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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.
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.
It's like putting people in a motorized wheelchair so they never learn to walk. In theory it's not a bad idea - a wheelchair with a powerful motor would give us the ability to drive around faster than we can walk or run, and carry lots of luggage around etc. In practice it's a stupid idea, obviously.
What you should have done in that one problem was not used a calculator, but looked at the sizes of the numbers given in the multiple choices, and then picked the choice where the magnitude was in the correct ballpark.
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.
My Sig: SEGV
What you should have done in that one problem was not used a calculator, but looked at the sizes of the numbers given in the multiple choices, and then picked the choice where the magnitude was in the correct ballpark.
Uh, no. If a test question says I can use a calculator, I'm using a calculator. For some of these tests, there's too many questions not to. Obviously, this one was trivial, but you catch my drift. In *most* cases, a calculator is more efficient (yes, you can find some edge cases where realizing the "trick" is faster than typing the equation)
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?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
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.)
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