Comment Re:A Terrible Question (Score 1) 165
"Yes, there are, particularly in North America, now a lot of utterly crap textbooks for physics..."
[and]
"Well if you knew my opinion on the quality of a lot of the Khan Academy material..."
Ok, I agree, so you were probably assigned questions from some of these 'awful textbooks/problems' along the way. I sure was, my kids sure were. I find it pretty implausible that you managed to make it to physics prof without ever doing one.
It's good to be critical of the quality of those questions and to point out their flaws but they are not unusual. And millions of people are presented with such questions daily. And they largely manage to solve them.
"Plus, 3.375 is the wrong answer because the correct answer is 3.375 m^3. Units are important in physics and if you actually have gone to grad school you really should know that."
Touche; although if you'd looked at the khan academy link I provided determining the units wasn't actually part of the question that was asked. It was given that the answer was in m^3.
But since we're nit-picking, I realize 'cuboid' isn't precise enough to describe the canonical 'box' either. It really should be 'rectangular cuboid', otherwise our mystery box could still be, for example, a parallelepiped; so your correction to the question was still "wrong" . If you were actually a physics professor you really should know that... I hope you don't write test questions!
More relevantly, 'rectangular cuboid' is not a term I've seen in grade school homework, maybe high school (?), but I've seen "block" and "box" a lot in those problems, and the kids know they're supposed to assume a rectangular cuboid -- although most probably wouldn't even know them by that name.