Re: Announcement from BOSTES - significant change to calculus courses
- someone definitely needs to review the confusion between e.g. sample and population parameters that are evident in their writings and keep termiologies consistent where capitals are used to refer to random variables, small greek letters refer to population parameters, and small English letters refer to sample estimates.
One such mistake is in ACMMM145 & 149 in MX1, where sample symbol is used for a population measure.
I admit statistics is a whole new area so mistakes are expected but this is supposed to be the final draft, only pending one more consultation before the very final implentation.
Minor-looking mistakes as they may appear to be, but conceptually there are large differences between these different symbols. I also admit there are certain areas of statistics (sampling theory) that use different notations as they were developed somewhat separately from the other topics in a historical context, but majority of statisticians use the symbols as I described.
- Another mistake appears in Advanced Mathematics ACMMM053 where basic definitions with respect to probability are wrong. P(A) = 0 DOES NOT equate to impossibility as the syllabus claims. There are events with zero probability that occurs (for details, one needs knowledge of measure theory).
As advanced as this concept may be for high school students, this is important because they introduce continuous random variables, with a direct contradiction to this definition, later in the syllabus.
For any continuous RV, P(X=a)=0, where a is any real number. But clearly e.g. a normally distributed random variable may take any value in the real field and so this "impossibility" definition is clearly wrong.
I will be interested to see how the final implementation will run, and who will produce the first textbook for this - which I (and many others) predict will be heavily plagierised throughout classrooms all over the state. If this one turjs out crap, the statewide teaching could too...
I apologise for not quite having enough time to provide exhaustive list today, but the mistakes I found are mainly in stats section (I only had close looks of those sections because they are new and most likely to have problems if any, + I'm a stats person myself haha):So can you be more specific and list them here?
- someone definitely needs to review the confusion between e.g. sample and population parameters that are evident in their writings and keep termiologies consistent where capitals are used to refer to random variables, small greek letters refer to population parameters, and small English letters refer to sample estimates.
One such mistake is in ACMMM145 & 149 in MX1, where sample symbol is used for a population measure.
I admit statistics is a whole new area so mistakes are expected but this is supposed to be the final draft, only pending one more consultation before the very final implentation.
Minor-looking mistakes as they may appear to be, but conceptually there are large differences between these different symbols. I also admit there are certain areas of statistics (sampling theory) that use different notations as they were developed somewhat separately from the other topics in a historical context, but majority of statisticians use the symbols as I described.
- Another mistake appears in Advanced Mathematics ACMMM053 where basic definitions with respect to probability are wrong. P(A) = 0 DOES NOT equate to impossibility as the syllabus claims. There are events with zero probability that occurs (for details, one needs knowledge of measure theory).
As advanced as this concept may be for high school students, this is important because they introduce continuous random variables, with a direct contradiction to this definition, later in the syllabus.
For any continuous RV, P(X=a)=0, where a is any real number. But clearly e.g. a normally distributed random variable may take any value in the real field and so this "impossibility" definition is clearly wrong.
I will be interested to see how the final implementation will run, and who will produce the first textbook for this - which I (and many others) predict will be heavily plagierised throughout classrooms all over the state. If this one turjs out crap, the statewide teaching could too...