe.
Thanks, RF. No way on God’s green earth that I’m going to get into the details of this question. You can send it to me offline if you wish (expressed clearly enough that I don’t have to work hard). But a couple thoughts/questions.
1) The wording isn’t great, but won’t k automatically be constant, because you had 1000 begin L1 the previous year, and with a known fraction progress to L2?
2) Are you sure students cannot re-repeat? I don’t even understand how you would encode that in the GM framework: it’s simply of current students (whatever their history) that progress.
3) You’re saying that the 5000 means “5000 in Year X”, rather than “5000 up to and including Year X”? It is not the plain reading of the question, but also does not seem plausible.
I wouldn’t worry about it – it is a multiple choice question on a NHT paper.
But even if k is fixed in Year 2 (or 1, depending on whether you call the first year 0 or 1) then it may not be the same in Year 3 (or 2) if students are allowed to re-repeat. Hence the source of the issue.
Of course, all this is doing way too much thinking and these questions do not reward thinking so I will stop now.