Our new WitCH, below, comes courtesy of Charlie the Enforcer. Once again, this WitCH is from the 2018 SCSA Mathematical Methods Exam (here and here): it’s the gift that keeps on giving. (And a reminder, WitCH 2 and WitCH 3 still require attention are still unresolved.)
Question 11 and the solution in SCSA’s marking key are below. Happy hunting.
Update
John has pretty much caught it all. The killer issue is the use of the term “deceleration” in part (c) which, the solution implies, refers to the drone speeding up in the southerly direction. This is arguably permissible, since deceleration can be (though is far from universally) defined as a negative acceleration, and since way back in part (a) it was implied that North coincides with the positive x direction.
Permissible acts, however, can nonetheless be idiotic: voting Liberal or Republican, for example. And, to use “deceleration” on a high stakes exam to refer implicitly to increasing speed is idiotic. Moreover, to use “deceleration” in this manner immediately after explicitly indicating the “due south” direction of motion is truly ruly idiotic. Still not as idiotic as voting Liberal or Republican, but genuinely special-effort idiotic.
That’s enough to condemn the question, even by SCSA standards. But, the question is also awful in many other ways:
- The question is boring and butt ugly.
- No indication is given whether exact or numerical solutions are permitted or required.
- Having a drone an arbitrary 5m up in the sky for a 1D problem is asking for trouble. For example:
- The “displacement” of x(0) = 0 for a drone 5m up is pretty stupid.
- “Where is the drone in relation to the [mysterious] pilot?” Um, kind of uppish?
- “How far has the drone travelled …” is needlessly wordy and ambiguous. If you want a distance, for God’s sake say “distance”.
- Given the position function x(t) is at hand, part (c) can easily and naturally be solved by hand. But of course why think about things when you can do mindless calculator crap?