{"id":17732,"date":"2015-06-05T22:09:25","date_gmt":"2015-06-05T21:09:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.diaryofanadi.co.uk\/?p=17732"},"modified":"2015-06-05T22:09:25","modified_gmt":"2015-06-05T21:09:25","slug":"exam-time-tears","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/?p=17732","title":{"rendered":"Exam Time Tears"},"content":{"rendered":"

I caught this story on the BBC website earlier today<\/a>. It concerns a mathematics exam which was taken yesterday, and which has apparently turned half of the teenage population suicidal as a result of one of the questions. Here\u2019s the question which has caused all the fuss:\"Maths<\/p>\n

The BBC quotes a pupil:<\/p>\n

\n

There was one person in the exam hall who was crying their eyes out during the exam.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Naturally, being 2015, the whole affair warranted numerous tweets and Facebook posts. These showed fairly conclusively that modern pupils\u2019 sense of humour is as bad as their maths skills.<\/p>\n

The Beeb quotes another one:<\/p>\n

\n

I found the exam bearable at the beginning but then it took a sharp turn to maths that was way too hard. <\/p>\n

I can’t remember the numbers, but the one about Hannah’s sweets in particular made me want to cry.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And Georgina (another pupil) is quoted:<\/p>\n

\n

The question involving Hannah’s sweets was the most annoying question I have ever seen in a GCSE paper. <\/p>\n

I think Edexcel want us to be like Einstein. It’s crazy, and I hope the exam board lower the grade boundaries because most of the people who took that exam did not know what that question meant.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I think it\u2019s fairly obvious that someone somewhere has screwed up if pupils hadn\u2019t effectively been given the answers before they went in. That\u2019s how it works these days, isn\u2019t it? The exam people reckon it was deliberate, but with so many unhappy boys and girls crying to mummy and daddy… well, let\u2019s see who backs down first. <\/p>\n

Georgina and her friends might want to consider the kind of questions we used to have to answer when O Levels were still around. Here\u2019s the first one from a maths paper (syllabus 1) from way back (the first question on any paper was always the easiest):\"First <\/p>\n

Or this one from syllabus 2:\"Fiest<\/p>\n

I passed my maths O Level with questions like this. As I\u2019ve said before, modern kids don\u2019t know they are born.<\/p>\n

The question about Hannah and her sweets is funny, because it\u2019s all typically baby-like (as you\u2019d expect of a 21st century exam paper), then you are smacked in the face by a proper equation and asked something in terms modern pupils have most likely never had to deal with (i.e. \u201cshow that… etc.\u201d). But what\u2019s even more surprising is the depth of knowledge of probability theory needed to answer it – the key is that you have to multiply probabilities to solve it. I ought to add that if this sort of thing really is being taught to school kids these days, I\u2019ll happily take back some of what I\u2019ve said about exams getting easier.<\/p>\n

Like I say, someone somewhere – and we\u2019re talking about Edexcel here – has cocked up. If not now, they will have once enough complaints have been made.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I caught this story on the BBC website earlier today. It concerns a mathematics exam which was taken yesterday, and which has apparently turned half of the teenage population suicidal as a result of one of the questions. Here\u2019s the question which has caused all the fuss: The BBC quotes a pupil: There was one […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[88,87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17732","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education-related","category-news"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17732","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17732"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17732\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}