I am a newbie, and doing the helmet tutorial.  It is asking me to go to the edit mesh menu and select the split polygon tool.  It isn’t there.  where is it.  please help !

It’s been replaced by the Interactive Split Tool. If you want the old split, you can still get it from the Shift RMB marking menu. Shift +RMB left, right.

i feel like a proportional perfectionist when modeling so the Interactive split was the best added feature in my opinion way better than the first one

Greg:  I believe he wrote “shift+RMB” That will bring you to the proper menu.

You can also type the MEL command on the command line or in the Script Editor - “SplitPolygonTool” will call up the old-style split tool.  You can then highlight this bit of text and MMB-drag it to a shelf or assign a hotkey to it.

I find the “Interactive Split” tool to be a little buggy - I teach at a school and find that it works well on some machines and not so much on others - is it a graphics card or driver issue?

Also, some students work on Maya 2012 at school and on 2011 at home; importing a model that you have created in 2012 into 2011 by using the “ignore version” option still gives some problems if the “Interactive Split” tool has been used.  These students use the old SplitPolygonTool and it works fine.