A couple of second years have started a petition in protest of this year's Algebra II exam:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=17439359079&ref=nf

Thoughts?

cry baby's

I remember real petitions that actually meant something, not damn facebook.

Don't really see the point to be honest, everyone knows it's going to be rescaled and a facebook petition wouldn't have changed anything anyway.

I reckon it's worth telling your tutor/head of department anyway, after all they are always sending us course evaluation things, so they want the feedback, good or bad

if people spent less time belly-aching and petitioning to get the course changed and more time learning it then they'd probably have passed the exam.

I think not, that was one tough exam!

I don't think a petition will achieve anything. People should say what they feel was wrong with the exam, tell their tutor, whatever, just signing your name to a bit of paper doesn't say much.

I'm not saying I found the exam easy, but I don't see what's wrong with being challenged with something very hard. Why else do you go to university.

Well, I don't think (as much as I'd like to) that most people study maths by love of the subject and are delighted by any interesting challenge that is offered to them.
I'm sure many people just want a degree (and would rather prefer having a good one), so hard exams isn't really what they like best. (Then again, who likes doing badly in exams ? I'm quite happy to be challenged the rest of the time (and I often am), but not really in exams)

People that just want a good degree should be prepared to work for it, or failing that take a less demanding course. I agree that an exam that expands considerably on what has been taught is slightly unfair since being asked to derive things under exam conditions is unreasonable however there was not much on that paper that wasn't in the lecture notes so I don't think it's a fair criticism.

I totally agree, I wasn't aware that most of what was on the paper was also in the lecture notes.

Yeah 'twas, but the fact remains that the course is a bit of a stinker, second year atm constitutes a whole bunch of abstract for a lot of people not really used to abstraction.

Technically foundations has some groups and LA has the abstract field stuff but really the former isn't examined and the latter is done in such a way that assuming you're in means you lose very little: there's none of the abstract tools you use in A2 in either of them (at least nowhere near the exam).

There is a tendency to be whistful about geometry to groups and say that what we need is more intuition for what a group means: but in my experience it is not the groups themselves that are the problem- what is lacking is an intuition for the abstractions built on group structure: conjugacy classes, normality etc.

Pumping some conjugacy classes into first year (in foundations for example) could be a real boost to the algebra side and could really help with the similar matrix arguments of LA.

The exam and course are not beyond second year level, and someone who really took the time out to understand every concept would ace the exam, but to do so to that level (and with that volume of concepts) should be a third year's mandate.

Spoonfeeding is silly, but when you're first taste of abstractions useful only to study useful abstractions comes so thick and fast, it is no small wonder that second years flounder. Spoonfeeding FTL: Dripfeeding FTW.