Math has always been a love-hate relationship for most people. You either love it because you are great at it and can calculate arithmetic like no tomorrow or you hate it because calculating the tax on a dollar item is too headache-inducing. Or, for most other people, math becomes a subject we despise because as the years go up, so does the difficulty level of each corresponding grade.
And then as a parent, not only do you have to survive through math homework once again, but you are also responsible for answering your children’s ‘BEDMAS’ questions.
But this simple arithmetic question stumped this student’s parents. Not because of the difficulty but because of how it was marked.
A picture that was posted on Imgur on October 2015 went viral recently after a simple math problem was marked incorrectly.
The Common Core math worksheet asked students to utilize the ‘repeated addition method’ to solve the following problem: 3 X 5.
For those that may have forgotten, repeated addition is simply adding something over again. So 3 times 5 is simply adding 3 five times or adding five three times.
The final answer as we all know (with or without the help of a calculator) is 15. But the boy’s answer was penalized despite the right answer.
The student arrived at the right answer but apparently the way he showed his work was incorrect.
Points were apparently taken off because he wrote ‘5+5+5’ and not ‘3+3+3+3+3.’ Although both equations arrive at the same answer, the student still failed to receive the full marks.
The teacher didn’t specify why one equation was more right than the other, but the parents were most certainly confused as to why marks were deducted.
Multiplication is simply adding a number a specific number of times so no matter how they decide to multiple or add it up, it should always arrive at the right answer (as long as it was done correctly.)
