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

As a student, when I come across a problem that I don't know how to do, I go and find out how to do it and get good at doing it. I don't go whining on social media about how the examiners are being mean to me by setting something that's "too hard".

[QUOTE=Ceil;47885946]No I mean grade as in the age of kids taking in. Like Grade 5 Grade 6 Etc. It is probably different in there than where I live.[/QUOTE] 15-16 year olds. Glanced over the fact we go by years 1-11 but others say grade.

You're not meant to be able to answer every question - that's how they discriminate between each grade. Because I'm bad at Maths, I couldn't answer q23-25 in most of my papers so I got an A. Don't see the issue. If a paper is hard no difference is made anyway due to UMS meaning that a harder paper has lower boundaries.

[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] So did OCR computing GCSE [video=youtube;o7WQA21Hb2w]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7WQA21Hb2w&feature=youtu.be[/video]

[QUOTE=FlashMarsh;47886783]You're not meant to be able to answer every question - that's how they discriminate between each grade. Because I'm bad at Maths, I couldn't answer q23-25 in most of my papers so I got an A. Don't see the issue. If a paper is hard no difference is made anyway due to UMS meaning that a harder paper has lower boundaries.[/QUOTE] Part of the problem is they throw in questions designed to mislead you when realistically, the whole point of an exam is a test of knowledge - not unravel the soup of words to work out what they're actually asking you. Another real issue is that there isn't a set standard of how difficult a question / paper should be with the exam boards, it's down to the head of that paper on what should appear and how strict marking is. I remember doing AS Computing and unless you used very exacting specific keywords when explaining something, you would get 0. This was back in 08/09, but it sounds like things haven't changed.

[QUOTE=meharryp;47886922]So did OCR computing GCSE [video=youtube;o7WQA21Hb2w]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7WQA21Hb2w&feature=youtu.be[/video][/QUOTE] The questions they're moaning about don't seem too bad to me, probably because it's GCSE and I'm doing A Level in a different exam board. But I agree with them on the teaching thing though: exam boards are just fucking nasty when it comes down to it, their actions often come across as downright spiteful.

[QUOTE=Headhumpy;47886572]As a student, when I come across a problem that I don't know how to do, I go and find out how to do it and get good at doing it. I don't go whining on social media about how the examiners are being mean to me by setting something that's "too hard".[/QUOTE] Well, that doesn't make any sense at all in this scenario. This was a final exam and they weren't taught the problem in class, so not only did they not have the knowledge of how to tackle the problem they didn't have a chance to go and study how to do it after realising they had no idea how to do it, they only get one chance to do the exam. It's not like they can walk out of the exam, go home and study the problem then come back to it

[QUOTE=Headhumpy;47886572]As a student, when I come across a problem that I don't know how to do, I go and find out how to do it and get good at doing it. I don't go whining on social media about how the examiners are being mean to me by setting something that's "too hard".[/QUOTE] Yeah next time I'm in an exam and I come across a question that I can't do I'll quickly pop home and google how to do it. It doesn't work the way you're talking about in reality: the issue is that they couldn't anticipate the questions because the exam board played fast and loose with the syllabus not that the students moaning aren't as pompously boastful about being good students as you are. [editline]5th June 2015[/editline] And trust me, exam boards playing silly buggers with their syllabus has to stop: they very clearly define what you need to learn and position it in such a way that basically forces you to regurgitate meaningless nonsense, just cramming shit into your memory. Basically creating a system where you learn a curiculam exactly to the word, then when the exam finally comes around, they always through a curve ball question (or ten) that has one foot inside the syllabus and the other out.

[QUOTE=Jojje;47879944]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.[/QUOTE] Biggest problem I have with math, and the thing that made me learn to hate it, was that nobody ever taught it to me the correct way. Like, I don't know how Sweden teaches you all mathematics, I don't know too much about the European systems of schooling in general. Here in America however, we aren't really taught to learn it and memorize it for applicational purposes; they more or less boil it down to: "Alright kids, standardized test time. Here's what you need to memorize to do well on your exams, and if you don't do well, we don't care. You're a lost cause then and we won't help you." It's all about testing in American schools and about how well you the student perform on those tests to make the school's statistics look good. It has nothing to do with whether or not you actually understand the material you're taught and can apply it in any practical way to life. I've talked to people in the older generations who went to school in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Back then, things didn't work this way (or so I'm told). Students were taught to derive the material so they'd understand it better, and they were educated in how it could be applied (and they were shown logically how math builds upon itself, one level of complication after another). There was more logical progression to it I guess is what I'm trying to highlight in the old days, and that logic was demonstrated more clearly and directly to students. But my experience in school is just one of various others; some people in my generation probably had good experiences with math and math teachers, others definitely didn't. I'm inclined to believe that most American children today do not have good experiences with math and math teachers-- hence why so many of them show such poor aptitude for it. Our educational system in the United States is, overall, dogshit. [editline]6 June 2015[/editline] And then there's also the issue of relevancy. Higher level mathematics simply aren't relevant to most people. I would have liked to learn them more thoroughly though, if nothing else than just for the sake of learning them. I probably would have forgotten them, but I'd like to believe that maybe I'd have retained more otherwise. Psychology and biological sciences don't really require a tremendous understanding of complex mathematics though; there's a few things here and there where a lot of advanced calculations are involved, but they're not mathematically-intensive fields.

[QUOTE=Teddi Orange;47887239]Part of the problem is they throw in questions designed to mislead you when realistically, the whole point of an exam is a test of knowledge - not unravel the soup of words to work out what they're actually asking you. Another real issue is that there isn't a set standard of how difficult a question / paper should be with the exam boards, it's down to the head of that paper on what should appear and how strict marking is. I remember doing AS Computing and unless you used very exacting specific keywords when explaining something, you would get 0. This was back in 08/09, but it sounds like things haven't changed.[/QUOTE] But they aren't trying to trick you, in my opinion. Maybe I was lucky with my GCSEs and A-levels but overall I felt satisfied that it was challenging while also being very realistic in terms of what someone of that age group could be expected to be able to do [editline]5th June 2015[/editline] As for this particular question, I remember being taught algebra and probability for GCSE so this question is very reasonable IMO

[QUOTE=Rossy167;47887401]Yeah next time I'm in an exam and I come across a question that I can't do I'll quickly pop home and google how to do it. It doesn't work the way you're talking about in reality: the issue is that they couldn't anticipate the questions because the exam board played fast and loose with the syllabus not that the students moaning aren't as pompously boastful about being good students as you are. [editline]5th June 2015[/editline] And trust me, exam boards playing silly buggers with their syllabus has to stop: they very clearly define what you need to learn and position it in such a way that basically forces you to regurgitate meaningless nonsense, just cramming shit into your memory. Basically creating a system where you learn a curiculam exactly to the word, then when the exam finally comes around, they always through a curve ball question (or ten) that has one foot inside the syllabus and the other out.[/QUOTE] I have never seen an exam paper where students didn't have the resources necessary to solve a problem. That's not to say that it has been taught before, but if you're good at the subject, the harder questions are designed to see if you can take what you've learned and apply it to novel concepts, i.e. not just passing tests but doing things outside. Sure, test conditions aren't 100% representative of real life, but those questions are what separate an A candidate from a B or a C. My D1, FP1 and physics exams all had various curve balls but there was nothing you couldn't do with syllabus knowledge and that put in the exam paper.

[QUOTE=Rossy167;47887401]Yeah next time I'm in an exam and I come across a question that I can't do I'll quickly pop home and google how to do it. It doesn't work the way you're talking about in reality: the issue is that they couldn't anticipate the questions because the exam board played fast and loose with the syllabus not that the students moaning aren't as pompously boastful about being good students as you are. [editline]5th June 2015[/editline] And trust me, exam boards playing silly buggers with their syllabus has to stop: they very clearly define what you need to learn and position it in such a way that basically forces you to regurgitate meaningless nonsense, just cramming shit into your memory. Basically creating a system where you learn a curiculam exactly to the word, then when the exam finally comes around, they always through a curve ball question (or ten) that has one foot inside the syllabus and the other out.[/QUOTE] I fail to see how this is a curveball at all. It is a combination of simple probability and elementary algebra. Good students will be able to see how to do it, weaker students won't. That's exactly what this question is meant to do: weed out the weaker students and let the good ones shine.

Eh not that unusual for similar stuff to trend. The recent czech abitur trended on facebook due to idiot kids who didn't have a basic cultural understanding.

[QUOTE=Headhumpy;47887771]I fail to see how this is a curveball at all. It is a combination of simple probability and elementary algebra. Good students will be able to see how to do it, weaker students won't. That's exactly what this question is meant to do: weed out the weaker students and let the good ones shine.[/QUOTE] Fair enough, I guess I didn't look into it deeply enough. But they do throw curve balls, this just may not have been one. My computing paper had a few, and our pre release code was (a poorly coded version of) Assyrian Chess while last year got 'higher or lower'. The shit exam boards pull is arbitrary, it shouldn't be. Problem is there isn't a solution, we obviously can't have the same exam every year but we shouldn't make it much more difficult for some years over others either and obviously difficulty is subjective to a large extent.

[QUOTE=Rossy167;47888123]Fair enough, I guess I didn't look into it deeply enough. But they do throw curve balls, this just may not have been one. My computing paper had a few, and our pre release code was (a poorly coded version of) Assyrian Chess while last year got 'higher or lower'. The shit exam boards pull is arbitrary, it shouldn't be. Problem is there isn't a solution, we obviously can't have the same exam every year but we shouldn't make it much more difficult for some years over others either and obviously difficulty is subjective to a large extent.[/QUOTE] The solution is UMS. Harder paper, lower grade boundaries. [editline]6th June 2015[/editline] also, since when were you Norwegian?

I swear this happens every year with the STEM papers in high schools. There's a difficult question on the paper, all the kiddies complain about it. Adults (most of whom haven't done pure maths since they were 16) take a look at the paper and are predictably flummoxed. News stations get wind of it and suddenly it's a big thing. Although I did have a go at the question and felt rather smug after solving it, before I remembered that I'm three years into a theoretical physics degree so of course this shit is going to seem easy. :v: [editline]6th June 2015[/editline] [QUOTE=NeonpieDFTBA;47890631]The solution is UMS. Harder paper, lower grade boundaries.[/QUOTE] The problem I've always had with UMS and other schemes where grade boundaries are not fixed is that there's not really any way to determine if the paper was legitimately hard or the entire class are just colossal fuckups.

[QUOTE=CoolCorky;47890694]I swear this happens every year with the STEM papers in high schools. There's a difficult question on the paper, all the kiddies complain about it. Adults (most of whom haven't done pure maths since they were 16) take a look at the paper and are predictably flummoxed. News stations get wind of it and suddenly it's a big thing. Although I did have a go at the question and felt rather smug after solving it, before I remembered that I'm three years into a theoretical physics degree so of course this shit is going to seem easy. :v: [editline]6th June 2015[/editline] The problem I've always had with UMS and other schemes where grade boundaries are not fixed is that there's not really any way to determine if the paper was legitimately hard or the entire class are just colossal fuckups.[/QUOTE] It is probable that with a sample of a few hundred thousand people, you can assume that the paper will be most of the difference, however, I would guess that a hard paper would affect the distribution of marks in a different way to bad students.

[QUOTE=UberMensch;47883757]I honestly don't get it. What's going on there, in layman's terms?[/QUOTE] It can help you to understand these things better if you actually pick a value for the unknown just to get a feel for what's going on. Just say for the sake of things that I have 20 sweets (n=20), 6 of them orange, and the rest yellow. You then ask me what the odds are of me picking an orange sweet. The answer is 6 in 20, right? If I ate that orange sweet and then went to pick another sweet there'd only be 19 left (n-1) because I've already picked and eaten one. If you ask me now what my odds are of picking an orange sweet again the answer is now 5/19 this time (there's only 5 orange left after I ate one of the 6, and as just mentioned there's only 19 sweets total left over after I ate the last one). So the total probability would be 6/20 * 5/19. In the exam question n was unknown, but it doesn't matter because on every subsequent pick you merely subtract 1 from the previous pick.

[QUOTE=Rossy167;47887401] [editline]5th June 2015[/editline] And trust me, exam boards playing silly buggers with their syllabus has to stop: they very clearly define what you need to learn and position it in such a way that basically forces you to regurgitate meaningless nonsense, just cramming shit into your memory. Basically creating a system where you learn a curiculam exactly to the word, then when the exam finally comes around, they always through a curve ball question (or ten) that has one foot inside the syllabus and the other out.[/QUOTE] A GCSE Science/History/Geography/etc exam is basically a memory test, yes, and a GCSE Maths exam is also mostly a memory test on account of remembering methods but you also have a few weird questions that involve multiple methods and some understanding to separate out the more intelligent people. This is why its perfectly possible for someone who doesn't revise until the last few days, or the night before, and pass with 80-90%. That's exactly what I did with all my Science and History exams at GCSE and I got A*/A/A in the three sciences, and 90%+ on the History exams. The thing is at A Level, exams test mostly [I]understanding[/I]. There will be about half a dozen variations on any Maths question you could get asked that will force you to adapt your method or use it creatively to get the right answer. GCSE: Find the distance the car travelled between 0 and 30 seconds using the velocity time graph A Level: Find the distance the car would have travelled given it had remained in motion at its acceleration of a ms^-2 for an additional 5 seconds using the velocity time graph GCSE: How did Adolf Hitler become chancellor in 1933? A Level: Growing anti-Semitism in the Weimar Republic was the most important reason the Nazi party gained popularity, do you agree? Explain why.

[QUOTE=Dr.Critic;47890854]A GCSE Science/History/Geography/etc exam is basically a memory test, yes, and a GCSE Maths exam is also mostly a memory test on account of remembering methods but you also have a few weird questions that involve multiple methods and some understanding to separate out the more intelligent people. This is why its perfectly possible for someone who doesn't revise until the last few days, or the night before, and pass with 80-90%. That's exactly what I did with all my Science and History exams at GCSE and I got A*/A/A in the three sciences, and 90%+ on the History exams. The thing is at A Level, exams test mostly [I]understanding[/I]. There will be about half a dozen variations on any Maths question you could get asked that will force you to adapt your method or use it creatively to get the right answer. GCSE: Find the distance the car travelled between 0 and 30 seconds using the velocity time graph A Level: Find the distance the car would have travelled given it had remained in motion at its acceleration of a ms^-2 for an additional 5 seconds using the velocity time graph GCSE: How did Adolf Hitler become chancellor in 1933? A Level: Growing anti-Semitism in the Weimar Republic was the most important reason the Nazi party gained popularity, do you agree? Explain why.[/QUOTE] Good point, but the whole understanding thing depends on what A Level you're taking and what exam board it's with and therefore can't be 100% generalized to all subjects: my Edexcel Psychology was a memory test and so was, to a certain extent, my AQA Computing paper. But the AQA Economics paper I did was absolutely understanding.

[QUOTE=Cabbage;47884840]No love for the sixth formers? The Edexcel AS papers were just as much of a clusterfuck.[/QUOTE] The AQA papers I took for my Maths A Level about two years ago were ridiculous. We all still don't talk about Core 4, it's too traumatic. Mind you, Further Pure 3 for my further maths A level was a fucking nightmare, I could only answer half the questions, and out of those I barely got any right.

[QUOTE=glitchvid;47880814]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.[/QUOTE] And here we come to the real crux of the issue "Where the fuck am I supposed to use this in real life" You don't, and you forget about it. The only purpose is to make shit harder to pass.

[QUOTE=MendozaMan;47897172]And here we come to the real crux of the issue "Where the fuck am I supposed to use this in real life" You don't, and you forget about it. The only purpose is to make shit harder to pass.[/QUOTE] A lot of it you don't [I]directly[/I] use unless you go into technical fields (however, as has been mentioned before, you take away a lot of problem solving and critical thinking skills from what you may consider the 'useless' stuff), but if we were at the whim of people like you then we wouldn't be getting useful scientists and engineers until their 30s probably (hell, it usually takes most scientists until their late 20s to get their doctorate already as it is) because we'd have to teach them all of this 'useless' stuff. That would mean they'd be spending less time in the work force. A lot of it you do use in every day life even if you don't realise it. EVERY TIME you go shopping with a budget in mind you use algebra. Every time you make a decision and weigh up odds you deal with probabilities (even if not in concrete numbers you'll deal with inequalities; do I think the odds of this happening are greater than, equal to, or less than the odds of this happening)? When dealing with recipes you use algebra again to modify for different initial volumes/masses to obtain a bigger/smaller outcome than the recipe ordinarily dictates. If you don't think you use a lot of what you learn then you're not thinking hard enough, to be honest.

[QUOTE=MendozaMan;47897172]And here we come to the real crux of the issue "Where the fuck am I supposed to use this in real life" You don't, and you forget about it. The only purpose is to make shit harder to pass.[/QUOTE] But you do use it in real life, either directly or indirectly. Chances are you'll enconuter either the exact types of situations described in tests like this, or you'll encounter situations that are analogies to the questions, so that the mathemathical techniques and logic still applies! Of course, it's not going to be of everyday use to you if you want to be a janitor or journalist or something, but even then understanding things like statistics and probabilities is really useful. None of the things I saw in that test are useless, they're all things I utilize on a near daily basis in my mechanical engineering studies, and they're probably not going to be any less useful later on.

[QUOTE=MendozaMan;47897172]And here we come to the real crux of the issue "Where the fuck am I supposed to use this in real life" You don't, and you forget about it. The only purpose is to make shit harder to pass.[/QUOTE] Truly no one but a mathematician at the top of their field has ever used basic probability or algebra in their daily life.

[QUOTE=MendozaMan;47897172]And here we come to the real crux of the issue "Where the fuck am I supposed to use this in real life" You don't, and you forget about it. The only purpose is to make shit harder to pass.[/QUOTE] do you say the same thing about stuff like history, art, english, science, practically everything they teach at school, or just maths?

[QUOTE=MendozaMan;47897172]And here we come to the real crux of the issue "Where the fuck am I supposed to use this in real life" You don't, and you forget about it. The only purpose is to make shit harder to pass.[/QUOTE] It makes you think better.

Don't end up like me, kids. Don't just think math is something you can ignore, because once you find yourself in higher education, prepare your rectum for some tearing because lacking math skills fucks you over [I]big. time.[/I]

[QUOTE=MendozaMan;47897172]And here we come to the real crux of the issue "Where the fuck am I supposed to use this in real life" You don't, and you forget about it. The only purpose is to make shit harder to pass.[/QUOTE] Failing to find a use for knowledge someone gives you doesn't make it useless. It just means you've wasted it.

Alright, I retract my statement since it was a half-thought one. I was never a fan of Alice, Bob and that fucking train anyway :v: