Academia rediscovered

As I mentioned a while ago, I'm doing a remote-learning maths course to keep up my maths skills while I'm on my gap year. You receive a CD containing workbooks for each of the eleven course sections - six compulsory, five optional - in PDF format, and both practice and final tests for each topic. The idea is to complete and submit eight tests altogether before the end of June, preferably at the rate of about one per month.

Now, given that the first two tests have to be completed by the end of November (or it's possible you'll be disqualified from the course) you'd think that, before yesterday, I'd have done more than flip idly through the first workbook.

As it happened I wasn't feeling too concerned about the amount of time I'd have to dedicate to the first two tests, since when I looked at the workbook what I was most struck by was the shallow and scarce coverage of the topic at hand (functions). Admittedly I do have an advantage having done Further maths at A-level as well, and therefore this particular topic is one that I covered quickly and easily about two years ago, but I still think that the level of difficulty aimed for was quite poor. Given that the course is specifically for Year In Industry students, who are all post-A-level, all took maths A-level within the last few months (YinI is focused on science and engineering students), and who all presumably achieved an A or B grade (you're recommended to have predicted A-level grades of AAB or higher before applying to YinI), I found it slightly shocking.

Worse were the tests themselves, the first of which I got around to doing last night. Question 1: "Given that f(x) = x + 1/x, find f(2x)." Not bad enough? Each and every question is multiple choice, presumably for ease of electronic marking. Plus there are only nine questions, and they're all as short as the above - the entire test took me a little over ten minutes. It hardly seems an adequate test of what you know and what you can do.

With all this in mind, and added to that the fact that the tests are untimed, you're allowed a calculator - you could even use a graphical calculator for the graphs questions ("Where are the asymptotes?") and no one would know - and you could easily have workbooks, notes, past exercises or textbooks open in front of you, I'm finding it less and less credible that the eventual certificate will be worth getting, and more and more annoying that I have to spend my precious time actually doing this.