On 6/13/07, Alan B. Pearce wrote: > >> According to my fellow teachers these boys are not bad, they are > >> typical. I hope for the safety of my country that serious engineering > >> work is very quickly outsourced to countries where 18y boys still have > >> at least some feeling for numbers and values... > >> > > > >I think your students are not too bad. After all they are first year > >students. > > So? That math is so basic that they should be able to do it without any > calculation aids before going to secondary school, let alone tertiary > education. It was for this sort of problem that the company I first worked > for gave incoming apprenticeship hopefuls a basic maths test (see previous > post on this tag). I used to work with an "engineer" who could not divide a simple number (say, 80) by 2 in his head. I found this out when I wrote a program to take data from a system and plot it. However, the serial link could not keep up with data from every point, and so I send every other point (it was a smooth function, and so nothing was "lost" by the missing data). However, I had a "brain fart" and labeled the graph with the original data rate. He claimed it was completely unusable, and so I had to change the program (trivial) and take the data again (not trivial). The only change was the numbers on the side of the graph... Bill -- Psst... Hey, you... Buddy... Want a kitten? straycatblues.petfinder.org -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist