Author: Justin Smallwood
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Failures of Instant Runoff Voting
I have always thought that Australia has had a perfect electoral system, at least for the House of Representatives. Compulsory ranked voting with instant run-off? What’s not to like?! The electorate is forced to show up once every four years and have their say, and no-one’s vote is wasted, or so I thought. I was…
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Magic Squares
I was watching an episode of Penn and Teller Fool Us with my parents, if you haven’t watched this show, you really should. It’s extremely entertaining, though my girlfriend gets very upset that the show doesn’t tell you exactly how the trick is done. In this episode, a magician by the name of Amazing Allison…
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Partial Scoring for Multiple Choice Tests
I read some time ago an article by Terence Tao on how to assign partial credit scores for multiple choice tests – the article can be found here. Terence’s solution focused on True/False questions, but could be easily generalized to multiple choice questions, but involved as part of the solution giving negative marks to students,…