Witch 113: Smoothing Over the Cracks

This one is a combo WitCH. The main concern is a multiple choice question from last week’s Methods Exam 2. The question may not be an “error” in the newspaper sense, but it is bad. To appreciate some (but far from all) of its badness, however, we need to see VCAA’s solution. We won’t likely see that solution, however however, for months, if ever; transparency is not VCAA’s strong suit (Section 7).

To deal with this, we’ve teamed up last week’s MCQ with a similar MCQ from the 2021 Exam 2, together with VCAA’s solution to that earlier question from the exam report. Last week’s question appears first. Continue reading “Witch 113: Smoothing Over the Cracks”

WitCH 85: The Continuation of MAV’s Trials

With Methods exams next week, this one’s kinda important.

We try to avoid critiquing, or even being in the same room as, third party VCE practice exams. They are invariably clunky and weird, with plenty to criticise, but they matter infinitely less than the yearly screw-ups of the official exams.

Even MAV trial exams we do our best to ignore. Yes, the MAV is (too) closely aligned with the VCAA (with a number of people in conflicted, dual roles), and so MAV has a significantly greater professional and moral obligation to maintain high standards. But still, third party is third party, and we try our best to just ignore MAV’s nonsense. On occasion, however, MAV’s nonsense matters sufficiently, or is simply sufficiently annoying, to warrant a whack.

Continue reading “WitCH 85: The Continuation of MAV’s Trials”

WitCH 58: Differently Abled

Like the previous post, this one comes from Maths Quest Mathematical Methods 11, and is most definitely a WitCH. It can also been seen as a “contrast and compare” with WitCH 15.

Subsection 13.2.5, below, is on “differentiability”. The earlier part of chapter 13 gives a potted, and not error-free, introduction to limits and continuity, and Chapter 12 covers the “first principles” (limit) computation of polynomial derivatives. We’ve included the relevant “worked example”, and the relevant exercises and answers.