Let's just call it 10.0

(From "This Is True")

School officials in Victoria, Australia, say it's too hard for students to calculate equations using the constant 9.8 meters/second/second – the acceleration of gravity at Earth's surface – so it's changing the Year 12 physics exam for the Victorian Certificate of Education to use a rounded-off figure of 10 m/s/s.

Close enough? No: "The difference could cause a parachutist or bungie jumper to plummet into the ground, or the launching of a rocket to fail," say people who actually understand physics. After hearing the criticism the Victorian Curriculum Assessment Authority announced that it would not penalize students who used the correct figure. (Melbourne Herald Sun, Australia) ...No penalty for wrong answers, no penalty for the right ones – modern education in a nutshell.

Well, it could be made right.

I sent the following e-mail:

Greetings: With respect to having students use 10.0 m/s^2 as the acceleration from gravity in calculations instead of 9.8 (or 9.81), there is a quick fix available. All you have to do is add enough mass to the Earth to make its gravitational pull equal to 10.0. This is about 2% of the total mass of the planet. I pulled out my copy of the CRC handbook, and decided this works out to some 235,000 metric tons of debris per square meter of the planet's surface. At the average density of the planet, this debris would pile up to a height of 42.6 kilometers (26.5 miles). It would be hard on buildings, forests, lakes, streams, and mountains, and it would be outweighed only by the environmental impact report, but it would make the lives of physics students sooooooo much easier...