Arbitrary questions don’t count as education

In these times of enforced home education, the school curriculum is likely to come under closer parental scrutiny than ever before. What will professional scientists make of it? I was stopped in my tracks by a question on a GCSE physics paper, which showed a drawing of an experiment with spring and weights that was supposed to test Hooke’s law, the linear proportionality of force to extension. The ruler to measure the spring’s extension was shown placed behind it at a slanting angle; the student was asked to explain why it was important first to set the ruler upright.

It seemed a bizarre question, to which I couldn’t imagine which answer the examiners were seeking. When I tweeted it, my puzzlement seemed justified. Some wondered if the ruler would fall over (it wasn’t clear if it had been fixed in place). Some wondered if this was about repeatability – if you wanted to replicate your findings, you’d struggle to get exactly the same angle again. One smart GCSE student I asked started to formulate an answer in terms of scalars and vectors, and a few respondents worried that the results wouldn’t be valid if the ruler was not aligned with the direction of the gravitational force.