Israel’s high school students were in a panic this week over the mathematics matriculations examinations, after a student’s confession that one of the highly guarded exams had been sold to him two days before they were scheduled to take place.
The Education Ministry decided to use backup questionnaires, replacing all levels of the examinations. Time restrictions necessitated their being sent to principals by coded emails rather than by delivery in sealed packages. The morning of the
Erudition can be imitated today by those who “google” to find information.
exam, the ministry’s website crashed due to the extra load, and countrywide testing therefore began one hour later than scheduled. The 005 level questionnaire, the highest, was answered from 7-9 P.M. by nerve-wracked students.
MK Zevulun Orlev (Jewish Home party), head of the Knesset Education Committee, lauded the decision to replace and not to postpone the exam to another date as being the optimum solution to a difficult situation. He said it took into account the thousands of students who had studied intensively up to the original date and have many other examinations ahead in coming weeks.
Teachers and students complained that the backup examinations were harder than usual. Education Minister Gideon Saar (Likud) responded that grades would be compared statistically with past years, and if a significant drop is found, the Ministry might use a factor to correct them.
Mathematics professors, however, reacted to the complaint with a critical assessment of the general level of mathematics students. They said the whole episode is symptomatic of the constantly-dropping level of students who apply to university mathematics departments in recent years.
Dr. Akiva Kadari, mathematics lecturer at the Jerusalem Women’s College in Bayit Vegan, Jerusalem, elaborated for ArutzSheva. He said that this generation’s students lack the ability for in depth analysis that their predecessors had. “They are used to everything being instant, like text messages, and the world of ‘internet thought’ has added to the problem.”
He noted that the Jewish world always aimed to and produced learned scholars who had vast amounts of knowledge and comparative analysis at their fingertips. This erudition can be imitated today by those who “google” to find information without effort and without reading original texts.
He added that if the mathematics examinations were really more complex, most students would fail because they cannot handle the unexpected thinking requirements anymore.
“The time has come for students to stop expecting to solve questions with pre-learned formulas and learn to face challenges. The college entrance exams [called psychometric exams in Israel, ed.] are being approached by students who learn robotic, prescribed techniques for answering questions and techniques for deciding how to eliminate incorrect multiple-choice answers. The time has come to end this absurdity and go back to teaching students to think.”
Not only mathematics suffers from “internet thought.” The late Professor Nechama Leibowitz, the famed Torah educator, was known to have complained to teachers that the use of the photostat machine had “ruined education." She said that students who received one paragraph of a work on a xeroxed page were not stimulated to read what came before and after the paragraph, as they would be if they had to look up opinions using the entire book. This not only meant that the information selected might not reflect the author’s real opinions, she said, but blocked students from mulling over texts in a library, a certain way to stimulate intellectual curiosity and depth.