Pauline Baynes This is an open offer to review Methods and Specialist SACs. Here are the conditions: 0) The review is free. (You can consider donating to Tenderfeet.) 1) You may email me any Methods or Specialist SAC, by anyone. 2) You should indicate whether or not you are the writer of the SAC. 3) […]
An article titled Mathematica and the Potential Gaming of VCE has just appeared in the MAV’s journal Vinculum (and we have posted it here). By Sai kumar Murali krishnan, who completed VCE last year and who we previously mentioned in this post, the article delivers what the title promises (noting the “Potential” is redundant): Sai demonstrates how Mathematica’s […]
What follows is the article Mathematica and the Potential Gaming of VCE, by Sai kumar Murali krishnan, which has just appeared in Vinculum and which we have written about here. Sai’s article is reproduced here with Sai’s permission. Sai can be contacted by email here. INTRODUCTION Last year I completed VCE, including Mathematical Methods (CBE) […]
A few days ago we received an email from “Concerned Student”, someone we don’t know, requesting advice on how to approach VCE mathematics. We have thoughts on this and intend to reply, but the email also seemed generally relevant and of likely interest. The email also raises interesting questions for teachers, and for the writer […]
This one is due to commenter P.N., who raised it on another post, and the glaring issue has been discussed there. Still, for the record it should be WitCHed, and we’ve also decided to expand the WitCHiness slightly (and could have expanded it further). The following questions appeared on 2019 Specialist Mathematics NHT, Exam 2 […]
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 […]
From frequent commenter, SRK: A question for commenters: how to explain / teach integration by substitution? To organise discussion, consider the simple case Here are some options. 1) Let . This gives , hence . So our integral becomes . Benefits: the abuse of notation here helps students get their integral in the […]
It seems that what amounts to VCE exam marking schemes may be available for purchase through the Mathematical Association of Victoria. This seems very strange, and we’re not really sure what is going on, but we shall give our current sense of it. (It should be noted at the outset that we are no fan […]
We’re not actively looking for WitCHes right now, since we have a huge backlog to update. This one, however, came up in another context and, after chatting about it with commenter Red Five, there seemed no choice. The following 1-mark multiple choice question appeared in 2019 Exam 2 (CAS) of VCE’s Mathematical Methods. The problem […]
We have a short Specialist post coming, and we’ll have more to write on the 2019 VCE exams once they’re online. But, for now, one more Mathematical Methods WitCH, from the 2019 (calculator-free) Exam 1: Update (04/07/20) The main crap here, of course, is part (f): as commenter John Friend puts it, what the hell […]