This just IN, from the Front Page Sections, translated, and no, still didn’t JUST make this up either!
1/2+1/3=2/5
Are the freshmen’s level of knowledge declined? The professor of the mechanical engineering department of Taiwan Technical University, Lin pointed out yesterday, that there was a joke of how messed up on simple math calculations of 1/2+1/3-2/5, but, this elementary school level fraction addition and subtraction problem, a couple of the freshmen who were accepted into public universities DID get it wrong!
Lin pointed out, that you must find the least common denominators in order to do the problem of fractions, and so, the answer is 5/6. But, in a certain public university in the southern region, the professor found that a freshmen got it wrong; most of the students only studied in their first two years of high school, the calculus course in the final year of high school, they’d not mastered yet, and so, the universities have to set up a class of remedial teaching for the subject.
The Assistant Dean of the Math Department of N.T.U. University, Chen said, last year, in teaching his course to freshmen, he’d discovered, that the level of the previous generations of students are WAY better than this generation of students. He pointed out, that after the high schoolers got into universities on early admissions, they’d start relaxing, didn’t even master the basics concepts, or, they’d forgotten what they’d learned back in high school completely.
Chen said, that the students from N.T.U. are average, that there are students from other universities who couldn’t even master the basics of trigonometry that they were taught back in their first year of middle school, and so, a lot of the universities would offer the connecting courses.
The professor of Agriculture from N.T.U., Liu had discovered, that some of the freshmen have good basics, but, because they’d gotten so used to relying on the cram schools, helping them cram for exams, they’d only known how to solve the problems in their freshmen year, and they would have difficulties, adapting to the thinking-oriented way of learning in the universities.
And so, there’s that HUGE gap, between the high schools and the universities, because when you’re in high school, you’d get sent to cram schools, where the instructors only hands you problems after problems, after problems to complete, and they’d give you a score at the end, without explaining to the students, steps that they’re supposed to take, from the problem, to get to the answers, which, is why the level of college students are declining, and, this is wasting the resources, because if the college instructors have to spend time to teach you what you should’ve mastered back in high school, then, you’ll be one of the millions of students who can’t make it out of the “program” in four years!
and no, this, is still NOT a “joke”…
Life, the Obstacle Course 