Oh come on. This is obviously a kid’s test, and the kid knew they were being a smartass. What’s less clear is whether the kid knew the actual answers.
In your world you start having to write “solve the equations to their simplest forms” on tests for kindergarteners who won’t even know what that means in order to avoid technically correct nonsense like “1 + 1 = 1 + 1”. Room should be made for genuinely unclear test directions, but this is not one of those cases.
Edit, maybe he should have gotten credit for literally writing “a number with a 2 in the ones place.” The test should have used “provide an example,” not “write!”
Yeah, sure, it’s for a kid. But even for kids - especially, in fact - it’s important to stick by what you say. And that test question says “write a number with a 3 in the 10s place” or whatever, which they did.
Basic use of language is fine. When you’re teaching you define what it means to “solve” or “provide the answer to” 1 1 = _. For a young kid, this is through examples, and later on it might be with an explicit written definition.
And then the question says “solve the following”, which does not mean “write any true statement”, and so excludes 1 1 = 1 1 as a correct answer.
Yeah sure, the kid is probably being a smart ass in this case. So? It’s ok for a kid to pull one over on you occasionally. Do better with the language next time, and it won’t happen again.
Do better with the language next time, and it won’t happen again.
Reward the kid for being a smartass and intentionally misreading directions, and it ABSOLUTELY will happen again. Unless you’re gonna start spending an hour writing incredibly precise paragraphs for each exercise like a magician giving instructions to a genie, there will always be some technically correct version that wasn’t what the question intended.
This is so silly. Kids aren’t code compilers. They know what’s being asked of them. This is like shrugging your shoulders and just letting it happen when a kid is doing the whole “I’m not touching you!” shtick.
It’s not rewarding. It’s assigning points based on the completion of the task. This is math, it does not have to be warm and fuzzy touchy feely nonsense with room for interpretation. If you can’t write clear instructions for a math problem, that is on you. If you cannot communicate your expectations to your students, that is on you. This problem would be incredibly easy to redo so that this answer was not allowed.
Ask the question you want the answer to. If you can’t think of a good way to ask your question to get the answer you want, ask of a different question covering the same concepts. If you can’t do that, then maybe you shouldn’t be writing math exams.
