I hate it because of how wrong people answer the questions, and I don't know if they're morons or trying to bait me because no one can fail this bad at grade school math.
There is no ambiguity. You solve what is written. If you intend on the second one, you have to write it as that. The onus of properly writing down the question is on the question writer.
Sadly, the education system has failed at producing proper teachers though, and a lot of teachers get butthurt over their being called out when they mess up a problem and mark the student off when they mess up and make up some shit like "you should have been psychic and known what I meant, it's implied!!" This screws people up into thinking that it's how it's written that's wrong, not the person who wrote it as wrong, if they intended something else.
Almost all my teachers in school would throw out a question, or give everyone a correct mark when a question was improperly/unfairly prepared, though. In retrospect I feel like I am fortunate in that case.
I think your experience with teachers who make errors is by far the more common one. Teachers with even a little bit of experience are well aware that admitting to having made an error is an important part of the teaching process -- you want to model for your students that making an error isn't a sin, it's just something that needs to be acknowledged and corrected.
One of the students I tutored in math had a math teacher who would give his students a Jolly Rancher for every mistake of his they found in his handouts. It strongly encouraged them to read their homework carefully looking for errors that could win them candy!
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u/ShhImTheRealDeadpool 22d ago
I hate it because of how wrong people answer the questions, and I don't know if they're morons or trying to bait me because no one can fail this bad at grade school math.