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Are You Better At Math Than a 4th (or 10th) Grader?
New submitter newslash.formatb points to this Washington Post blog post, which "discusses the National Assessment of Educational Progress test (specifically, the math part). One of the school board members took it and was unable to answer any of the 60 math questions, though he guessed correctly on 10 of them. He then goes on to claim that the math isn't relevant to many people. P.S. — if you want to feel like Einstein, check out some sample questions." Maybe this is mostly about the kind of life skills that are sufficient to succeed in management.
But I found those questions trivial without a calculator, how you'd manage to fail with a calculator is beyond me.
After reading this article, having someone as influential as a school board member take this test and fail it is putting education on a very dangerous course. It normally wouldn't be too bad but this guy's ego is so big that instead of admitting that he just isn't knowledgeable on the subject, he goes on a rant about how irrelevant this stuff is to life and how unnecessary this subject matter is to evaluating a student's college career. I mean sure, it might not be relevant to him for his job duties, but any science/engineering discipline should be well versed in simple math like this. I really hope he doesn't make a push to dumb down these tests to make the math easier.
The guy's quite right. He shouldn't have a bachelor, let alone two masters and 15 credit hours towards a doctorate.
Unfortunately, too many students are in a similar position. Universities have been turned into for pay degree mills, and the qualifications the higher education industry produces are generally not worth the paper they are printed on.
I think your excuse shows why older people fail at these tests: They treat them as something you need to learn by heart. If you visualize the problem, it is immediately clear where the mirrored point is. Then you don't need to remember "how many" signs to flip.
From TFA:
"I help oversee an organization with 22,000 employees and a $3 billion operations and capital budget, and am able to make sense of complex data related to those responsibilities."
And he couldn't answer a single question right. How much do they learn between eighth and tenth grade? Is it actually likely that the eighth-grade one is something we should all expect to get perfect on in less time than it takes to write a post about, but the tenth-grade one is so hard that a reasonable person couldn't be expected to get a single question right?
My guess is tat this guy is not able to make sense of complex data. You are
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I am a recent import from Canada to the US, working near 'Intelligently Designed' Dover, PA.
The amount of willful ignorance here in the US is shocking, even this far North.
This whole article is a symptom of the 'dumbing down' of the the US, embracing style over substance, abandoning reason for the sake of conformity.
The math questions are relatively easy (even for a sleepy dyslexic), I only had to grab a pen and paper for the hourly wages one.
Yes, there are smart people in the US, but the majority are afraid to think for themselves.
They gravitate towards the loud pompous idiots, and will ignore facts and the reality around them.
Current and past GOP candidates are a very sad commentary of American leadership (Palin for education czar, Gingrich for morals minister?).
The US is a quickly fading empire, willing to blame anyone and everyone (immigrants) but itself for becoming non-competitive in the world market.
Sorry about replying twice to your post, but I forgot to comment on this:
So RTFA, and then: what conclusions do you draw?
First of all, we have to remember that the sample questions were from the 4th and 8th grade, but the test he failed was 10th grade. At that age level, the questions might already be hard enough that it's justifiable to have forgotten a couple of rules and fail as an adult.
It's his reaction that's terrible. Because if you don't understand those rules when they're relevant, you're not going to be able to move on to the harder stuff. Is this guy seriously telling us he has 15 hours towards a doctorate and doesn't have the math skills to even begin to understand statistics?
The stuff you learn up to high school isn't supposed to be 100% relevant to the field you choose to work in when you're old enough to make that decision. It's supposed to enable you to choose any career at that point, and maybe even more importantly, have a general understanding of how the world works.
This guy is so strictly confined within his own bubble that he thinks children should be optimized for his one career path out of thousands. And he's on the school board. Ouch.
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Blagojevich ran the entire state of Illinois, and claims to not know how to use a computer. I'm not sure I could trust him with an iPod.
A movie star was in charge of California for several years, I am pretty sure we had a professional wrestler as the govenor of another state in the last 15 years.
Politics and booksmarts don't seem to have anything in common, as far as I can tell. Success in politics seems to be centered around who you know and how adept you are at talking to people and making both parties mutually happy. If politicians were booksmart they wouldn't need to pay analysts to sort out the facts of the studies that they commission.
moox. for a new generation.
It's quicker just to do it in your head. An exact answer wasn't needed - it's a multiple choice question and the answers provided were so different that a simple "guesstimate" would lead you to the correct one.
(47*75)/25=
becomes 50*(75/25) = 50*3 = 150
so what are you going to pick, 141, 1175, or something even larger?
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Believe it or not it is something I and many others do every. Sure we crank everything though spreadsheets and all sorts of other tools, but its always easy to place an extra zero, drop a zero or transpose number. At least if you have a ballpark figure you know if something is an order of magnitude off it can't possibly be right.
Assuming all questions had four options and the answers were uniformly distributed, then yes, the "expected value" is 15. But, surely you recall that the standard deviation of the binomial distribution is sqrt(60*(1/4)*(3/4)) = sqrt(11.25) = approx 3.35. So to get 10 puts you less than 1.5 stdev from the mean. For normally distributed data (which I would expect the scores for such a test with random answer selection), 68% of the results are within 1 stdev, and 95% are within 2.
So, a score of 10 doesn't seem out of place at all. (And this is all high-school level stats, mind you, sticking to the Probability 101 theme here.)
Program Intellivision!
As someone with a masters in maths and PhD in physics, this is the same way I did the calculation. In fact, I suspect it's the way anyone who knows some more advanced maths would do it: What you've effectively done (in maths language) is:
1) Use the associative property of multiplication and its inverse: (AB)C=A(BC).
2) Rewrite the unknown product 47*3 in terms of two known products, by first rewriting 47=50-3, thus (50-3)*3.
3) Expand the bracket: 47*3=50*3-3*3.
Now this is much akin to the 'normal' method used to teach kids, except they always expand their brackets in terms of positive numbers broken up by powers of 10, ie 47=40+7, however from a mathematical standpoint there's no reason not to use any splitting you like, only the expedience of learning a limited number of multiplications.
The true gift of good mathematicians is not only being able to make these thought processes, but properly explain them so that others can too. Far too often maths as it is taught is just a voodoo recipe for performing calculations rather than a well explained, reasoned setup. This is fine for people who merely have to perform the function (much as you don't need to know the workings of an internal combustion engine to drive a car) but if you want to derive a deeper understanding of what's going on its woefully insufficient.
My first step was to laugh at the "you can use a calculator" instruction - what the heck? What are they testing with this question?
He continued, “It seems to me something is seriously wrong. I have a bachelor of science degree, two masters degrees, and 15 credit hours toward a doctorate.
Yeah, something is wrong. If he took a test with questions like the sample, how the hell did he manage to get a BS without the ability to figure even one of them out. "you can use a calculator"!!!!
I'd really, really, really like to review the original test now...
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Especially once you realize that 3*7=21 and only one answer ended in 1.
Yeah, something is wrong. If he took a test with questions like the sample, how the hell did he manage to get a BS without the ability to figure even one of them out. "you can use a calculator"!!!!
It depends on what the BS was in. A little more digging reveals this:
A resident of Orange County for three decades, he has a bachelor of science degree in education and two masters degrees: in education and educational psychology.
I'm not sure why the education undergrad degree was a BS, rather than a BA, but that, combined with the two master's degrees in education, explain a whole lot. He could probably have gone through all of those degrees, including the 15 hours towards a doctorate (by which he probably means an Ed.D., which is definitely not the same as a Ph.D.) without ever taking any math more advanced than basic algebra. Educational psychology might (and definitely should) have included basic statistics, but it might not have, and depending on the way the course was taught, might have been easy to skate through.
Also, being able to oversee a large budget tell me nothing about his math ability. It tells me he has basic Excel skills. If he thinks he doesn't need those math skills in his job, he probably doesn't realize how much more efficiently/accurately he could be doing his job if he did have and use them.
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The lady I buy bus tickets from (Who is VERY sweet) told me a couple days ago that she is amazed that the school kids she sells stuff to can't count their money.
Those "tricks" and "cheats" are nothing of the sort. They are thinly disguised high-level abstract concepts from number theory, group theory, etc.
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