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Have Mathematics Exams Become Easier?
Coryoth writes "The BBC is reporting on a recent study in the UK that found that the difficulty of high school level math exams has declined. The study looked at mathematics from 1951 through to the present and found that, after remaining roughly constant through the 1970s and 1980s, the difficulty of high school math exams dropped precipitously starting in the early 1990s. A comparison of exams is provided in the appendix of the study. Are other countries, such as the US, noticing a similar decline in mathematics standards?" Readers with kids in school right now may have the best perspective on changes in both teaching and testing methods -- what have you noticed?
Clearly this is happening ... in the western world anyway. It's the only way that schools can keep up with the shear numbers of parent classified geniuses.
We've noticed this 'dumbing down' (thanks Idiocracy) for a while now at Uni. The newer mathematics students enrolling in first year are lacking some of the basic skills. Example: a couple of years ago, trigonometric functions and identities were completely removed from the high school syllabus. It goes back all the way to year one at school.
I don't think teachers are being paid enough and they are certainly not valued enough by the community. Once upon a time, the best and brightest minds went into the teaching profession; it had respect and was highly valued. Now, it's whoever wants to become one, winner by default. The best and brightest need to be attracted back. Why would somebody who has the ability to earn more than four times the national average wage go into a job that earns less than the average wage?
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we don't want to upset the poor children or make their lives too difficult. their parents might sue.
The reason girls and Windows users don't understand UNIX is because all the documentation is in Man files.
They had to lower the standards because the kids today can't handle simple math.
I'm glad somebody finally pointed this out in black and white. I remember lining up A-level (UK age 18 exams) maths papers from the 80s and 90s, you could see the questions get easier almost year-by-year.
Yet every year the exam results get better and the government congratulates itself on improving standards while denying the exams are getting easier.
There is strong pressure on the education system to "improve"; and these improvements are measured by tests. Students are generally not going to get smarter, so why not make the tests easier to make it seem like you are doing your job?
back in the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s kids got a slide rule, protractor, compass, and graphing pad. Now it's ti-83+ for algebra class and the ti-89 has more computing power than the original Macintosh.
doing the math is going to be easier, even if they didn't ask harder questions. However, the amount of automation these days means that most people aren't ever going to have to do the harder math in their daily lives.
Slashdotters are an anomaly because our careers and interests require us to do maths all the time. If the future historians are allowed to slack off on their trig tests, so what? They weren't going to be engineers anyway.
They probably should track out classes more than just "regular" and "honors/AP" though. That way the future nobel prize winning poet who is an over acheiver and the future NASA scientist don't have to compete for the teacher's attention to detail in Calculus.
Just a suggestion.
So I have my A level maths exam (core 3) in two days, taking it a year early, and I'm still finding it trivial, and thats because I'm working from '90s papers and they're so much harder. So basically yes, the exam I am taking has gotten easier over the past years. It's not that the questions are easier though, it's because year by year subjects get dropped so you can focus so much more time on one subject so you can quite easily perfect your understangin of it.
This is trotted out every single year
pass rates go up - exams are getting easier. education system in decline
pass rates go down - teachers not able to communicate with students. education system in decline
I'm a licensed teacher - Social Studies, not Math - and I've seen many district personnel changing how tests are delivered or graded, simply to make sure that the school is meeting the NCLB standards. As a Social Studies department, we were asked to make certain questions easier to understand, or to eliminate hard to study areas all together in order to make sure that the results would be up to where they need to be. Math teachers in my district have complained a LOT that the district is forcing them to dumb down the tests simply to make sure that scores are where they need to be.
Kids aren't dumber, they just aren't given the opportunity to fail. If they aren't given the chance to make mistakes, they don't learn from them, and unfortunately, that is where the NCLB is leading us.
The problem is, our current bottom-to-top emphasis on mathematics and the sciences effectively ensures that all but the brightest, most driven students will be alienated from these core disciplines because of the minutae they are forced to memorize. The prevailing logic would seem to be that this creates a detailed knowledge base for higher learning.
While this is true, very few actually pursue higher learning in these fields because all of the emotion and excitement is gone when math and science are taught in this way. The wonderment that inspired so many young engineers during the space race is gone. Teachers need to address and emphasize the larger concepts to get children excited about math and science.
Our local school district has unfortunately adopted a math curriculum called "CPM" which is supposed to stand for "College Preparatory Mathematics" - an oxymoron if there ever was one. My wife is a licensed secondary-level math teacher, and does tutoring locally although she wouldn't be able to ethically work in the district if she was forced to use this horrible curriculum that amounts to educational malpractice.
Because the government education establishment in many places has given up on any attempt to maintain the tried-and-true approach to math education that has been employed in the past - building skills step-by-step in such a way that the student's "toolkit" grows in a logical fashion through the different skills, now they are left with a very fuzzy approach that doesn't really build anything on anything, and mostly is concerned with keeping busy doing something that they can pretend is math and pretend that some sort of progress is being made.
The most tragic part of it is that the kids who would have been the real math enthusiasts under traditional teaching methods never get the chance to see the order and beauty of math, because curricula like this completely hide it.
For more info on this, see the Web site mathematicallycorrect.com .
Because the poor government "education" establishment is failing to really teach math, of course they have to put a happy face on the situation by dumbing down the tests too.
No one is going to say that the teachers are doing a better and better job every year. No one is going to say that the students are held to higher and higher standards in math and that they are achieving those standards more often than before.
This is because it would be false. You might get arguments about the extent of the change, but none on the direction.
And nothing in education will ever improve in the US as long as the system is union-controlled.
Could everyone put their country in the comment, if applicable? It saves people arguing back-and-forth about the same point, when both are correct for their own country and experiences, but on opposite sides of the world ;-).
has demonstrated that curriculum's have been dumbed down to accommodate a greater breadth of material. The students I see are exposed to more Stuff, but never have any in depth mastery. I am in the U.S., not UK.
I'm a math professor and I must say, just in the past 10 years, I've noticed the "average" undergrad is A LOT worse at basic math than they used to be. I don't know which was cause and which was effect, but students are worse at math and we're teaching them less up through high school. This needs to change very soon or we're going to be a nation of mathematical idiots in another few decades. It has already started... just look at the percentage of American math PhDs coming out each year.
I agree with everyone else, we need to pay math teachers more. In states like TX a public school teacher makes barely enough to live poorly, and with a math degree, they can make double working in private industry. It is a very hard sell to convince mathematicians to go into education.
The other thing we need to do is not be afraid to actually fail someone. This society has made it so that everyone feels its their "right" to graduate high school and go to college. We need to change this and actually fail people when they can't do the work. If someone doesn't earn a degree, they shouldn't be "awarded" one.
Mensa won't take SATs from later than 1/31/94 as an indication of your IQ. That says something about changing test difficulty...
Looking at the example questions, the earlier questions look difficult, but unnecessarily so. What I mean by that is, they take what could be a straight forward question and then obfuscate it behind a bunch of random noise merely to confuse the test taker.
The newer example questions seemed more rationalized, they test whether you know the theory or formula needed to solve the question without throwing you a curve ball.
Would you rather encourage people to continue studying onto more advanced levels with easier tests, or throw them a GOTCHA question which will totally turn them off to the subject matter?
There is a difference between testing knowledge of the subject matter, and giving the test taker a hard time. A "difficult" question might be great to ponder when you have unlimited time, but in a time pressured test, it is not appropriate.
I'm sorry but what do we really expect to learn from this research?
Maths in the 1950s was designed for engineers and scientists in that generation. They learned what they needed.
Maths today is exactly the same. The fact is you can't use 1950s standards to evaluate today's exams any more than you can use today's standards to evaluate 1950s exams.
The only real question is - Are engineers and scientists finding their maths education weak?
The answer in my view is no in most cases. In a limited number of careers the maths they received isn't nearly advanced enough but that would have been the case in the 1950s too.
As I said they're using the wrong measuring stick to measure the difficulty of exams. Nobody needs to know half of the useless junk that kids learned in the 1950s when frankly it is less time consuming and more accurate to use a calculator.
That's just my opinion. I honestly think a lot of this kind of "research" is a result of much older people looking at today's maths and thinking "Why aren't they learning what I did?" While completely ignoring what they're learning that the 1950s students didn't.
Look, you can read about it anywhere. We even had math classes in some cities where success was built around "best attempt" or other such non-sense.
What it all boils down to is that no matter what standard the Federal Government tries to set someone tries to cheat it. That is why there is always such an uproar versus standardized tests. Down here in Georgia they failed nearly 40% of all students in tested grades versus a standardized test. They knew it was coming. They even had practice tests. Is it all the schools fault?
No. Students seem have this sense of inevitability. They are still of the belief that they don't have to. After all anything else they complain about in school gets changed. I don't see their attitudes as defeatism, its entitlement that they suffer. They don't have to do this, that, or what not. We don't have the right culture in schools, especially city schools among minority students. Until we change the fabric of society the MTV generations will forever think themselves above "working hard". They are all going to be rap starts, professional sports players, or worse win the lottery!
We gave up control of our schools to "feel gooders". Now its all about grief counselors and no winners allowed because no one should be a loser. When we removed the reward of success what did we expect? I have seen articles where every student got to walk the diploma line regardless if they graduated just so they didn't feel ostracized. Well tough shit. Your boss ain't going to worry about making a failure to feel good. If you don't perform your in for a world of hurt. I guess you could go into government work, of all categories in the job market they have added more jobs than anyone and everyone knows the saying about how its near impossible to lose a government job.
Schools and students are simply trying to cheat the system. The problem is the schools encourage it because they don't allow for losers. They don't want to hurt little Bobby's feelings so they set him up to fail in life. If they want control of our kids then they should be responsible for them. They get hell bent if someone raises a finger about the Bible in school or complains about sex education yet they are completely aloof when it comes to holding the kids to a standard of education.
Private school was the only recourse I found. Standards had to be met or we might not be allowed to come back. Students were encouraged to be better. I don't see that outside of a few select public schools; you know I hear it all the time how so and so's public school isn't like those others but sorry it is.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Maths has definitivly become a lot easier here. It takes a lot less work to get good grades now, and there's an alarming lack of focus on basic math skills. There's plenty of A-students who can't do basic math. The norwegian school-system is really fucked up though. There's so much focus on getting the trouble-makers through school, so they're allowed to basically take over classes. I mean, we don't want to send them to special schools, because that would stigmatize them! Never mind the 25 other students in the class, they'll just have to sit there and feel neglected.. Not to mention, without consequences these students never learn. I've had students yell at me straight off at 08:15 in the morning because the last test had some questions which weren't exactly as the ones in the book. They're so mal-adjusted and unfit for real life it's scary.. (ohh.. and just for kicks.. 90% of the worst students are pakestani.. while they make up about 3-4% of Oslo in total..trying to teach them anything is basically a crash-course in becoming a racist)
That said, I work with a couple of really old math teachers, and there's a few subjects like probabilites that are completely new them.. so math has changed. Don't be fooled though, they've replaced all the hard'n'gritty stuff with fluffy feel-nice stuff.
In Norway, we've had two big reforms in the last ten years, and both made the hardest paths easier. Ironically, they also both made the maths for students taking vocational education harder. It's so tragic I want to cry :(.
"" How about taking the safety labels off everything, and let the stupidity-problem solve itself? """
It's been said before, but (imo) today's students are essentially 'weaker' in 'doing' math simply because they don't have to do much of the doing. The result? Easier tests so that more, or at least the same number of, students pass. Schools funding is often determined on this criteria, so no one wants "below passing" students.
When kids start Algebra I with a TI-89 that is drawing tangent lines and running linear regressions (in between games of tetris) for them, they don't learn any of the basic skills. This leads to a general decline in non-assisted capability, leading to a 'requisite' decline in the difficulty of tests so that more students can perform acceptably and schools maintain their funding.
Perfect Example? Shopping the other day in a store who's register was offline. I was -unable- to make a purchase because the register was down. When I offered that we could simply calculate the tax on the purchase and subtract that total from my $20 you should have seen the look on the kids face; would have thought I'd just asked him to land a hampster on the moon w/ just pencil and paper.
Then: Sally is twice as old as Suzy. Three years from now, the sum of their ages will be 42. How old is Sally?
Now: Chloe has 7 apples. How many apples does Chloe have?
Tomorrow: Write the number 5.
Also, in general, we are slowly getting away from this idea that memorization is what is important and what makes you smart. Part of that is simply that these days it is much less useful, but there has also been development in educational theory. We do not need or want our children memorizing tons and tons of facts. That really isn't helpful. If I need something remembered, I'll have my computer do it. It's way better than you. We need them learning how to think.
Well, since education used to be so much heavier in the memorization it is no surprise that the tests are "hard" for people today. I remember getting in to this argument with someone I knew. They'd found a test posted online that was a highschool graduation test circa 1900. They used it as an example of how much "harder" school was then and how I couldn't pass it. Well, turned out I could, but only because I'm a trivia junkie. I know lots of useless facts, and there was a whole lot of the test that was full of it. The geography and history sections were nothing but. Things like matching capital cities to states.
Ok, well that's neat and all, but it is quite thoroughly useless. There is no reason to know that. If you want to, great, but don't pretend like it is useful knowledge or that you are smart because you can do it.
So ya, people today had trouble passing the test, but that doesn't mean the test was hard, it meant the test was different.
When I went through the Ontario system (1986), the requirement for engineering was 3 high schoool math courses in: Calculus, Algebra, and "Functions and Relations".
I did some Calculus T.A. work, and the new students are missing certain critical concepts. The new curriculum has eliminated Integration from High School Calculus. It is actually lucky that the students get any Calculus in High School at all. One of the original proposals for the new curriculum recommended eliminating Calculus entirely. The Engineering schools fought hard to keep Calculus in High School.
Some of the first year engineering students have not seen key trignometric functions like the sine function. Other students have not seen Sigma notation, which is used for for finite and infinite series. Almost all of the students struggle with the university Algebra course, which makes me suspect the high school introduction to vectors and matrix algebra was been watered down.
Reducing the high school requirement from three to two high school math courses hurts the undergraduate engineering students. Further, a subject like Calculus benefits from repeat exposures over a number of years. The students would benefit from an introductory Calculus course in Grade 11, a deeper course in Grade 12, and then the 4 more courses in first and second year university. That way, the students have had 4 years Calculus experience before they need to apply the hard stuff in 3rd and 4th year engineering. As it is, students might only see Calculus for 2 years at university, and I'm not sure if this is enough time to really absorb the subject.
As for the quality of the students themselves, the students from the new curriculum are different. They are very fast (faster than me) at solving problems with known forms. On structured problems, similar to ones they have seen before, they are very fast. Unfortunately, they are very poor at solving unstructured problems, and problems where they have not seen the solution technique in advance. It is like someone has beaten the creativity out of the students. They can write tests really well, but they can't do original math. I imagine the students will pick up the creativity as they gain experience. It is just that someone has removed the fun advanced questions that really get the students thinking from the curriculum. The high schools are somehow creating students that can do simple stuff, but lack deeper insights into what they are doing. The students haven't been allowed to try, fail, and sometimes succeed at solving the harder mathemetical questions.
9 out of 7 math students agree, standards have not been dropped!
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
I too have a belief that the system protects teachers too much. However this year my Daughter's eighth grade Math teacher was awful and could not even attempt to keep control of the class. He was let go about 1 month before school was out and it was his first year.
Interestingly the High School that she is going to is aware of that teachers failings and identified all of his students as likely needing extra help in ninth grade.
This was supposed to be the GATE class too. Now most of these advanced math students have lost the edge they had and are behind other GATE students in the district.
Glad they got rid of him.
Life moves pretty fast; if you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. -FB
For people not in the U.S., NCLB is the controversial No Child Left Behind act.
As I understand it (I once dated a teacher,) the history of NCLB is basically:
Examples of the evolution in teaching math since the 1950s.
1. Teaching Math In 1950:
A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production
is 4/5 of the price. What is his profit?
2. Teaching Math In 1960:
A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production
is 4/5 of the price, or $80. What is his profit?
3. Teaching Math In 1970:
A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production
is $80. Did he make a profit?
4. Teaching Math In 1980:
A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is
$80 and his profit is $20. Your assignment: Underline the number 20.
5. Teaching Math In 1990:
A logger cuts down a beautiful forest because he is selfish and
inconsiderate and cares nothing for the habitat of animals or the
preservation of our woodlands. He does this so he can make a
profit of $20.
What do you think of this way of making a living?
Topic for class participation after answering the question:
How did the birds and squirrels feel as the logger cut down their homes?
(There are no wrong answers.)
6. Teaching Math In 2008:
Un maderero vende un camión de madera de construcción para $100. Su
coste de producción es $80. Cuántos de su familia pueden usted alimentar
desde los $20 beneficios?
Geology - it's not rocket science; it's rock science
Let me start off by owning up to my bias -- actually, twofold. First, my wife is a middle school teacher, and I have volunteered in many different ways at her school as both elective teacher and simple extra pair of hands. Second, I have found very little in Milton Friedman's writings that I can wholeheartedly agree with. The man seemed to think that private enterprise was a panacea for all of mankind's various ills. He somehow seemed to miss the problem that the underlying profit motive is often at cross-purposes with many of the not-really-business areas he advocated for privatization.
To extend this and dig into the meat of your post, let's look at your postulation. Schools are, ostensibly, there to provide a public service. There is some real debate at certain levels in education circles about how much that public service really has to do with teaching, and how much has to do with daycare. No, I'm not just being cynical -- a large part of why schooling in the US plays out the way it does is because, historically, mandatory schooling for certain age groups was instrumental in allowing for the 9-5 working day for both men and women, which became very important during WWII.
So let's say we assume that schools are there to provide the public service of actually teaching kids, with daycare as a nice side-effect. Fine.
Now let's look at the theoretical private company under Friedman's model that would step in to fill this sudden demand for private education. It would ostensibly be a for-profit corporation, given Friedman's leanings, which means a number of things. For starters, the corporation's management is under a legal obligation to ensure that the company makes as much profit as possible -- by deliberately taking in more money than it costs to do business. This is diametrically opposed to how not-for-profit corporations (i.e. most private schools that I'm aware of) operate -- by deliberately spending all funds alloted in the budget for that year in order to ensure that the services provided are the best possible.
With those *very* different directives, a few moments' thought should be enough to show that any for-profit entity operating in the field of public services is going to provide the least possible service at the highest possible rates. We've seen that time and again, in country after country, in sector after sector. Medical services in the US? Check. Water utilities in the UK? Check. Power companies in the US? Check. Major ISPs in Australia, Canada, the US? Mobile communications services just about anywhere? Check.
Fobbing such services off onto the private sector produces other problems as well, as corporations are by their very definition protected by legal limits on their liability. Given the intimate roles that teachers play as in loco parentis, it is important on many different levels that parents have a serious say in what happens at schools -- which is where PTAs come in. I could well be wrong, but I strongly suspect that no for-profit company would really allow a PTA to have much authority over what goes on.
Part of the problem in the Friedman model is the simple issue of motivation. Why would companies suddenly spring up to take over the role of schools? Private schools that exist at present are there in large part because of an organic need in the community, combined with the presence of people with the motivation to be teachers. The Friedman pipe dream instead seems to be based on the profit motive, which is, as noted above, largely incompatible with public services. His model is also flawed in ignoring the very real geographical constraints of schools -- even assuming real market-style competition
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
It's pretty bad being a teacher. Had a partner teaching first then second grade -- not all of the kids, but enough to create a problem had the rebellious chip-on-the-shoulder attitude that came around 7-8th grade when I grew up. One issue is there is no way to discipline the children that they care about. Since corporal punishment was stricken, I don't think teachers have found an effective replacement. But "time-outs"...they don't care, their minds are off most the time anyway -- and sending them out of class, or suspension/expulsion -- many of them don't care -- they don't want to be in school anyway. Many of the kids had behavior issues that might have put them in a remedial class (apparently, like Bush was). That's a major problem that's come up in the past several years since Bush's "No Child Left Behind" act. Instead of holding kids back or allowing kids to progress at different rates, all must wait for the slowest child (little Georgie). The regular testing of the kids is more or seems more to evaluate the teachers than the children. Now, it's no longer a child's responsibility to behave or learn -- it's the teachers responsibility to "emote" knowledge into them...kids are simply being trained to be passive receivers and the learning is predictably suffering.
...several or dozen or more years -- too much focus on remedying the lowest rung at the expense of dragging down the whole -- but that's part of the "false dichotomy" -- that there has to be a trade off.
That's been a bad trend over the past
It's the same "root cause" as teacher's not being able to afford to live in the communities they teach in. Not enough resources into education -- too many resources invested in high-end of life and the adult stages (including, recently, this war that is causing oil prices to go up (war->deficit spending->'printing' money (how close is US debt to 3 T$ (Tera-$)?)->dollar deflates in value as massive 'unbacked-money' is created, commodities (incl oil) go up) -> US goes bankrupt)). But look at how much the rich spend on luxury goods --- increase in cruise ships, vacation spots -- extremely expensive hobbies/sports...so much wealth concentrated in top 1% people -- but it's the 'masses' that are taught in schools -- and that's where the dollar share has been shrinking the most.
There was an opinion piece in the WSJ that tried to show how increasing the top tax rate didn't increase the government's tax-income as a percentage of GDP -- what it unintentionally showed, actually was GDP going up as
the top tax rate rose, and GDP going down as it fell -- so the % going to government appeared level. GDP going
up or down reflects almost directly goes into a rise or fall of the "standard-of-living" of the nation. That meant that as the top tax rate fell, the average standard of living for the nation as a whole fell -- and vice versa.
GDP has fallen to lowest levels in my lifetime under the top tax rate falling from over 70% to the 20-25% it is now. All that was Reagan-& the Bushes rolling back taxes on the rich while using government deficit to inflate the economy. While Clinton didn't raise taxes -- he did manage to get the deficit from around 2-billion to almost breaking even by the time he left office -- now it's up higher than ever.
Bush needs to be out of office so yesterday. I think my postings are too long and people don't get this far...
*sigh*...just supposed to shut-up while the nation is tanking to hell...
According to http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bludge it's a slang word used in "chiefly Australian & New Zealand". That's not "most of the English speaking world" AFAIK. And something that "googling it" turned up quite easily. I'm not a native English speaker, but I had 4 years of education in English-speaking schools. I had never heard of a bludge.