I need luck

[Superglucose]

I don't know what country you're from but America has an absolutely terrible method of teaching (and grading) math exams. I dropped from a B to a C because in the work I did for problems where I was asked to test various series for convergence, I didn't write the little sigmas. And then the professor got snooty because I didn't write which tests I used, but I shouldn't think it would be a mystery (generally when I'm dividing the nth term by the n+1th term, I'm using the RATIO TEST and I shouldn't need to say RATIO TEST in big, bold letters for you to understand that I'm using the RATIO TEST).

So I have another math test tomorrow, and had to self-teach power series because neither my professor nor my book were any help. Also have to self-teach differential equations. Also these math textbooks I've been forced to spend $150 on are officially making things worse not better.

[Don Julio Anejo]

You have a dumb ass of a professor. We all do at some point. No reason to blame the entire country.

I once got 60%ish on a math test because when it asked me to find area under a curve, I integrated it for all the questions... It wanted me to count the squares. And didn't even state so. The explanation I got? I shouldn't know integrals. Even though I took calculus AB before I took grade 12 math, my high school allowed and many students did so as well. The best part? It was the same teacher I had for calculus the year before.

[thubby]

check out youtube. throw in whatever you're having trouble with.
I swear i would have failed calculus but for youtube.

[mucat]

I don't know what country you're from but America has an absolutely terrible method of teaching (and grading) math exams.

No they don't. "America" doesn't have any way of teaching or grading exams; each professor decides that for themselves. I agree with you that it sounds like the Prof should have been able to tell clearly from context what you were doing with that series...so just find a time to talk to him, make your point calmly and intelligently, and don't get whiny or defensive (or offensive either, for that matter...) and maybe he or she will see your point of view.

One think the Prof won't say is "I'm required to teach this way because we live in the U.S." :smallwink:

EDIT: Ah, and by the way: while not writing "RATIO TEST" is perfectly OK in context, leaving out the Sigmas is not. The equation makes no sense without 'em!

[rakkoon]

On the subject "Please help out a foreigner": what is this calculus thingy that keeps showing up in all American movies and series?
Wikipedia gives me way too much information. Am I right in deducing its advanced Mathematics, differentials and integrals and stuff? Things you need to get into colleges/uni's ?

Oh and good luck, Superglucose !

[mucat]

what is this calculus thingy that keeps showing up in all American movies and series?
Wikipedia gives me way too much information. Am I right in deducing its advanced Mathematics, differentials and integrals and stuff?

Exactly. It's differentials, integrals, and stuff.

[Amiel]

The quick answer is that calculus involves differentiation and integrals; there are special forumulae to work out each.
If f(x) = x2 (the squaring function), then the derivative of f or f'(x) = 2x (doubling function)

With differentiation, you are trying to work out derivatives of functions, as denoted by f'(x).

I'm mostly familiar with differential calculus. This is what a typical graph looks like;
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0f/Tangent_to_a_curve.svg/400px-Tangent_to_a_curve.svg.png
Where x is the horizontal axis and y is the vertical axis.

Common notations to working with graphs include the Leibniz notation;
http://upload.wikimedia.org/math/6/7/a/67ac8d1ed96745357c342c55e979b8a3.png

For example, y = f(x), the derivative function therefore becomes http://upload.wikimedia.org/math/9/0/b/90bb92136e5bef00665a2c834a180805.png

By extrapolating we can work out that the derivative of the function f(x) is thusly
http://upload.wikimedia.org/math/f/5/8/f58fbfb6c826d7f0ba1e232552ee56f9.png

We can then conclude that http://upload.wikimedia.org/math/7/a/e/7aee7c8eaa94c32b58db3bbd963fa33d.png

I also remember these; http://upload.wikimedia.org/math/b/5/5/b55e6b83395e520601238fb320e20895.png; much fun was had by none.


And good luck!

[rakkoon]

Hmm. I actually remember some of this stuff. They are the reason I took up extra languages. So I could avoid them. Sadly this did not work because someone who studies 5 languages also needs a clear understanding of Integer factorization according to our schooling system. Who knew?

Lots of respect SuperG!

[TSGames]

Sorry, SuperGlucose, but a large part of American education, life, and work revolves around knowing how to play the game. Make people like you and push the right buttons and you'll do fine. In this case, even though your math teacher is clearly a jerk, he is fully within right to try to force good and clear form on you; you should have known that he expected that of you. Another's faults cannot justify your failings. If your teacher likes you and you do most of what they ask, you will get an A, that's all there is to it.

[mucat]

In this case, even though your math teacher is clearly a jerk, he is fully within right to try to force good and clear form on you; you should have known that he expected that of you.
Wait a minute...if all the teacher is doing is trying to push clear communication, how is he "clearly a jerk"? I mean, I disagree with him about the ratio test (tentatively, not having actually seen the test question), but it's a long way from there to personal insults.


Another's faults cannot justify your failings. If your teacher likes you and you do most of what they ask, you will get an A, that's all there is to it.
Now this is a lot worse than calling him "clearly a jerk". Now you're accusing the teacher of basing his grades on personal like or dislike, which is malpractice so severe that it should cost him his job if true. Nothing in the OP's post justifies this kind of accusation.

[skywalker]

Hmm. I actually remember some of this stuff. They are the reason I took up extra languages. So I could avoid them. Sadly this did not work because someone who studies 5 languages also needs a clear understanding of Integer factorization according to our schooling system. Who knew?

Heaven forbid you be... Well-rounded.


Sorry, SuperGlucose, but a large part of American education, life, and work revolves around knowing how to play the game.

Fixed this for you.


Make people like you and push the right buttons and you'll do fine. In this case, even though your math teacher is clearly a jerk, he is fully within right to try to force good and clear form on you; you should have known that he expected that of you.

Agreed, altho perhaps the teacher didn't clearly express this. That would be his only fault. There is nothing wrong with requiring proper communication. In fact, it's been very helpful to me. I failed several math classes across middle and high school, not because they counted me off for improper form, but because eventually I couldn't understand what was going on due to my proper form, and it was impossible for my instructors (or me) to go back and see what I had done wrong and either correct the mistake, or teach me how to do it better. When I got to college, I had the bright idea of actually using the form they provided, and my scores and actual understanding both soared.

SG, make your own luck by doing the work properly.


Wait a minute...if all the teacher is doing is trying to push clear communication, how is he "clearly a jerk"? I mean, I disagree with him about the ratio test (tentatively, not having actually seen the test question), but it's a long way from there to personal insults.

It is kind of a jerk move to require that stuff in certain contexts. And attitude is everything.

[Mauve Shirt]

Why does it say Canada for location if you are being subjected to the American grading system? Do you mean North American and Canada has just as bad/worse schooling?
Superglucose's location says California.

I wish you good luck, SG

[pinwiz]

he's from California, a state in the United States of America. Not Canada. :smallconfused:

EDIT: ninjas everywhere....

[Milskidasith]

The quick answer is that calculus involves differentiation and integrals; there are special forumulae to work out each.
If f(x) = x2 (the squaring function), then the derivative of f or f'(x) = 2x (doubling function)

With differentiation, you are trying to work out derivatives of functions, as denoted by f'(x).

I'm mostly familiar with differential calculus. This is what a typical graph looks like;
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0f/Tangent_to_a_curve.svg/400px-Tangent_to_a_curve.svg.png
Where x is the horizontal axis and y is the vertical axis.

Common notations to working with graphs include the Leibniz notation;
http://upload.wikimedia.org/math/6/7/a/67ac8d1ed96745357c342c55e979b8a3.png

For example, y = f(x), the derivative function therefore becomes http://upload.wikimedia.org/math/9/0/b/90bb92136e5bef00665a2c834a180805.png

By extrapolating we can work out that the derivative of the function f(x) is thusly
http://upload.wikimedia.org/math/f/5/8/f58fbfb6c826d7f0ba1e232552ee56f9.png

We can then conclude that http://upload.wikimedia.org/math/7/a/e/7aee7c8eaa94c32b58db3bbd963fa33d.png

I also remember these; http://upload.wikimedia.org/math/b/5/5/b55e6b83395e520601238fb320e20895.png; much fun was had by none.


And good luck!

That last one is just F'''(x), which shouldn't be that hard unless it's one of the annoying functions that gets bigger every derivative. Deriving f'''(x) where f(x) = X^3 is easy (it's 6; 3x^2, 6x, 6), deriving f'''(x) when f(x) = -csc(x^2) is a bit trickier.

[deuxhero]

Superglucose's location says California.

I wish you good luck, SG

I should slow down reading.


Yeah, I would expect California to be worse than the already poor average.

[Winter_Wolf]

I am SO glad I didn't have to do calculus in high school and managed to find a loophole to avoid it in uni. Matrices were a hell of themselves, and I stopped after algebra II.

That said, OP I don't really understand your complaint. Are you complaining because your teacher wants you to show your work? Or are you complaining because your teacher is a poor communicator and blames you for not being psychic and just knowing what they want? If it's the first one, then stop complaining and show your work. If it's the second one, my condolences on getting one of those teachers.

[ForzaFiori]

That last one is just F'''(x), which shouldn't be that hard unless it's one of the annoying functions that gets bigger every derivative. Deriving f'''(x) where f(x) = X^3 is easy (it's 6; 3x^2, 6x, 6), deriving f'''(x) when f(x) = -csc(x^2) is a bit trickier.

f(x)=-csc(x^2)
f'(x)=2(csc(x^2)-cot(x^2))
f''(x)=csc(x^2)(csc^2(x^2)2)+(-cot(x^2)(-csc(x^2)cot(x^2)2)
=(2csc(x^2)^3)+2(cot(x^2)^2)(-csc(x^2)
f'''(x)=(3(2(-csc(x^2)(cot(x^2)))+(cot(x^2)^2)(2(csc(x^2)(-cot(x^2))+(-csc(x^2)(2csc(x^2)^2)

I think. I may be off slightly, and the 3rd derivative needs simplifying.

I just took my calc AP exam last wednesday, so it's sorta fresh in my mind. If you give me this a year from now, I'll probably cry.

[UglyPanda]

I've been through that before. Even if you get the answer exactly perfectly right, you're going to lose a bunch of points for a lot of stupid crap.

Here's the thing: That's just how it is and you have no recourse.

Just do the homework and the quizzes and hope you can remember whatever the hell the teacher wanted you to write down*. Write down every stupid little thing you can, including basic arithmetic*.

It doesn't matter if you're doing Abel's theorem* or adding 2+2*, write every freaking thing down.


*Due to how life is, you will inevitably make a mistake on something you didn't write down and several things you did.**
**y''-6y'-9y=0; y(0)=3***
***Non sequitur

[SensFan]

As a math teacher to be, I must say, I agree 100% with your prof/teacher.

If you are going to use the Ratio Test, then say so in words.
If you are going to do Integration By Parts, then say so in words.

Your prof doesn't want you to tell him the answer; he can find that part out on his own. He wants you to show that you can explain the steps required to find the answer.

[absolmorph]

As a math teacher to be, I must say, I agree 100% with your prof/teacher.

If you are going to use the Ratio Test, then say so in words.
If you are going to do Integration By Parts, then say so in words.

Your prof doesn't want you to tell him the answer; he can find that part out on his own. He wants you to show that you can explain the steps required to find the answer.
... Isn't explaining the steps part of being a teacher, not a student?
Showing that you can do the steps should be the priority (and something that I despise doing but understand the importance), not explaining what the steps are (which would be writing Ratio Test or Integration By Parts).

[Pyrian]

Gah, this stuff makes me remember why I despised school so much. :smalltongue:
As a math teacher to be, I must say, I agree 100% with your prof/teacher.So, they really do teach you guys to do it this way.


If you are going to use the Ratio Test, then say so in words.
If you are going to do Integration By Parts, then say so in words.Seems like an enormous waste of time to me. And it's not like that's not a factor; it's either a timed test, cutting into your time to complete and verify your work, or it's homework, probably given to a student already far more busy than he ever will be outside of school.


Your prof doesn't want you to tell him the answer; he can find that part out on his own. He wants you to show that you can explain the steps required to find the answer.He can do that part on his own, too. In fact, that's his job. I want to know how to get the right answer and whether I got the right answer. Given that I have succeeded, your opinion of how I got there means nothing to me.

Being graded on wasting time is one of the best things about getting out of school. Learning is so much easier without such people getting in the way. :smallfurious:

[deuxhero]

Let me guess, your grader has a job secured by that thing called "Tenure"

I'd love to have MY job secured for life because I didn't mess up for a few years.

[Umael]

As a math teacher to be, I must say, I agree 100% with your prof/teacher.

If you are going to use the Ratio Test, then say so in words.
If you are going to do Integration By Parts, then say so in words.

Your prof doesn't want you to tell him the answer; he can find that part out on his own. He wants you to show that you can explain the steps required to find the answer.

Absolutely agree.

There are a couple of lessons being taught here, and math is just the most obvious one.

Show your work. Show what you are doing. Show how you are getting there. Show why it works. Show, show, show - that goes for so many professions, it's not funny. Going to be a lawyer? Need to show why your client is not guilty. Engineer? Show me how you build your bridge to standards. Performer? Show me you've been working on that double-back flip. Salesperson? Show me you know all the pros and cons of your product so that I know its the right one for me. Financial advisor? Show me how I get make all that money if I let you invest my money.
Do what the "man" says. The "man" is a person in a position of authority, and even if you do not respect that person, you should respect that position - even if you think that the person is abusing or misusing his position. If you do think the person is wrong, you either prove it or you suck it up and deal with it. It is not a question of freedom, but the value of following directions.
Life's not fair. You know that phrase about "grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference"? This is another lesson in teaching you that wisdom.

[skywalker]

He can do that part on his own, too. In fact, that's his job. I want to know how to get the right answer and whether I got the right answer. Given that I have succeeded, your opinion of how I got there means nothing to me.

You might have just guessed. And then you didn't really learn, did you? So I (the teacher) have failed.

I'd say most of the time, it's more important that you got the "how" right, rather than the "what." Yes, it's more important that you show proper technique than the proper solution. They're both important, but as a teacher, I'd be far more disconcerted by a student that just had blank paper and the proper answer, than the student who documented every step but got the wrong answer because of a missed "-" sign somewhere.

[Fri]

You might have just guessed. And then you didn't really learn, did you? So I (the teacher) have failed.

I'd say most of the time, it's more important that you got the "how" right, rather than the "what." Yes, it's more important that you show proper technique than the proper solution. They're both important, but as a teacher, I'd be far more disconcerted by a student that just had blank paper and the proper answer, than the student who documented every step but got the wrong answer because of a missed "-" sign somewhere.

From all of my school life it's true, and even preferable for me. Most, if all of my teacher from all of my school life will give you grade for wrong answer but clear description on what you're doing to get that answer, but no grade for correct answer but unclear or illogical way to reach that answer. how you get the answer is more important.

[Lord Loss]

My Science and Math Teahcer (yes I has her for both) :smallfurious: failed 60% of my science class last term and a lot of my math class.

When I attempted to talk to her about a test that TWO PEOPLE passed, she got angry at me. Good times, good times :annoyed:.

[Umael]

Given that I have succeeded, your opinion of how I got there means nothing to me.

Unless I (the teacher) believe that you cheated to get the right answer. Of course, as has been pointed out already, my opinion might get you bonus points if you came up with the wrong answer anyway - because I like to know you know the concepts, and I know where you made your mistake so I can correct you and we can move on to the next lesson.

[Winter_Wolf]

My Science and Math Teahcer (yes I has her for both) :smallfurious: failed 60% of my science class last term and a lot of my math class.

When I attempted to talk to her about a test that TWO PEOPLE passed, she got angry at me. Good times, good times :annoyed:.

Now THIS is epic teacher fail. If that many people are failing the class, teach is doing something WRONG. I hate those kinds of instructors. I'm not a certified teacher, but I do instruct some subjects, and I give a damn that people learn.

[Lord Loss]

She speeds through the manual, and, if multiple people complain about not understanding something, she calmly explains to us that she doesn't have time to re-look at it. And she assigns page upon page upon page of homework, generally speaking. Sometimes, she'll quickly teach us something and then give us a quiz on it.

:smallbiggrin:

[Pyrian]

There are a couple of lessons being taught here, and math is just the most obvious one.The go-to excuse for every piece of nonsense bandied about in school. None of it is true. The real world is so different that all the "intangibles" they're pretending to be teaching you are even less applicable than the tangibles they're supposed to be teaching you but are leaving aside in favor of making you do busywork.


Engineer? Show me how you build your bridge to standards.Y'know, if they actually TAUGHT validation in school that would be cool. But they don't, and this isn't it, and it's not a valid - or even meaningful - substitute. Validation isn't "showing your work", it's proving your work to a rigorous standard.

Writing excess verbiage doesn't teach you project validation (or any of your other examples). Seriously, I get programmers fresh out of college who write crap like (slightly exaggerated):

i++; // This line increments the "i" variable

No, really!? (Dude, anybody who should be reading your code can read code.) They were taught to comment, just another piece of busy work, but somehow they were never taught what comments are really for, what the value of the process is. (Seriously, there ought to be a class where you go back to something you yourself wrote three years ago and have to edit it.)


Do what the "man" says. The "man" is a person in a position of authority, and even if you do not respect that person, you should respect that position - even if you think that the person is abusing or misusing his position.Now you're stepping from misguided and into borderline evil. If your boss is abusing his position, you need to speak up and let his boss know, or move on. Nobody should put up with nonsense. It's not good for you, it's not good for your projects, it's not good for your resume, and it's not good for the company. Getting meaningful employee feedback is a constant struggle for many businesses.


It is not a question of freedom, but the value of following directions.Most disasters have at least one person (and often rather a lot) who could've prevented it but didn't on account of meekly following directions they knew were misguided and dangerous. You're teaching all the wrong things.


Life's not fair.Ah, yes, the other "use anywhere" excuse for behaving badly. It is far better to teach people how things should be done (e.g. fairly) so that they can (A) replicate that and (B) recognize when things are being done poorly. People who've had bad teachers make bad bosses and have difficulty telling bad bosses from good ones - they think being unfair is just the way things are done. In practice, being unfair means failing to reward good behavior and rewarding bad behavior, which in turn means paying unproductive workers and losing your most productive workers.


You might have just guessed. And then you didn't really learn, did you? So I (the teacher) have failed.Improbable in the extreme in most cases. The other cases are cheating. And who is the student cheating by circumventing their own education? Themself. Once people are actually paying for their own education rather than having it forced upon them, it's amazing how that sort of attitude simply evaporates into mist.

The whole attitude of "the students are there to make the teacher happy" is so backwards as to be ridiculous. The teacher is serving the students - they're the customers, the teacher is supposed to be the provider. We forget that because kids are forced into it and often don't like it (which is profoundly weird because learning is awesome, fun and wonderful yet school manages to make it horrible with all this "we're trying to teach you that life is unfair by showing our work").


I'd say most of the time, it's more important that you got the "how" right, rather than the "what."An attitude exclusive to academia. All too few people will examine the "how" if the "what" is acceptable (and again, I don't mean at all to demean the various kinds of validation, but that whole subject is fundamentally distinct), but outside of school you'll never get a pass for an incorrect "what" no matter how solid your "how" was.


how you get the answer is more important.Poor preparation for the results-oriented business world.

[arguskos]

Now THIS is epic teacher fail. If that many people are failing the class, teach is doing something WRONG. I hate those kinds of instructors. I'm not a certified teacher, but I do instruct some subjects, and I give a damn that people learn.
Actually, considering the INSANELY STUPIDLY hard physics program at my old university, where the pass rate was under 40% even for the best, most excellent professors you could find, it is possible that it's just that damn hard. Rare, but possible.

[Umael]

*snip*

:smallsigh:

Okay, Pyrian, this is one of those times when you aren't being objective, so I'm just going to step away from this conversion, okay?

[Lord Loss]

Actually, considering the INSANELY STUPIDLY hard physics program at my old university, where the pass rate was under 40% even for the best, most excellent professors you could find, it is possible that it's just that damn hard. Rare, but possible.

I'm in Grade 8 (Secondary 2).

[arguskos]

I'm in Grade 8 (Secondary 2).
Not honestly sure what system this is, sorry. It's clearly not an American system (8th grade doesn't include an option for failing). British, perhaps? I'm sorry, I am not crazy familiar with education system details in other countries, it's a personal failing. :smallfrown:

However, I can intuit that such a thing is vanishingly rare at best at that point in your education. Yeah, that's pretty rough, not gonna lie. :smallyuk:

Still, my general point stands: such difficulty curves are not always the fault of the professor. At times, the material just is that maddeningly hard. It's uncommon, but it does happen.

[Pyrian]

Let me turn this around for a second. Here I am, complaining about what was done and what teachers are being taught to do. I've talked enough about why that's a waste of time. Let me say some things about what should be getting done and is not getting done.

Forget that student who got the right answer without explaining why. He or she is fine, and probably asking lots of questions about the one or two questions he or she did get wrong because that person wants to know why. Odds are, they even found an error in your key. However annoying you may find this person (and I have no doubt that's the REAL reason for all those requirements - it's not about teaching, it's about feeling that your authority is respected as if you were the master rather than the employee, but that's all backwards - the teacher is there for the benefit of the student, not vice-versa, and don't ever forget that), they're not the ones who aren't learning the material.

The ones who aren't learning the material probably looked at their letter grade at the top of the exam, put it away and never thought about it again. THIS IS AN ENORMOUS PROBLEM AND SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED TO HAPPEN. (And you can be dang sure it's mostly not tolerated in the business world, short of financially insignificant errors in tremendous transaction sets and in some places not even then.)

So, teacher asks if there are any questions about the exam, fields a few questions from the brightest students, and the rest of the masses go on with their lives, with everybody involved knowing perfectly well that they don't know the material. Why is that fact all-but-ignored (except in terms of a letter)?

No, that's all wrong. Every single person should be absolutely required to get every single answer correct, no matter how many times they have to revise it, no matter how much they have to be walked through the process. (You might have to make some of the questions easier, but in most cases that's okay, many test questions right now are pitched specifically to generate a spread of results rather than to simply demonstrate mastery of the material.) You can't just leave people behind and then build on what they don't actually know. And the process of being held truly accountable for and correcting their own mistakes is a fantastic long-term teaching instrument and an excellent introduction to the sorts of things they're likely to be exposed to in the working world.


Okay, Pyrian, this is one of those times when you aren't being objective, so I'm just going to step away from this conversion, okay?Feel free to step away, Umael, but I hope you'll at least consider the possibility that teaching should be more about educating and less about punishing independence, skill, and initiative. The best learners are rarely allowed to shine and the mediocre performers are ignored - and I'm not making that up nor the only one saying it. I found your argument to be a pile of rationalizations and excuses for behavior you know perfectly well is bad, or else you wouldn't have to defend it with rationalizations and excuses.

[Lord Loss]

Quebec Education System. here's how it works:

If you fail a term by getting under 60% (like in the example I gave), nothing happens. If your average of all 4 terms is below 60%, you fail the year, you need to attend summer school. If you fail this, you are either expelled from the school and must attend another one or you must redo the year (not sure which). This only applies to SOME subjects.

[Milskidasith]

f(x)=-csc(x^2)
f'(x)=2(csc(x^2)-cot(x^2))
f''(x)=csc(x^2)(csc^2(x^2)2)+(-cot(x^2)(-csc(x^2)cot(x^2)2)
=(2csc(x^2)^3)+2(cot(x^2)^2)(-csc(x^2)
f'''(x)=(3(2(-csc(x^2)(cot(x^2)))+(cot(x^2)^2)(2(csc(x^2)(-cot(x^2))+(-csc(x^2)(2csc(x^2)^2)

I think. I may be off slightly, and the 3rd derivative needs simplifying.

I just took my calc AP exam last wednesday, so it's sorta fresh in my mind. If you give me this a year from now, I'll probably cry.

I'm probably wrong as well (I also just took the calc AP exam) but for that, you have to take 2x out, not 2 (derivative of x^2 is 2x).

Also, in regards to showing your work: Every math teacher, every English teacher, science teacher, every standardized test, *everything*, is more concerned with your method of solving the problem than whether or not you got the problem right. On the AP tests, chemistry and math problems are about 1 point for the answer, three for the work, on any test with a free response question, it's about a third whether or not your free response is the correct response and two thirds your defense of it (well, a little is using the right terminology, but you get my point). The only test in school where the answer is more important than the "how" is in History, and even then, it only because if you don't know the answer at all your logic isn't going to score you any points, but even if you know the answer, you still have to explain it to get good scores. This shouldn't be a problem in college.

And you know what? It makes sense. I'd honestly rather have somebody design a bridge with the math having a screwed up derivative due to putting 2 in place of 2x at a certain point than somebody who has the exact right derivative but no math, because I have no clue if they are doing the work. I'd rather have a lawyer who looked up the wrong case or read the jury wrong than the one who got by through winging it, because at least the first lawyer is likely to know what he's doing later, I'd rather hire a doctor who tested the bacteria but got a contaminated slide and identified it wrong than one who looked at me and guessed based on the most common cases and got it right, etc. I'd much prefer somebody who knows what he is doing but made a clear mistake than somebody who got it right through what could have been a fluke.*

*Note: If somebody manages to routinely get things right with no work shown, then obviously my opinion would go up, just like if somebody routinely did the correct work but made mistakes, my opinion would go down. However, on tests, where you only have a small number of samples, the work is more important than the answer for figuring out if you know it.

EDIT: Of course, the world doesn't work like that; you don't ever see why somebody got something wrong, you just see the number of times they did it right, and the number of times they got it wrong, so obviously you'd have to pick the one who got it right. In theory, which obviously wouldn't work, it would be better to get the "how" right. Of course, at high levels guessing probably wouldn't work *anyway*, but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't be able to show you know how to use the most efficient method for solving problems.

EDIT X2: In regards to showing work for school, however, it's necessary simply because of cheating. And yes, people say that cheating only cheats the person doing it... but that's a complete lie. It cheats everybody else as well, and quite possibly does no harm to the person cheating, especially if it is in a subject only slightly related to what job they go into. It hurts all the other students who do the work but now only look mediocre compared to the one who cheated.

[Umael]

Feel free to step away, Umael, but I hope you'll at least consider the possibility that teaching should be more about educating and less about punishing independence, skill, and initiative. The best learners are rarely allowed to shine and the mediocre performers are ignored - and I'm not making that up nor the only one saying it. I found your argument to be a pile of rationalizations and excuses for behavior you know perfectly well is bad, or else you wouldn't have to defend it with rationalizations and excuses.

Pyrian, I am more than willing to entertain the possibility that I am in the wrong, but I honestly feel that you will not do likewise. You already attacked me and your earlier post was, frankly, venomous.

I respect you. I really do.

But this apparently hit a sensitive point, and no matter how well-meaning and well-thought out your position is, I am not going to take the time to discuss this with you when I feel that your mind has already been made up and you are willing to indirectly villianize me for disagreeing with you.

So I'll just make a mental note not to talk about public education with you until you can convince me that you are going to be as open-minded and fair about this issue as I hope I am going to be. And if you don't want to bother, that's cool too. I don't need to convince you of anything, and hopefully you feel the same way about me. The Internet's a big place.

[Syka]

As someone who has been directly effected by someone else plagerising (aka, cheating), it doesn't just hurt the person doing it.

Twice I had to stay up until 2 or 3 in the morning to correct their work, make sure items were cited properly, rewrite it so we weren't copying, etc. It seriously stressed me out wondering if there was something I missed in my examination of their work. I was basically doing 2-3x the work I was supposed to because my groupmates wouldn't do it (yes, we ended up having TWO people who copied).

The teacher didn't do anything to those students. I didn't tell him directly who it was, but I told him we were having an issue with it and asked to be split off in a group with the two others who were not doing this.

I, as well as the two other honest students, were sincerely worried about what would happen if a group paper was flagged for plagerism. I may possibly still go in to academia, and an academic dishonesty charge would ruin that. Another group member is in the Army and an academic dishonesty charge would ruin her established career.

HIS problem was jeopardizing OUR lives.





Also, math teachers et al. aren't having you show your work to torture you or because they don't want to do it themselves. It's important that they see you know the HOW because if you don't grasp the HOW, you can't fully grasp the concept. It's why my Economics teacher (as horrible as his final was) made us compute our own t-Statistics and will give partial credit if we mess up one number but show we know how we did it. It's why on my Finance T-F questions, we have to give justification and even if we get the T-F part, we can still get partial (or even full) credit if we have a valid defense.

It's shows them that they were able to clearly teach you how to do what they were supposed to teach you.

Hell, in AP Calculus I had to do the long way to get derivatives. He knew we knew how to do the short cut from Pre-Calc, but he had to know we knew how to do the long-way, which shows WHY you get the derivative that way.

[ForzaFiori]

Not honestly sure what system this is, sorry. It's clearly not an American system (8th grade doesn't include an option for failing). British, perhaps? I'm sorry, I am not crazy familiar with education system details in other countries, it's a personal failing. :smallfrown:

However, I can intuit that such a thing is vanishingly rare at best at that point in your education. Yeah, that's pretty rough, not gonna lie. :smallyuk:

Still, my general point stands: such difficulty curves are not always the fault of the professor. At times, the material just is that maddeningly hard. It's uncommon, but it does happen.

8th grade does include options for failing. Not sure about your state, but in SC, if you have below a 70% (in otherwords, an F) in either: English, Math, OR any two classes, you fail the year, and must either: make up the failed classes in summer school (and pass them) or repeat the year.



Teacher's wanting a student to know HOW to get an answer more than just what the answer is really helps alot. By drilling the method into someone, it lets them quickly adapt to something ALMOST like it. IE, in my math class, we drilled just the basics in Calculus. We'd do simple derivatives, some basic Trig derivatives, etc, and then our teacher wanted the derivative of Csc(2x^2)/Sin(x^3). Because we knew the METHOD behind everything (the chain rule, the quotient rule, etc) rather than just memorizing some answers, it was easy to do, even though it was a little different than anything we had before. By making you show your work and your method, your teacher makes sure that you can branch out and take on the bigger problems.

[arguskos]

8th grade does include options for failing. Not sure about your state, but in SC, if you have below a 70% (in otherwords, an F) in either: English, Math, OR any two classes, you fail the year, and must either: make up the failed classes in summer school (and pass them) or repeat the year.
Here in Ohio, it's a bit different. Failing a class doesn't always automatically relegate you to summer school, depending on the circumstances (at least, that was the case 7 years ago, when I was in 8th grade).

[Pyrian]

EDIT X2: In regards to showing work for school, however, it's necessary simply because of cheating.I really hope this is an exaggeration. There are plenty of standardized multiple-choice scantron tests being given out.


It hurts all the other students who do the work but now only look mediocre compared to the one who cheated.Anybody want to hear my "grading on a curve" rant? ...No? Okay. :smallcool: Anyway, I don't want to be on the record here arguing that cheating is okay or anything like that. I'm not convinced this is a good and worthwhile (or even effective) way to fight it, especially given the price I've seen paid.


But this apparently hit a sensitive point...You hit several. The "life is unfair" as an excuse for unfair behavior inflicted upon society's most helpless is a whole additional kettle of rage, but that has more to do with parenting, honestly.


...I feel that your mind has already been made up...12 years is a long time to see patterns and set opinion. Changing my mind is unlikely to be easy, especially when you're towing a party line that we know all too well is not working so great. It was all too obvious for all too long that the priority was on doing lots of work and not on learning. I saw our valedictorian get a terrible grade on a Bio assignment for an entirely perfect set of answers on the grounds that it was too concise, while I got an A+ on the same assignment by putting an extremely verbose answer to the first question and then stapling a large completed Spanish assignment behind it. I've received F's for perfect Physics answers because I glossed over basic arithmetic. High School and earlier punished me horribly not despite a love of learning, but because of it. I'd come out of every class knowing all the material, acing AP exams, but my grade? That was on the mercy of the teacher, really. It would have been easier if I'd wanted good grades but what I wanted was to learn, and I had little patience for the various obstacles thrown in the way of that.

But what I really resent was the excuses, the same things you've repeated here (I assume you didn't come up with them because I've heard them so many times before). I resent them because I believed them. I believed it when they said the real world was the same or worse. It's not. Even College starts to take the attitude that the student is availing themselves of a paid service. Working, efficiency is appreciated and admired. If you can clearly express a twenty-page paper in a page-and-a-half, that's a failure in school, and an invaluable skill anywhere else. Again and again I've been professionally complimented and rewarded for the exact same behaviors for which I was beat down in school.

Moving quickly through the material? That's good now! Accomplished a great deal with relatively little effort? That's a plus in business! (Just try that in High School.) Speaking up when the boss is doing something that...could be better? Rewarded! Questioning procedures and suggesting ways to improve them? Heck, we have whole systems of buzzwords around that (six sigma, anyone?)! Best of all, from my perspective, is the simple fact that the work has tangible benefits, that code I wrote sees daily, practical use, rather than being the same throwaway busywork that we're all doing, for many of us long beyond the point of mastery of the educational material and well into pointless drudgery. I don't mind drudgery so much if somebody's going to use the result.


...to indirectly villianize me for disagreeing with you.It's not personal. I don't think you came up with any of this. (I do think you've bought into it, but few people buck the systems they grew up with, nor the justifications thereof, however paper-thin some of them are.) The system is built this way. I think it needs a substantial overhaul, and I think the place to start is with the notion that education is a service.


As someone who has been directly effected by someone else plagerising (aka, cheating), it doesn't just hurt the person doing it.I think your example strays quite far from the original discussion, but I'm sorry I minimized your experience with that statement. I maintain that cheating is a self-defeating behavior and that forcing students to show all the steps to get a correct answer is not an efficient way to fight cheating, but I absolutely concede that cheating is bad and should not be tolerated in the academic environment.


It's important that they see you know the HOW because if you don't grasp the HOW, you can't fully grasp the concept.The person who glances at the problem and can figure out the answer in their head correctly is not the person who is having difficulty with the concept.


...and will give partial credit if we mess up one number but show we know how we did it.I don't have a problem with that sort of thing. Obviously the person who does most of the steps right deserves a better grade than the person who just writes down the wrong answer. That's a risk I'd've been happy to take.


Hell, in AP Calculus I had to do the long way to get derivatives. He knew we knew how to do the short cut from Pre-Calc, but he had to know we knew how to do the long-way, which shows WHY you get the derivative that way.We had to do that. Once. Which is fine. If we'd had to do it for every derivative in the whole class, then yeah, that would've been... A waste of everybody's valuable time that would've been much better spent learning and reviewing new concepts.

[Ashery]

Hey look. Another one of these...

Since I'm a chronic procrastinator and my Topology comp is later this week, I'll throw in my thoughts.


And then the professor got snooty because I didn't write which tests I used, but I shouldn't think it would be a mystery (generally when I'm dividing the nth term by the n+1th term, I'm using the RATIO TEST and I shouldn't need to say RATIO TEST in big, bold letters for you to understand that I'm using the RATIO TEST).

It all comes down to one simple question:

Did the professor phrase the question as: "Check if each of the following converge. State which test you used."

OR: "Check if each of the following converge."

If the former, then the professor *should* mark you off if you forgot to write it down. Now, the amount he marks you off is still a matter of debate. If each of the questions was worth ten points, losing two to three would be considered perfectly fair. Of course, taking off eight points for such a mistake is bull****, but that's not being debated by me.

This *also* applies if the professor verbally stated at some point that he expects you to write down which method you used.

Now, if he never made it clear that he wanted you to answer in such a manner, then yes, it's bull****.


I've been through that before. Even if you get the answer exactly perfectly right, you're going to lose a bunch of points for a lot of stupid crap.

But how do you know you got the answer right? How can you be *certain* that your answer is right if you don't fully understand *how* to get it? Or if you cannot quickly glance over your work and identify where you made a mistake?

As skywalker and the others have said, proper form goes a *long* way in helping you understand math.


... Isn't explaining the steps part of being a teacher, not a student?
Showing that you can do the steps should be the priority (and something that I despise doing but understand the importance), not explaining what the steps are (which would be writing Ratio Test or Integration By Parts).

The teacher explains the steps during the lecture; the student explains the steps during the exam.


Seems like an enormous waste of time to me.

God forbid you waste a couple seconds writing the words "Ratio test."


Given that I have succeeded, your opinion of how I got there means nothing to me.

How wonderfully short sighted of you.

Here's a question for you: How do you know your answer is correct?


Here's what I dont get: You're complaining that a professor marked off some points for not writing two simple words on exam. You just missed some of the easiest possible 'gimme points' that can exist on an exam. Hell, the only thing easier would be if a professor gave away a few points for just writing your name on the exam.

Return to responses:


Writing excess verbiage doesn't teach you project validation (or any of your other examples). Seriously, I get programmers fresh out of college who write crap like (slightly exaggerated):

i++; // This line increments the "i" variable

No, really!? (Dude, anybody who should be reading your code can read code.) They were taught to comment, just another piece of busy work, but somehow they were never taught what comments are really for, what the value of the process is. (Seriously, there ought to be a class where you go back to something you yourself wrote three years ago and have to edit it.)


This bit, however, is well said.


Improbable in the extreme in most cases. The other cases are cheating. And who is the student cheating by circumventing their own education? Themself. Once people are actually paying for their own education rather than having it forced upon them, it's amazing how that sort of attitude simply evaporates into mist.

Bahahaha. How wrong you are.


The whole attitude of "the students are there to make the teacher happy" is so backwards as to be ridiculous.

Holy ****, what school did you go to? :x I've never *once* been exposed to this viewpoint, and one of my parents is a teacher.


An attitude exclusive to academia. All too few people will examine the "how" if the "what" is acceptable (and again, I don't mean at all to demean the various kinds of validation, but that whole subject is fundamentally distinct), but outside of school you'll never get a pass for an incorrect "what" no matter how solid your "how" was.

And what if the "what" isn't acceptable? If a program you're creating has some bugs, do you start over from scratch or examine the code to figure out where the bugs are?


Forget that student who got the right answer without explaining why. He or she is fine, and probably asking lots of questions about the one or two questions he or she did get wrong because that person wants to know why. Odds are, they even found an error in your key.

Yes, the person who has given no indication to me that they know what the hell they're doing is just fine. They didn't just happen to get the right answer by using an improper procedure (Yes, I've had this happen several times) or by copying off of another paper. Better yet, how would I know the person who got the answer *wrong* but just made a simple 2+2=5 type of mistake knows exactly how to do whatever it was I am testing them on, but is just a bit careless?


...and I have no doubt that's the REAL reason for all those requirements - it's not about teaching, it's about feeling that your authority is respected as if you were the master...

What the ****?

Seriously.

What the ****?


The ones who aren't learning the material probably looked at their letter grade at the top of the exam, put it away and never thought about it again. THIS IS AN ENORMOUS PROBLEM AND SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED TO HAPPEN. (And you can be dang sure it's mostly not tolerated in the business world, short of financially insignificant errors in tremendous transaction sets and in some places not even then.)

So, teacher asks if there are any questions about the exam, fields a few questions from the brightest students, and the rest of the masses go on with their lives, with everybody involved knowing perfectly well that they don't know the material. Why is that fact all-but-ignored (except in terms of a letter)?

No, that's all wrong. Every single person should be absolutely required to get every single answer correct, no matter how many times they have to revise it, no matter how much they have to be walked through the process. (You might have to make some of the questions easier, but in most cases that's okay, many test questions right now are pitched specifically to generate a spread of results rather than to simply demonstrate mastery of the material.) You can't just leave people behind and then build on what they don't actually know. And the process of being held truly accountable for and correcting their own mistakes is a fantastic long-term teaching instrument and an excellent introduction to the sorts of things they're likely to be exposed to in the working world.

This bit I'm in complete agreement with...


...but I hope you'll at least consider the possibility that teaching should be more about educating and less about punishing independence, skill, and initiative.

...but stop this ****.

tl:dr

I should be studying for a comp and this was a welcome distraction.

[Ashery]

Hey look, a response two minutes before I hit submit. This may end up in a double post, but meh, someone will likely respond before I finish writing this.


I really hope this is an exaggeration. There are plenty of standardized multiple-choice scantron tests being given out.

Scantrons shouldn't come anywhere *near* a mathematics exam. Not only do they put far too much emphasis on the answer, but students should be studying in order to learn the material, not to learn techniques that are used to improve your odds on a multiple choice exam.


Anybody want to hear my "grading on a curve" rant? ...No? Okay. :smallcool: Anyway, I don't want to be on the record here arguing that cheating is okay or anything like that. I'm not convinced this is a good and worthwhile (or even effective) way to fight it, especially given the price I've seen paid.

So, if I write an exam that's a bit too hard, give me a fairer method for correcting that mistake since curves can't be used.

And what's this "price" you're talking about? That you have to indicate to me that you know what you're doing?


It was all too obvious for all too long that the priority was on doing lots of work and not on learning.

...But then you come and state something I am, once again, in complete agreement with. Our system *does* focus far too much on quantity over quality.

Not having much experience with highschool level biology, I can't provide an informed comment with respect to your valedictorian. However, while I *can* make a judgment with respect to physics, I would need to see the exam in question to make an accurate one.

Examples: If I was asking a very basic arithmetic question (In a class where that was just introduced) that involved carrying, I'd expect almost every student to write the value they're carrying above the tens column (ala 16 + 17). I'd be a bit more lenient on not forcing everyone to write out their work in this situation, simply because it's a very basic two step process, but a student would have had to indicate to me that they have a *very* strong understanding of what's going on before I allowed them to get away with it.

Now, if I was asking some horribly ****ed up integration question, I wouldn't demand that students write out every bit of minor arithmetic (Although it *would* be to your benefit to do so), but they damn well better write out all the relevant integration steps.


Working, efficiency is appreciated and admired. If you can clearly express a twenty-page paper in a page-and-a-half, that's a failure in school, and an invaluable skill anywhere else.

This bit I'm in complete agreement with. As well as the paragraph following.


I think your example strays quite far from the original discussion, but I'm sorry I minimized your experience with that statement. I maintain that cheating is a self-defeating behavior and that forcing students to show all the steps to get a correct answer is not an efficient way to fight cheating, but I absolutely concede that cheating is bad and should not be tolerated in the academic environment.

We're also talking about two vastly different fields. With mathematics, having students show how they got something can prevent quite a large amount of cheating (It prevents someone from simply glancing at another paper, seeing the answer, and writing that down), even if it's not perfect.


The person who glances at the problem and can figure out the answer in their head correctly is not the person who is having difficulty with the concept.

What happens when the problems develop in complexity to the point where the student cannot do it in their head?


I don't have a problem with that sort of thing. Obviously the person who does most of the steps right deserves a better grade than the person who just writes down the wrong answer. That's a risk I'd've been happy to take.

Then you would've likely walked out of a class with a grade a full letter or two below what you're actually capable of.

[Milskidasith]

I really hope this is an exaggeration. There are plenty of standardized multiple-choice scantron tests being given out.

You don't have to show your work on a scantron, yes. There is cheating on scantron tests as well. Granted, there is less cheating on scantron tests than on "take this work home and turn it in" but there is far *more* cheating, and it is far easier to cheat, on a scantron test in a class than it is to cheat on a test where you have to show your work, simply due to the volume of material to copy and the fact that, speaking from experience, people attempting to copy work they don't understand will not be able to copy effectively; they either write everything exactly the same, which is obvious, or drop stuff that makes the work complete, but they'll never be able to *add* in the small steps that don't need to be written in for most teachers, like putting everything over 4 in between 4x=8 and x=2, for an incredibly simple example.


Anybody want to hear my "grading on a curve" rant? ...No? Okay. :smallcool: Anyway, I don't want to be on the record here arguing that cheating is okay or anything like that. I'm not convinced this is a good and worthwhile (or even effective) way to fight it, especially given the price I've seen paid.

Wait, where was grading on a curve mentioned? Even if it's not on a curve, the guy who cheats to get the highest grade in the class/a 100 (depending on how he cheats; iPhone plus a ringer with a major gets you pretty close to a 100, copying answers gets you the top of your class or as close as you can get to people who you are "friends" with), and that makes the legitimate 2nd in classes/95s look worse. If it's on a curve, it's even worse, because the 95 could be shunted down to a really low grade if enough people who would have set the scale for a zero due to failing cheated. Even on a curve that's purely positive (such as one teacher I have, who's system is the root of your grade *10), the cheating grade is *always* going to hurt the people who are being cheated off of due to possibly getting zeroes for the work they actually did *and* the fact the legitimate accomplishments of others get outshined. Cheating is a *massive* problem, even on standardized tests.

[Umael]

You hit several. The "life is unfair" as an excuse for unfair behavior inflicted upon society's most helpless

Life IS unfair.

But I never said it should be.

Will you please do me the favor of not reading into my words things I did not say? I get it, you don't like the fact that life is not fair, and it rankles. I am aware.



12 years is a long time to see patterns and set opinion. Changing my mind is unlikely to be easy, especially when you're towing a party line that we know all too well is not working so great.

...that is an insinuation that I'm being a sheep.

I believe I resent that.



It was all too obvious for all too long that the priority was on doing lots of work and not on learning.

:smallsigh:

Your experience does not mirror mine. Let's move on.



It's not personal.

Then I humbly submit that you work a little on your delivery next time. Even if the insult is indirect and unintentional, it is still an insult.



I don't think you came up with any of this. (I do think you've bought into it, but few people buck the systems they grew up with, nor the justifications thereof, however paper-thin some of them are.)

Maybe I just see the reasoning - on both sides.

Something I doubt you do.



The system is built this way. I think it needs a substantial overhaul, and I think the place to start is with the notion that education is a service.


I think that the system has major problems with it, and that it is too complex for a simple solution. I am not saying that your idea is incorrect, however.


Okay, I said I'm going to bow out, so I'm going to try this again. I do not want to get into an argument on the Internet. It wastes time and energy, as well as being an exhibition in public disgrace the likes of which I can think of several alternatives that are equally as degrading but at least pay better.

[Syka]

The person who glances at the problem and can figure out the answer in their head correctly is not the person who is having difficulty with the concept.

I don't have a problem with that sort of thing. Obviously the person who does most of the steps right deserves a better grade than the person who just writes down the wrong answer. That's a risk I'd've been happy to take.

We had to do that. Once. Which is fine. If we'd had to do it for every derivative in the whole class, then yeah, that would've been... A waste of everybody's valuable time that would've been much better spent learning and reviewing new concepts.

You may be willing to take that risk, but then you are also accepting getting a lower grade. On the final (she didn't say this on the midterm), my professor outright said that if you just put true or false with no explanation, even if correct, you'd only get half credit for that question.

It's also why many professors WANT all the steps spelled out for them. So they know you know the correct way to do it, AND can see if you made a slight calculation error. If you mess up a + or - that'll result in a lot less points off than if you set an equation up wrong. So they want to see you set the equation up. I don't understand why you think this is some power trip thing. The teachers I know who have required showing all work have been the best teachers I've had because they care. The ones who aren't adament about it, they don't care and like the ability to grade easily. (Also, the ones who have you show your work will go through if it's a multi-part question and you get the first question wrong to see if you got the rest of it right with the result you got in the first part. For a class of 20+ students, with several portion to each question...that's a lot of work.)


As for your last point, we have no indication that the teacher was repeatedly requesting something silly like doing long-form derivatives when the short cut is known. For all we know, this is the first test utilizing that and/or they haven't taught the 'short cut' in this particular class, which is valid for wanting to see it long form.

I usually give teachers the benefit of the doubt, and in this case I'm not so much seeing where the teacher is a jerk. Particularly if he's been with the teacher all year/semester, the teaching style and requirements for the test (label Tests, show all work, etc) have likely not changed.

ETA: With the cheating thing, the same kid (and four others...) got called on it for another class. It resulted in the teacher having to double check every single person's paper each week against the article we used. This took up more of her time and made her doubt each of us.

Same kid also was looking off of someone's test on the final according to a friend of mine. It hurts him, but it would also hurt whomever he is looking off of. My sisters fiance was actually accused of cheating because him and another kid got the same question wrong in the exact same, very odd, manner. The only reason he was saved is that a TA was right next to him while he was doing that problem and the kid in question was on the other side of the room.

Even if it was cheating on the other kids part, her fiance would have taken the fall as well. Cheating doesn't just hurt the cheater.

I personally liked the method we used during AP exams and some other tests where there was an actual tall barrier placed between each student so they couldn't look at each other's tests.

[Milskidasith]

I never had a barrier during the AP exams. :smallconfused:

Anyway, the problem with having no work shown is that you can't tell if the student just knew it in their head or if they copied the answer or if they guessed or if they used the wrong formulas and got the right answer somehow. Even if you were to administer the test orally or have a cheating proof test (impossible) then you wouldn't know their thought process unless they said what they were doing/wrote it down.

[Cealocanth]

Tell me about it. We just went through our latest Interims and one question was multiple choice.

"Mary was a _______ when she cleaned her room.
A: A b*zz*ng fly.
B: A smooth wave.
C: A crazy chicken.
D: neat."
The answer was not B, C, or D. I don't know how that makes a lick of sense
, the real term is "a busy bee." I got it wrong because she could only be neat. Do they just let any sap off the street in charge of making these stupid tests. Not to mention we were expected to fill out a whole cubic equation graph and show our work for every x within the 15 minutes we had to work with. :smallfurious:

PS: I had to censor because it's illegal to give away the correct answer to these tests. I can say what it isn't though.

[ForzaFiori]

I didn't have a barrier in my AP test either. Though, you are required to sit at least 5 feet away from all other testers. (4 in calculus because everyone has a different test)

Do they actually prosecute people who talk about the questions on an AP or other such test? I mean, I know they say that we can never talk about the questions ever, to anyone, for any reason, blah blah blah, but honestly, after say...a week, I don't see the point. The tests have to be given on a specific day (IE, AP calculus this year HAD to be given between 8AM and 9AM (7AM and 8AM in Alaska) on May 5th) and no other times. What difference does it make if someone knows the answer to a question a week after the test has been sent out? We're allowed to discuss the long answer questions 2 days after word, why not multiple choice?

[Syka]

Maybe it was my school. They had these nice cardboard/wooden wall things that you could set up and divide a normal table in to four seats. It was nigh impossible to look around it without being completely obvious.


Also, I've known a lot of people (myself included) who have 'discussed' questions post-AP test. I think as long as you aren't copying them down or archiving them or anything like that it's OK. Like, we told our Economics teacher about this one question for the sheer look of shock on her face (none of us had any idea what they were asking since she hadn't taught it, and she couldn't believe they asked it). I don't remember what it was, but it was ridiculous. As far as I know, none of us have ever been prosecuted. :smallwink:



...I'm noticing a correlation between "ridiculous test" and "Economics". :smallamused:

[arguskos]

Do they actually prosecute people who talk about the questions on an AP or other such test? I mean, I know they say that we can never talk about the questions ever, to anyone, for any reason, blah blah blah, but honestly, after say...a week, I don't see the point. The tests have to be given on a specific day (IE, AP calculus this year HAD to be given between 8AM and 9AM (7AM and 8AM in Alaska) on May 5th) and no other times. What difference does it make if someone knows the answer to a question a week after the test has been sent out? We're allowed to discuss the long answer questions 2 days after word, why not multiple choice?
Yes, they do. My high school actually had to discipline a few students over this to avoid greater issues for them. One student found to have kept discussing the AP test was actually suspended.

[Milskidasith]

The real problem is mostly discussing the free response questions; at one point on the AP US. History test last year (or it might have been the English) an east coast student finished early, the teacher had started early, etc, so they talked about it immediately... and the teacher called her niece on the west coast and, during the break and during the test, she wrote notes for the potential topic, which were noticed by the teacher there (or something like that) and a whole mess of tests got invalidated entirely.

Discussing the multiple choice questions can be bad, but as long as you aren't saying the exact question, it's fine; for example, I'm pretty sure I won't lose my test results for saying "I guessed on the question on the US History exam about The Feminine Mystique and got the fact it's about *insert what it was about, I already forgot* right."

Also, as for the question listed, guessing D was pretty bad; it was grammatically incorrect. A was actually reasonable; none of them were expressions, but A made sense as a metaphor. A "busy bee" wouldn't have been selected as an answer choice because it was too much of an "obvious" answer; if all of the answers are metaphors, but one is a cliche, the cliche is going to draw attention, which means a question with "a busy bee" is likely to have more of the students who scored fives get it wrong than usual, or more of the students who scored low get it right, making it invalid. As a side note, seriously, why would you not guess A just because it wasn't the normal expression? If I said somebody was "He had liquid nitrogen in his veins" would you not choose that answer just because it wasn't the cliche of icewater, even if it still made perfect sense?

There is *way* more that goes into making those questions than you want to know about; my English teacher worked on the AP English test a couple years, and my math teacher has gotten a job writing for the ACT, and let me tell you, they use about as much math and statistics as you would use doing your taxes for the questions. Pays well, though; my math teacher gets something like 450 dollars, cash, for writing 13 potential questions, and more for going on an all inclusive trip to the ACT headquarters to study and discuss questions with a panel of other teachers.

[Cealocanth]

Also, as for the question listed, guessing D was pretty bad...

I see how I got that wrong, and how I typed that wrong. :smalltongue: A buzzing fly just doesn't make any sense at all. I guess I'm not a professional test taker like you. I'll heed your advice next time.

[Milskidasith]

I see how I got that wrong, and how I typed that wrong. :smalltongue: A buzzing fly just doesn't make any sense at all. I guess I'm not a professional test taker like you. I'll heed your advice next time.

It makes perfect sense; it's a metaphor. A calm wave wouldn't make any sense either (especially in that context) but if it was "as she practiced Yoga on her front lawn" the metaphor would be very appropriate.

[Pyrian]

As skywalker and the others have said, proper form goes a *long* way in helping you understand math.Understanding the math was never the problem in the first place.


This bit, however, is well said.Thank you. :smallcool:


Here's what I dont get: You're complaining that a professor marked off some points for not writing two simple words on exam.I'm complaining that 12 years of education consisted of upwards of 75% padding, and still much of my learning occurred of my own initiative. This is merely one example. Note, however, that the scale is similar; writing out the complete set of steps and describing them individually would typically have taken about four times as long. Time I could have spent verifying my answer, for example, or otherwise advancing my understanding in more productive ways.


And what if the "what" isn't acceptable?That's what I made the other post about. :smallcool: You seemed to approve.


You just missed some of the easiest possible 'gimme points' that can exist on an exam.That was often true for me, and yet, I was there to learn. Jumping through hoops for grades did not motivate me.


Holy ****, what school did you go to? :x I've never *once* been exposed to this viewpoint, and one of my parents is a teacher.Actions speak louder than words. I knew the material. They knew I knew the material. They knew I was going to ace the AP exam. When none of that matters, it's because something else matters. And then they tell you almost straight up: "We're going to be unfair because life is going to be unfair." But that's not why - that's rationalization. Turned out, life wasn't so bad; it was all school.


So, if I write an exam that's a bit too hard, give me a fairer method for correcting that mistake since curves can't be used.I've been called out. :smallcool: You say "fairer" because you know perfectly well that the system isn't especially fair in the first place. A one-class curve punishes people for the intelligence of their classmates, and rewards them for other's failure. (You can mitigate this by excluding outliers, but only to a certain extent.) But then we get back to my primary thesis: is the purpose of this test to teach, or to judge? Grades are primarily about judging, IMO. (Concession: they also help motivate people to learn. Well, other people.) I would restrict them to standardized systems across very large groups of people; after all, beyond passing they're mostly about getting into College, so the College is going to want to be able to compare across all their applicants as evenly as possible. In-class tests, IMO, should be about demonstrating a adequate mastery of the material, and as we discussed earlier, virtually every student should be getting virtually every answer right - not so much immediately, but eventually. They don't need to be hard (although in advanced math and physics there may be little way around that!).


Now, if I was asking some horribly ****ed up integration question, I wouldn't demand that students write out every bit of minor arithmetic (Although it *would* be to your benefit to do so), but they damn well better write out all the relevant integration steps.Heh. Never had this sort of problem in higher math. I'm not that smart. I could never do a difficult integration without writing down the steps.


What happens when the problems develop in complexity to the point where the student cannot do it in their head?I'm not saying they have to. But, y'know, I'm sure I got dinged at some point for doing 16+17=33 without explicitly carrying the 2.


...but a student would have had to indicate to me that they have a *very* strong understanding of what's going on before I allowed them to get away with it.My experience was that teachers like that were the overwhelming exception, and not the rule. I definitely had a few.


Life IS unfair.

But I never said it should be.Here (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showpost.php?p=8467528&postcount=23). Your post. Last bullet point. I took that as meaning that you support the school system in being unfair on account of the fact that such behavior supposedly better prepares people for the world outside. I challenge that notion "venomously", and most aspects of it, as discussed previously. I am not seeing a different interpretation thereof, but I'm open to explanation.


I get it, you don't like the fact that life is not fair, and it rankles.That is so close to the opposite of what I'm saying that I'm a bit mystified. Life has not been particularly unfair to me. (In fact, in many ways I'm a danged lucky punk.) It was school that was deliberately and systematically turned against, of all things, my desire to learn. The bitter irony of that left a mark. It was drilled into me over and over that complete mastery of the material was not enough, not even nearly enough, not even 25% of enough.


...that is an insinuation that I'm being a sheep.

I believe I resent that.Yeah, I think you're taking this too personally, then. "You're expressing an opinion I've heard a lot before" is not an insult.


Even if the insult is indirect and unintentional, it is still an insult.Umael, I set out to condemn in strong terms the argument I still think you made on precisely the grounds that I think it is morally unacceptable. There are limits to making such a statement come out nice.


Maybe I just see the reasoning - on both sides.

Something I doubt you do.Way to take the high ground. :smallamused: I believe I have sufficiently demonstrated my ability to discuss the issues involved on their merits and suggest productive ways to improve matters.


You may be willing to take that risk, but then you are also accepting getting a lower grade.Don't dangle grades in front of me. Dangle learning.


On the final (she didn't say this on the midterm), my professor outright said that if you just put true or false with no explanation, even if correct, you'd only get half credit for that question.This is the sort of thing where I'd usually get dinged for being too concise. I assure you I can follow basic instructions.


I don't understand why you think this is some power trip thing.Because my mastery of the material was never in question in the first place. And because it was spelled out to me that way too many times.


The teachers I know who have required showing all work have been the best teachers I've had because they care. The ones who aren't adament about it, they don't care and like the ability to grade easily.That's interesting. I had the exact opposite experience. I had a ton of teachers that wanted to see lots and lots written and very obviously never read any of it. The teachers that actually read all the stuff were quite happy - delighted, even - with concise answers.


I personally liked the method we used during AP exams and some other tests where there was an actual tall barrier placed between each student so they couldn't look at each other's tests.Yeah. Wonder what the cost would be?

[Milskidasith]

Pyrian, I have to say, overall, your argument is pretty much entirely based on your subjective experiences, which seem to be so far beyond the point of reason that you should realize it was your teachers, and not the system in general, that you hate.

I mean, honestly, when your argument actually consists of the fact you've lost points for not explicitly stating you carried the two on basic addition, you've gone from "the school system doesn't encourage learning, just padding your work out" to "my teachers were insane."

Also, honestly, do you *really* think that every teacher is perfectly capable of knowing if you know the material? When teachers have seven classes a day (or whatever it is at your system) with anywhere between ten and thirty students a day, unless you're the class idiot or the class smart kid (as in, the people the *kids* think are really dumb/smart, not necessarily the smartest people), teachers simply aren't able to adequately know if every student knows the material without a clear rubric... which, in this case, is testing. And if you can only prove that you know how to write down the correct answers, and there are plenty of other people with work shown with the exact same answer, it seems like the teacher may be leery of giving you the points.

Also, to an even *more* normal extent, you can take all of my math teachers, ever. Writing out the work to solve the problem was never *needed* to get full credit except on the lesson the work was taught in. If we were doing long form derivatives, then yes, you had to write out the long form derivative, because that was the entire point of the question. Once we knew the shortcuts, writing it out was unnecessary, but if you did the work, you could get points anyway if you proved you partially knew the material (though in this example, doing long form derivatives would get no points since it's about using the shortcut, which you kind of need to be even remotely effective in calculus). Sure, your experience may have proven to you that all teachers are horrible and require you to still be writing basic addition out and dividing on your paper with the subtraction method instead of using a calculator when you are doing calculus (or that seems to be the implication, anyway), but I have never had, nor heard of, a teacher that strict.

Yes, for comprehensive tests, they want you to show work. That's the thing, though: They are comprehensive tests. The AP calculus test requires you to write out anything you learned in calculus (save long form derivatives, because the shortcut was taught in calculus, and any other shortcuts that were taught, you can use), but doesn't require you to even finish solving the problems once you have it set up in quite a few cases. That's not unreasonable at all. You don't even have to finish the question, because simplifying the equation or adding all the numbers for your Riemann (sp?) sum are all skills that they assume you know. Yeah, you have to write out the work for integrating, but that's to prove that you know calculus, and that you aren't, say, really good at counting blocks on a graph or just getting the answer by plugging it in to your calculator without understanding the material.

So, in short, there are basically two parts to my argument: One, your experience, or at least your portrayal of it, is so completely beyond even the worst teachers I've ever heard of I cannot possibly assume that you are even the slightest bit objective on this topic, and you will clearly not change your mind (as an aside, 12 years of being in school doesn't mean you can't change your opinion; I am, at the moment, about to finish my junior year of high school, and I can tell you from 16 years of living that my opinion, no matter how long it has been set, can always change), and secondly, the school system as is already works close enough to the way you think it should work that I don't see why you are even arguing about it; the only things you seem to dislike are the fact that every school isn't giving out standardized tests for every grading periods grade and the fact that you have to show any work, even when the entire point of the lesson is to prove you know how to do the work.

EDIT X2: As a further aside, tall barriers do nothing to prevent a myriad number of ways to cheat; Iphones, headsets with somebody on the line feeding you the answers, texting, simply bringing in an illegal calculator and having it do all the work for you while also having a function programmed in that simply shows you the conversion of calculator symbols to the symbols you can write on the test to show you know the material, etc. Walls only prevent the most basic and least effective form of cheating on free response tests.

[Brewdude]

I seriously got this question in third quarter calc 2 at a top science/technical college in California. It was for a full third of the grade for the final.

There are 3 distinct pairs of shoes in a closet. If you pick out twp shoes from the closet, what is the chance that you pick out one of the distinct pairs?

My answer? 6/6 chance for the first shoe to be a shoe. 1/5 chance for the second shoe to be it's match, so 20% to get the correct pair. For this answer, I got 5/30 points of credit.

The correct answer was: There are 15 possible combinations of two shoes in the set of 6 shoes. 3 of them are correct, therefore 3/15 = 20% chance of getting the correct pair.

After some argument, I convinced them to give me 20/30 points, and I still simmer about that grade to this day.

[Pyrian]

^ That's a classic example of a puzzle where the idea is not to solve it, but to figure out what the designer intended. A lot of point-and-click games have things like that. Oddly, I was quite good at that particular "game" in school, but I found some of the puzzles in Monkey Island games maddening.

Milskidasith, I'm aware that I'm an extreme case, but that's more to do with my own traits. I do not think my teachers were particularly out of the ordinary, however. In fact, I suspect I had a relatively good experience; I had a stellar High School that was much more lenient than it strictly speaking had to be. Consider that I'm a pretty lone voice in this thread, despite a fairly wide swathe of geographic points. My issues with the educational system as I've known it are much larger than the degree of showing the work in a test. I take that as a pretty minor symptom; after all, it works reasonably well for most people most of the time.

There's a reason I flipped out at Umael's post specifically and not so much at the original situation.


Also, honestly, do you *really* think that every teacher is perfectly capable of knowing if you know the material?When the teacher is using your test to grade the rest of the class, they know you know the material. When (another) teacher is having you write the test, they're confident you know the material. When you raise your hand in class and the teacher simply asks you what they got wrong on the chalkboard, they're confident you know the material.

I got C's and D's in these same classes. Routinely. Personally, I didn't much care. When confronted, I'd say I knew the material, and that was what school was for. Then, I'd get some variant on Umael's post. Imagine my surprise to learn that the "real world" wasn't much like that at all.

EDIT:
...the school system as is already works close enough to the way you think it should work that I don't see why you are even arguing about it...:smallconfused: While I've been known to have long and in-depth arguments over the exact reasons why we agree on something, I assure you that reconfiguring the grading system and the test-review practices in a nearly complete overhaul is not all that minor. Besides, if I limited my internet discussions to arguments that were likely to actually have a significant effect in the real world, I probably wouldn't post at all. :smallwink:

Have a good evening, everyone! :smallcool:

[Milskidasith]

^ That's a classic example of a puzzle where the idea is not to solve it, but to figure out what the designer intended. A lot of point-and-click games have things like that. Oddly, I was quite good at that particular "game" in school, but I found some of the puzzles in Monkey Island games maddening.

I agree, the above situation was stupid.


Milskidasith, I'm aware that I'm an extreme case, but that's more to do with my own traits. I do not think my teachers were particularly out of the ordinary, however.

The examples you listed seem to prove that isn't the case; if you've got teachers docking points for not showing work on addition past third grade, they're pretty extreme.


In fact, I suspect I had a relatively good experience; I had a stellar High School that was much more lenient than it strictly speaking had to be.

I honestly have to say that if your teachers were doing what they were doing, whether or not the school was lenient on you for what your teachers probably assumed was laziness is the least of that schools problems.


Consider that I'm a pretty lone voice in this thread, despite a fairly wide swathe of geographic points.

I have considered it. It makes it even more likely your school, your personality, and your experience are outliers, and you cannot judge effectively. If I was the sole person arguing that asking students to demonstrate they know the techniques taught by the class, rather than simply how to get an answer, I'd (hopefully) realize I had no way of being objective in this situation.


My issues with the educational system as I've known it are much larger than the degree of showing the work in a test. I take that as a pretty minor symptom; after all, it works reasonably well for most people most of the time.

What exactly *are* your issues then? They seem to be people saying "real life is unfair", showing work on your test, and the fact that people don't care. Two of the three really can't be changed, and the other one is the issue we are discussing.


When the teacher is using your test to grade the rest of the class, they know you know the material.

I've had it happen before. The teacher just forgot the answer key and I was the school smart kid. Not that I didn't know the material (I think I got a -1 on the test out of about sixty questions), but I really doubt a teacher would be so incredibly lazy that they would just use your test as an answer key without actually having their own answer sheet. If they did, well, again, you had bigger problems.


When (another) teacher is having you write the test, they're confident you know the material.

Or they are incredibly lazy. I'm not sure how much confidence in the student matters when the teacher isn't even doing their job.


When you raise your hand in class and the teacher simply asks you what they got wrong on the chalkboard, they're confident you know the material.

That I can't disagree with.


I got C's and D's in these same classes. Routinely. Personally, I didn't much care. When confronted, I'd say I knew the material, and that was what school was for. Then, I'd get some variant on Umael's post. Imagine my surprise to learn that the "real world" wasn't much like that at all.

Again, this seems to be a problem with your teachers; in no class I have ever had has the work been more important than the answer unless they were teaching us how to do the work and showing our steps would be obvious. It's either that, or you didn't do your homework/projects, which are admittedly generally stupid, but also generally don't take much time. If you were getting C's and D's while getting all the answers right on your test and doing all your homework and projects and getting all of those questions right, something is wrong with your experience, because I have never had that happen to me, ever, except, again, if I didn't show my work in a situation where the work was the point of the lesson.


EDIT::smallconfused: While I've been known to have long and in-depth arguments over the exact reasons why we agree on something, I assure you that reconfiguring the grading system and the test-review practices in a nearly complete overhaul is not all that minor. Besides, if I limited my internet discussions to arguments that were likely to actually have a significant effect in the real world, I probably wouldn't post at all. :smallwink:

As for this, I meant the system is about as close as it can get to what you want, as far as I can tell, without getting into the impossible things you want: national standardized testing for all subjects at all times in order to get the grade, getting all students to suddenly care about learning things, having cheat proof tests that can also tell if you know how to work the material rather than just guessing, etc. Which actually isn't very close at all, but... it's about as close as it can get

[Ashery]

I seriously got this question in third quarter calc 2 at a top science/technical college in California. It was for a full third of the grade for the final.

There are 3 distinct pairs of shoes in a closet. If you pick out twp shoes from the closet, what is the chance that you pick out one of the distinct pairs?

My answer? 6/6 chance for the first shoe to be a shoe. 1/5 chance for the second shoe to be it's match, so 20% to get the correct pair. For this answer, I got 5/30 points of credit.

The correct answer was: There are 15 possible combinations of two shoes in the set of 6 shoes. 3 of them are correct, therefore 3/15 = 20% chance of getting the correct pair.

After some argument, I convinced them to give me 20/30 points, and I still simmer about that grade to this day.

While your approach does work perfectly in this situation, my only problem is with the phrasing of "6/6 chance for the first shoe to be a shoe." It would've been better as "After one picks any shoe, only one of the five remaining will match it." It's still not perfect, but better. Still, 5/30 is ridiculous. Even 20/30 is far too low.

Now, maybe there are issues that arise with this method when more complex examples are used, but it's been a long time since I've fiddled with combinatorics (Statistics is actually one of the subjects that drove me from applied to pure math, heh).

Now for the long post (Oh god, why am I starting this at 12:30am?). I'm also too lazy to add in the names (Or, rather, copy paste the quote tag given).


Understanding the math was never the problem in the first place.

For basic questions, yes. But what happens when they become too complex to do in your head? I'd expect many people to be able to do 16 * 17 in their head, but very few, if any, to be able to do 86398 * 43887.


This is merely one example. Note, however, that the scale is similar; writing out the complete set of steps and describing them individually would typically have taken about four times as long.

Yes, and no. Simply requiring that a student state directly what method they were using hardly qualifies as "writing out the complete set of steps and describing them individually." Secondly, if an instructor asked you, for one question regarding some topic, to write out a solution and explain every step, that's perfectly reasonable. Now, if they required you to write out an explanation for every step on *every* problem on that topic, then it's pointless (Assuming that there is more than one problem on that topic, but I'm going to hope you won't nitpick asinine stuff like that ;p).


You seemed to approve.

I agreed that the coding example you gave had a superfluous comment on it and that *forcing* students to write down every piece of minor arithmetic in a long, complicated problem is counter productive. It may still be in their benefit to do so, but you can only lead a horse to water...

Even then, that coding example would be more akin to forcing a math student to write "This is where I added two and two to get four." to the line "2 + 2 = 4".


That was often true for me, and yet, I was there to learn. Jumping through hoops for grades did not motivate me.

Would you also ignore my question to define some fairly basic concept because it's just too far below your level to explicitly state some simple definition?

*SHOW* me that you know what the **** you're doing.


You say "fairer" because you know perfectly well that the system isn't especially fair in the first place.

Don't put words in my mouth. I was, in essence, asking a question along the lines of "Give me a number larger than 1 that belongs to the interval [0, 1]."

Solution? There *ISN'T* a number larger than 1.

While this isn't the exact case in the curve example, grading on a curve is, by far in my opinion, the fairest option to fix an exam that was too difficult, but I cannot claim that a fairer option doesn't exist.


A one-class curve punishes people for the intelligence of their classmates, and rewards them for other's failure. (You can mitigate this by excluding outliers, but only to a certain extent.)

A point that's already understood on my end. I've often heard fellow students joke about how everyone should do poorly as the professor can't fail us all. But that was, as I said, just a joke.

In reality, although I'm not sure about other instructors, I only curve when I see distinct patterns. The most notable element being that the high score and the first cluster of grades are significantly (At least a letter grade) below where a typical exam would be.

I also completely disagree with curving on a scale that hurts the students, but that's just because, for all seven of my university years, I've had classes where such a practice was outright banned. Instructors are required to state the grade scale on the syllabus and they are required to keep those as maximal minimums (Meaning that the minimum grade to get an A cannot go below the level stated on the syllabus).


Heh. Never had this sort of problem in higher math. I'm not that smart. I could never do a difficult integration without writing down the steps.

But such problems exist, and how would it be possible to check your solution if you don't write down, in quite a bit of detail, every step taken? If you leave out the work for some simple arithmetic, you're far less likely to pick up on that mistake. Sure, if I were to ask you what 28 + 37 was, it's simple as hell to answer that and check your work in your head. It's nearly impossible to do the same when it's not written down in your work because you feel that it's just a trivial substep.


But, y'know, I'm sure I got dinged at some point for doing 16+17=33 without explicitly carrying the 2.

If I just taught a class how to do basic carrying, I'd do the same except in some rare cases.

If it was in the middle of some complex integration question, it's completely irrelevant. The only reason I'd even write 16 + 17 = 33 in my solution would be so I can quickly and easily check my work without having to go through every substep in my head again.


I had a ton of teachers that wanted to see lots and lots written and very obviously never read any of it.

Then *that's* the problem, not the fact that you should write out your work. This drags back into the brief quantity over quality point I made.


Don't dangle grades in front of me. Dangle learning.

But grades are, despite all their faults, the method used to measure how much one has learned.

[Umael]

Umael, I set out to condemn in strong terms the argument I still think you made on precisely the grounds that I think it is morally unacceptable. There are limits to making such a statement come out nice.

So think that.

Like I said, I'm not going to get involved in an argument, and I still don't believe that anything further between us on this topic will be anything but.

[skywalker]

I'm late, but, let's see what we can do:


The whole attitude of "the students are there to make the teacher happy" is so backwards as to be ridiculous. The teacher is serving the students - they're the customers, the teacher is supposed to be the provider. We forget that because kids are forced into it and often don't like it (which is profoundly weird because learning is awesome, fun and wonderful yet school manages to make it horrible with all this "we're trying to teach you that life is unfair by showing our work").

I think it's silly to think that "students are there to make the teacher happy." But it's also dangerous to say that students are customers and teachers are "employees," especially in our "customer is always right" society. No, students aren't there to make teachers happy. Students are there to learn. Teachers are there to teach. But when you pay someone to teach you, you entrust them with certain things. You give yourself over (within reason) to their methods. You have to play the game the way they want you to. Otherwise, you're not guaranteed to get the information you wanted in the first place. It's up to you whether you think they're enforcing these rules to lord over you, or to create a situation where you get the information you were promised in the way they best know to give it to you. Personally, when I stopped viewing my education as the first, and started viewing it as the second, not only did I start getting better grades, but I started learning (something which I can understand your extreme yearning for) far more than I ever had before.


An attitude exclusive to academia. All too few people will examine the "how" if the "what" is acceptable (and again, I don't mean at all to demean the various kinds of validation, but that whole subject is fundamentally distinct), but outside of school you'll never get a pass for an incorrect "what" no matter how solid your "how" was.

Poor preparation for the results-oriented business world.

And you know, it's entirely proper for it to be exclusive to academia. Because academia is supposed to teach you things. Again, how can I teach you what you've done wrong if I don't know? Of course the business world is results-oriented, it's not educational, nor intended to be. I'm not intending to say that the how exclusively outweighs the what, merely that in an educational setting, it's much more important to know that you got the technique right rather than the answer. Why are businesses so interested in your GPA if they don't think education is in some way good preparation? I argue that they're far more concerned with the techniques the Uni is teaching you than the psychology you might be getting ingrained with. They have time to familiarize you with a results-oriented culture. They don't have time to teach you how to find an area under a curve.


12 years is a long time to see patterns and set opinion. Changing my mind is unlikely to be easy, especially when you're towing a party line that we know all too well is not working so great. It was all too obvious for all too long that the priority was on doing lots of work and not on learning.

In my humble experience (and I have done it both ways), lots of work leads to learning. I mean, yes, I could see the problem and know the answer in the book, but somehow I could never get the test question right. And I am (or so I've been told) very intelligent (again, humbly. I don't think it's all that to brag about, to be honest). I could sometimes even get good grades on the tests and pass the class, but I'd find that the next year, I was having to relearn those concepts over again. Eventually, life caught up to me and I began failing math classes. Prodigiously.


But what I really resent was the excuses, the same things you've repeated here (I assume you didn't come up with them because I've heard them so many times before). I resent them because I believed them. I believed it when they said the real world was the same or worse. It's not. Even College starts to take the attitude that the student is availing themselves of a paid service. Working, efficiency is appreciated and admired. If you can clearly express a twenty-page paper in a page-and-a-half, that's a failure in school, and an invaluable skill anywhere else. Again and again I've been professionally complimented and rewarded for the exact same behaviors for which I was beat down in school.

True efficiency is admired. I don't know about your school, but my University has been very adamant about not using 4 words when 3 will do, etc. But no one clearly expresses a twenty-page paper in 1.5 pages. It's just not possible. When a teacher asks for 20 pages, they ask for a depth of engagement with the material that simply cannot be provided in a page and a half. I used to write my papers too short, and then pad them to the required length. I would get decent grades. I'm sure someone, somewhere, just checked my page length and went on. But when I started writing papers that were 25 pages and having to cut them down, I noticed that not only was I getting better grades (because instructors were recognizing my "depth of engagement"), but I was also learning more about my chosen topic, and also developing new viewpoints that I hadn't before.


Moving quickly through the material? That's good now! Accomplished a great deal with relatively little effort? That's a plus in business! (Just try that in High School.) Speaking up when the boss is doing something that...could be better? Rewarded! Questioning procedures and suggesting ways to improve them? Heck, we have whole systems of buzzwords around that (six sigma, anyone?)! Best of all, from my perspective, is the simple fact that the work has tangible benefits, that code I wrote sees daily, practical use, rather than being the same throwaway busywork that we're all doing, for many of us long beyond the point of mastery of the educational material and well into pointless drudgery. I don't mind drudgery so much if somebody's going to use the result.

I've never been in a situation where truly insightful questions weren't rewarded. I mean, very occasionally, but most of the time looking back, they were mainly an excuse for a smart mouth. And I'm 100% better at the things I did the pointless drudgery for.


It's not personal. I don't think you came up with any of this. (I do think you've bought into it, but few people buck the systems they grew up with, nor the justifications thereof, however paper-thin some of them are.) The system is built this way. I think it needs a substantial overhaul, and I think the place to start is with the notion that education is a service.

The problem with seeing education as a service is that it puts it in the category of every other American business where we've decided that since the customer is always right, you can abuse employees and make totally unreasonable demands on them. There are a lot of people in academia who think they're already being subjected to this treatment by incoming freshmen and sophomores.


We had to do that. Once. Which is fine. If we'd had to do it for every derivative in the whole class, then yeah, that would've been... A waste of everybody's valuable time that would've been much better spent learning and reviewing new concepts.

I wouldn't require that people show all their work. I certainly don't have to. But I still do show all of my work, just in case I get it wrong. That way I can get whatever points I can for the method.


Here's what I dont get: You're complaining that a professor marked off some points for not writing two simple words on exam. You just missed some of the easiest possible 'gimme points' that can exist on an exam. Hell, the only thing easier would be if a professor gave away a few points for just writing your name on the exam.

Had a teacher do this once. Put "write your name upside down for 3 bonus points" in the instructions at the top of page 1. Not everyone got the points. *facepalm*


It's also why many professors WANT all the steps spelled out for them. So they know you know the correct way to do it, AND can see if you made a slight calculation error. If you mess up a + or - that'll result in a lot less points off than if you set an equation up wrong. So they want to see you set the equation up. I don't understand why you think this is some power trip thing. The teachers I know who have required showing all work have been the best teachers I've had because they care. The ones who aren't adament about it, they don't care and like the ability to grade easily. (Also, the ones who have you show your work will go through if it's a multi-part question and you get the first question wrong to see if you got the rest of it right with the result you got in the first part. For a class of 20+ students, with several portion to each question...that's a lot of work.)

The "power trip thing" is a decently common attitude. I don't know why. Just is. People like having something to fight about, maybe? My mom is still trying to vilify my math teachers years later. "But mom, did it ever occur to you that I just... Didn't do the work, and that's why they failed me?" No, apparently, it didn't. They weren't teaching me properly, it seems. No, I don't have a learning disability, and everyone else in the class did fine, but somehow it's the teacher's fault. They were trying to keep me down. I don't get that, anymore. I don't think I ever really did. It was easy to be told that when I was a child, but at a certain point you realize that your failings are your own, I would think. You gotta own up to that stuff and do better next time.


Also, as for the question listed, guessing D was pretty bad; it was grammatically incorrect. A was actually reasonable; none of them were expressions, but A made sense as a metaphor. A "busy bee" wouldn't have been selected as an answer choice because it was too much of an "obvious" answer; if all of the answers are metaphors, but one is a cliche, the cliche is going to draw attention, which means a question with "a busy bee" is likely to have more of the students who scored fives get it wrong than usual, or more of the students who scored low get it right, making it invalid. As a side note, seriously, why would you not guess A just because it wasn't the normal expression? If I said somebody was "He had liquid nitrogen in his veins" would you not choose that answer just because it wasn't the cliche of icewater, even if it still made perfect sense?

You have to admit you're being pretty smug in your understanding of the inanities of standardized testing these days. Yes, it's obvious to you, you've had it explained by an AP or test-prep teacher somewhere along the way. For the vast majority of people, they don't understand what the questioner is asking, which is really the problem with those tests, so much of it depends on recognizing that, and not on expressing your understanding of the subject. What class was that for, anyway? I see no "judgemental value" in that question.


I'm complaining that 12 years of education consisted of upwards of 75% padding, and still much of my learning occurred of my own initiative. This is merely one example. Note, however, that the scale is similar; writing out the complete set of steps and describing them individually would typically have taken about four times as long. Time I could have spent verifying my answer, for example, or otherwise advancing my understanding in more productive ways.

I've never had a situation where I was adequately prepared for the test and didn't have time to write out all of my work and verify my answer, sometimes twice or even three times.


Actions speak louder than words. I knew the material. They knew I knew the material. They knew I was going to ace the AP exam. When none of that matters, it's because something else matters. And then they tell you almost straight up: "We're going to be unfair because life is going to be unfair." But that's not why - that's rationalization. Turned out, life wasn't so bad; it was all school.

You know, it is true that a certain amount of schooling (generally at the lower level) is intended to have some psychological impact that turns you into a worker bee. It's less pronounced in private schools and other alternative institutions, and I think it's near non-existent in University. It's also true (Meyers-Briggs and all that) that a certain type of person is likely to become a teacher/school admin/educator of some kind, and that person is likely to teach/plan school the way it would work best for them. This is, of course, not going to be the best way for people like me and Pyrian. That's actually a bigger source of conflict than you might think. Perhaps I've changed? Or perhaps I've learned to see the system like a great big video game? Yeah, I think the second one is more likely. A's are like achievements! GPA is like gamerscore!


I've been called out. :smallcool: You say "fairer" because you know perfectly well that the system isn't especially fair in the first place. A one-class curve punishes people for the intelligence of their classmates, and rewards them for other's failure. (You can mitigate this by excluding outliers, but only to a certain extent.) But then we get back to my primary thesis: is the purpose of this test to teach, or to judge? Grades are primarily about judging, IMO. (Concession: they also help motivate people to learn. Well, other people.) I would restrict them to standardized systems across very large groups of people; after all, beyond passing they're mostly about getting into College, so the College is going to want to be able to compare across all their applicants as evenly as possible. In-class tests, IMO, should be about demonstrating a adequate mastery of the material, and as we discussed earlier, virtually every student should be getting virtually every answer right - not so much immediately, but eventually. They don't need to be hard (although in advanced math and physics there may be little way around that!).

The class is there to teach. The test is there to judge... how well you've been taught. "Demonstrating adequate mastery" seems like a perfectly good euphemism.

Am I unique in never having been subjected to a "negative curve?" As in, I've never had my score lowered to make the data fit a certain distribution the prof was looking for?


That's interesting. I had the exact opposite experience. I had a ton of teachers that wanted to see lots and lots written and very obviously never read any of it. The teachers that actually read all the stuff were quite happy - delighted, even - with concise answers.

In History, and English, yes. As long as you adequately address the prompt/material. Sometimes it's even a question of "If you don't know it, save me having to read 6 pages of BS and write what you do know, or, failing that, 'I don't know and I'm not going to waste your time.'" I had an AP History teacher (who was an AP reader) who said he gave higher scores to a sentence saying "I don't know" than he did to 6 pages of BS. Food for thought.

But, in math and science, I've never had a teacher that was bothered by verbosity. They only look at your work when you've done something wrong, and then, the more verbose you are, the more likely you are to get points back.

Cheating has never really bothered me. My high school had an honor system, we would sometimes be left alone during exams by the teachers. Did people cheat? I'm sure they did. Did it affect me? Nah, not really. Sure, I might not have gotten an award or two here or there, but in the grand scheme of things, I still got the grade I deserved.

Never really had a problem with curves either, as long as they didn't subtract points from me (which they never have). The one curve I ever had a problem with was the one that somehow gave the person with a raw 73 enough points to have an A, but left me (with a raw 85) with a B+. That one, I took issue with, but that teacher was well known to be absolute garbage.

Most of the time tho? I get mine, and you get yours. Who cares if someone else gets more points back/gets an "unfair advantage?" It doesn't make you look any worse. (at least in my opinion)

[arguskos]

Am I unique in never having been subjected to a "negative curve?" As in, I've never had my score lowered to make the data fit a certain distribution the prof was looking for?
I've no dog in this fight, but I'd like to respond to this snippet. Yeah, you are fairly unique in that respect, in my experience. I know a great deal of folks that, when in a class with a curve, have experienced the "negative curve" effect (great name for it, btw). I've experienced it personally. I still don't mind the curve as a concept, though I do wish more professors would be open-minded about shifting the curve up when everyone does really well, rather than forcing failing grades on people who got an 85% instead of a 95% or some such (happened a few times in several of my classes).

This isn't super relevant, but, I thought I'd throw one experience out there, for anyone keeping score back home. :smallwink:

[Milskidasith]

You have to admit you're being pretty smug in your understanding of the inanities of standardized testing these days. Yes, it's obvious to you, you've had it explained by an AP or test-prep teacher somewhere along the way. For the vast majority of people, they don't understand what the questioner is asking, which is really the problem with those tests, so much of it depends on recognizing that, and not on expressing your understanding of the subject. What class was that for, anyway? I see no "judgemental value" in that question.

First off, part of the AP test is knowing the test. AP classes have *plenty* of books and online resources that tell you what it should be teaching, teachers have to be certified to teach AP, and they are given the material you should have to know. Sure, you don't have to know why "buzzing fly" was the metaphor as opposed to "busy bee" but if you don't understand how the AP test works (guessing is only good if you can eliminate answers, showing your work is important, etc.) then that means either the teacher has failed to teach you the concepts needed for testing or you have failed to learn them. There is no reason for any student who takes an AP test, or any test, to think "This metaphor has the exact same meaning as one that would fit perfectly into the sentence, but it uses slightly different words than the cliche, so it's wrong." That's not just the AP test, that's *every* standardized test, and, indeed, should be self apparent. My point about why the AP test questions are written the way they were was merely to counteract the all too common assertion that "The AP test is stupid and the people writing the questions are all incompetent." That simply isn't true; all the major standardized tests (ACT, SAT, PSAT, AP tests, etc.) are all held up to magnifying glass levels of standards far beyond what is even strictly necessary to get a valid measurement simply so the tests aren't unfair.


Cheating has never really bothered me. My high school had an honor system, we would sometimes be left alone during exams by the teachers. Did people cheat? I'm sure they did. Did it affect me? Nah, not really. Sure, I might not have gotten an award or two here or there, but in the grand scheme of things, I still got the grade I deserved.

Yes, you get the grade you deserve. You don't get the class ranking you deserve, nor the recognition you deserve, etc. You can have a 4.0 and be the only honest kid in school and still be tied for valedictorian with 20 other people who *all* cheat to a greater or lesser degree (whether it is copying homework or outright cheating on tests). I'll fully admit I'm not objective here, because that is my exact situation, although I will end up with one more AP course than most of the students who are tied so I should get what I deserve in the end.


Never really had a problem with curves either, as long as they didn't subtract points from me (which they never have). The one curve I ever had a problem with was the one that somehow gave the person with a raw 73 enough points to have an A, but left me (with a raw 85) with a B+. That one, I took issue with, but that teacher was well known to be absolute garbage.

If it works like that, it's not really "curving" the grade, so much as a piecewise function. It's probably like the people who (incorrectly) assume that when you jump up a tax bracket you make less money because you suddenly go from 20% tax to 25% tax with only a small increase in pay; in a system that worked (like actual taxes), you get 20% up to the bracket, then 25% for money earned after that.


Most of the time tho? I get mine, and you get yours. Who cares if someone else gets more points back/gets an "unfair advantage?" It doesn't make you look any worse. (at least in my opinion)

It very easily could. Granted, colleges look more and more at leadership positions and club activities and other EC activities when recruiting, but if I were to lose the number one spot in my class due to cheating, it would definitely hurt my chances directly. Again, I'm not objective on this issue *at all* and my situation is a pretty slim edge case; for the honest person making A's and B's with the occasional C, all cheating does is potentially hurt your grade when you are curved, while it doesn't affect your class position as much.

[THAC0]

Working in the educational field, I am aware of significant flaws in the way we structure education in America. I have been unable to come up with a practical way of fixing these flaws.

However.

Yes, you (general you) can get the answer without showing your work.

But almost certainly (again, exceptions), you will encounter a concept or topic which you cannot do this for.

And, if you are anything like me, you will persist on doing these concepts without showing work, and therefore never figure out what you are doing wrong. Or, in fact, if you even are doing anything wrong, or if you just keep missing a (-) somewhere!

As a student, I abhorred being forced to "show everything" and such. As an educator, looking back on my experiences, I realized how much more I would have achieved if I had "given into the man."

Yes, that means that the true top-level students will be "held back" to the level of a larger number of students. But here's the news: that's always going to happen when you have classes larger than two or three. There is no way around it, since society and parents in general will not accept students being held to different standards.

I hope that was coherent. I'm getting quite tired. :smalleek:

[Superglucose]

Update: I'm 90% sure I failed that exam. Something about Calculus just doesn't want to sit in my brain, which is annoying because I get like 95, 96% on my physics exams.

I know exactly what the problem is: I can't see what's going on. Like with a physics exam, I can watch the electrons moving in a circle, see the field lines, feel the forces, know which direction it's all going in, etc. etc. With rotations (though I had a really poor grade on the volumes exam, but it was always because when she asked me to do it about the y axis I revolved around the X axis and vica-versa... correct methods and results if I had read the problem right but I kept confusing the Y and X axis?!?!) I can see it, with integrations I can *kind* of see it (looking at the area helps a lot), with series I can definitely see it (which is why I got ALL of those questions right) and with diffy qs and power series?

I can't see it. At all.

The good news is I can *barely* pull a B in the class if I ace the final, which I should be able to do. It's calculus, it is not hard all I need to do is figure it out.

EDIT: I am not particularly racist, but I would like to say that a thick enough accent is something that prohibits job performance if you are a professor or teacher of some sort. Nothing you can do about it as a student; however, especially when there's no such thing as TAs.

[TSGames]

EDIT: I am not particularly racist, but I would like to say that a thick enough accent is something that prohibits job performance if you are a professor or teacher of some sort. Nothing you can do about it as a student; however, especially when there's no such thing as TAs.

Amen.

I dropped one class and only one class in college because I could not understand a word the professor was saying. At least in America, being able to speak English at a minimum level of fluency, and a minimal accent should be required to teach.

[arguskos]

EDIT: I am not particularly racist, but I would like to say that a thick enough accent is something that prohibits job performance if you are a professor or teacher of some sort. Nothing you can do about it as a student; however, especially when there's no such thing as TAs.
Two things.

1. I've found that when people start anything with "I am not particularly XYZ", observers tend to believe more strongly that they are in fact XYZ. Not an accusation, just an observation I've put together over time. Odd, how the human mind makes such assumptions, isn't it? :smallconfused:

2. I totally agree, based on some seriously bad experiences. :smallannoyed: I've had professors who were utterly impossible to understand, and in subjects where clarity of communication was paramount, such as mathematics or the hard sciences.

[The Rose Dragon]

I've once stopped attending a class because of the incredible accent of the instructor.

I got an A- from the class.

Obviously, that works only if your instructor is slavishly devoted to the coursebook.