Edexcel examiners are possibly crack addicts
August 29th, 2007
Today the Times announced dedicated its front page to claims of a “gentlemen’s agreement” amongst examiners to make GCSE science exams easier. The JCQ director gave this wonderful logic:
Dr Sinclair added that the changes would help to stop children being “turned off” by science.
“Part of the desire is that the student can come out of the exam with a feeling of success that they have actually tackled a significant proportion of the questions, and achieved the best grade expected,” he said. “The vast majority of candidates taking this exam are going to achieve grades D to G, and they deserve a positive experience of science.
Clearly, in answer to my previous article, the purpose of exams is actually to give kids a warm fuzzy feeling, and to teach that smoking pot all day instead of studying doesn’t preclude you from deserving an academic qualification. Speaking of drug abuse, here’s an example question from the GSCE paper posted on the Times website. Can anyone even begin to understand what’s going on here?
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14 Comments
1. Ithika | August 29th, 2007 at 3:51 pm
That’s some special crack the setter of that question must have been smoking… wow. I can’t… I’m… uh, I think I’ll come in again.
Right, element of surprise, bright red uniforms, fanatical devotion to the Pope. Seriously though – is the answer A? It’s the only one in an approximately circular orbit around the tiny blob marked “star” so I guess so.
Extra points for having the chutzpah to write “not to scale”. O rly?
2. Frank the SciencePunk | August 29th, 2007 at 4:29 pm
It’s not that A is the wrong answer, so much as you won’t get a point for it.
3. james | August 29th, 2007 at 5:09 pm
I think it’s like a magic eye, if you squint and turn your head slightly to the left, it should be come clear.
Is it C? A appears to be the orbit of a planet around the star, which would make C its moon. I think. B is obviously a comet, and D is… I don’t know, the hopes and dreams of people who believe kids should leave school with at least a basic understanding of science.
4. coracle | August 29th, 2007 at 5:50 pm
Yeah, what James said, with C being an orbit perpendicular to A rather that horizontal. That would silly.
What is going on with D?
5. TauHecht | August 29th, 2007 at 8:01 pm
Oh God my brain is melting! What deprave madman would unleash this on the world?
It says the orbit of a moon, not our moon. This may not even be our solar system. Judging by the diagram, this may not even be our universe. Any one of these is a plausible answer! Oh jesus! Its eating through my miiiiind!
I’m assuming A is correct, but C or D is correct if they are not reffering to the moon’s actual orbit but rather the orbit around some unspecified object out there, somewhere. Maybe there is a black hole at the other end of B’s orbit, creating this messy slingshot effect it has going. I don’t know. It kinda looks like somebody just said “fuck it” and started drawing circles.
But then again, it’s not to scale. So anything is possible. This seems more like a question on Quantum Mechanics than orbits. Then smoking pot would be an advantage rather than a detriment. “The answer is E, they’re all the orbit, dude.”
6. Owen | August 30th, 2007 at 1:42 am
This is crazy stuff. I’d take a wild stab at C. Assuming that A represents the orbit of a planet, and therefore C represents the orbit of the moon around that planet. Nonsense of course, because the orbital path of the moon would look like a spiral because it will also be following the path of the planet. Aaaagh!
Who writes these papers!?
7. Ithika | August 30th, 2007 at 3:18 pm
@Owen:
I think the examiners got really trashed and spent the night hacking on one of those programs that generates sensible-looking but meaningless academic papers, so that now it produces physics papers with strange diagrams like this.
The only possible answer to this question is along the lines of the “Find x.” question: draw a big circle and an arrow, with the words, “here it is”.
8. Frank the SciencePunk | August 30th, 2007 at 3:37 pm
you mean like this?
9. Ithika | August 30th, 2007 at 4:28 pm
Yes, that’s it! Frank wins the thread.
10. Marty | August 30th, 2007 at 6:41 pm
You haven’t even got on to question 5 yet…
Our moon seems to disappear during an eclipse. Some people say that this is because an old lady covers the moon with her cloak. She does this so that thieves cannot steal the coins on the surface.
Man, they’re on some next-level shit.
11. coracle | August 30th, 2007 at 6:53 pm
Frank wins, thread over.
12. Kingreaper | September 1st, 2007 at 12:10 am
Thanks for linking me to that thing, it got a lot of agression out of my system writing a rant about EVERYTHING that’s wrong with it (well, not everything, but there’s only so much one can do)
Check it out if you want, it involves liberal use of the word “fucktard” though, so if that offends you…. Why are you on the internet?
Science Education is going down the crapper
13. Reef | September 7th, 2007 at 4:08 pm
I can’t help but thinking what would have happened if Kevin Spacey had sketched that diagram up in front of all the Nasa scientists in K-Pax?
Straight back to the loony bin me-thinks; it would have added a certain comic irony to the smug, ‘that should solve all the mathematical problems you were having’ type line that followed though!
14. poor shrew « this t&hellip | January 26th, 2010 at 11:41 pm
[...] bit upset with AQA. Sciencepunk blog explains the details further. On a bad exam related theme he also links to an interesting forum thread on The Time’s science questions. I really could not [...]
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