Michelle Malkin reports a bizarre exam question from Bellevue Community College in Washington state. She (and her readers) are unimpressed with the gratuitous use of Condoleezza Rice in the question - with which I can't but agree - but my complaint is more basic. The question is:
Condoleezza holds a watermelon just over the edge of the roof of the 300 -foot Federal Building, and tosses it up with a velocity of 20 feet per second. The height of the watermelon above the ground t seconds later is given by formula h= -16t2 + 20t + 300
a. How many seconds will it pass her (she's standing at a height of 300 feet) on the way down?
b. When will the watermelon hit ground?
Now I'm not going to get into the metric argument, although I think that 100m etc would be better, because I want to complain about the level of physics and maths involved in this question. When you get past the /grammarpuss English, part A is simply asking
Solve for t in 300 = -16t2 + 20t + 300
and part B is asking
Solve for t in 0 = -16t2 + 20t + 300
I don't have much of an idea of the level of knowledge the students are supposed to have been taught but this ought to be an embarrassment. Not only is Condoleezza Rice irrelevant from this question so are all the basic physics aspects. You could as well ask simply:
Given the formula h= -16t2 + 20t + 300
Solve for t when h = 300 (and t>0)
Solve for t when h = 0 (and t>0)
Required mathematical knowledge to solve this equation is the standard quadratic equation formula and nothing else (actually for part A not even that is required as it is possible to divide by t and hence solve a simple linear equation).
This is, IMO, pretty basic maths of the sort that I was solving at age 14 and which was most definitely expected to be solved by inky English schoolboys (and girls) by age 16 in the mid 1980s. How come it appears on the final exam of a (community) college unless the exam is for a class of (pardon my Political Correctness) mathematically challenged students?