I haven't had time to look at the test itself, so I will rely on your thoughts. Word problems are _always_ somewhat ambiguous; I think that that is the point of them. They test the student's ability to use common sense and abstract the important elements. That's why the easiest way to confuse student in word problems is to give them extraneous information. They keep trying to incorporate all the information, and all of the information isn't necessary. Are you telling me that in this era where _everyone_ practises for tests, using Kaplan, internet, whatever, that students aren't prepared for these kinds of tests? I keep hearing stories about teachers teaching _only_ for the tests. One would expect that under these conditions, the students would do well on the tests, but still not know any math. But we have an even worse situation -- they don't do well on the tests, and they don't know math, either. Perhaps students did better (as when we were in high school) when they didn't actually "study" for the tests. At 08:22 AM 7/3/03 -0400, William Thurston wrote:
On Thursday, July 3, 2003, at 12:35 AM, Henry Baker wrote:
I looked at the exam on the web. There were many questions that to me seemed poorly designed. This particular question as you paraphrased it may be something that you think most people *should* be able to do, but in reality I think few high school graduates actually master it, since, in particular, solid geometry is generally not taught. The actual question was about a juice container something like 2" x 4" x 5", and it asked how long a straw would fit diagonally, to the nearest tenth of an inch. A straw is not the same as a line, and the thickness of the straw (not specified, of course, and *intended* to be disregarded) would actually be likely to change the answer. People who've been taught a particular mechanical formula for this particular question can do it, but otherwise, it's likely to be a time-consuming and futile exercise, compounded by trying to calculate square roots presumably without a calculator.