VCAA has just announced that,
[VCAA] require custom functionality – including User Defined Functions (UDFs) – on Computer Algebra System (CAS) calculators to be restricted during VCE Mathematics examinations from 2027.
The full statement is here, and is transcribed below.
This is, needless to say, very good news. Yes, there are churlish responses that come to mind, but let’s leave it as the good news it is. Continue reading “VCAA Does Something Very Right”
Over the summer, my family and I took a holiday, driving around Tasmania. It was great, of course, albeit the ferry over was a bad mistake.1 Our first stop was Stanley, a gorgeous, windswept town, featuring a mini Ayers Rock, and penguins that could be viewed unobscured by an MCG-sized stadium or a crazed horde of fellow tourists. Also in Stanley, as it happened, I found a book. Continue reading “Arithmetic, CAS and the Dangers of Obsession”
Alex Blanksby, the Vic Maths Notes guy, has posted a thorough and well-written and (too) even-handed summary of the CAS debacle.
As noted by Simon, the list of survey questions is different, depending upon whether you indicate you are a teacher, student or whatever: non-(teachers and students) get to respond to almost nothing, and are launched straight to Q21. Additionally, the survey is submitted without warning for teachers (clicking “Next” after Q15) and students (clicking “Next” after Q20).
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Well, more or less. VCAA is kind of sort of asking for teachers’ opinions on the insane UDF CAS arms race. Continue reading “VCAA Wants to Know What You Think About CAS”
Similar to some 2024 VCAA grading idiocy we have already noted, a colleague has just pointed out to us some idiocy from the grading of last year’s (CAS-poisoned) Specialist Mathematics Exam 2.
This “half a square” is not mathematics. It is anal retentive madness, courtesy of mathematical midgets who demonstrably lack any sense of proper mathematical thought or how to assess it.
Presumably, we’ll get the same grading idiocy from the same midgets this year. And, whether or not the same grading idiocy will appear, students will be stressing over whether the same grading idiocy will appear rather than concentrating upon anything of genuine mathematical depth.
CAS exams are insane. VCAA is insane.
There is a lot to write about Tuesday’s Age article on CAS and exams. The article was good but it was long and somewhat confused, tending to muddle specific CAS-exam issues with the more general CAS debate.* On the day of the article, I took a quick whack at the MAV (as did Greg Ashman today), quoting a teacher-friend who emailed me and who was horrified by MAV’s contribution to the article (and generally). I will return to the MAV, and more general issues of the Age article, after some dust has settled, but of the course the main culprit is VCAA. Here, I want to quickly highlight an astonishing but somewhat hidden aspect of the Age article, which proves VCAA to be both very stupid and very dishonest. Continue reading “VCAA’s Ludicrous Defence of CAS Programming for Exams”
Asking for a friend. Continue reading “Is it Possible to Hate the MAV Enough?”
In 2022, David Leigh-Lancaster and Kaye Stacey had an article published:
Evolution over Two Decades of CAS-Active Senior Secondary Mathematics Curriculum and Assessment
I stumbled across the article a year ago, pondered for a year what to do with it, and I’ve finally decided: give up. Life is simply too short to address all that is annoying and wrong with the article, so I’m simply putting the thing here as a WitCH and people can do what they want. Or nothing. I don’t care. I’ve read the damn thing three times, which is four times too many, and I just don’t care. Continue reading “WitCH 143: David and Kaye’s Excellent CAS Adventure”
This continues on from the previous post, where we whacked VCAA’s internal response to Burkard’s and my critique of 2022 exam questions with minor mathematical issues (part 3). This post considers questions Burkard and I identified as being poorly conceived (part 4).
Continue reading “VCAA’s Responses to Poorly Conceived 2022 Exam Questions”
A few years ago, before having introduced the secret exam business and the exam error lists, I posted a WitCH on a question from the previous year’s Specialist Exam 1. For me, there was a glaring issue with the question. It turned out that the commenters, while noting other clunky aspects, could not see this issue. Now my commenters includes, of course, the smartest maths teachers around, and so I was puzzled.1 So much so, that I checked the question with some mathematicians. As I wrote in a comment,
This post will shed a little light on VCAA’s inner sanctum; not much, but a little. First, the motivation for this post.
Kylie White has gone. Perhaps that was always going to be the case, terrible decision though it is, but the media crusade against her undoubtedly helped. The last arrow fired in this crusade, the day before White resigned, was, predictably, an article by the Herald Sun‘s Susie O’Brien:
VCAA staff dragged into exam scandal as authority accepts fault
You gotta love the Herald Sun‘s headlines. In this case, a more accurate headline would have been,
Susie O’Brien managed to drag VCAA staff into exam scandal Continue reading “VCAA’s Response to the 2022 Critique”