26 Replies to “Secret 2025 General Business: Exam 1 Discussion”
Seems to be a largely tame exam this year. Not really much of anything that was totally different or wild from the usual. A few questions with some unusual choices (Q9/10 tracking “goals against” which is certainly… a choice and Q28’s inefficient means of getting the message to the intended recipient).
Still has questions utterly trivialised by the programs floating around. Still has questions where one CAS has an operation (creating a matrix according to rule) whereas the other doesn’t. Joy.
I continue to wonder what VCAA thinks they’re assessing when the intended solution is “enter data into CAS and then use CAS to get particular thing we want”.
General maths exam 1 q7, the answer can be either B or D depending on how u interpret it. From this table, the percentage of female car buyers whose preferred car colour is silver is closest to. The question can be interpreted as only considering the females who preferred silver or the percentage of females who’s preferred car colour is in the silver column compared the males.
I think the question is fair, if less than perfect in a Mathematical sense, but I totally take the point that there is a reasonably logical argument for the other option.
I’m not sure I fully understand the point, but I take it there are two things one might calculate from the table: (i) of the females, the percentage that prefer silver; (ii) of those that prefer silver, the percentage that is female. From the way the question is written – “From this table, the percentage of female car buyers whose preferred car colour is silver is” – I only get the first reading, not the second.
The second reading is asking for the percentage of female car buyers where the preferred car colour is silver. If the question was like “From this table, the percentage of [the] female car buyers whose preferred car colour is silver is closest to” then i would agree B is the only option because the “the” makes it clear that it’s only considering the female car buyers but since “the” is not present i believe 2 interpretations of the question are valid
Reasonable? Arguable. It goes over 2 pages (for a 1 mark question) and takes more than 2 minutes to read. Given the time for each question is 2 minutes, this feels a bit less-than-reasonable.
Clearly worded? Also arguable. There are lots of words. Given sufficient time, they are clear enough. Given how late this question was in the paper… I’m not a fan of it.
Other questions took me longer to read and work through than this one. In the end it was actually one of the easiest questions on the paper (opinion, others welcome to disagree).
Not a hugely exciting paper (I’m not a General teacher, I just do the papers for fun…).
Q21 I felt the wording was sub-standard and (remember, not a General teacher) I did not at first assume that all the interest was paid out each year. After making that assumption the question seemed almost too easy as the total payments were 100% of the investment. Just watch out for the word “exceed” and… on with the paper.
Some questions seemed to take way longer than others – maybe due to my very slow button bushing on the damned CAS.
How do feel about the histogram for question 1?
I would’ve rather it be a bar graph with those numbers on the x-axis since we usually teach at school that histograms always have a range of values…
Have no intention of ad hominem-ing anyone but I don’t think there were any wording problems in this year’s paper (I sat it as a student today). The wording was fine in my opinion for all questions others have scrutinised above and I certainly understood them without any hesitation, mind you under exam pressured conditions as well. The difficulty was a bit underwhelming though, but I commend the team at Monash for writing a paper; in my eyes with well phrased questions and well phrased multiple choice solutions.
I have not worked through the details, so my opinion might change. But my initial verdict is that the exam was too easy, so stronger students are disadvantaged by possibly losing marks due to “silly” mistakes.
On balance, I thought it was a fair exam that covered most skills reasonably.
Of course, the majority of those skills required more button-pushing than anything else, but in the VCAA world this is considered a skill, so…
As to whether it was too easy – there were years where high-aiming students made the same complaint about Methods paper 1 exams, too. Until Paper 2 is run and done, it is difficult to judge.
Seems to be a largely tame exam this year. Not really much of anything that was totally different or wild from the usual. A few questions with some unusual choices (Q9/10 tracking “goals against” which is certainly… a choice and Q28’s inefficient means of getting the message to the intended recipient).
Still has questions utterly trivialised by the programs floating around. Still has questions where one CAS has an operation (creating a matrix according to rule) whereas the other doesn’t. Joy.
I continue to wonder what VCAA thinks they’re assessing when the intended solution is “enter data into CAS and then use CAS to get particular thing we want”.
I’m not sure “VCAA” and “thinks” belong in the same sentence.
General maths exam 1 q7, the answer can be either B or D depending on how u interpret it. From this table, the percentage of female car buyers whose preferred car colour is silver is closest to. The question can be interpreted as only considering the females who preferred silver or the percentage of females who’s preferred car colour is in the silver column compared the males.
Maybe, but from the wording and from past papers I would suggest the female part is given, hence B is the only correct answer.
Is this figuring out what makes mathematical sense, or is it figuring out what is the weird mind of VCAA?
I think the question is fair, if less than perfect in a Mathematical sense, but I totally take the point that there is a reasonably logical argument for the other option.
The second half of your sentence contradicts the first half.
OK, then I think the question is imperfectly worded.
I also cannot see VCAA admitting as much and assume B was the intended answer.
Of course, I could be wrong.
I’m not sure I fully understand the point, but I take it there are two things one might calculate from the table: (i) of the females, the percentage that prefer silver; (ii) of those that prefer silver, the percentage that is female. From the way the question is written – “From this table, the percentage of female car buyers whose preferred car colour is silver is” – I only get the first reading, not the second.
The second reading is asking for the percentage of female car buyers where the preferred car colour is silver. If the question was like “From this table, the percentage of [the] female car buyers whose preferred car colour is silver is closest to” then i would agree B is the only option because the “the” makes it clear that it’s only considering the female car buyers but since “the” is not present i believe 2 interpretations of the question are valid
No, I disagree. You can read the question in the second manner but I think it is really strained to do do. The first reading is much more natural.
The response to the Hungarian Algorithm question from last year seems to have been to have students find the matrix after row reduction.
Of course this was predicted and there’s a calculator program going around that shows the algorithm step by step.
Ignoring the CAS crap, is the Hungarian question this year reasonable and clearly worded?
Reasonable? Arguable. It goes over 2 pages (for a 1 mark question) and takes more than 2 minutes to read. Given the time for each question is 2 minutes, this feels a bit less-than-reasonable.
Clearly worded? Also arguable. There are lots of words. Given sufficient time, they are clear enough. Given how late this question was in the paper… I’m not a fan of it.
Yeah, ok. So “reasonable” by clunky VCAA standards.
Other questions took me longer to read and work through than this one. In the end it was actually one of the easiest questions on the paper (opinion, others welcome to disagree).
Not a hugely exciting paper (I’m not a General teacher, I just do the papers for fun…).
Q21 I felt the wording was sub-standard and (remember, not a General teacher) I did not at first assume that all the interest was paid out each year. After making that assumption the question seemed almost too easy as the total payments were 100% of the investment. Just watch out for the word “exceed” and… on with the paper.
Some questions seemed to take way longer than others – maybe due to my very slow button bushing on the damned CAS.
How do feel about the histogram for question 1?
I would’ve rather it be a bar graph with those numbers on the x-axis since we usually teach at school that histograms always have a range of values…
Nah, discrete numerical data. Histogram is fine.
Have no intention of ad hominem-ing anyone but I don’t think there were any wording problems in this year’s paper (I sat it as a student today). The wording was fine in my opinion for all questions others have scrutinised above and I certainly understood them without any hesitation, mind you under exam pressured conditions as well. The difficulty was a bit underwhelming though, but I commend the team at Monash for writing a paper; in my eyes with well phrased questions and well phrased multiple choice solutions.
Thanks, BB. There’s no question that in general the wording has generally improved since Monash came on board.
I have not worked through the details, so my opinion might change. But my initial verdict is that the exam was too easy, so stronger students are disadvantaged by possibly losing marks due to “silly” mistakes.
On balance, I thought it was a fair exam that covered most skills reasonably.
Of course, the majority of those skills required more button-pushing than anything else, but in the VCAA world this is considered a skill, so…
As to whether it was too easy – there were years where high-aiming students made the same complaint about Methods paper 1 exams, too. Until Paper 2 is run and done, it is difficult to judge.
Agreed. We had a lot of students claiming they got it all correct and we definitely shouldn’t have had that many tbh…
I will admit I got Q23 wrong because I was in a hurry and missed the word “effective”.
But in my defense, the last time I actually taught Further 3&4 was 2004 so…
Yep. Not a valid excuse, I get it.
Thought it was pretty easy. Bit of a *meh* exam but the students felt good about it. I’m hoping exam 2 is a bit more exciting.