BBC News WTF



  • BBC News online currently has an interactive quiz at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7773974.stm. The timer's meant to give you ten minutes to do the quiz but it only gives you six seconds... I already had a pretty good idea what the WTF would be, but here it is:

    var date = new Date()

    var date10 = new Date(date.getTime() + 6000);

    var endTime = date10.getTime();

    For the developer's sake, I hope that there was once, somewhere, a version of Javascript that measured time in deci-seconds, but I suspect there wasn't.

    Apologies for the formatting, I haven't got time to learn a whole new way to type frickin' text into a frickin' text box.



  • They fixed it.  Nothing to see here.



  •  Looks like they fixed it.



  • Apparently it's been fixed.

     I'm not familiar with UK schools, so is that test meant to be for 11 year old kids or high schoolers?  If it is for 11-year olds, that's a pretty hard test.



  • Looks like it has been fixed.



    Look! I can be really stupid just like you guys!



  • @Farmer Brown said:

    Looks like it has been fixed.

    Look! I can be really stupid just like you guys!
     

    You don't say! 



  • @Ilya Ehrenburg said:

    You don't say!

    You forgot to tell everyone it has been fixed. You cannot be part of our cool guy club!



  • @campkev said:

     I'm not familiar with UK schools, so is that test meant to be for 11 year old kids or high schoolers?  If it is for 11-year olds, that's a pretty hard test.

    Not any more it isn't. I can't remember when the 11-plus was phased out in England; the article seems to be referring to this being the last year in Northern Ireland.

    I assume this is the recent version; I'm sure the one I took (45 years ago !) was harder. It certainly wasn't multiple choice. The point is it's supposed to be fairly hard, it was used to separate the bright kids - back when it wasn't politically incorrect to do so !



  • @Farmer Brown said:

    Looks like it has been fixed.

    Look! I can be really stupid just like you guys!

    Look! I can be a jackass too. Because I'm new to the internets, so I don't realize that occasionally, while  viewing a link from a thread or typing a reply, some one else also posts a similary reply making for duplicate posts.



  • @campkev said:

    Because I'm new to the internets, so I don't realize that occasionally, while  viewing a link from a thread or typing a reply, some one else also posts a similary reply making for duplicate posts.

    Yes, because loading a page on the 'internets' takes 13 minutes.

    Wed, Dec 10 2008 10:29 AM


    Wed, Dec 10 2008 10:42 AM

    @campkev said:

    Look! I can be a jackass too.

    QFT



  • @campkev said:

    @Farmer Brown said:

    Looks like it has been fixed.

    Look! I can be really stupid just like you guys!

    Look! I can be a jackass too. Because I'm new to the internets, so I don't realize that occasionally, while  viewing a link from a thread or typing a reply, some one else also posts a similary reply making for duplicate posts.

    Sweet fucking Christ will you people stop responding to the troll?


  • @belgariontheking said:

    Sweet fucking Christ will you people stop responding to the troll?

    Sorry, I will try to ignore them in the future.



  • The test is the 11 plus - for 11 year olds, and it is still used in some places in England! For instance, it is used in Calderdale (Halifax area) for choosing which schools people go into. One of our friends' children is doing it this year, and the questions are very much like those on the BBC site. There are a lot more (and harder) questions, but many aren't suited to a quick test like this on a website (it's hard to do an automated web test when the answers aren't multiple choice).

    The 11 plus was phased out in most places in about 1977-8 (my sister did it in 1976, by the time I was 11 in 1979 it had stopped - that was in the Wakefield district of Yorkshire at least).

    As SenTree says, it's not a test that everyone is meant to pass (like GCSEs are ), but a test to sort out the 'intellectual' from the 'practical', so they could go to a high school that was more suited to their abilities. Nowadays, everyone just goes to schools intended for non-intellectuals, and the intellectual kids don't have a chance to excel.



  • @pscs said:

    The test is the 11 plus - for 11 year olds, and it is still used in some places in England! For instance, it is used in Calderdale (Halifax area) for choosing which schools people go into. One of our friends' children is doing it this year, and the questions are very much like those on the BBC site. There are a lot more (and harder) questions, but many aren't suited to a quick test like this on a website (it's hard to do an automated web test when the answers aren't multiple choice).

    The 11 plus was phased out in most places in about 1977-8 (my sister did it in 1976, by the time I was 11 in 1979 it had stopped - that was in the Wakefield district of Yorkshire at least).

    As SenTree says, it's not a test that everyone is meant to pass (like GCSEs are ), but a test to sort out the 'intellectual' from the 'practical', so they could go to a high school that was more suited to their abilities. Nowadays, everyone just goes to schools intended for non-intellectuals, and the intellectual kids don't have a chance to excel.

     

     

    There are tests similar to this one in NSW, Australia. Actually there are 2 for school children. The first is for an advanced stream of the last 2 years of primary school, and the second is for "selective high schools" which are public (in the free sense, not the British sense) high schools which select for academic ability.

    I've never really been convinced of their accuracy. I tend to score extremely well on them, but that's because they play to most of my strengths. I've known some really brilliant people who don't do well on them because either the tests are skewed away from their talents, or they aren't particularly good at focussing on a succession of narrow, specific problems.

    I think there should be a division in schooling to allow brighter kids to excel, but that the definition of an intellectual kid needs to be adjusted to allow for a variety of skills.

    To be honest, though, one of the biggest problems with schooling is parents who can't accept that their child isn't an amazing, brilliant and unique snowflake.



  • @pscs said:

    Nowadays, everyone just goes to schools intended for non-intellectuals, and the intellectual kids don't have a chance to excel.

    That's accurate, unfortunately.

    I was bright enough to take both GCSE and AS Maths a year early, but the school managed to screw up both exams.

    For the GCSE, they put me in for the lower paper, so I couldn't score higher than a B (which I did). I had to retake it with everyone else the next year.

    For the AS, it was at the changeover from the old-style to the new-style Maths A-Levels, and I was taking the older exam, and the students actually doing their A-Levels that year were taking the newer one. They managed to give the other students the wrong exam, forcing them to retake it the next day. Apparently most of them were happy to retake because they'd all done so badly in the exam they had taken (it included some different topics to theirs). I didn't do particularly well (though I did pass), mostly due to not having anyone to teach me, and the poor quality of the older maths textbooks. I retook AS Maths with everyone else, so actually had a teacher, and learning from the new books (which were much better), and did much better, even getting 100% on one module.

    I wasn't so great at other subjects, just maths and physics, so I didn't do particularly exceptionally overall, getting a spread of pretty even spread of grades (A to D). The teachers were predicting me As in pretty much everything, but I spent most of my time at school bored out of my skull while the teachers explained the same simple things multiple times until everyone got it.

    Still, despite eveything I made it through school and then uni, and now have a job making computer games (which had been my ambition for almost as long as I can remember), so it didn't turn out too badly.



  • @Thief^ said:

    For the GCSE, they put me in for the lower paper, so I couldn't score higher than a B (which I did). I had to retake it with everyone else the next year.

     

    Are you sure that wasn't intentional, to ensure that your A* counted towards their league table entry?



  •  I noticed this bug on the BBC site too. I did manage to get all the questions right though, which was a relief, as I did pass my original 11+...

     Incidentally I took mine in about 1987, so it was definately still being used at that point.


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