Month: April 2009

Let’s put the swine flu in perspective

The total number of deaths in World War One was 16 million.
The number of deaths as a result of the Spanish flu which followed in 1918 was somewhere between 30 and 80 million.

In the 14th century the Black Death is estimated to have killed 75 million people (including anywhere from 30% to 60% of Europe’s population – including Ireland).

 Which isn’t to say that the current Swine Flu shouldn’t be taken seriously, just that when it comes to risk our ability to be objective tends to go out the window.

The Black Death by Philip Ziegler is a book well worth reading for the historical and in particular the social and political implications of this desease.

Leaving Cert Physics Notes: now with experiments

My homework over the Easter break was to write up all the Leaving Cert Physics Mandatory Experiments, including diagrams, sources of error and precautions.
I have incorporated them into the notes (they are at the very end) so now there’s no excuse for not having them written up on time!

They do tend to add bulk to what gets printed out and photocopied, which is not a good thing.
I would also like to have all the pages automatically numbered for easy reference but to do so pushes up the text at the bottom of the page considerably and results in even more pages being required.
Anybody know of a way around this?

I used  four different sites to help me:

  1. Tom Healy’s site at thealy.com
  2. Tim Brophy’s site on teachnet
  3. Sean Foley’s site at mathsphysics.com
  4. The physics pages at slss.ie

Thanks to all concerned.

If they’re any use to you feel free to use them as they are or copy, paste and adjust them as required. You don’t need to let me know, but it would be nice. To see when and where the individual experiments came up on the exam paper just check the test questions which are also in the notes; they are all cross-referenced with the marking schemes which accompany them.
Together with the related syllabus extracts I hope that makes up the complete package.
Leaving Cert Physics Notes

🙂

Horrendous:Average mark in Junior Science H.L written exam is 55%

I was browsing through the Chief Examiner’s report (as one does) for the Junior Cert science exam 2006 and found buried amongst all the text and statistics the following unbelievable nugget: the average mark for the written exam was 55%.
I couldn’t find any data on 2007 or 2008, so I don’t know if things have changed in the meantime or not.

55%

This is after three years work. In hindsight it would have been more useful if it was one percentage point lower in that we could then conclude that the average mark didn’t merit an honour and maybe drastic action could have been taken. Maybe for that matter action has been taken, but again I couldn’t find any comment or reference to this anythere.

I can see why this statistic didn’t cause a furore at the time: the overall mark turned out to be 67%, so most students would have been (relatively) happy with that. This was due to the combining of the written exam with the two other sections.
Coursework A: (recording of experiment work over the three years) is worth 10% of the overall mark and the average mark here was 98%.
Coursework B: (based on a report of two seperate investigations) is worth 25% of the overall mark and the average mark here was 85%.

But stilll.
55%
Shocking.

The standard explanantion for this is that students no longer have a choice in the paper, so all questions need to be answered. This is certainly a large contributory factor, but when I looked over the papers for 2006, 2007 and 2008 there was another shock. I concentrated on Physics and found that the hardest topic – Electricity – accounted for over one fifth of all the marks on the physics sections.
Three other sections featured very strongly; Heat, Light and Energy, and all other topics were then very much hit-or-miss as regards whether they featured or not.

Some of the questions within each section were also ridiculous. I have listed some of the worst offenders in a submission to the editor of SCIENCE, the in-house journal for members of the ISTA (Irish Science Teachers Association). The full article can be accessed below: on the top-right there is the option to toggle for the full screen.

I included in the document a link to this posting so hopefully we will receive some feedback (the next edition of the journal goes out towards the end of May) .

What think you?