My son attends LASA in Austin. His calc teacher has a 97% rate for his students scoring a 4 or 5 over 15 years. This includes a few students who didn't take the test.
(My son got a '5' on the BC calc AP.)
A Lincoln High teacher gets all his students to pass the AP Calculus exam
101–110 of 122 posts
Re: A Lincoln High teacher gets all his students to pass the AP Calculus exam
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
So I have no idea what it means to have everybody 'pass'. That reminds me of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grading_systems_by_country It's interesting to see where the 'pass' bar is in different countries. I've always found the 50% mark, which seems quite popular, to be rather unusual since it implies that someone who 'passed' essentially was correct on only half the material tested (which is then a fraction of…
I have had many tests where the material tested is not a strict subset of the material taught, and some problems require creative generalization or insight during the test.
I had this too in Mechanical Engineering, especially on exams where you have e.g. an hour and a half to solve 5 problems and more so as you take higher level classes. There would often be room for interpretation in the questions, and part of the problem was to make sure you're making the right assumptions about the system.
I remember one test in particular in a class about heat transfer where one question was essentially "Same problem as the previous question, but now assume ". My answer was something along the lines of, "Whoops, I already made that assumption in the previous question. Extra points?" The professor was kind enough to grant me a few bonus points.
Re: A Lincoln High teacher gets all his students to pass the AP Calculus exam
#103But how did you come up?
why do we fall Bruce?
Re: A Lincoln High teacher gets all his students to pass the AP Calculus exam
#104This article is strange. Unless something has changed recently, AP exams do not have a concept of pass or fail. You get a score and colleges can choose to give you college credit based on the score. I got a 1 on the AP Calculus exam but colleges wanted a 3 or a 4 or a 5 depending on their requirements to give me credit for college calc. So I have no idea what it means to have everybody 'pass'. I have no doubt he's pr…
So I have no idea what it means to have everybody 'pass'. That reminds me of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grading_systems_by_country It's interesting to see where the 'pass' bar is in different countries. I've always found the 50% mark, which seems quite popular, to be rather unusual since it implies that someone who 'passed' essentially was correct on only half the material tested (which is then a fraction of…
Most real life situations don't require you to solve 3 distinct problems in an hour.
That's why most degrees require you to produce a thesis, which is closer to what you'll need to do later.
Re: A Lincoln High teacher gets all his students to pass the AP Calculus exam
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That was one of the hardest classes I've ever had to take because the grammar is so complex Did you study Latin for several years before? I think that class is typically intended for people who have already studied Latin at the high school level for three years (most likely reading Caesar or other authors first). That would give a lot more opportunity to become familiar with Latin grammar rules.
Yeah, I took it from 8th grade to 12th grade. In my class of 10 or so students, only one of us got a passing score. Perhaps our teacher didn't adequately challenge us. We had read Cicero and other Latin literature yet Latin grammar always seemed so challenging for me to parse. I could make out enough meaning but never do a literal translation well enough. I took it because I couldn't speak any of the Romance language…
It's a really excellent demonstration of how difficult it can be to internalize certain things for people - I was eventually acceptably good at extracting meaning from Latin after years of taking it, but it never became anywhere near an internalized process of digesting the sentences, and my instructors were quite skilled in teaching and Latin.
One of the more interesting hypotheses suggested was that Latin classes, unlike a lot of SL classes, are not nearly as "immersive" as more common ones, and a lot of the language processing hardware we've got is better at digesting from spoken immersion. (Part of that, of course, is that outside of specialized environments, we don't really have any "native" speakers; part of that is also that common "spoken" Latin was a lot simpler than the brick-by-brick construction of Vergil or Cicero.)
Re: A Lincoln High teacher gets all his students to pass the AP Calculus exam
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
I took AP Latin: Vergil in high school. That was one of the hardest classes I've ever had to take because the grammar is so complex (I'm also not surprised Japanese has few perfect scores). I know I didn't get a passing score. I'm surprised however that Chinese has no perfect scores. I remember some students that had moved from Taiwan or China would take AP Chinese to get free college credits. The grammar of Chinese…
I wouldn't be surprised that a native speaker would do something one way, and a test would insist the 'correct' way is actually pretty awkward and wouldn't be used.
This... In Vietnam seeing some (as a 30yr old native English speaker) of the "correct" answers to VN made English homework or tests is interesting to say the least. The questions are so awkward, pretty sure the only reason the students able to deduce the answer is because they have been taught vn-English so it makes sense to them ;)
Re: A Lincoln High teacher gets all his students to pass the AP Calculus exam
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
I took AP Latin: Vergil in high school. That was one of the hardest classes I've ever had to take because the grammar is so complex (I'm also not surprised Japanese has few perfect scores). I know I didn't get a passing score. I'm surprised however that Chinese has no perfect scores. I remember some students that had moved from Taiwan or China would take AP Chinese to get free college credits. The grammar of Chinese…
I wouldn't be surprised that a native speaker would do something one way, and a test would insist the 'correct' way is actually pretty awkward and wouldn't be used.
This... In Vietnam seeing some (as a 30yr old native English speaker) of the "correct" answers to VN made English homework or tests is interesting to say the least. The questions are so awkward, pretty sure the only reason the students able to deduce the answer is because they have been taught vn-English so it makes sense to them ;)
Re: A Lincoln High teacher gets all his students to pass the AP Calculus exam
#108AP Calc is kinda trivial, anyone taking it should pass ...
This is snobbish at best. Apart from the fact that there are various social and economic barriers it also isn't easy for everyone.
Perhaps you are biased from being surrounded by developers but It's akin to me (a non farmer) making a blanket statement like "Surely it isn't so hard to grow a tomato. Why are all these people in Africa starving?"
Re: A Lincoln High teacher gets all his students to pass the AP Calculus exam
#109Is this that unusual? I'm sure there are many teachers out there whose entire classes passed. I'm pretty sure in high school, my entire class passed. It was unusual for people to fail APs. (My high school only admitted the top 2% scorers on an admission test, so it was biased towards high exam scorers.)
Yeah man in my class 90% of the kids got 5s.
Re: A Lincoln High teacher gets all his students to pass the AP Calculus exam
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, I teach Math at a college, and am a former dept chair. We require 4 or 5, as do the folks I talk to at other schools.
I had a conversation with a prof from Harvey Mudd and another prof from somewhere else who was an AP calc grader. The HMC prof said they quit giving credit for 5's because not all recipients of 5's could do the work. The grader commented that he could understand how, as the range of 5's is quite broad. My take-away was that there is insufficient granularity at the high end.
I was shocked I got 5 in physics, doing well in multiple choice made up for skipping two of the five word problems. It seems weird to have the best possible score not require answering all the questions correctly.