The A3/2 Unit and Exam
Originally over 2 dozen, or so, people decide to follow A3/2. Like all Newcastle units, this is actually split into two parts.
The responsible lecturers were
Davey ( for the first part - partial differential equations )
Professor Freeman ( for the second part, which was Compressible Fluid Mechanics ). Freeman was due to retire at the end of the academic year, and was an incompetent who taught us nothing.
Initially, Davey makes a point of starting every lecture with warnings about how hard the other part of the unit is, emphasising that people should be fully aware of this and openly encouraging students to switch to another unit. He states an exact figure thus :" I would estimate that, last year, students only gained 5% of their marks from the other half of the unit".
As a result only 12 of the original two dozen students are left finally. Of these, only 10 eventually attend Freeman's lectures, the other two following an option that allows them to submit a project instead of attending Freeman's courses (a course of action which seems not to have neen followed by students on any other course).
Davey makes a specific statement regarding the previous year's exam :" I included a question which everyone did and got full marks for. I got into quite a bit of trouble for it."
I spend an enormous amount of time on A3/2 - on a conservative estimate, at least twice as much time as on any other unit.
To compensate for the fact that the 'lecturer' on the Compressible Fluid Mechanics course was, to put it very, very mildly, not very good, the exam questions in Partial Differential Equations (Stage 2) were fiddled - most obviously by inserting a couple of questions similar to questions set on the previous year's Partial Differential Equations (Stage 1) exam. In other words, this A3/2 exam contained a couple of questions which were effectively identical to questions on the previous year's A2/1 exam, A2/1 being a required course for entry to A3/2. Further there is a third-year question identical to the one which prompted Davey to previously state :" I included a question which everyone did and got full marks for.I got into quite a bit of trouble for it " (see a previous paragraph).
So, in reality, students were able to get over 50% of their marks in the (3rd. year) Partial Differential Equations exam by answering questions which were effectively identical to questions which had appeared on the second year Partial Differential Equations exam.
Here are the relevant questions. In each case, I have omitted to say which is the Second Year question and which is the Third Year question - see if you can guess which is which.
And here is how to do them
Second year work is not necessarily an advantage for me (considering I only arrived
in the second year and had to blunder thru that because of severe financial difficulties i.e.
no grant.) but the real problem arises when trying to do first-year work incorporated into
the "easiest" question - the question that everyone does in short order and gets fully correct,
and which then sets them up for the other two easy questions. I find I am unable to do this
easy question and everything else falls apart, in panic. At the time, I was unaware
that the problem lay in the fact that I had never been taught the relevant techniques -
I remember clearly looking at the exam paper wondering for all the world why my mind had
gone such a blank. The truth dawned on me gradually - it was about 6 weeks
later that I saw the same technique brought up in an Open University program,
and that made me realise that the problem that was indeed caused by first year material.
The situation was entirely different to that on A3/1 where certain questions involved
first-year material that I was less-than-confident with, but which I was able to
recognize as such straight away.
While I was at Durham University, I came to know Dr. Nick Fay who undertook his postgraduate
studies at Newcastle. Without much prompting from me, Nick seemed to understand all I
was saying about Freeman - he called him a "plodder". Given that Nick was not in the Applied Mathematics section - he
studied Statistics, I take this as strong evidence that the problems with Freeman had been known thruout the entire Maths Department, for several years.
The above are excerpts from the Open University course HH851 - Teaching in Higher Education
With respect to Davey's advice that students should change units because "the other
part of the unit is extremely hard", are aeronautical engineers etc. held in some sort of
awe, by virtue of their subject being so extremely hard?
What kind of idiot do these people think I am, that I would enter my final exams,
the crucial exams for my entire future, and achieve fairly decent marks in most exams
while simultaneously doing so little work for one particular section that I could not do
any of the questions.
For the same reasons outlined above, even if I had been at Newcastle right from the
first year (and therefore sailed thru A3/2 for the same reason that the other students did) I
would still have felt compelled to complain bitterly about A3/2. It was to do
with a subject that interests me intensely, and I exit from the course knowing next to
nothing. Further this gap in my knowledge has proved a disadvantage in a certain amount
of postgraduate work, and no doubt (especially given the nature of Sod's law) will prove a
disadvantage at some time in the future.
If there is nothing wrong with the exams, then it is a bit of a mystery why I have had such difficulty ngetting anyone to point out the differences in the exam questions to me. I must have asked about 70 or 80 people in Newcastle University and received no reply - I have asked the current Professor of Applied mathematics, Brandeburg, about 50 times obver the years and been ignored each time.
By claiming that there was nothing wrong with the exam, by rights Newcastle are liable to complaints from those students who did swop courses after being told that there was something wrong with the course.
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Report from the Guardian of 23. January 2001, which includes criticism of Liverpool JM University setting identical questions in successive years.
Probably they are referring to identical questions set at the same level in successive years, so, as detailed above, Newcastle University exceeded JM University in this respect by a long chalk.
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