Friday, January 29, 2010

You Are Making a Different Point Than You Intend

One of the questions on WebAssign was to estimate the slope of the tangent line.

I give the students 20 chances at each problem. Stu couldn't figure it out with 20 guesses so emailed me complaining about the problem. Even Stu's friend the math major couldn't find the slope of the tangent line.

I'm not at all swayed that this may be too hard of a problem for calculus students. However, I am wondering how clueless some of our math majors are.