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Admit your Brain lock
IanB:
--- Quote from: coppice on April 03, 2024, 02:44:02 pm ---I find it amusing when younger people say this. When I was at school I never got above 93% in maths. All answers correct. All workings shown. That got me 93% consistently. 70% would get you an A, as the questions were tough enough that this restricted those As to less than 10% of students. I find the expectation that anyone but a genius on a good day would get 100% on an exam an indictment of that exam. A well formed exam should be able to separate even the top 1% of student's performances in that exam.
--- End quote ---
I think this shows how many people have a brain lock with mathematics, and how mathematics is "hard". For example, in the O-level test paper where I was able to answer all the questions correctly, most of my classmates were marked below 70% and only one or two above that. So, statistically, it was not an easy test for the population as a whole.
Siwastaja:
--- Quote from: coppice on April 03, 2024, 02:44:02 pm ---I find it amusing when younger people say this. When I was at school I never got above 93% in maths. All answers correct. All workings shown. That got me 93% consistently.
--- End quote ---
I think this just represents small implementation differences between countries. Here, the scoring system usually required around 40-50% score to pass, then linearly the best grade for 100% correct answers, without such weird 7% deadzone on the top. With finite resolution and usual rounding rules, the best possible exam score could be had even with one or two small mistakes.
Maybe it was easier for us here.
tggzzz:
--- Quote from: coppice on April 03, 2024, 02:44:02 pm ---I find the expectation that anyone but a genius on a good day would get 100% on an exam an indictment of that exam. A well formed exam should be able to separate even the top 1% of student's performances in that exam.
--- End quote ---
My father was once given 96% on an exam (probably maths) on the principal that nobody should be able to get 100%
My second year undergraduate elwctronics degree was given by someone from the maths faculty. We showed our notes to a friend doing that course, and he was flabberghasted - saying that the content was most of his course. The end-of-year exam rubric memorably stated "full marks may be obtained for answers to about 6 questions". One other person on this forum might remember that :)
IanB:
It's odd (what coppice said). Mathematics does not have fuzzy marking like, say, a language exam. If you get all answers correct, you would get 100%. There is a marking scheme with marks allocated to each question according to each part of the answer that needs to be provided to obtain the marks. For someone to get 93% that means that marks were dropped somewhere, probably due to not providing some expected element of some answers, or maybe by being incorrect in some answers that were given.
coppice:
--- Quote from: tggzzz on April 03, 2024, 03:25:01 pm ---
--- Quote from: coppice on April 03, 2024, 02:44:02 pm ---I find the expectation that anyone but a genius on a good day would get 100% on an exam an indictment of that exam. A well formed exam should be able to separate even the top 1% of student's performances in that exam.
--- End quote ---
My father was once given 96% on an exam (probably maths) on the principal that nobody should be able to get 100%
--- End quote ---
Our maths teachers said 100% was unreasonable, as if they gave someone 100% and the next paper in the pile used some great insight the previous paper had taken a longer way around, they would have no room to complement that insight. Why 93% seemed to be that cap below 100% I don't really know. They were awfully vague about that.
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