Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion The Ultimate Bad Homework Question Thread!

Yes, so "most likely" is most likely to be the answer they are looking for, given the choices -- and if you're at the point of having to figure out what the most likely answer is, instead of the correct answer, it's not a good problem.

____________ energy comes from the burning of carbohydrates.

is it...


a. kinetic?

or

b. potential?


DD-- Um....


YES??

I presume they aren't referring to toast here.

Presumably not. A bit later DD also piped up to ask me if I was aware that diabetes is the result of poor cardiovascular conditioning...



This would be news to anyone with Type I, I'm thinking...

Well, on this, I certainly agree.

Although I am glad to see DD using the time-honored strategy of crossing out obviously wrong answers and choosing between the remaining two (or whatever) when approaching a bad MC question (we taught her this, of course), I always feel a slight unease in my gut about it, too.

Not so much a bad homework question issue as a bad teacher issue...

DD9 asked me to quiz her on a geography study guide, all of which was review from last year, and should be easy. And it was, up until we got to:

Me: Which hemispheres are we in?

DD: North.

Me: And?

DD: East. [pause] No, west.

Me: (sensing she may have changed because she saw a reaction from me) Are you sure?

DD: East.

Obviously she was guessing, and in pressing her on it, I found out that her teacher had told her that the prime meridian went all the way around the earth. [facepalm] That would beg the question... east or west of WHAT? DD told me this same teacher told her the same thing last year, and when the teacher repeated it in class that morning, several of the students who hadn't had her last year went, "HUH??"

For any who remember some of my earlier posts, this is the teacher DD calls "the vampire."

Well, clearly those of us in N. America are in the LEFT-ern hemisphere. Because that's where it is in the picture in the textbook, too.

DS is working on a "Martian Genotypes" assignment for science, using Punnett squares. A question asks, "two Martians who are both heterozygous for fingers marry and have four children. What percent of their children will have three fingers and what percent will have two?" (Three is dominant)
So: FF, Ff, Ff, ff.

I have had him write a disclaimer on his answer, explaining that while there is a 75% chance of any child having three fingers and a 25% chance of any child having two, that is NOT the same thing as "75% of their children will have three fingers". They could all have three, or all have two. Grr. And there is another question that does the same thing, incorrectly.

To mix it up, there are other questions worded that way which are correct, such as the one where 100% of the children will have two antennae because one parent is homozygous dominant and the other is homozygous recessive.

It is a little thing but according to ds7's teacher 4500g converts to 4.500kg. It is not inaccurate just incorrect and it makes me think she just taught them to move the decimal place rather than say there are 4.5 1000's in 4500.

I'm just a 'umble maths prof, but that doesn't look incorrect to me, even if it is an opportunity to talk about precision and how to guess it when it isn't stated...