Edexcel Maths Paper: Goes Trending on Twitter - Too hard - Polidicks

[QUOTE=Fetret;47879373]I didn't understand that it was the question at first and then I was slightly put off by the discrepancy between the first and the second question. But... Come on, the solution or what the question is asking for becomes clear as day the moment you write it out as if you were trying to solve the odds of her picking two orange candies in row. And the fact that this was an exam makes my first problem of not understanding that it was a question pretty moot. I have to say though, none of this reflects whether this is an appropriate question for GCSEs. I really don't know about the pre-uni education in the UK and whether this question was suitable for the level of the students to make a call. I really think it is a good question in the sense that the solution becomes apparent if you just think about it a second to make sense of what the question is about (calculating odds) and then using the steps you (hopefully) have been taught on how to deal with calculating odds.[/QUOTE] That's one of the major issues; a lot of kids only got taught it once if they did because it was only taught to higher classes and it came right at the end of the course during the rush crunch time lessons. If we'd learnt it more thoroughly I doubt they'd be a problem.

I'm doing A2 and working at an A grade and I can't fucking figure out what that probability question wants from me haha

My AS physics today asked me to provide the advantages and disadvantages of travelling by coach and by car in terms of power consumption and "other factors relevant to the passengers". :v: [editline]4th June 2015[/editline] I was very tempted to say that you can get in a car whenever whereas two buses only come every hour. [editline]4th June 2015[/editline] Still not as good as last year's gcse question: Name a disadvantage of buying a new fridge. You may not use the cost of the new fridge.

[QUOTE=Purple Gecko;47879392]That's one of the major issues; a lot of kids only got taught it once if they did because it was only taught to higher classes and it came right at the end of the course during the rush crunch time lessons. If we'd learnt it more thoroughly I doubt they'd be a problem.[/QUOTE] Now this is certainly an appropriate criticism. If you do not know enough about probability calculations then it is completely understandable to find the question hard. But there is definitely nothing wrong with what the question is asking for. Thanks for clarifying that point. [editline]5th June 2015[/editline] [QUOTE=NeonpieDFTBA;47879504] [editline]4th June 2015[/editline] Still not as good as last year's gcse question: Name a disadvantage of buying a new fridge. You may not use the cost of the new fridge.[/QUOTE] I really want to know the answer now. Would having to carry it to my house/carry it up to my flat/having to spend energy be an acceptable answer?

this exam was 10/10 would not do again.

This happened for my high school higher maths exam. People at my university who didn't even take it had heard about it. It was the same sort of thing, confusingly worded and ambiguous questions that were more a test of english than maths.

Link for the paper for anyone interested: [url]https://www.dropbox.com/sh/d1vzwhll2ewybea/AABwYhl-3ymNeGB44uaxhJR0a?dl=0[/url]

I remember when I did Edexcel's C3 June 2013 That was not a fun paper and I remember people screaming after leaving the exam hall fun times.

Christ am I glad I'm not in school anymore. Math is such horseshit, I leave it to the pros aside from simple arithmetic I use in my daily life.

Some of the questions people are moaning about seem a little tougher than your average GCSE question but they hardly seemed A-level maths hard like the people in that petition were moaning about the optimisation question looked pretty tough though

I figure some students will always complain about any test whether it was actually too hard or not. I don't like that they now have an audience in the news and the general public. The petition in particular sounds really entitled. If the question in the OP is the worst there is, then I don't see how it's harder or more confusing than your typical word problem.

AS Computing was worse this year too. The last year had a simple higher or lower game using cards. This year, they gave my year fucking Assyrian Chess. It was fucking hard and most people I know didn't even manage to begin the last question, question 9. Not going to lie though, the thing that geuinely kept me going was the video below. I'd watch it before an exam and laugh like fuck. [video=youtube;ehpzYOhK-WU]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehpzYOhK-WU[/video]

[QUOTE=KillerLUA;47878720]Been a big fiasco over the COMP1 AS Level exam as well. The exam board fucked with us by inventing their own version of chess, back pedalling on all of the suggested possible questions by actively not including any of the practised solutions in the [URL="http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/A-level_Computing/AQA/Problem_Solving,_Programming,_Data_Representation_and_Practical_Exercise"]wikibooks[/URL] and included a random question at the end about a weird form of chess FEN encoding. Ended up spawning a hitler rant video. [media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWLxu_uBaUk&feature=youtu.be[/media][/QUOTE] As well as the question to somehow add new functionality to a single bloody piece, somehow in a single procedure that I swear doesn't even have anything to do with the capturing mechanic. Don't get me started on the FEN crap. Literally nothing to do with the shit I was told to practise. And then in COMP2 there was a random out the fucking nowhere question on whether we think that computers will achieve the same level of intelligence as a human

[QUOTE=Darth_Kris;47880036]As well as the question to somehow add new functionality to a single bloody piece, somehow in a single procedure that I swear doesn't even have anything to do with the capturing mechanic. Don't get me started on the FEN crap. Literally nothing to do with the shit I was told to practise. And then in COMP2 there was a random out the fucking nowhere question on whether we think that computers will achieve the same level of intelligence as a human[/QUOTE] Mine got so fucked up: I got it to captue the pieces and turn them into the color of the captor but instead of turning a black X into a white X it would fucking copy the piece that captured it it so that if white Y was the one capturing by the end there were tons of white Ys on the board.

[QUOTE=Rossy167;47880057]Mine got so fucked up: I got it to captue the pieces and turn them into the color of the captor but instead of turning a black X into a white X it would fucking copy the piece that captured it it so that if white Y was the one capturing by the end there were tons of white Ys on the board.[/QUOTE] At least you got it working some what, in my attempt, the kashitfuckwhatever just captured normally

[QUOTE=Darth_Kris;47880091]At least you got it working some what, in my attempt, the kashitfuckwhatever just captured normally[/QUOTE] Probably would have been an easy fix, just in an exam you don't have time to look over and make sure everything is good. Absolute bollocks if you ask me: we're never, in a coding job, going to be expected to make a teensy, but arbitrary, subroutine in a matter of minutes from the top of our head with no notes, co-workers or internet at our disposal.

[QUOTE=Turnips5;47878721]P(choose two oranges) = 6/n * 5/(n-1) = 1/3 => 30/(n^2 - n) = 1/3 90 = n^2 - n n^2 - n - 90 = 0 take that, 16 year olds[/QUOTE] What... What does this mean? I swear that's some weird forgotten language. I'm 20, and I have no idea what any of this means. Dear God.

[QUOTE=Rossy167;47880111]Probably would have been an easy fix, just in an exam you don't have time to look over and make sure everything is good. Absolute bollocks if you ask me: we're never, in a coding job, going to be expected to make a teensy, but arbitrary, subroutine in a matter of minutes from the top of our head with no notes, co-workers or internet at our disposal.[/QUOTE] Exactly, I probably would've found a fix for it if I could've looked at my notes, but I couldn't, and now I'll probably fail the entire course

[QUOTE=woolio1;47880127]What... What does this mean? I swear that's some weird forgotten language. I'm 20, and I have no idea what any of this means. Dear God.[/QUOTE] [img]http://i.imgur.com/8MMsCOj.png[/img]

[QUOTE=woolio1;47880127]What... What does this mean? I swear that's some weird forgotten language. I'm 20, and I have no idea what any of this means. Dear God.[/QUOTE] If I'm not mistaken theres at least one equation going on in his working where he's plugged in values, so like most math involving equations you don't know it just reads like gibberish When I did Maths at A level the only reason mechanics (which was infuriatingly hard) wasn't my least favourite unit was because decision and statistics existed, and half of those units is remembering things that amount to gibberish and makes no sense to you, things like equations for probability of B given A. You can still answer questions but remembering it is painful. Last two lines is just basic algebra/ equation modifying

[QUOTE=Jelman;47879906]Link for the paper for anyone interested: [URL]https://www.dropbox.com/sh/d1vzwhll2ewybea/AABwYhl-3ymNeGB44uaxhJR0a?dl=0[/URL][/QUOTE] Wording for question 11 is horseshit, other than that paper is something students of their level should be able to do. [editline]5th June 2015[/editline] Question 9 is shite as well, system is underdetermined.

[QUOTE=Fetret;47880283][img]http://i.imgur.com/8MMsCOj.png[/img][/QUOTE] Yeah... That's not helpful. This is why I'm a journalist.

[QUOTE=woolio1;47880364]Yeah... That's not helpful. This is why I'm a journalist.[/QUOTE] Very simply: 1st line is derived from logic the guy already knew like an equation or method starting point 2nd line is its simplification (6*5=30, n*(n-1)=n^2-n) and for the third line the guy (probably or at least effectively) cross multiplies the bottom left (denominator) by top right (numerator) across from the equals sign and repeating this with multiplying the top left by bottom right to get the two sides of the equals sign in line 3, this simplifies into the quadratic n^2 - n - 90 = 0 that the question asks for

If a paper is hard, grade boundaries will be lower - I don't understand the complaing. The paper really wasn't that hard if you just think about the question before answering. If you struggle with English then do the Edexcel iGCSE as it's a paper designed to be for international, it's more numerical, questions are harder and grade boundaries are higher, but GCSE maths is a joke

[QUOTE=Purple Gecko;47878629] Hannah has n sweets, 6 are orange and the rest are yellow. The chance of her getting two orange sweets is 1/3. [B]Prove N^2 - N - 90 = 0[/B] [/QUOTE] I looked at the quiz, the last line actually says: [i]Show that[/i] n^2 - n - 90 = 0. The fact that the n's are now lower case makes this much less confusing (for me anyway).

[QUOTE=woolio1;47880364]Yeah... That's not helpful. This is why I'm a journalist.[/QUOTE] Sorry I thought the linear way it was written was the confusing bit. Basically there are n sweets, 6 of them orange. The odds (I might get my terminology mixed up here I'm not doing a maths degree and odds etc... sometimes means different things) of picking an orange sweet randomly from the n sweets is 6 / n. Because out of the n possible sweets there are 6 that are orange. Now the odds of picking another orange sweet the second time is 5 / (n - 1), this is because if you are calculating the odds of picking two oranges in a row you assume you pick an orange sweet the first time. Since now you have removed that orange sweet there are 5 oranges left in n - 1 number of sweets. The odds of both of these happening is found by multiplying the odds of the each event. And the odds of this happening was given in the question as being 1 / 3. So the first line basically is the odds of picking two orange sweets in a row being calculated. The second line is basically multiplying the fractions, 30 is obvious and n * (n - 1) equals n * n + (-1 * n) which is n^2 - n. Third line basically gets rid of the fraction by cross multiplication, or basically equalising the denominators by multiplying each side with the denominator of the other side so: 30 * 3 = 1 * (n^2 - n) which equals 90 = n^2 - n, which is what the question is asking you to prove. Be gentle with whatever mistakes I might have in my explanation, this is beyond my pay grade.

[QUOTE=Jelman;47879906]Link for the paper for anyone interested: [url]https://www.dropbox.com/sh/d1vzwhll2ewybea/AABwYhl-3ymNeGB44uaxhJR0a?dl=0[/url][/QUOTE] The only tricky question would be 21 and question 9 suffers from ambiguous wording

[QUOTE=Fetret;47880283][img]http://i.imgur.com/8MMsCOj.png[/img][/QUOTE] This is unsettling, I used to be able to do this stuff way super easy, but in the last 4 months I've forgotten everything math related.

The problem is kids simply aren't taught how to think about this stuff in a constructive matter. They're just drilled for tests and don't know what to do when a simple question of logic pops up. Everyone who does well in school should be good at math since continual neuro-cognitive studies show math skills light up the same areas of the brain as writing and critical thinking skills do. It's not these kids' fault they feel inadequate.

I can't do subtraction (couldn't get down borrowing) or anything more difficult by hand unless I've memorized it as part of a table or I have a mnemonic for it. This candy color shit is moonrunes. If high school kids think they have it bad (they do), imagine having a learning disability (in the American public school system shortly after NCLB was enacted) and going through this before the internet was widespread and made portable. The way mathematics is taught needs to be completely rebuilt or higher maths need to be abolished as a main and mandatory part of the curriculum. Texas has the right idea, for once.