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Announcement from BOSTES/NESA - 2019 Syllabus Changes for Calculus courses (1 Viewer)

leehuan

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Re: Announcement from BOSTES - significant change to calculus courses

I'd hope that I'll learn all the stuff by second year though.
 

turntaker

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Re: Announcement from BOSTES - significant change to calculus courses

Leehuan stop seenzoning
 

eyeseeyou

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Re: Announcement from BOSTES - significant change to calculus courses

I'd hope that I'll learn all the stuff by second year though.
Learn it during the holidays (or whenever you have the time to)
 

tywebb

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tywebb

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leehuan

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Re: Announcement from BOSTES - significant change to calculus courses

I was thinking that the MX1 course looked tiny compared to 2U and MX2... but woah didn't expect a lot of the feedback they gave out of naivety. Yeah I'm supportive of pushing away some more MX2 content and matrices into MX1.

So they are basically hoping that MX1 is to be targeted at engineers whilst MX2 is for those who seriously need the maths in the future?
 

tywebb

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Re: Announcement from BOSTES - significant change to calculus courses

Bill Pender has had his say now on it and isn't impressed at all

(from http://www.smh.com.au/national/educ...er-proposed-new-syllabus-20161019-gs6eyf.html )

HSC: Maths teachers in revolt over proposed new syllabus - Eryk Bagshaw - SMH - October 20, 2016.

NSW education leaders have savaged the Board of Studies for "sabotaging its own syllabuses" by issuing "insanely difficult to read" documents to teachers outlining changes to the state's mathematics program.

Sydney Grammar's former master of mathematics, Bill Pender, has accused the board of copying and pasting material, neglecting basic principles, and warned that the board was in danger of losing its credibility as the authority responsible for mathematics education in NSW.

"Material from goodness knows where seems to have been cut and pasted into the drafts," Dr Pender said in a submission to the board. "It is unclear how 30 years of discussion has led to such a disaster."

Dr Pender is one of several prominent mathematicians who have signed a letter demanding the board withdraw the draft syllabuses. Another signatory is the principal of SCEGGS Darlinghurst, Jenny Allum.

"The drafts are appalling," Ms Allum said. "They should be scrapped and we should start again," she said, adding that problems began when the board was directed to use the national curriculum as the basis for the new syllabus.

"If you design a horse by committee you get a camel: there is a bit here and there, so every state feels there is a bit of them in it. You end up with a dog's breakfast."

She slammed a month-long consultation period that had been given to teachers. "Work is being done in a very quick time frame; that is no recipe for good curriculum design," she said.

The comments come as more than 57,000 students across NSW prepare to sit their HSC maths exams on Friday. The subject continues to suffer from declining participation rates across the state and experts have warned of a crisis in mathematical ability throughout Australia.

Dr Pender said it was sad to see the board issue a calculus-writing attempt that displayed so little knowledge of mathematics and the classroom. He cited concerns over how essential topics such as the demands for proof, Euclidean and co-ordinate geometry had been implemented.

He rubbished the board for "constant serious confusions in the use of mathematical language".

Some sentences, such as, "determine that for the relation to become a function, the domain must be restricted," were meaningless.

"Why is the board enforcing such nonsense on the writers, and thus sabotaging its own syllabuses?" he asked.

"No one who understands mathematics would write these sentences," he said. "The board, whose standards must be higher than an individual teacher's, cannot issue documents with such poor language."

He said the proposed changes to assessment, which would include an increase in the number of take-home projects, would cheapen mathematics in the eyes of most students.

"HSC courses with projects already have huge problems with plagiarism, with assignments being traded on the web, and assignments being completed by tutors or parents."

Dr Pender argued it would be far more difficult to identify such practices with mathematics projects.

"These things would certainly occur routinely, leading to rank unfairness, accusations true and false within classes and cohorts, and great bitterness by students who are not cheating," he said.

The head of the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences at UTS, Anthony Dooley, said the new syllabus would be a blow to education standards.

"It has taken NSW 30 years to get it to this kind of level and this sets us back several paces," he said.

A spokeswoman for the Board of Studies said the directions for the draft mathematics syllabuses were approved in 2014 following extensive consultation with mathematics experts.

"The board will consider the draft syllabuses at its meeting in November," she said.
 
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s-f

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Re: Announcement from BOSTES - significant change to calculus courses

but it seems they still have significant mistakes throughout in new course content document...
 

tywebb

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Re: Announcement from BOSTES - significant change to calculus courses

but it seems they still have significant mistakes throughout in new course content document...
So can you be more specific and list them here?
 

s-f

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Re: Announcement from BOSTES - significant change to calculus courses

So can you be more specific and list them here?
I apologise for not quite having enough time to provide exhaustive list today, but the mistakes I found are mainly in stats section (I only had close looks of those sections because they are new and most likely to have problems if any, + I'm a stats person myself haha):

- someone definitely needs to review the confusion between e.g. sample and population parameters that are evident in their writings and keep termiologies consistent where capitals are used to refer to random variables, small greek letters refer to population parameters, and small English letters refer to sample estimates.
One such mistake is in ACMMM145 & 149 in MX1, where sample symbol is used for a population measure.
I admit statistics is a whole new area so mistakes are expected but this is supposed to be the final draft, only pending one more consultation before the very final implentation.
Minor-looking mistakes as they may appear to be, but conceptually there are large differences between these different symbols. I also admit there are certain areas of statistics (sampling theory) that use different notations as they were developed somewhat separately from the other topics in a historical context, but majority of statisticians use the symbols as I described.

- Another mistake appears in Advanced Mathematics ACMMM053 where basic definitions with respect to probability are wrong. P(A) = 0 DOES NOT equate to impossibility as the syllabus claims. There are events with zero probability that occurs (for details, one needs knowledge of measure theory).
As advanced as this concept may be for high school students, this is important because they introduce continuous random variables, with a direct contradiction to this definition, later in the syllabus.
For any continuous RV, P(X=a)=0, where a is any real number. But clearly e.g. a normally distributed random variable may take any value in the real field and so this "impossibility" definition is clearly wrong.

I will be interested to see how the final implementation will run, and who will produce the first textbook for this - which I (and many others) predict will be heavily plagierised throughout classrooms all over the state. If this one turjs out crap, the statewide teaching could too...
 

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