UK Maths Tests, Past And Present

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Subject: Teaching Maths in Britain

1. Teaching Maths In 1970
A logger sells a truckload of timber for £100..
His cost of production is 4/5 of the price.
What is his profit?

2. Teaching Maths In 1980
A logger sells a truckload of timber for £100.
His cost of production is 80% of the price.
What is his profit?

3. Teaching Maths In 1990
A logger sells a truckload of timber for £100.
His cost of production is £80.
How much was his profit?

4. Teaching Maths In 2000
A logger sells a truckload of timber for £100.
His cost of production is £80 and his profit is £20.
Your assignment: Underline the number 20.

5. Teaching Maths In 2005
A logger cuts down a beautiful forest because he is selfish and inconsiderate and cares nothing for the habit of animals or the preservation of our woodlands.
Your assignment: Discuss how the birds and squirrels might feel as the logger cut down their homes just for a measly profit of £20.

6. Teaching Maths In 2009
A logger is arrested for trying to cut down a tree in case it may be offensive to Muslims or other religious groups not consulted in the felling licence. He is also fined a £100 as his chainsaw is in breach of Health and Safety legislation as it deemed too dangerous and could cut something.. He has used the chainsaw for over 20 years without incident however he does not have the correct certificate of competence and is therefore considered to be a recidivist and habitual criminal. His DNA is sampled and his details circulated throughout all government agencies. He protests and is taken to court and fined another £100 because he is such an easy target.

When he is released he returns to find Gypsies have cut down half his wood to build a camp on his land. He tries to throw them off but is arrested, prosecuted for harassing an ethnic minority, imprisoned and fined a further £100. While he is in jail again the Gypsies cut down the rest of his wood and sell it on the black market for £100 cash. They also have a departure BBQ of squirrel and pheasant and leave behind several tonnes of rubbish and asbestos sheeting.

The forester on release is warned that failure to clear the fly tipped rubbish immediately at his own cost is an offence. He complains and is arrested for environmental pollution, breach of the peace and invoiced £12,000 plus VAT for safe disposal costs by a regulated government contractor.

Your assignment: How many times is the logger going to have to be arrested and fined before he realises that he is never going to make £20 profit by hard work, give up, sign onto the dole and live off the state for the rest of his life?

7. Teaching Maths In 2010
A logger doesn’t sell a lorry load of timber because he can’t get a loan to buy a new lorry because his bank has spent all his and their money on a derivative of securitised debt related to sub- prime mortgages in Alabama and lost the lot with only some government money left to pay a few million pound bonuses to their senior directors and the traders who made the biggest losses.

The logger struggles to pay the £1,200 road tax on his old lorry however, as it was built in the 1970s it no longer meets the emissions regulations and he is forced to scrap it.

Some Bulgarian loggers buy the lorry from the scrap merchant and put it back on the road. They undercut everyone on price for haulage and send their cash back home, while claiming unemployment for themselves and their relatives. If questioned they speak no English and it is easier to deport them at the governments expense. Following their holiday back home they return to the UK with different names and fresh girls and start again. The logger protests, is accused of being a bigoted racist and as his name is on the side of his old lorry he is forced to pay £1,500 registration fees as a gang master.

The Government borrows more money to pay more to the bankers as bonus's are not cheap. The parliamentarians feel they are missing out and claim the difference on expenses and allowances.
You do the maths.

8. Teaching Maths 2017
أ المسجل تبيع حموله شاحنة من الخشب من اجل 100 دولار. صاحب تكلفة
الانتاج 80 من
الثمن. ما هو الربح له؟= 20
 
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Not really far from the truth..a recent government exam that I was subjected to, and I'm not making this up...

If a lift arrives at floor 1, where you are, and goes up two floors, which floor are you on? Subjective whether you got in the lift, trick question.

Can you find the speling mistake in the following sentance? "Bill weren't the, but Jill was' - So do you point out the spelling mistakes in the question itself? The grammatical errors in the statement, or the spelling errors in the quote? Strangely, I scored over 100%..

Another test paper, it turned out that the wrong crib sheet was used for the answers, and people still passed the tests...Blimey! That's Quango's for you.
 
Whitespirit well done! I'm a retired, life-long, mathematics teacher and so know that what you have described is pretty much spot-on.

Dumbing down has now gone so far that I don't know why anyone bothers to deny it.
 
I have been helping a lad out with his A-levels, in one question it said "use the frequencies in the table". All the information in the table was between 0 and 1. I think the may have meant proportion!

In another question they said how do you know there is a significant difference between group 1 and 2. The answer was because the standard deviations don't overlap. Morons!

What hope have the kids got when the plonkers writing the questions haven't got a clue.

I am a statistician....
 
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Adrian, you may be interested in this example if you haven't already heard about it.

A few years ago, a child was given the homework question 9 divided by 0 and gave as his answer that it was impossible. The teacher marked his answer wrong and said that the correct answer was 9. His father complained to the school but the headteacher backed the individual teacher.

The father then complained to the local authority but they backed the school. He continued with his complaint and was told he was wrong by the local numeracy advisor. He finally complained to the Minister of Education who consulted a university professor who, of course, said that the lad and his father were correct. 9/0 is undefined and there is no answer.

How many of the incompetent people involved are still holding their senior positions?
 
That is disgusting.

How any sort of teacher could get something so simple so wrong, and then not have the decency to admit their mistake is crazy.

I find the crazy thing with the example i gave was, it was in a science paper.

I also find it astonishing that in his stats paper he didnt even know how to calculate a standard deviation by hand. and wasnt sure what the i in xi actually referred to, and the use of calculators was so encouraged to the detriment of true understanding.

As you say its amazing some people still believe we are not dumbing it down.

Personally i can not believe that they are not making exams easier. It seems crazy that A grade % is increasing year after year. Personally i don't think evolution is that quick, or new teaching methods are that much more effective. Possibly 0.25% per year might be believable.

Bonkers...
 
More students are now getting grade A in mathematics A-level than used to pass the exam at all. Possible explanations are

1. Teaching is now very much more effective than it used to be when I started in 1965.

2. Students are now much more intelligent and/or hard working than before.

3. Exams have got very much easier to pass.

Which would you put your money on?
 
My money is safe..

Easy way to test this.

get a paper from 65 and one from 2009. Get the students to sit the exam. I bet the proportion that pass will be less than in 65.

However you can guarantee that some educational boffin will say the exams are now designed to test lateral thinking and problem solving or some other nonsense.



:rolleyes:
 
Adrian, here's one for your own specialism.

A youngish head of mathematics was showing a class how to find the mean when two groups are combined. She told them to add the individual group means and halve it. For some reason I was present, and made a surprised face.

She asked me to confirm what she had said. When (putting it as diplomatically as possible) I said that yes, that is the answer, but only if the two groups are the same size, she was stunned. She did not appear to have seen the formula (N1*mean1 + N2*mean2)/(N1 + N2) before.
 
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