Pulley Question Possibly To Be Taken Off The Exam?

[Chazef]

pretty sure you only need to analyse situations where an object is at the top or bottom of the vertical circle

[Robert123]

But again, vertical circular motion has come up in past papers, so you'd need to show some sort of meaningful change in the study design for it to be off the course.

But the issue is though many schools believe that vertical circular motion was off the course completely so they didn't cover some of the topics (I know my school avoided it but I learnt it from past exams).
I just think it's bad how VCAA mislead many teachers (this statement is very speculative).

[Aurelian]

But the issue is though many schools believe that vertical circular motion was off the course completely so they didn't cover some of the topics (I know my school avoided it but I learnt it from past exams).
I just think it's bad how VCAA mislead many teachers (this statement is very speculative).

Huh? The 2013 VCE Physics study design clearly states that students must be able to:

• apply Newton’s second law to circular motion in a vertical plane; consider forces at the highest and lowest positions only

If schools didn't teach vertical circular motion, that's their own fault (or rather the teachers' faults). Sorry, but VCAA hasn't mislead anyone.


Source: http://www.vcaa.vic.edu.au/Documents/vce/physics/PhysicsSD-2013.pdf

[~T]

I disagree that VCAA has misled anyone, because (although I didn't realise at first) the study design for motion is unchanged. If any of your teachers told you that anything had been taken off the study design - even though it hasn't changed - then that is entirely their fault.

I think some people are looking at study designs the wrong way. They're not intended to be a list of the questions which you should be able to respond to. They're not intended to be a checklist for the exam questions that may come up. They are purely a guide of the areas of study that are to be taught within the course.

The study design still states "apply Newton’s second law to circular motion in a vertical plane; consider forces at the highest and lowest positions only". So obviously, vertical circular motion is still on the course; ostensibly, however, the claim that we only need to consider the top and bottom points has some merit. But the reasoning for the multiple choice question that I think you're all asking about is in understanding circular motion; to remain in circular motion, there must be a net force directed towards the centre of the circle of rotation. This is not "considering the forces" as the study design suggests we need not do; that would be separating the individual forces at play, and calculating the magnitudes and/or directions. I don't think it was too harsh of VCAA to put in a question that just went back to the core of what circular motion is.

I think, as the final point of my argument, you should read the study design a little closer and see that under the outcome 1 heading it says: "To achieve this outcome the student will draw on the following key knowledge and apply the key skills listed on page 12." If we go back to the "key skills" section that they mention, it has a number of relevant points.

• identify and describe relevant scientific information, ideas and concepts, and the connections between them
• apply understanding of concepts to explain qualitative and quantitative data in both familiar and new contexts

I especially like the second one in this case. It seems like it gives VCAA the right to use any questions that require a true understanding of the concept in question. And it's not like they've misled anyone if this information is available on the public domain; if you have only printed off the shorter list of "key knowledge" then VCAA are not to blame.

[Professor Polonsky]

Can someone just lock this thread already