This Proof of Stupidity Without Words comes courtesy of a smart Year 11 VCE student. It’s an exercise in the Jacaranda text Maths Quest 11 Mathematical Methods (2019). (Just to clarify, the stupidity obviously contains plenty of words; it’s the proof of stupidity that requires no words.)
In this WitCH we will again pick on the Cambridge text Specialist Mathematics VCE Units 3 & 4 (2019): see the extract below. (We’d welcome any email or comment with suggestions of other generally WitCHful texts and/or specific WitCHes.) And, a reminder that there is still plenty left to discover in WitCH 2 , WitCH 3 and Tweel’s Mathematical […]
The VCE maths exams are over for another year. They were mostly uneventful, the familiar concoction of triviality, nonsense and weirdness, with the notable exception of the surprisingly good Methods Exam 1. At least two Specialist questions, however, deserve a specific slap and some discussion. (There may be other questions worth whacking: we never have the […]
We’re sure we’ll live to regret this post, but yesterday’s VCE Methods Exam 1 looked like a good exam. No, that’s not a set up for a joke. It actually looked like a nice exam. (It’s not online yet. Update: Now online.). Sure, there were some meh questions, the inevitable consequence of an incompetent study design. And […]
This one is long, a real Gish gallop. Question 4, Part 2 from the 2017 VCE Specialist Mathematics Exam 2 is a mess. The Examiners’ Report is, predictably, worse. Part (a) of Question 4 is routine, requiring students to express in polar form. One wonders how a quarter of the students could muck up this easy 1-mark question, […]
Our previous post was on good guys making a silly, funny and inconsequential mistake. This post is not. Question B1 of Exam 2 for 2018 Northern Hemisphere Specialist Mathematics begins innocently enough. In part (a), students are required to graph the function over its maximal domain. Then, things begin to get stupid. In part (b), the graph […]
The 2018 Northern Hemisphere Mathematical Methods exams (1 and 2) are out. We didn’t spot any Magritte-esque lunacy, which was a pleasant surprise. In general, the exam questions were merely trivial, clumsy, contrived, calculator-infested and loathsomely ugly. So, all in all not bad by VCAA standards. There, was, however, one notable question. The final multiple […]
It’s been a long, long time. Alas, we’ve been kept way too busy by the Evil Mathologer, as well as some edu-idiots, who shall remain nameless but not unknown. Anyway, with luck normal transmission has now resumed. There’s a big, big backlog of mathematical crap to get through. To begin, there’s a shocking news story […]
Late last year we posted on Madness in the 2017 VCE mathematics exams, on blatant errors above and beyond the exams’ predictably general clunkiness. For one (Northern Hemisphere) exam, the subsequent VCAA Report had already appeared; this Report was pretty useless in general, and specifically it was silent on the error and the surrounding mathematical […]
First, a quick note about these WitCHes. Any reasonable mathematician looking at such text extracts would immediately see the mathematical flaw(s) and would wonder how such half-baked nonsense could be published. We are aware, however, that for teachers and students, or at least Australian teachers and students, it is not nearly so easy. Since school mathematics […]