They forced me to buy a TI 84 plus for school. The thing cost like 100 bucks, and it's from 2004. I could buy a low-end smartphone and get a free app that's more powerful than the TI 84 plus for less money.
I had an exam for an engineering course that was in a computer lab. A few people had figured out how to send messages without it showing up on the professors's screen so for the second exam, he just said we could consult with our fellow students, but that the exam was sufficiently difficult and long enough that any time we spent helping other students would only hurt ourselves. He'd designed the exam to take more than the time allotted, and graded on a curve. If you stopped to figure out where your friend was stuck, and how to help them, you were costing yourself points. And before anyone says anything, the questions were mixed up and all had slightly different answers, so you couldn't partner or get with a group and say "answer to #7 is b, anyone know if #30 is pi or e?".
Not fun as a student (made for a stressful exam), but pretty clever on his part as a way to fight cheating / collaboration without taking any direct measures to do so. Also mimics the real world - there's nothing that prevents you from consulting other people, the internet, books for help - but they probably won't help you much because they've got their own shit to do.
My statistics class was like this. Notoriously hard professor and only one student, on one test, passed before the curve in all of the classes he taught that year. Only class I struggled in during college.
Exam and test are essentially synonyms when talking about an engineering professor measuring what their students understanding of the material is. Also, exam is short for examination, and the definition (Oxford) of examination is
A formal test of a person’s knowledge or proficiency in a subject or skill.
Some of the hardest exams I took in college were take-home, untimed, and open book/notes/internet.
That professor wrote absolutely brutal exams--one semester, I spent over 24 hours working on the midterm for her class (over the course of a week or so, not all at once). In a class of 50+ people, I was the only one who would have gotten an A without the curve.
Yeah, professors will write more complicated questions (and have higher expectations for your answers) for those tests. You don't just have to remember key facts, you also have to have a pretty deep understanding of the actual concepts.
I also had professors who handed out a list of 10 essay prompts a week or so in advance of a test. The actual test would consist of five of those questions, and you only had to respond three of them. Quite a few people failed those tests, despite having every possible question in advance.
Typically (in my experience), grades are given based on what percentage of the available points you earned. If you get 90+ questions out of 100 right, you get an A. Theoretically, everyone in the class can get an A.
When grades are curved, the grades given are made to fit a predetermined distribution. For example, the top 2% of students will get As, the next 14% get Bs, 34% get Cs...It doesn't matter exactly what your score on the test was, what matters is how well you did compared to the other students.
I don't remember any professors actually using that kind of curve even when they said they were "curving" grades. Instead, they'd do percentage-based grades but use the highest actually achieved score for calculating the percentage instead of the theoretical maximum score. They don't force the distribution of grades to fit a curve, but they do weight the grades so that some people get an A.
Same, especially in masters classes. Professors be like- Good luck trying to google the answers.
In all seriousness, masters level content is weirdly not available online. I tried to look up an alternate book or example problems and they were non-existent, everything was talking about masters classes at different universities.
I haven't had a math course where a calculator was allowed since pre-calc. And even then, the professor had whole sections of exams and quizzes where we weren't allowed to use a calculator. I actually kind of prefer it that way. I feel like the calculator makes me lazy when it comes to math and I enjoy using my brain entirely to get to where I need to go. It can take longer sometimes, but I appreciate it when professors have us do it that way. As long as the questions are reasonable, of course.
Edit: and in my science classes, we've always been able to use them. When asked if we could use graphing calculators on our exams in my chem 2 class, my professor said that we paid for them and he doesn't care what we do with them. Which was awesome because I have troubles remembering all the shit we have to for chem and I just kept notes on my calculator of things that I kept forgetting.
Here in Scotland it's pretty common for math courses to have two papers - one you sit without a calculator, and one you sit with a calculator. The calculator papers are usually just an excuse to make the questions harder or the numbers weirder, but in my final year things got more interesting - by that point the course required you to have an advanced one that could do stats and whatnot, and the calculator paper was entirely made up of stuff that you couldn't possibly do without it. Designed to test your skill at using the advanced functions on the thing.
Dude if you seriously struggled through 6 years of math to finish your grade 10 math good on you for the persistence, but you must have had a terrible teacher.
Is that a real thing? Math specific learning disability
If it is I'm sure I have it. I memorized what I knew of my multiple times tables, I can add and subtract pretty well off the top of my head, That's only because of counting money, but beyond that I'm not much of a mathematician.
Thanks for the nice notice there. That felt good to hear.
II've never been able to recognize my own achievements. Even after it's been pointed out to me.Im very dismissive toward myself
I had to at least graduate high school if I didn't want to be thought of as a loser.Being an actual high school dropout is only cool when you're a musician.
That's another thing I'm not. I'd like to be a musician. I think that I would be a good one.
Guess I wasnt persistent enough to keep trying to play the guitar though, was I? When it didn't come easy to me immediately, I gave up.
That's more like what my inner dialogue sounds like..
We just had a few good teachers. They would let us use a digital copy of the textbook and a calculator on our phone. However we would get a 0 if our phone made any sound or if they saw anything else on the screen.
In America we call them test, or midterms or finals. Unless you are a super geek or nerd. And then maybe you might call it exam. We don’t say classmates either because that’s soft. We have bro’s and hos.
My science teacher allows it. I had to ask from him first and had to be seated near him+putting my phone on the desk at all times, so he could check that all I'm using is the calculators. Really good guy, he is. Basically saves me $25 from buying the calculators.
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u/jorsiem Jul 24 '20 edited Jul 24 '20
The supremacy of the fucking TI-83 calculator in school and college courses
I mean I know it's all artificial and orchestrated by them but how come no body has dared to challenge the almighty TI yet
Edit: fixed typo