Friday, April 09, 2010

April Fool's Joke

On 1 April I played a joke on my Int 2 Maths class which went down a treat.
I made up an official looking letter which accompanied the 1979 O'Grade Arithmetic Paper 1 (non-calculator) and gave it to the class. To their credit they tried to do it but I had to stop them after 15 minutes as they were beginning to panic. They commented that it was much, much harder than anything they had ever seen before. They found it hard to believe that it was an actual exam paper.
For those of you who are much younger than me there used to be two exams, the O Grade Maths and the O Grade Arithmetic. For entry into nursing a pass Arithmtic was essential and they did not need maths. Personally I would rather my nurse was excellent at arithmetic and do not care whether they can do trig or factorise a quadratic.
Perhaps CfE will address this.

1 comment:

ninalazina said...

I have seen past papers and they do indeed seem more difficult than what we have now. Not sure if this is good or bad?
Nina