BBC English Lit GCSE Quiz
Jul. 5th, 2009 01:07 amFollowing Pter's link to the technology quiz, I browsed several of the other GCSE quizzes. In general I approve of raising awareness of knowledge, and inviting adults to demonstrate a GCSE or greater standard of knowledge in fields they may have no connection to.
However, the examples given weren't necessarily academically rigorous, so I had a number of quibbles I'm now going to rant about:
1. All but one of the quizzes have three result categories. 7/7 is "excellent". 4-6/7 is "not up to scratch" and 0-3 is "awful". This seems like an unfortunate granularity when you might optimistically hope many adults would fall into the range of "good", somewhere between 6 and 7.
2. However, for the maths quiz, 6-7 out of 7 are listed as "top marks" [sic] and below that as "could do better". Someone had a lot of gumption to label 6/7 as "top" marks in a maths exam.
3. In the English Literature exam, five of the seven questions are simple factual observations on a common book or play or English word, and one requires you to have the ability to psychically read the mind of dead people to find out their reasons for certain choices. It would seem nice if more questions had represented a balance between these two extreme extremes.
For the record the factual questions required you to have read the work, or at least have a vague recollection of the plot a few of the most famous lines. Presumably, in the course, you would have studied this specifically, although most adults who read extensively have probably read most of them. As it happened, I'd read Macbeth, Kill a Mockingbird, Mice and Men, and enough of Romeo and Juliet, but not yet Jane Eyre (I know the plot from Jasper Fforde, but not all of the details. I will soon!) And also embarrassingly fluffed applying the exact definition of "malapropism" to a series of quotes.
Presumably the psychic medium "why did the poet choose this word" question had the answer taught by rote at some point in the curriculum. Possibly a longer study of the poem would establish that one of the options was incontrovertibly more dominant. But I would imagine that Alfred Lord Tennyson, world-famous poet, might in general have more than one reason to choose a word, and might attempt to convey both danger and noise with the same words.
4. Doing the maths exam entirely in your head is probably showing off, though I bet most people I know did that, and bet that in the actual exam calculators (or at least pencil and paper) are allowed or even required. To be fair, I only knew 6/7. One required a theorem of plane geometry I'd long forgotten, and I managed to rule out two answers from simple examples before I managed to re-derive the theorem.
ETA: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/default.stm, scroll down to "Complete quiz archive" in sidebar.
However, the examples given weren't necessarily academically rigorous, so I had a number of quibbles I'm now going to rant about:
1. All but one of the quizzes have three result categories. 7/7 is "excellent". 4-6/7 is "not up to scratch" and 0-3 is "awful". This seems like an unfortunate granularity when you might optimistically hope many adults would fall into the range of "good", somewhere between 6 and 7.
2. However, for the maths quiz, 6-7 out of 7 are listed as "top marks" [sic] and below that as "could do better". Someone had a lot of gumption to label 6/7 as "top" marks in a maths exam.
3. In the English Literature exam, five of the seven questions are simple factual observations on a common book or play or English word, and one requires you to have the ability to psychically read the mind of dead people to find out their reasons for certain choices. It would seem nice if more questions had represented a balance between these two extreme extremes.
For the record the factual questions required you to have read the work, or at least have a vague recollection of the plot a few of the most famous lines. Presumably, in the course, you would have studied this specifically, although most adults who read extensively have probably read most of them. As it happened, I'd read Macbeth, Kill a Mockingbird, Mice and Men, and enough of Romeo and Juliet, but not yet Jane Eyre (I know the plot from Jasper Fforde, but not all of the details. I will soon!) And also embarrassingly fluffed applying the exact definition of "malapropism" to a series of quotes.
Presumably the psychic medium "why did the poet choose this word" question had the answer taught by rote at some point in the curriculum. Possibly a longer study of the poem would establish that one of the options was incontrovertibly more dominant. But I would imagine that Alfred Lord Tennyson, world-famous poet, might in general have more than one reason to choose a word, and might attempt to convey both danger and noise with the same words.
4. Doing the maths exam entirely in your head is probably showing off, though I bet most people I know did that, and bet that in the actual exam calculators (or at least pencil and paper) are allowed or even required. To be fair, I only knew 6/7. One required a theorem of plane geometry I'd long forgotten, and I managed to rule out two answers from simple examples before I managed to re-derive the theorem.
ETA: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/default.stm, scroll down to "Complete quiz archive" in sidebar.