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May 23, 2005
Math for dummies
From Yahoo:
Sports Fans Cry Foul on Math Question
By The Associated Press 2 hours, 27 minutes ago
RALEIGH, N.C. - The state's test writers tried to come up with a math question about football and ended up with a fumble.
On an end-of-grade test this month, seventh-graders had to calculate the average gain for a team on the game's first six plays. But the team did not gain 10 yards on the first four plays and would have lost possession before a fifth and sixth play.
The team opened with a 6-yard loss, a 3-yard gain and a 2-yard loss, which would have made it fourth down with 15 yards to go for a first down. The team's fourth play was just a 7-yard gain, yet it maintained possession for a 12-yard gain and a 4-yard gain on two additional plays.
"Whoever wrote it didn't think it through," said Gene Daniels, athletics director of Salem Middle School in Apex.
Mildred Bazemore, chief of the state Department of Public Instruction's test development section, said the question makes sense mathematically and was reviewed thoroughly.
"It has nothing to do with football," Bazemore said. "It has to do with the mathematical concepts that you're studying."
This is a major mistake by the test writers. Technically speaking, it shouldn't matter for the purposes of testing that the team got an extra two plays, because they're not testing what you know about football, they're testing whether you can find the average of something. However, it takes a bunch of very dense people not to realize that the football aspect of the question would come into play. When something doesn't make sense in the context of a question, that makes it very difficult to continue. So, when you're asking about yards gained on six plays when the team would have lost possession after four, a lot of people are going to say, "this does not compute!" or something.
Maybe they're playing some fictional version of football, where you get six plays. I mean, you get three downs in Canadian football, so why doesn't North Carolina football get six downs? Either way, it was a bad question. Poor form, North Carolina. Poor form.
Posted by oz115 at May 23, 2005 08:25 AM
Comments
Or maybe the Fidel Castro version. The world's most famous leftist hurler was once pitching in a game in which his team was still trailing after nine innings. So Castro simply decreed that the game would go into extra innings. His team eventually won, not surprisingly.
Posted by: Pete at May 23, 2005 08:57 AM