Lies they tell you at GCSE

Scroll to see replies

Reply 60

jobo3

sunspoon

There's no such thing as the square root of a negative number. :mad:

There isn't such a thing, they're imaginary.

Reply 61

yaf

Lord Azrael

I'm afraid so, Bourne; I'm afraid so. :frown:

ha ha made me laugh
thanks

Reply 62

Morbo

jobo3

There isn't such a thing, they're imaginary.

Imaginary numbers exist just as much as negative numbers do.

Reply 63

NoQualms

Anyone else find it hilar how our GCSE, Sats etc papers were soo multicultural:

In one science paper we'd have a Bill-a blonde white boy, Dipesh-an indian boy, Jemima-a black girl with two plaits and Xing-Mei-A small chinese girl with a bob-how patronising/stereotypical...like anyone was actually gonna go through the paper to see if it was representative of society-we were all just tryna pass!

Reply 64

Creole

Sin, cos and tan aren't the only trig functions. :mad:

Reply 65

.ACS.

I wouldn't say it's so much lies, rather the content is dumbed down to make it easier for people to understand (even if at that level you're actually capable of understand the more complex reality).

crosscurrents

The only real one I've come across is probably chemistry: electron shell diagrams and the like.

Sulphur's Electron Configuration
GCSE: 2)8)1 is how it works!
AS: Well, actually... 1s2 2s2 2p6 3s1

:wink:

Well... it's not really a lie, per se.

At GCSE you're taught it's: 2, 8, 8 (or 2, 8, 1 depending on the board).
Well, you'll find out at degree level that electron shells are labelled K, L, M, N, etc. and in actual fact what you were taught at GCSE matches that of electron shells, so in actual fact to make it more accurate you should have been taught: (K)2, (L)8, M(8). (Apart from the fact M can actually take 18 electrons)

Reply 66

ShaolinTemple

Tagit

GCSE's are hard and take months of revision to do well.

Amen

Reply 67

Morbo

.ACS.

I wouldn't say it's so much lies, rather the content is dumbed down to make it easier for people to understand (even if at that level you're actually capable of understand the more complex reality).

It's not really "dumbed down" - the models introduced at GCSE are the simplest ones that explain the simplest phenomena. I very much doubt that at GCSE you would have been able to cope with the Hartree-Fock self-consistent wavefunction model of the atom, the Pauli exclusion principle and subsequent band structure in solids.

In fact, a lot of the time physicsts do ignore the complexities of the atomic structure and simply talk about shells. It's not because they need to dumb it down, it's just because the phenomena they are dealing with do not require them to model the physics in any more complicated a way.

Reply 68

Irrelevance

Show us your Bronstead - Lowry Conjugate pairs?

Reply 69

Ben Dover the Lollipop Man

jobo3

Where's energy ever destroyed or made? The only thing I've kinda heard of is quantum tunelling, where things can have a negative potential, but that's about it.

no because its conservation of mass-energy. mass and energy are interchangeable... e=mc^2

Reply 70

ashy

Morbo

It is compulsory to take RE at GCSE.

It was for me. :bawling:

Reply 71

Morbo

Kelv

no because its conservation of mass-energy. mass and energy are interchangeable... e=mc^2

That's a pedantic point to a physicist. The equivalence of mass and energy means that when we refer to the conservation of energy, we are referring to the conservation of mass-energy implicitly.

Particle physicists even measure the mass of particles in units of energy.

Reply 72

Glutamic Acid

We were also told that as long as you got 5 A*-Cs then they didn't really matter. Partly because of that I never really tried and only got the grades that I got. If I'd been told universities sometimes reject applicants because of GCSEs as well as the fact that many applicants to the top universities will have an array of A*s then I'd have tried harder and possibly got 11 A*s. I'm furious at both myself and my old school.

Reply 73

Ben Dover the Lollipop Man

Morbo

Us Physicists and Mathematicians are GODS.

Reply 74

Planto

But what about the conversation of mass and energy?

Reply 75

CommunistHamster

ashy

It was for me. :bawling:

According to our head of sixth form, it's also compulsory at A-level. They talk about abolishing it every few years in Parliament, but it's so far been kept. Luckily our head of sixth form doesn't care for it and gave us all letters which our parents signed, saying whether we wanted to do it or not.

Reply 76

JonnoE

One from a Welsh secondary school:

Welsh is a very important qualification that will be extremely helpful in future education and in employment.

Hmm, really?

Reply 77

blahhh

in biology, cells used to be so much more simple :frown:

Reply 78

CommunistHamster

JonnoE

One from a Welsh secondary school:

Welsh is a very important qualification that will be extremely helpful in future education and in employment.

Hmm, really?

There's an apostrophe at the end of that statement. It stands in for "in the Welsh Assembly Government or any other hilariously pro-welsh-language group"

Reply 79

Titch89

liss31d

Worse than lies at GCSE, this is a lie we were told in Key Stage 3 - That SATs were extremely important :rolleyes:

I remember when we were doing SATs, the teachers were going on like our lives depended on it. At GCSE, hardly any of the teachers cared about how we did.

One of our SATs maths papers was mental arithmetic (sp) and someone said (when the tape was stopped) 'why not just use normal names like Sofie?' (which is my name)