Double Down is a quiz show for New York State high school students that airs on PBS (WCNY to be specific). I happened to catch a rerun last night, and one of the categories was “Math”. Here are a couple of the questions:
- A polygon with 5 sides is called what?
- A polygon with 8 sides is called what?
These are high school students, remember. My 20-month old daughter knows what an octagon is. Can we give these kids some credit?!
Then there was this one (emphasis mine):
What is the perimeter of this right triangle?
Read that again. It really says “right triangle”. And the contestant guessed 50. Fifty!
I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised by the “tough” final question:
The surface area of a cube with side s is 6s2. What is the surface area of a cube with a side of length 4 inches?
Math wasn’t the only subject that had softballs. How about this question in English Language Arts:
What verb tense indicates an action that occurred in the past?
Yes, the answer is the “past tense”.
In fairness, I will say that some of the other questions were challenging. How many high school freshmen know what a tropism is? But it bugs me that they appear to be passing off math questions as hard simply because they are math questions.