Wrong answers in the books
We’re puzzled by problems with certain books that should be authoritative.
Our tutoring consultant, as we’ve mentioned, has given us reservations about the current standardized-industrial model of education. At the moment he is dealing with students taking High School Advanced Placement courses. In principle, he supports the idea. It’s entirely rational that students who already have a certain background and skill not be required to take certain basic college courses. And since students can come from any secondary school and go to any college, it makes sense to have a national standard. There are many potential drawbacks to this kind of thing, of course, but for the moment we’ll just talk about the books.
It was inevitable that a book industry should spring up around preparing students for AP tests. If nothing else, parents would make the rational choice that buying even an expensive prep book is cheaper than paying for the course itself at college. We have no quarrel with the hints for studying effectively, or the ways to organize one’s knowledge, that these books contain. We are less enthusiastic about the test-taking gamesmanship they advise, though such things were no doubt inevitable. What really bothers us is that the books contain a number of things that are simply wrong.
We’re not talking about oversimplification, in which (for instance) complex historical factors are reduced to simple cause-and-effect in AP History, nor with questionable interpretations simply stated as fact. Nor are we terribly worried about things that could be typos or momentary slip-ups, such as the ones that invented the North China Sea or identified Henri IV as Valois. What puzzles us are things like the identification of Mozarabs as Arabs who immigrated to Spain. And they aren’t confined to History. One passage on optics in AP Physics presents formulas on lenses that are only true for mirrors, and one in AP Statistics sets out what is in effect the Gambler’s Ruin problem, and gives the ruined gambler’s solution as the correct one.
Our point is that no author with any background in the field would make these mistakes. And even allowing for the puffery of book jacket biographies, all of the authors we’ve read are qualified to write on their subjects. Hence our puzzlement.
We have one hypothesis, based on our experience in a quite different context. Suppose the final composition of these books is not due to the listed authors, but in fact is turned over to someone else. Under pressure of time, or page limits, the output of the author has to be compressed or otherwise fit into the format. Sentences are deleted, substituted or rewritten by a non-expert. However, we still can’t explain why competent proofreading wasn’t done.
Does it matter? Of course it doesn’t for anyone who goes on to further studies of these subjects. They’ll discover and correct their mis-learning in later courses. But those who last see History, or Physics, or Statistics in the form of these books will retain their errors. And we think there are already too many wrong answers in the world.
