WP34s Birthday Gift @ ISU

[MarkHaysHarris777]

(02-28-2015 04:13 PM)troll80 Wrote:  Interesting thread. This entire website is about calculators, yet everyone is agreeing they are the devil (paraphrasing).

I LOVED my HP calculator back in the day . . .

no no no... I do not believe anyone is agreeing to any such thing (not even a loose paraphrase). In many ways academia is still playing catch-up with technology; and no wonder, technology is accelerating at a rate that is even hard for us professionals to keep up with!

There will always be purists (mathematicians all) who believe that mathematics is for the work of young men with a pencil and a stack of paper... power to 'em! The mathematicians at IAS Princeton absolutely 'hated' the engineering team that was assembled there to build their land-mark computer (used primarily for H bomb wave testing in the early cold war). Was that machine evil? No, the people using it were evil; IMHO.

We now know that mathematics has a place for calculating machines--- some proofs are simply not possible without them! Eventually calculators (all communicating image and symbol devices, not just limited to calculators) will be viewed as a necessary tool in every environment including the classroom during examination periods... even on the NCEES FE exam(s). Its just going to take some time; the old school needs to die off first, for one thing.

My idea for the NCEES exam(s) is to generate the exam on-the-fly from a database of 300,000 problems chosen randomly and administered over a five hour period in five categories. The student proceeds through the examine until the five hour period expires, or until they have correctly worked 300 multi-level word problems; which ever comes first. The score is pass fail.

The student should be allowed to bring whatever reference materials (including books, crib sheets, calculators (2 or three of them), a slide rule if they want, and hey, give them internet access to boot--! (Why, because they're going to need ALL of those things on the job!)

If the student requires ALL of those things for every problem they are NEVER going to get through the problems in five hours. On the other hand, if they need those resources to manage one or two of the problems (what the heck, they are going to do that at work too, let's get serious!).

The testing (NCEES, or other) should not be about how well you take tests, nor how well you can use your programmable calculator; it should only and ever be about, "Does the student understand engineering principles?"

Cheers,
marcus