freecounterpoint: Ever Grade Something Like This?

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Ever Grade Something Like This?

10 comments:

Mr roT said...: Nice. Reminds me of a poster I saw in our conference room.; 12/11/2007 5:58 PM
Tecumseh said...: Hah! That;s a good one -- no, I haven't seen it before. My favorite blooper is from a calculus exam I gave a long time ago. I asked:

Find \lim_{n\to \infty} \frac{\sin x}{nx}

The answer some hapless student gave was:

si

It took me a while to figure out WTF he meant. You get it?; 12/11/2007 6:36 PM
Mr roT said...: wonderful.; 12/11/2007 9:45 PM
Tecumseh said...: From today's Taranto: Neal Boortz says:

FairTax: You look at the item on the shelf. The item is priced at $100. You take the item to the cashier. The cashier asks you for $100. You pay your $100, take your receipt and walk out. You look at the receipt. The receipt tells you that 23 percent of the $100 you paid for that item is the FairTax and will be forwarded to the federal government. You call upon your years of education and quickly calculate that $23 is 23 percent of $100.

Hey, JJ, how many points off do you take for this? I betcha you give lots of partial credit, dontcha?; 12/12/2007 1:14 AM
My Frontier Thesis said...: This has been circulating around the office a bit today. I hear you can answer it this way and still ace the "Math for Poets, 101" course at Harvard.

Good poster, too, JJ. I also like the one that says, "You're not getting paid to believe in the power of your dreams: Get back to work." Even got a coffee mug of it.

AI, I have no idea why you got the answer you got. Let me in on the Logic used.

And we seriously need a flat tax of sorts in America instead of Internal Revenue Service legal code, the thickness of which can be measured with a yard stick.; 12/12/2007 2:42 PM
Tecumseh said...: MFT: That student must have thought that sin is just a string of letters. Thus (sin x)/(n x)=si. After this leap of faith, no problemo: si is just a constant (does not depend on n), so the limit is simply si. QED.; 12/12/2007 8:02 PM
Arelcao Akleos said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 12/13/2007 3:24 AM
Arelcao Akleos said...: asked:
AI said:
"Find \lim_{n\to \infty} \frac{\sin x}{nx}

The answer some hapless student gave was:

si

It took me a while to figure out WTF he meant. You get it?"

Beautiful. If you had made it instead the limit, as x--> oo, of Sin x / x then you would have led your student to the discovery of the origin of Sin.; 12/13/2007 3:27 AM
Tecumseh said...: Yeah, I think I meant to trick them a bit (oh, I love to do that, now and then, to relieve the monotonicity of boring Calc tests). I seem to recall I'd done that beautiful \lim_{x\to 0} (\sin x)/x limit in class (l'Hospital rulz!), so I put that to see if they gonna give something like 1/n as an answer, or perhaps 0 (ah, all the way operations may commute in perfervid calc student's minds!) But I did not foresee that answer. One could write a book about these things -- hey, MFT, is there grant money up for grabs for studying possible all the possible mistakes that can occur on a Calc exam? Is there even a finite set, or are there theoretically infinitely many ways things can get screwed up?; 12/13/2007 2:26 PM
My Frontier Thesis said...: AI, there is always another way to interpret a question, so I'd say there is an infinite way to screw things up. The best we could do with a study is to develop a couple categories that contain similar themes, and organize the clusterfucks that way. I'll bet there's some kind of Fulbright out there, some grant money of some sort. You might be in luck, too, as it's trendy nowadays to point out how idiotic Americans are.

Also: I'm completely lost with the Calculus/mathematics humor, but I'm sure it's very funny.; 12/13/2007 4:09 PM

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