Re: math skills, was Proper scientific notation

[John Mallinckrodt <ajmallinckro@CSUPomona.Edu>]

On Wed, 11 Mar 1998, Jerome Epstein wrote:

> If you want to make your faculty and administration see the reality, I
> suggest giving my diagnostic test to a sample of your 12th graders. The
> first half of the test contains questions which should be easily
> solvable by a competent 8th grader, the second half contains algebraic
> questions all but 3 of which should be answerable by anyone who has
> passed first year algebra, the remaining 3 questions involve: basic
> concept of a logarithm, concept of a function and graph of a function.
>
> If you'd like to receive a copy of the report on this test (It has been
> given now at about 20 institutions [high school and college] and to well
> over 1000 students), please let me know, and let me know if you have
> Microsoft WORD. The test has been a major eye-opener everywhere it has
> been given. Of course, the reality rarely prompts any appropriate
> action.

Jerome,

I would be very interested in both the test and the report.  I just began
giving my own diagnostic test recently, but it would be great to have one
with some statistics to back it up.  I have Word 5.1 for the Mac.  RTF
interchange format should be a common denominator.

Thanks,

John
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