Calculus Exam

Well, my students are taking their second calculus test today. This test is on derivatives. They will have 95 minutes of fun using the power rule, product rule, quotient rule, chain rule, implicit differentiation, intermediate value theorem for derivatives, graphs, equations of tangent and normal lines, derivatives of polynomial/trig/inverse trig/exponential/logarithmic functions. It amazes me how smart these students are, but how bad they are at taking tests some times.

I put a problem on the calculator portion that they could have done in 1-2 minutes by using their calculators. But most of them tried doing the whole thing by hand. I wonder why they do things like this. We had a day for review on Wednesday and I told them that I was likely to give them a really hard chain rule on a calculator section, but that I wanted the slope at a specific point, so use the nDeriv feature to calculate the slope.

I know these students are point hungry and they all want nothing less than an A. But why do they not listen when I basically tell them how to do less work and get full points on a problem? I thought the test was pretty straight forward, but most of the students have said it was the hardest test they have ever taken. I guess it is good for them to realize these tests are hard, maybe they will start doing all of their homework on time. Maybe they will ask questions more often and study more for the test. Hopefully they will realize what it takes to do well on the AP test and be ready for it come this May.