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Beauty may be only skin deep, but stupidity…

July 9, 2005

I don’t know what to make of this:

School officials in Victoria, Australia, say it’s too hard for students to calculate equations using the constant 9.8 meters/second/second—the acceleration of gravity at Earth’s surface—so it’s changing the Year 12 physics exam for the Victorian Certificate of Education to use a rounded-off figure of 10 m/s/s.

Close enough? No: “The difference could cause a parachutist or bungie jumper to plummet into the ground, or the launching of a rocket to fail,” say people who actually understand physics.

After hearing the criticism the Victorian Curriculum Assessment Authority announced that it would not penalize students who used the correct figure. (Melbourne Herald Sun, Australia)
 
…No penalty for wrong answers, no penalty for the right ones—modern education in a nutshell.

Yes, I know 9.8 m/s2 is not the precise figure, either… but I’m still choking on the idea that students are learning that constants can be rounded off to whole numbers.  What’s next – both e and pi rounded to “3”?

Well, at least the Victoria Museum got it right.

(via James Randi)

Categories: Education
  1. July 11, 2005 at 08:00 | #1

    I’m *really* hoping that this shows up in Snopes soon (just like the <a >pi</a> entry).

  2. July 11, 2005 at 14:11 | #2

    I quite fancy pi should be 7 as it looks pretty. About the same logic!

    And just to repeat the previous poster’s link so that it works (I hope!) pi

  3. Lucas
    July 13, 2005 at 09:11 | #3

    I don’t know whether the quoted link describes something real, but the trend is real.  In my chemistry class in HS, I was required to round numbers *at each stage in a calculation*, which, based upon answer keys when I was marked wrong for not doing it, frequently resulted in errors of about 10%.  More recently, I tried to help my roommate with his chemistry homework (a problem involving kinetics of a reaction).  The homework was an online submission thing, and I wasn’t able to help him.  The website kept saying the right answer was wrong.  This was because of a rule in the textbook (the “5% rule”), wherein if you are summing a+x+x^2, you assume that x^2 is zero if x<0.05.  Admittedly, 0.0025 is pretty small, but it was enough to cause the computer to find the correct answer wrong.

  4. July 13, 2005 at 10:03 | #4

    The original article (where Randi found it) came from a website called This is true, which is pretty good about original sources.  The link given here goes to the site’s source standards’ page.  Unfortunately the Melbourne Herald Sun didn’t have that article online.  Most likely someone sent Randy Cassingham of This Is True a newspaper clipping.  So (sadly) it probably is true.

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