It was another subpar week for me on KA. I did manage to get through the Quadratic Functions & Equations unit test, but I used Desmos to check my answers before submitting them so I essentially cheated. 😒 The test was 25 questions long and I kept making careless mistakes like forgetting to enter a negative sign or simply misreading the question. I had restarted the test about four times by the time Friday rolled around (each time because I made a careless mistake) which is why in the end I just decided to use Desmos to check my answer before submitting them every time I could. I didn’t feel great about doing it that way, but I know that I do understand what the questions were asking and how to do the math, I just couldn’t lock in for 25 questions in a row. 🤷🏻‍♂️ After I finished the unit test, I got started on the next course, Geometry, and made it through two exercises in about 20 minutes. So, even though I don’t feel great about the week overall, I did manage to make some decent progress through KA, so I’ve at least got that going for me which is nice.

Here are six questions from the unit test:

Question 1

I spent ~10 minutes thinking about how to solve this question. I knew the parabola would face down and would be ‘widened’ (so to speak) since it’s coefficient was –1/5, and I knew the y-intercept would be –4 given if x = 0 that would be the only term left in the expression. I didn’t know what the 2x would do to the parabola so I used Desmos to graph the function. But before I used Desmos, I inputted a few values into the function like 1, 5, –5, 2, and 3 but still couldn’t make sense of the shape. 😔 I wanted to use vertex form but couldn’t easily factor out the –1/5. After looking at KA’s answer, I realized I needed the formula –b/2a which I definitely completely forgot about.

(Also, the function in KA’s answer at the very bottom is completely wrong. There were a few answers I saw throughout the test where the function they graphed at the end was completely off. 😂)

Question 2

Pretty straightforward algebra here. I don’t think there’s I need to give much more of an explanation on this one.

Question 3

This was one of the questions that I got correct without using Desmos but forgot to add the (–) sign in front of the y-coordinate and then got the question wrong. At this point I was 8/25 questions in and then had to restart. So annoying!

Question 4

Again, another pretty straightforward question asking me to find the x-intercepts and vertex. Having reviewed vertex form and the quadratic formula for past few weeks, it wasn’t difficult to solve. (But I was still stressed out thinking that I would make another careless mistake!)

Question 5

This is the exact same type of question as the previous ones except the equation is given in what I believe is called x-intercept form. (I think that’s its name because you can quickly determine that the x-intercepts are 2 and –6.) I then multiplied the binomials to put it into what I think is called y-intercept form—where the equation turned into y = –1/4(x² + 4x – 12), and is called y-intercept form (I think) because you can quickly tell the y-intercept would be (–12)—and then used the vertex formula to figure out the vertex’s coordinates. Boom. 🧨

Question 6

I got this question wrong because I quickly answered it without thinking and didn’t read it properly. I answered 180 thinking that would be the y-intercept and wasn’t paying enough attention to realize the equation was in vertex form, meaning that the vertex was (4, 180) and that the parabola was shifted over 4 units. At this point, I was 13 questions into the test and had to restart. 🤦🏻‍♂️ (This was also when I decided to use Desmos for every single question going forward…) 

I ended up finishing the unit test on Friday and then got started on the following course, Geometry, on Saturday. Before I started, there were 17 exercises and six unit tests for me to get through. But like I said at the start of this post, I finished off two exercises quickly, so now I have 15 exercises left. Both of the exercises I did were super easy. Here are a few screenshots of two of the questions from each exercise:

Question 7

Question 8

As you can tell from these two questions, this exercise was all about what’s called “rotational symmetry”. I didn’t know what that was initially (or at least I had forgotten what it was), and so when I tried to answer the first question I ended up getting it wrong. Once I read KA’s answer and realized that rotational symmetry essentially means, “if you rotate a shape x number of degrees and it appears to have the same shape after the rotation as it did before the rotation, it has rotational symmetry”, then it was easy to solve the rest of the questions.

Question 9

Question 10

These questions were both from the exercise Proofs With Transformations. I found these questions much harder than the ones from the first exercise but ironically got all four correct in a row and passed the exercise on my first try. 🙃 As you can see, the questions were more terminology based, and by that I mean I had to know what the words meant in order to determine the correct solution. To be honest, I didn’t really remember what any of the words/phrases meant, but I was able to think through what they likely meant and got a bit lucky, I guess.

And that was it for this week. As usual, it could have been better but it also could have been worse. My goal for this upcoming week is to get through five exercises and two unit tests. If the questions continue to stay as simple they were in these first two exercises, I should be able to get through everything. It would be great to get through the entire course by the end of July (i.e. ~2.5 weeks from now), but that could be a tall order. As always, my fingers are crossed that I’ll make some decent progress this week so I can potentially get it done! 🤞🏼