Australian Geometry Test Too Difficult?

[Thomas Okken]

(11-22-2017 08:50 AM)pier4r Wrote:  I never liked this argument:

"One student who studied for weeks in preparation for the exam said she was thrown by the difficulty of some of the questions, which tested skills she hadn’t been taught."

So either someone spoonfeeds the technique to you, or you are brainless. Although I can understand that finding innovative solutions may need more time, I really dislike when people act like robots.

So you think it's fine to ask students to translate some German in a French test? Calculus in an algebra exam? Just figure it out, be creative?

I took a look at that Guardian article, and I was quite surprised, too. "Geometrical reasoning?" I remember that being touched very lightly in my high school (Netherlands, late '70s to early '80s), before moving on to Cartesian coordinates and solving geometrical problems in terms of such coordinates, using not geometrical reasoning, but trigs and algebra. (Which is an approach that has served me well ever since). If after that kind of lesson plan, I had gotten an exam with a three-part question asking for clear geometric reasoning, I would have felt I was getting screwed, too.