Ah, so much crap …
Tons of nonsense to post on, and the Evil Mathologer is breathing down our neck. We’ll have (at least) three posts on last week’s Mathematical Methods exams. This one is by no means the worst to come, but it fits in with our previous WitCH, so let’s quickly get it going. It is from Exam 1. (No link yet, but the Study Design is here.)
The following WitCH is pretty old, but it came up in a tutorial yesterday, so what the Hell. (It’s also a good warm-up for another WitCH, to appear in the next day or so.) It comes from the 2011 Mathematical Methods Exam 1:
For part (a), the Examination Report indicates that f(g)(x) =√([x+2][x+8]), leading to c = 2 and d = 8, or vice versa. The Report indicates that three quarters of students scored 2/2, “However, many [students] did not state a value for c and d”.
For Part (b), the Report indicates that 84% of students scored 0/2. After indicating the intended answer, (-∞,-8) U (-2,∞) (-∞,-8] U [-2,∞) or R
(-8,-2), the Report goes on to comment:
“This question was very poorly done. Common incorrect responses included [-3,3] (the domain of f(x); x ≥ -2 (as the ‘intersection’ of x ≥ -8 with x ≥ -2); or x ≥ -8 (as the ‘union’ of x ≥ -8 with x ≥ -2). Those who attempted to use the properties of composite functions tended to get confused. Students needed to look for a domain that would make the square root function work.”
The Report does not indicate how students got “confused”, although the composition of functions is briefly discussed in the Study Design (page 72).
Jo Boaler is in the news again, this time teamed up with famed economist, Steven global-warming-is-easy Levitt. Boaler and Levitt are on a campaign to revolutionise mathematics education, and their argument is simple: no one ever divides a polynomial in real life, and therefore “data science”.
But of course. What fools we’ve been.
The easy WitCH below comes courtesy of the Evil Mathologer. It is a worked example from Cambridge’s Essential Mathematics Year 9 (2019), in a section introducing parabolic graphs.
The problem, as commenters have indicated below, is that there is no parabola with the indicated turning point and intercepts. Normally, we’d write this off as a funny but meaningless error. But, coming at the very beginning of the introduction to the parabola, it most definitely qualifies as crap.
The following WitCH comes from (CAS permitted) 2018 Specialist Mathematics Exam 2:
The Examiners’ Report indicates that about half of the students gave the intended answer of D, with about a third giving the incorrect answer B. The Report notes:
Option B did not account for common factors and its last term is not irreducible, so should not have Dx in the numerator.
The worst kind of exam question is one that rewards mindless button-pushing and actively punishes intelligent consideration. The above question is of the worst kind. It is also pointless, nasty and self-trippingly overcute.
As John points out in the comments, the question can simply be done by pressing CAS buttons. But, alternatively, the question also just appears to require, and to invite, a simple understanding of partial fraction form. Which brings us to the nastiness: the expected partial fraction form is not a listed option.
So, what to make of it? Not surprisingly, many students opted for B, the superficially most plausible answer. A silly mistake, you silly, silly student! You shoulda just listened to your teacher and pushed the fucking buttons.
The trick, of course, is that the numerator factorises, cancelling with the denominator and leading to the intended answer, D. The problem with the trick is that it is antimathematical and wrong:
But of course all that is way, way too much to think about in a speed-test exam. Much better to just listen to your teacher and push the fucking buttons.
Yesterday, I received an email from Stacey, a teacher and good friend and former student. Stacey was asking for my opinion of “order of operations”, having been encouraged to contact me by Dave, also a teacher and good friend and former student. Apparently, Dave had suggested that I had “strong opinions” on the matter. I dashed off a response which, in slightly tidied and toned form, follows.
1) The general principle is that if mathematicians don’t worry about something then there is good reason to doubt that students or teachers should. It’s not an axiom, but it’s a very good principle.
a) No mathematician would ever, ever write that.
b) I don’t know what the Hell the expression means. Honestly.
c) If I don’t know what it means, why should I expect anybody else to know?
The fact that schools don’t instruct this first and foremost, that demonstrates that BODMAS or whatever has almost nothing to do with learning or understanding. It is overwhelmingly a meaningless ritual to see which students best follow mindless rules and instruction. It is not in any sense mathematics. In fact, I think this all suggests a very worthwhile and catchy reform: don’t teach BODMAS, teach USBB.
[Note: the original acronym, which is to be preferred, was USFB]
4) It is a little more complicated than that, because mathematicians also write arguably ambiguous expressions, such ab + c and ab2 and a/bc. BUT, the concatenation/proximity and fractioning is much, much less ambiguous in practice. (a/bc is not great, and I would always look to write that with a horizontal fraction line or as a/(bc).)
5) Extending that, brackets can also be overdone, if people jump to overinterpret every real or imagined ambiguousness. The notation sin(x), for example, is truly idiotic; in this case there is no ambiguity that requires clarification, and so the brackets do nothing but make the mathematics ugly and more difficult to read.
6) The issue is also more complicated because mathematicians seldom if ever use the signs ÷ or x. That’s partially because they’re dealing with algebra rather than arithmetic, and partially because “division” is eventually not its own thing, having been replaced by making the fraction directly, by dealing directly with the result of the division rather than the division.
So, this is a case where it is perfectly reasonable for schools to worry about something that mathematicians don’t. Arithmetic obviously requires a multiplication sign. And, primary students must learn what division means well before fractions, so of course it makes sense to have a sign for division. I doubt, however, that one needs a division sign in secondary school.
7) So, it’s not that the order of operations issues don’t exist. But they don’t exist nearly as much as way too many prissy teachers imagine. It’s not enough of a thing to be a tested thing.
Our second sabbatical post concerns, well, the reader can decide what it concerns.
Last year, diagnostic quizzes were given to a large class of first year mathematics students at a Victorian tertiary institution. The majority of these students had completed Specialist Mathematics or an equivalent. On average, these would not have been the top Specialist students, nor would they have been the weakest. The results of these quizzes were, let’s say, interesting.
It was notable, for example, that around 2/5 of these students failed to simplify the likes of 81-3/4. And, around 2/3 of the students failed to solve an inequality such as 2 + 4x ≥ x2 + 5. And, around 3/5 of the students failed to correctly evaluate 
or similar. There were many such notable outcomes.
Most striking for us, however, were questions concerning lists of numbers, such as those displayed above. Students were asked to write the listed numbers in ascending order. And, though a majority of the students answered correctly, about 1/4 of the students did not.
What, then, does it tell us if a quarter of post-Specialist students cannot order a list of common numbers? Is this acceptable? If not, what or whom are we to blame? Will the outcome of the current VCAA review improve things, or will it make matters worse?
Tricky, tricky questions.
The following PoSWW comes courtesy of Franz, who states that “when it comes to ‘stupid curricula, stupid texts and really monumentally stupid exams’ no Western country, with the possible exception of the US, is worse than Germany.” We take that as a challenge, and we’re waiting for Franz to back up his crazy-brave claim.
Franz’s PoSWW, however, has nothing to do with Germany. This PoSSW follows on from two of our previous posts, on idiotic questions appearing in New Zealand exams. Franz wrote to us, noting that the same style of question appears in the Oxford Year 8 text My Maths. Indeed, a number of versions of this ludicrous question appear in My Maths, all inventively awful in their own way. The two examples below are enough to give the flavour:
This PoSWW comes courtesy of a smart Year 11 VCE student who, it appears, may be a rich source of such nonsense. It’s an exercise in the Jacaranda text MathsQuest 11, Specialist Mathematics (2019).
To be honest, we’re not sure the exercise below is a PoSWW. It may simply be a minor error, the likes of which are inevitable in any text, and of which it is uninteresting and unfair to nitpick. But, for the life of us, we have no idea what the authors might have intended to ask. Make of it what you will:
UPDATE: For those hoping that context will help make sense of the exercise, the section of the text is an introduction to factoring over complex numbers. And, the text’s answer to the above exercise is A = 2, B = 5, C = -1, D = 2.
