I remember when OCR of mathematics was such a difficult problem that there was no good solution. I remember hints some years ago that the then-current version of InftyReader could do a reasonable job of taking a PDF document and converting it into LaTeX code, but it was far from perfect.
Today my phone told me that the app Photomath has an update and now supports handwriting recognition. This means I can write something like this:
and Photomath does this with it:
When I have been involved with running exams (I wasn’t, really, this year), special care seems to be made to spread these out so that where possible students don’t get exams bunched together. Still, I’ve heard students complain “we only have one day off between the Monday and Wednesday exams, that isn’t enough time to revise for the second topic”. I have a lot of sympathy for this; assessing a module (or proportion thereof) by how you perform in a one-, two- or three-hour window is quite a problematic arrangement, and if you haven’t had sufficient time to get up to speed on the topic, even more so. But I have had in mind that, essentially, “when I were a lad, we had it much worse”. Clearing out some boxes to move house, I found exam timetables from five of the six semesters I spent as an undergraduate, so now I can confirm or refute my feeling on this, in the latest of my series of posts that are surely only of interest to me.
A while ago I was helping out at an open day. The material presented gave some information about the range of assessment types we use. A potential applicant asked me “how can you do coursework for maths?”. She felt that (what she understood as) maths could only be assessed by examination. (This is presumably because her experience of the English school system has not exposed her to anything but exams for maths.)
I thought it might be interesting (to me, at least) to list the types of assessment I’ve been involved in marking in the 2015/16 academic year.
My university is advertising 30 fully funded PhD scholarships for autumn 2016. Basically, there are a list of projects and which ones get funded depends on applications. I am lead on a proposal for a topic in maths/engineering higher education. The description is below, and I would be grateful if you could bring it to the attention of anyone who might be interested.
Christian Lawson-Perfect asks:
Where do old issues of MSOR Connections live online these days? @peterrowlett?
— Christian Lawson-Perfect (@christianp) November 26, 2015
It’s complicated, but here is what I know.
At the Maths Jam conference, I was delighted to chair the first ever (and possibly only) edition of Spoof My Proof, a panel show devised by Colin Beveridge and Dave Gale as a special edition of their podcast Wrong, But Useful – the show that iTunes reviewer @twentythree calls an “unassuming, gentle and informative chat on mathematics”.
When I worked for the MSOR Network under the National HE STEM Programme, we funded a project called Being a Professional Mathematician which was run by Tony Mann (University of Greenwich) and Chris Good (University of Birmingham). This included the production of a set of audio interviews with mathematicians about their work and historians about historical mathematicians. This audio is now available to listen to in podcast format.
Get the Being a Professional Mathematician podcast in RSS format.
Get the Being a Professional Mathematician podcast on iTunes.
The wider project includes resources and suggestions for using this audio in teaching undergraduates, inclunding the booklet Being a Professional Mathematician.
Enjoy!