<p>
</p>
<p>Couldn’t that be said of basically any class? For example: “the trick with history is memorizing it all. If you have the time history is the easiest of any class.”</p>
<p>Anyway, how are you missing entire problems due to stupid mistakes? A stupid mistake, to me, is a silly error that will cost you 1 or 2 points at most (depending on exactly how significant a single point is with your teacher’s grading scheme). A mistake that causes you to miss a whole problem seems a little more serious unless we’re talking about multiple choice questions. </p>
<p>If you’ve got teachers who are giving you multiple choice math exams, then frankly I feel sorry for you and urge you to see if you could persuade them to do something different. Multiple choice questions are absolutely the worst way to test someone’s math ability and are completely contrary to the entire spirit of the subject.</p>
<p>Ugh, don’t get me started on math exams. I think most of them are pointless. Giving students routine, straightforward computation problems to be solved within (say) an hour’s time hardly provides an adequate means for discriminating between those who are merely able to execute memorized algorithms and those who actually understand anything that’s going on. As this thread shows, they also tend to punish for making small mistakes rather than lack of understanding. I’m a big fan of essay-based take-home math exams whose problems span a very wide range of difficulty starting with a slightly hard but still routine computation and concluding with a severely challenging problem that would be unsolvable by every student except those with almost perfect understandings. Of course, the tests can be graded on a curve: obviously the teacher would by construction not expect but one or two students to get the final problem, for instance. The huge benefit of this approach is that it discourages memorization (you can look everything up!), encourages people to try to actually understand stuff, and actually provides a large enough difficulty span as to discriminate between different students effectively. And it makes what member said wrong. :D</p>
<p>Wow, I got off topic! Uh, proceed.</p>