None of the above

[gareth_rees]

As background for an article complaining about falling standards in education, The Times scanned and posted the 2006 Edexcel GCSE Science: Physics P1b exam paper. This is a multiple choice paper covering topics of waves, electromagnetic radiation, astronomy, cosmology, and seismology.

I don’t necessarily concur with the judgment of the article (

Comments

[autodidacticphd]

i love what you are saying here. exams, especially multiple choice, need to be written accurately in order to test the knowledge of the students... not just to test what a student may have been lead to believe through the course. this is especially a problem for students who have a strong auto-didactic streak and may know more about a subject than is covered by the course materials and lectures. i've found myself frustrated by poorly written exams on many occasions, even in math classes, where there are often multiple ways to approach a problem, but the particular course may not include all methods. there are also problems of notation that can lead to ambiguity if the students have not been exposed to all possible representations.

what i find most frustrating is that many universities don't seem to have a good method for questioning the accuracy of exams writers or exam results, which can lead to very poor practices on the part of examiners causing inaccurate judgments of both the student's knowledge and the appropriate amount of material that a single course should (or can) effectively cover.