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Interesting Note on AP Tests
Posted:
May 19, 1998 10:34 AM
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I just received this from Jerry Uhl - for your informaton:
In two lists I sunscribe to there is lots of excitement about the AP (advanced
placement) calculus test, but little excitement about calculus itself. Are
we in
the math business or the test business?
The famous French mathematician Henri Lebesgue addressed this point 70
years ago. He said:
"Unfortunately competitive examinations often encouage [an educational]
deception. The teachers must train their students to answer little
fragmentary questions quite well, and they give them model answers that are
often veritable masterpieces and that leave no room for criticism. To
achieve this, the teachers isolate each question from the whole of
mathematics and create for this question alone a perfect language without
bothering about its relationships to other questions. Mathematics is no
longer a monument but a heap."
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Jerry Uhl juhl@ncsa.uiuc.edu
Professor of Mathematics 1409 West Green Street
University of Illinois Urbana,Illinois 61801
Calculus&Mathematica Development Team
Any fool can know. The point is to understand. ----- Albert Einstein
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**************************************************************
Jerry P. Becker
Dept. of Curriculum & Instruction
Southern Illinois University
Carbondale, IL 62901-4610 USA
Fax: (618)453-4244
Phone: (618)453-4241 (office)
E-mail: JBECKER@SIU.EDU
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