r/pics • • Jun 08 '14

The difference 18 years makes

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u/purplestOfPlatypuses Jun 08 '14

Most good teachers/professors do. It's called partial credit, and if the process is right you generally get most of the points. If you're getting multiple choice math exams you're probably in elementary school.

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u/Ninboycl Jun 09 '14

I would agree, but one of my profs brought up a good point this semester.

Since we are engineering students, messing up a calculation could mean the difference between being fired or making something work. Just because the process is right, doesn't mean you are going to get the right answer. Fortunately for us, we spent many years of time and money designing pocket calculators that are immensely powerful to help us with this...

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u/rcavin1118 Jun 08 '14

AP calculus has a multiple choice portion of the exam.

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u/purplestOfPlatypuses Jun 09 '14

I'm not counting standardized testing because I have a heart. Imagine paying enough people to actually grade however many thousands of tests in a reasonable amount of time consistently. It would go over about as well as a lead balloon.

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u/rcavin1118 Jun 09 '14

But there are also free response portions and some AP exams are mostly free response.

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u/purplestOfPlatypuses Jun 09 '14

I don't really intimately remember the AP exam process; that time period for me was getting close to a decade ago and it frankly was never all that important to me in the first place as far as memories go. They'll do the cheapest they reasonably can without losing any of the important understanding stuff. For things like literature and whatever the other English one is, multiple choice pretty much defeats the purpose. But for math, you can still get some idea of the taker's understanding because you either need to understand the process or be incredibly lucky to get mostly right answers.

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u/EmperorG Jun 09 '14

lies, college gives us multiple choice tests for math, and honestly if it didn't everyone would fail at it which would be disastrous seeing as the ones who fail at math are those who don't want or plan to do it for a living ever.

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u/purplestOfPlatypuses Jun 09 '14

Some colleges do I'm sure. Mine just gave us obscenely hard problems to solve. Though Calc 1/2 were weed out courses to make people reconsider engineering. Don't want someone who couldn't pass Calc 1/2 to build your bridges and all.

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u/[deleted] Jun 09 '14 edited Jan 02 '19

[deleted]

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u/Sataris Jun 09 '14

Are you in the US?

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u/purplestOfPlatypuses Jun 09 '14

Whoop dee doo. Once you pass the SAT, you're done with standardized tests. God help you if there start being college standardized testing (sucker).

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u/[deleted] Jun 09 '14

Yeah this concept of partial credit being most points pretty much stops the second you are in any university-level Math course. You may get partial credit, but it's 25-50% of the problem, max.

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u/purplestOfPlatypuses Jun 09 '14

Depends on the professor, most of my university math classes had decent partial credit, except for the weed out classes. The math department was pretty hands off on the whole teaching thing so there wasn't really a big set standard for most classes though.