RutSum

CBSE Maths Paper 2008

The Maths paper this year couldn’t have been easier. Everything was in course, mostly similar to the NCERT textbook examples. The paper even had questions from the CBSE Sample Papers. The paper wasn’t too long either, it was a 2 hour 50 minutes paper, which leaves you with 10 minutes for going back and revising and correcting any mistakes you spot while going through your answer sheet.

Despite all this, I blew off my chance of scoring a 100. I got stuck on a 6 mark calculus question, which was from the chapter Definite Integrals. I tried out all sorts of wacky and absurd ways to solve the question, but just couldn’t get to it. Later on I found out that my method of approach was wrong, apparently it was quite a simple question.

Next I screwed up a formula, again in a calculus question, this time from the chapter Application of Integrals. I did the whole thing correctly, but because I applied the wrong formula, which made the subsequent steps wrong too, I’ll get a 2 or 3 mark deduction out of 6.

So that makes the maximum possible total 92. I’m sure I would’ve made a few more mistakes, which have a chance of getting neglected by dumb CBSE examiners. So I think expecting a total score of above 85 marks would be appropriate.

UPDATE : After reading the newspaper, I got to know that the question on Binary Operations was wrong, or maybe it was a trick question to find out how smart kids are. The expression in the question was -

a * b = (a + b)/2

where a,b belong to N (Set of Natural Numbers).

But this operation isn’t binary at all, not over the set N. It would have been a binary operation if the set was Q (Rational Numbers). So no binary operation, no meaning of commutativity or associativity.

Another tricky part was the Linear Programming problem, which had two answers, but one was fractional. The catch was - the answer couldn’t be fractional, as the numbers represented machines. You can’t buy half or one-fourth of a machine. You have to buy a whole one. So the correct answer was (6,0).

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