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There is absolutely NOTHING WRONG with that question.
The problem is that people get distracted by the "story" and start to overthink things. It's not about how much the story makes sense. The story is there only as a vehicle for the math.
Forget the story and just extract the mathematical data. An equation was provided.
Well, that is what is wrong with the question. Math does not require a story, just knowledge of formulae that one has learned.
The "forget the story" advice is good, but it should be given to the test author, not the poor person slogging through the test!
The point of a word problem that actually includes a formula is beyond me. The purpose of a word problem is, or used to be, to test the student's ability to formulate a problem from nothing but data provided. Giving them the equation to be used defeats the purpose.
I also agree with the OP that the story here is pretty silly and contrived. Dosages are typically calculated by weight, which is far easier to measure accurately than a person's surface area! When they are set by area, that area is most probably approximated by proportion to the easily measured quantity (weight) rather than the other way around.
The author of the question should have come up with a realistic purpose for the problem, there are situations where the ratio of surface area to mass is important - rate of heat transfer problems for example.
"This is just a simple substitution for finding x." not a calculus problem.
Calculus comes in when you want to solve the problem of determining an approximate surface area of a complexly curved surface based on nothing but weight and height. Without having the formula already derived for you, solving this problem would require college level mathematics. The subject of calculus was raised because the OP was pointing out that this isn't even how anyone would go about solving this problem in the real world.
My point is that it is an obscure formula and that there are much better real-life, surface area to mass word problems that would have been more appropriate for this test.
My point is that it is an obscure formula and that there are much better real-life, surface area to mass word problems that would have been more appropriate for this test.
Even if it was a "real ife " story, the math would be the same. That's why the story isn't important.
Interesting this discussion about what makes for a good question. I tend to agree with Charlygal, because if you are focused on whether the question makes sense to you or whether there is real life relevance, you are not focused on the math. If the question is a math problem, the focus should be on solving the math problem. Evaluating relevance is another issue.
Last edited by toobusytoday; 07-19-2015 at 10:37 AM..
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I'm of the view that the "story" has to make sense or the math does not. That is the math has to derive logically from all the information provided. When a "story" is provided that is not central to the actual math problem being asked, then they are not testing the ability to do math, but the ability to figure out what the heck the question writer wanted. The "story" is there to confuse the student into making the wrong choice -- a distractor, not as useful information. That's my real problem with standardized testing. They rely way to much on trickery than on actually testing knowledge.
Yes. I have seen supposed test writers do nothing more than play stump-the-student and then claim that they are testing to a higher degree of understanding. It's a thinly veiled attempt to deride educators and puff themselves up.
Pearson was appointed to do the GED tests in 2011.
Pearson does all the tests so it shouldn't be a wonder that they are all the same with the same convoluted "real world" problems.
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