Setting the coursework

I had a very pleasant morning sat in my conservatory in the spring sunshine scribbling on a notebook writing the coursework problems. I based this heavily on last years coursework. In mathematics it is common to use the same questions but change the numbers and words slightly. So the question where you have to draw a linear graph of a logarithmic dataset is changed from a "decline in pollution levels in a lake" problem to a "increase in infections during a pandemic" problem, and so on. Knowing I am a new lecturer, and that the students are above expectations, I wanted the assessment to be obviously of similar difficulty to previous years.

An interesting feature of the coursework for Scientific Mathematics is that 6 out of 8 questions are nearly identical and reduce to the techniques used in the other 2. So really it is just the same question over and over. The problems are dressed with different contexts, different numbers obviously and slightly different focus means that the questions appear different, though fundamentally they are all the same technique.

The following contexts are used to dress the same question, reduction of natural law to linear form, into several different problems:

• Decay of pollution levels in a lake over time;
• Increase in number of people infected in the early stages of a pandemic;
• Decrease in temperature of a body;
• Radioactive decay;
  
• Compound interest.