Appalling
This Times story has a link to a GCSE physics paper (hat tip to aendr). Some people would complain it was too easy, but I think that's alright for a GCSE paper with foundation components.
I read through it, and started seeing a few ambiguous questions, a few that were wrong but with some answers that were at least substantially less wrong or got things not entirely right (the digital/analogue thing is pretty close to digital signals carrying more information, but it's not entirely right and it misses the key point of why in practice they do).
I knew I was being pedantic when I took the opportunity to come up with silly ways to use a meter stick to measure frequency (like the infamous barometer problem).
But then I hit question 30. Wrong. And most importantly anyone writing that question should have known it was wrong. Flat out wrong.
33 also wrong, although you could easily have taken it to be ok before 1996, and a lot of textbooks from before then will make the same error. But 1996 was more than a decade ago, and the discovery of 70% of the universe is not something that can be ignored. It's a complicated issue, but better to just not go into it than teach simply incorrect material.
It's infuriating. Extremely infuriating.
[and now an aside where I come up with ways to use a meter stick to measure frequency. Please feel free to comment and add your own:
Hang the meter stick from one end and use as a pendulum, counting cycles within however many periods of the pendulum swing (this might suffer from the meter stick being too long, hence falling under answer A)
Strap one end to the edge of the table and give the other end a good twang, and do the same (advantage of probing a higher frequency domain than the pendulum)
Drop the meter stick out of the window and count the number of cycles until the stick hits the ground (shamelessly stolen from the barometer problem, but A doesn't affect this one although a shorter stick might be better as you don't have to worry so much about which end of the stick needs to hit the ground to stop counting)
Swing the stick about at ever increasing speeds until you get a sonic boom from it, thus determining the speed of sound and enabling you to convert wavelength to frequency.
]
I read through it, and started seeing a few ambiguous questions, a few that were wrong but with some answers that were at least substantially less wrong or got things not entirely right (the digital/analogue thing is pretty close to digital signals carrying more information, but it's not entirely right and it misses the key point of why in practice they do).
I knew I was being pedantic when I took the opportunity to come up with silly ways to use a meter stick to measure frequency (like the infamous barometer problem).
But then I hit question 30. Wrong. And most importantly anyone writing that question should have known it was wrong. Flat out wrong.
33 also wrong, although you could easily have taken it to be ok before 1996, and a lot of textbooks from before then will make the same error. But 1996 was more than a decade ago, and the discovery of 70% of the universe is not something that can be ignored. It's a complicated issue, but better to just not go into it than teach simply incorrect material.
It's infuriating. Extremely infuriating.
[and now an aside where I come up with ways to use a meter stick to measure frequency. Please feel free to comment and add your own:
Hang the meter stick from one end and use as a pendulum, counting cycles within however many periods of the pendulum swing (this might suffer from the meter stick being too long, hence falling under answer A)
Strap one end to the edge of the table and give the other end a good twang, and do the same (advantage of probing a higher frequency domain than the pendulum)
Drop the meter stick out of the window and count the number of cycles until the stick hits the ground (shamelessly stolen from the barometer problem, but A doesn't affect this one although a shorter stick might be better as you don't have to worry so much about which end of the stick needs to hit the ground to stop counting)
Swing the stick about at ever increasing speeds until you get a sonic boom from it, thus determining the speed of sound and enabling you to convert wavelength to frequency.
]