Aughwhut!

[bladespark]

Here is an article about the dumbing down of science in the UK.

Here is a sample test that shows what teens over there are supposed to know.

I have read a lot of science fiction, including some hard stuff that has real physics in it. But I have never taken a single physics class in my life. I could ace this thing. A monkey could ace this thing. It is the stupidest test I've ever seen in my life. There is literally a question on here that a kindergartener has a good chance of getting right, (see question 3) and several questions where the real correct answer is not even present, because they've dumbed it down so much that they've taken real physics right out of it and substituted something stupid.

Take, for example, question one. NONE OF THOSE THINGS ARE THE PATH A MOON TAKES if considered in relation to a sun, okay? OKAY? I want to take that and draw the correct path on there. AUGH! A real lunar orbit is this squiggly and/or looping thing, depending on how the orbit goes compared to that of the planet it's around. I don't even have to have studied to know this, it is common sense. The planet is moving around path A, and as it goes forward the moon loops around, making the moon's path go back and forth. A moon does not move in a neat circle like C unless the planet it's orbiting is stationary relative to the sun, and if you ever find a stationary planet, please tell me, I want to know how that happened.

And WHY are there two questions on here about retinal scans? What does the proper use of retinal scanning have to do with physics? WHYYYYYYYYYYYYY?

And ten annoys the heck out of me. Jupiter is not uninhabitable because it is too cold, okay? It's uninhabitable because it's freaking HUGE, and is actually very hot, if you get down past the outer cloud layers and into the interior. And yes, duh, it's cold out at Jupiter because you're far from the sun, but couldn't the writers have found a better way to write this question than that? And what kind of idiotic physics student needs to be tested on the idea that close to the sun = hot, and far from the sun = cold? This is a second grade concept here!

Gah. Two thirds of this test are for utter morons, and the last third I can still see at least one option to every question that is obviously stupid and wrong. A good test doesn't let you eliminate answers unless you know something about the subject! But come on. Ultrasound is NOT going to be evidence of the Big Bang. Nosoundinspace! I would think that anybody who made it through elementary school knows that you don't get sound in space.

Also, why do we have to have little characters who go out and learn about astronomy? Why can this not just be a test? You do not need to say "Jas reads in a book that a galaxy has red shift. This provides evidence that:" You say "A galazy has red shift. This provides evidence that:" By high school kids should be past needing cutesy little stories to interest them in science, and if they're not, tacking on that "Jas" is studying science too is not going to help things.

Stupidity!

Oh well. I guess at least I can take comfort in knowing that America isn't the only country out there where this sort of total idiocy happens.

Comments

[killerdetergent.livejournal.com]

Yea the dumbing down of society makes me sad as well :(

[dotty-alice.livejournal.com]

Finally, a country is coming down to our level.

So much for moving to London, I'll move to Canada instead!

[beetlecat.livejournal.com]

I looked at the first question and went "wha?" because the answers make no sense.. moons orbit planets, not stars and what the heck is the difference between answer C and D?

At the 2nd question, I giggled because that's something you learn in elementary school. The moon is a small star? I haven't believed that since I was 6...

At the 3rd question, I burst out laughing and had to do a double take to believe it. Where I come from, we call that a 'gimme' question and it's only apparent purpose is to boost test scores.

Though I dunno if I can talk since in one class in collage, my final exam was 20 question multiple choice!

[bladespark.livejournal.com]

I dunno, college I feel is different. The testing is incidental to the purpose, which is learning in order to apply towards eventual degree + career + use. The test is more just to make sure you show up and pay attention, but really you're an adult, so the learning part is up to you. High school tests are suppose to actually test your knowledge. Which this thing so doesn't.

[beetlecat.livejournal.com]

True. And the 20 question thing wasn't really so hot (well, except for the fact I was finished in like 15 minutes) because just one wrong answer was a big chunk of mark taken off.

[dexam.livejournal.com]

I looked at the first question and went "wha?" because the answers make no sense.. moons orbit planets, not stars and what the heck is the difference between answer C and D?

Answer A is supposed to represent the orbit of a planet around a star.
Answer B is supposed to represent the orbit of a comet around a star.
Answer C (the correct answer) is supposed to represent the orbit of a moon around a planet (the path of the orbit intersects with the orbit of the planet, which is how the orbits of moons are represented in most science text books).
Answer D is supposed to represent an orbit that is physically impossible.


And ten annoys the heck out of me.

It annoys me, but for different reasons. The question states "Jupiter is too cold to support life". This is poorly stated! It is not know if this is true or not - Jupiter could very well support life, just not life as we know it.


I would think that anybody who made it through elementary school knows that you don't get sound in space.

You would think that, but you would be wrong. Personally, I blame television and movies - after all, don't the spaceships all go vrroooooom! and the lasers pewpewpew! and the exploding spaceships ka-BOOOM!??

Further proof that all education is lies to children. :P

[graydown.livejournal.com]

I dunno. I've gotten some pretty weird questions from supposedly educated adults. Everything from "does a nuclear bomb work in space?" to "have astronomers ever seen outside our solar system?"

At first I tried to explain things. Now I just play dumb.

[bladespark.livejournal.com]

Yes, but this test is supposedly to be administered to people who have been taking physics. Not just random people with no interest in science, this is for physics students.

Since, as a totally not physics student who never took a single physics class in my life, I can still answer pretty much all of them, that's pathetic.

Have you looked at #3? It gives you a chart listing frequencies in order, and then asks what of those frequencies visible light falls between. This is like giving you a list of 1-10 and then asking what numbers does 6 fall between. The answer is right there. You do not have to know anything about physics. You just have to be able to read English, and not even terribly well.

"Educated" and "IS A FREAKING PHYSICS STUDENT" ought to be different things. One of them should know a couple of very basic ideas about physics.

[sparkindarkness.livejournal.com]

I blame privatisation of the exam boards and league tables.

Teachers are encouraged to increase test results as much as possible - so they dumb down and help at to an unreasonable degree. It doesn't matter if the kids leave the school educated or not - so long as the test results are up! This also leads to teachers teaching a TEST rather than the subject

They also look for the "easiest" exams on the market - out to make a profit, the exam boards write the easiest exames they can that still fit the necessary criteria.

[rimspace.livejournal.com]

I do have a suspicion about the reason behind the retinal scan stuff in there, although articulating it would make me sound like a paranoid (although I note that a paranoid is someone in full possession of all the facts ¬¬).

As for the rest... tell me about it. The universities in the UK are currently going through hell because of this sort of thing. The qualifications kids are coming away from schools and colleges with are often not worth the paper they are printed on, and it is widely known that they are massively dumbed down and the kids have been taught how to pass the test rather than anything about the subject.

It has become so bad, in fact, that several of our first year courses are remedial courses designed to try and bring up the level of literacy, numeracy and self-lead study in the intake, and even then we have huge trouble because... well, say that you want students to do activities a, b and c. If you only attach marks to parts a and c, then the students will only do a and c, and will spend the minimum amount of time possible on doing them. They won't even consider attempting b. In trying to force them away from the "studying is only worth doing if you get a mark out of it at the end" mindset, we have to expend massive amounts of thought and effort. In some of the worst cases students will even 'answer tactically': they will drop marks if they don't think they are getting enough to cover the effort they are putting in! It's absolute madness.

[malakim2099.livejournal.com]

As a reformed physics nut (went into business instead since I want to make money that doesn't involve new ways of exploding people, or worse finding tenure)... that was a laugher. Especially the retinal scans, wtf?

I particularly like the fact that red giants ONLY can form from main sequence stars. Unless something changed... you could get a red giant forming 'naturally' too. I won't comment about the other bits of idiocy on that waste of space, mainly because others have touched on them far better than me. *grins*

[aoanla.livejournal.com]

Given that stellar temperature is correlated with stellar mass, for stars on the main sequence, you'd need to somehow get an anomalously helium-rich cloud of gas together to make a red giant while skipping the normal stellar evolution process. That said, of course, it is idiotic that they're implying that all stars somehow go from yellow through red to white (the sloppy construction of the question, however, implies that they mean "all stars which are spectral class G when on the main sequence" and not "all stars", they just can't write well enough to express that unambiguously).

[jtbeckett.livejournal.com]

wow... i have a hard time believing that isn't an elementary school test... are we sure there wasn't a typo that said "high" and meant to say "elementary"???

[thetommydodd.livejournal.com]

This a recent, and disturbing phenomenon. Until maybe 15yrs ago you had 2 choices if you wanted a degree, namely University or Polytechnic. University qualifications generally got a lot more respect. (The term "college" here can refer to one of 2 things, either an autonomous outfit within a University (as at Oxbridge) or an institution providing academic (usually A levels) or vocational qualifications for over 16s who've left school). However, the government decided that was nasty and snobby, and at the same time decided that lots more people should get to go to uni and have a degree (anywhere between a third and a half of the relevant age group, depending on which politico you ask). They also introduced "league tables" of exam results for schools, so their performance could be compared, and wealthier parents could buy improved opportunities for their kids by moving to the catchment area of better schools, without having to spring for private education- an unintended consequence maybe, but a real one nevertheless. Also, since politicians and administrators both wanted to be able to point to a steady year-on-year improvement in results, this has led to some bending (even corkscrewing) of the grading curves.
SO, this led to a flood of new students, all wanting degree courses and not necessarily hard ones. All polytechnics rapidly promoted themselves to university status, usually with charmingly vague names: If a poly and uni existed in the same city, you can usually tell which institute used to be a poly from it's complex and pretentious name EG Instead of Birmingham Uni and Birmingham Poly you now might have Birmingham Uni and Heartlands Uni, or the Uni of the West Midlands. This fools nobody, but still they persist.
Also, to attract the differently-intelligent, and the funding that goes with them, a host of new academia-lite courses have sprung up, in the wonderful worlds of media and cultural studies for example. To survive, science departments must compete for student numbers, so entrance requirements have gradually watered down, and the courses must now reflect that.
Good, isn't it?

AUGH!

[aazhie.livejournal.com]

that is so terrible... and i thought I was undereducated!!??

[scribe-of-stars.livejournal.com]

Yeesh. No wonder high-level courses at my college revisit things I learned in my private-school education. Granted, the courses cover things I didn't know, but I shouldn't know anything beforehand.

[silveradept]

Sounds like the United Kingdom is taking America as its example when it comes to test styles and scores. This is not a good idea. They should be running away screaming from anything that looks like it's American-inspired.

[scribe-of-stars.livejournal.com]

Iraq, for example? I find it likely we'll get out of there pretty soon, anyway...

[aoanla.livejournal.com]

I should note, as no-one else from the UK seems to have, that the first half of that paper is "Foundation" level. Foundation level, at least when I was at school, was the "I have roughly the same ability in education as a clever reptile" paper, so it is entirely unsurprising that you found that part of the paper easy - bear in mind that, unless things have changed since I did GCSEs, you can't actually get a grade higher than (IIRC) a C while doing Foundation level GCSEs. So, to quote from your post, the kind of idiotic physics student that needs to be tested on the idea that things are colder further from the Sun... is an idiotic physics student, forced to do the three part Science GCSEs by his or her school (remember, it's not like you can opt out of Science at GCSE level, so most people aren't motivated at all), and who certainly isn't expected to actually take Physics at A level or above.

[rabbitsystem.livejournal.com]

A point. I recall the foundation students of my year, and by and large they were thick.
(I'm not being elitist. I have intimate experience with 'thick' and I know it when I see it.)

[bladespark.livejournal.com]

The article does say that. *shrugs* But it doesn't get much better as it goes along, really. The questions are astonishingly poorly written, even if the later ones do tackle harder subjects, they don't tackle them very well.

[aoanla.livejournal.com]

I agree that the questions are also poorly written; however, the later ones are slightly harder than the Foundation level ones, at least.

[rabbitsystem.livejournal.com]

The second half of that paper is about the standard of the tests I took when I was fourteen (two years early) and I aced them. But having since studied physics at pre-college level, I learned physics. There was some actual science involved. Science in the UK has not been dumbed down. School has been dumbed down. A-levels have come down to reflect what you can actually teach in two years when the starting point is so low. Our university system, at least, is still (mostly) worth the money you pay to attend.
Our state school system is poor, particularly in the hard sciences and maths. Partly a lack of teachers, partly a lack of funding, and partly the yearly testing that MUST be passed by a certain propoertion of pupils or the head gets sacked, so the children are taught to pass the tests, whether they understand the material or not.

(While we're on the subject, Question 19 is just plain wrong. I'm assuming they want you to say that digital signals carry more information, but that is wrong. Digital radio signals carry less information because there's loss in coding, but suffer less from noise assuming an intermidiary boost of the signal. Grr!)

[bladespark.livejournal.com]

*nods* It's still rather a bad sign when you're lowering the standards like that.

And most of those questions are really disgustingly poorly written.

[aoanla.livejournal.com]

Thank you, so much, for being someone who actually understands that basic fact about digital signals.

[doran-eirok.livejournal.com]

Sheesh. What sorta grade level is this aimed at anyway? Regardless the way it's written is just... bizarre and strange and... wtf retinal scans. I like question 8 myself, I can only assume they want you to put 'ultraviolet' for the type of radiation that causes skin cancer and damages eyes, though last I heard Gamma radiation wasn't exactly aloe vera either..

[2dlife.livejournal.com]

Gamma doesn't cause skin cancer.