begin quoting Andrew Lentvorski as of Sun, Mar 18, 2007 at 11:15:44PM -0700: > Stewart Stremler wrote: > > >Hm. Then I wonder what the appeal was based on. > > "If you have two triangular pyramids (four sides each) and join them > such that one side of one is in full contact with one side of the other, > how many faces are left exposed?" > > Four sides each can be read as either "four sides other than the base" > or "four sides including the base". If "four sides including the base", > then sticking two faces together gives 6 exposed faces. If "four sides > other than the base" then sticking two identical faces together gives 8 > exposed faces.
Ah, okay. A side is not necessarily a face. I really don't like the term "triangular pyramid" either. :) > However, unless somebody can quote *verbatim* the wording of the > question, it really isn't worth considering as there are simply too many > permutations. Yup. > This is one of the things which the SAT really gets correct with their > "experimental" sections. They clean out the questions which are > misleading to the better students. > > I bumped into this a *lot* when I was preparing for the SAT. Whenever I > took a sample test from J. Random Prep Book, I could never score more > than about 1400. Never. When I took the SAT, I rather easily scored 1560. Oddly enough, I never took the SAT. The ACT was sufficient the first time I went to school (for the schools I was looking at), and the second time I counted as a transfer student... > The difference was that the SAT questions are *never* misleading. Hard > questions are hard. Easy questions are easy. Everybody gets the easy > questions. Only good students get the hard questions. Any hard > question which easy students might get because of some random change > correlation get thrown out after statistical testing identifies that in > the question. Writing hard-but-not-misleading questions is very, very hard. -- Some people are better at it than others. Stewart Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
