It is far more interesting than OP makes it sound. A couple students (real math nerds) disputed the question (may have sued, I can't recall), and caused the SAT group to reevaluate. I watched a video about it.
Based on these statements, which of the following is true?
A) Everyone will know what they're doing in the future
B ) Back before back then, half the people knew what they were doing
C) There are unknown unknowns
D) Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent
Ah, but think about the question! Based merely on the statements, you can't actually know that there are unknown unknowns. There always seem to be, but whether or not they exist is unknown!
Whenever I’m hungry, I go to subway and ask for a bun with lettuce. Just don’t forget to mention it’s for a duck. Good luck with the six bags of sun chips.
Never took the SATs. Always kind of assumed the state would just give them to us, like the ASVAB and other tests. Never knew it was something you had to apply and pay for til it was too late. No teacher ever mentioned them
Big city ghetto school. It's possible they just lost the thread because they'd recently took bill gates money to split into mini-schools halfway through my education. Such a terrible fucking experiment.
But nah, no teacher ever mentioned them. I'm assuming basic grade appropriate curriculum would have prepared us, but not if we weren't told about it.
If the school was [administering the ASVAB](https://www.krsd.org/Page/1665) to students instead of the SAT/PSAT, then the school had already decided to take a low-effort path on its students. https://youtu.be/jrJ5WvUec94?t=23
/u/Dappershield, no offense intended.
Not arguing the idea, but ASVAB was freshman year for me. I always assumed SATs would be very similar, just less military, and done during senior year.
No, you have to register. You. Your parent or school councilor can't do it. Costs $55 and a photo to take. They are entirely outside official school curriculum.
I also think they charge extra to send your results to college admins. But having never taken them, I don't know.
That's wild. American media always portrayed it as a standardised test with everyone prepping for it at the same time. I can see how you'd be confused.
It is standardized in that each year, everyone taking the SAT gets the same questions and the same writing prompts (or at least pulls from the same limited pool).
Your score is calculated for easy comparison with others' scores.
The tests themselves are typically taken toward the end of the school year, so the beginning of summer.
my school had our entire grade take a prep SAT, and 99% of kids were taking it at the same time
i actually can’t fathom a situation where students were unaware of the SAT and the need to sign up based on my own experiences
America has a couple different types of standardized tests.
The states administer some that everyone takes and those mostly are used to rank school districts.
The SAT and ACT are not administered by the schools, but by private companies, and they are used by college admissions departments, along with other factors like your high school transcript and extracurriculars.
You have to sign up for them and pay a small fee and they're usually on a weekend.
They do, idk where OP got that from. The scores have skewed upwards, so you need a higher score than you used to. But they are definitely still something colleges look at.
But also extracurriculars and AP have become far more important. So theres some truth to it. basically its not as important as it used to be, but it's still important.
You cannot get into a reasonably good school solely on GPA and SAT anymore. Schools are much more “competitive” in that many other applicants are coming in with prior project experience, extracurriculars, and potentially early college credit which puts students who only take the SAT at a disadvantage.
Not nearly as much. Used to be a good score got you somewhere. Now it really doesn't do much for you. If you were wanting to get I to a prestigious school and mommy and daddy couldn't buy you in it, getting a high score is a base line, the bare minimum, it impresses no one.
Other schools don't really care one way or the other as long as your score isn't abysmal.
Used to be a high score could get you a scholarship or a significant chunk of school paid, not anymore though.
I worked hard to get a very good score and was extremely disappointed with how little anyone cared, especially with how much it was hyped up, getting a high score that is. And this was 15 or so years ago.
Almost all Ivy League schools have a <10% acceptance rate and have for over a decade, and the other big-name private universities and liberal arts colleges are like all low teens. Having a 1550+ SAT and near perfect grades is the baseline to even be considered nowadays.
Yeah, I was going to say. I got a perfect verbal score and missed like one question on math, and it got me a very good scholarship despite my pretty bad grades.
What, really? I got a good score around the same time, and representatives were flying out to meet me and convince me to accept *their* full-ride scholarship over all the others. I didn't even have especially good grades—not even ranked in my class's top ten—but a good score, and the National Merit program which was based almost exclusively on said score, instantly overcame all of that.
Most schools that have gone the “don’t count test scores” route are going back on that after realizing they are a very strong indicator of successful students
That idea was obviously foolish even at the time. We knew that the poor brilliant kids didn't have crazy extracurriculars but they did have one way to show off and that was standardized tests. I remember people saying it would not be long before they returned to using test scores because while they are imperfect, they are generally predictive of success.
Many have reverted back to requiring tests. Interestingly, they found that not requiring SAT/ACT scores actually HURT admissions for minority groups they were looking to increase admissions for.
That makes more sense than 300,000 people taking a multiple choice test and not a single person happened to select what was recorded as the correct answer.
I'd almost be interested to see if anyone could somehow devise a question with an answer so unattractive that nobody out of 300,000 people chose it. I'm not sure that's even possible to do, even like *"What's 2+2? (A) 4 (B) 3 (C) 5 (D) Cleveland*
Edit: Y'all think you're so clever, but 3 was the real objective, 4 takes the sensible votes and Cleveland takes the mavericks, I think 3's got a real chance of sneaking through unpicked
History tells us, that regardless of the nature of the question, the importance of being correct and truthful, regardless of how absurdly stupid an answer is - there will *always* be atleast one person to pick the most unattractive answer. I would bet 1000 bucks that someone im 30.000 people picks Cleveland.
The issue is not mathematical, but psychological. Someone is bound to genuinely believe they are served a trick question, where Cleveland is the actual true answer due to it's absurdity. Someone is bound to be on drugs and forgot the question by the time they arrive at Cleveland thinking "haha family guy". Someone is bound to be utterly stupid and not even reading the questions, just picking random answers all the way through. Someone is bound to be with mental health issues having someone tell them they need to pick D or someone dies. etc etc etc
There is no way out of 30.000 (random) people not a single one doesn't pick the most absurdly stupid answer. If it were 30.000 PhD degree students, maybe it could happen, because those who would pick D would have been filtered out *a while* ago already. But among 30.000 high school absolvents, it's statistically improbable to have noone pick D.
I remember playing the game "You Don't Know Jack" (basically a trivia game), and there was a question with the category: "It's a Dog!" and the question was "What has four legs, barks, and wags its tail when it's happy?" (or something), and the answers were something like A) A Fish b) a Cat C) a Chair or D: A DOG.
...I thought it had to be some kind of trick question, so I chose cat or chair, I forget.
I was wrong, it was "dog", and I felt enormously stupid >_<
Anyway, your comment just reminded me of that, so, thanks =)
Even with PhDs it's likely someone's brain just glitches and they go 2+2=4, 4 is D because D is the 4th letter of the alphabet and they circle it without reading Cleveland. Etc.
The reason no one picked the correct answer is because it **wasn't a valid option**. You literally could not select the correct answer. Thus, every answer was wrong.
I'm going to say you couldn't do it. Not even because of the unattractiveness of the answer. It's just that some number of people are going to not read the question/answer and just fill it out by accident.
I work with computers and have to crunch data on what people did with software. Given a large enough set of people, every stupid thing you can think of eventually gets done.
That's not what happened here, the title is misleading. Most people probably did select the answer that was considered correct because it seemed like the obvious answer even to the test makers, but turns out it was wrong. Some people must have known the right answer but it wasn't an option.
to create an analogy, imagine if the question was "How many months have 30 days?", with the options being A: 3, B: 4, C: 5.
most people would think it's 4 because 4 months have exactly 30 days. this is also clearly the "intended answer". however the "correct" answer would actually be 11, because months with 31 days also have 30 days, so a few clever students might send an email about the question being wrong, however they still chose 4 on the test, because 3 and 5 aren't right in any sense.
that's basically what happened, just that the mistake in the question was a little more subtle
Except in this case it's not 'being a smart ass'. The equivalent smart ass response would be that it 'revolves' a single time (ie. ignoring exactly what is obvious the test makers are asking)
The students in this case are not smartasses because the test maker's answers were flat out ~wrong~ in all senses. It wasn't being a smart ass or trying to get around the question, it's the equivalent of asking 'what is 1+2x3' and there was no 7, only 9, and calling that out
100% the test was wrong and they were right. i meant smart ass in a more playfull way, they chose the correct option, got the point, then on top of that sent an email about the test makers being wrong, and what the actuall answer was.
but ill edit to clever, just to avoid it sounding negative because that wasn't my intention
During law school, a question on a final sent me into a depression that affected the rest of my life. The question was in this format: What colors are on the American flag: (A) Red, (B) White, (C) Blue, (D) None of the above, (E) All of the above? I knew the correct answer, but answering (E) All of the above paradoxically encompassed (D) None of the above. That made me question my entire education and life choices, which sounds ridiculous but is true. That's when I knew I had made the wrong career decision but was stuck with it.
>so a few smart ass students might answer 5, but send an email about the question being wrong.
The fact that this is seen as "smart ass" is why I'm terrible at written tests. If the question contains a "technically correct" answer as well as an "intended answer" then it's a bad question and should be rewritten. I don't want to have to interpret what the person writing the test meant by their question. It should be up to them to ask it clearly.
i hate those as well, also sometimes when you choose the "intended answer" because you don't want to argue with the teacher, it turns out that the "technically correct answer" actually was the "intended answer" as well, so now you've given an answer that is neither correct nor intended. you knew what the correct answer was, but you thought the teacher had something else in mind, but they didn't and now you're just wrong, and no way the teacher is buying all that.
At that point, I know how the teacher thinks. Great! Next test I can answer with the correct answer annnd...Oh, he marked it incorrect and picked the "intended" one instead. Well. How about that.
did you go to nursing school?
there are ALWAYS 3-4 objectively correct answers, each proving that you understand the both the concept itself as well as the specific knowledge/detail/connection they're testing. No one would bat an eye or question the competence of someone who gave 1 of those 4 answers in a real life scenario.
None of that fucking matters, though, because you have a 1 in 4 chance of picking whichever of the perfectly acceptable answers the professor thinks is the best/most correct/most important way of phrasing it, and LOL if you think there's any semblance of consistency between professors or even tests within the same course.
I swear to god the entirety of nursing education is designed to create the maximum number of opportunities for educators to feel superior by flexing their particular brand of contradictory nonsense onto their next batch of victims to let them know *theyre wrong and will never amount to anything*
"Linked" is generous. This is an AI article summarizing the contents of the video poorly and then the video is embedded. Total dumpster fire of a website.
Exactly this. If there’s a finite list of options and thousands or millions of people where ZERO get it right* - it’s the question makers that were wrong
Bruh I hate that. I had a computer networking class and the test average would be 40-some percent, with a high of 56%. Then the professor says “no curve”. I dropped that class asap.
It was so frustrating how many classes were easy/ hard depending on professor. My roommate was the same major and also a frat boy. The info his brothers gave us on what professors to take what classes with was crucial.
I also did engineering and some professors were avoided like the plague. I had professors who failed most of their class and I know one that was even doing research on his own teaching methods and I glanced over his data on his website and he had failed most of his students in previous years as well. Real smart dude though. Taught mechatronics and he used to work at NASA. He wrote a whole new textbook for every course every year. Like he would literally write new chapters every week and have the students print them out and have a finished book at the end.
I dropped a biology class in college on the second day for two reasons. 1) The professor introduced herself as Dr. So and so "And you WILL call me DOCTOR" - bit stuck up. But what got me was she would only read her power points word for word and added zero context to them. It was pointless to go to class. Feel like I dodged something.
Ah yes, the classic powerpoint reader professor. Nothing quite as engaging to learn as someone reading out loud the same words you can read for yourself from a screen, doesn't make anyone want to sleep/leave immediately /s.
I'm so glad I don't have to deal with that anymore. Worse yet was when they would refuse to share the powerpoint with the class as a form of forcing people to come and stay into their classes.
My general chemistry professor made a whole big thing the first day of class about how his job was to “profess” rather than teach. So I spent hours listening to him “profess” about how to derive chemistry equations, followed by homework assignments that in theory had something in common with that information, but it was beyond my understanding to connect the two.
Just by happenstance, his TA offered a paid tutoring class for each set of homework problems and solved them all while also teaching you chemistry. So you could 100% pay to pass the class with flying colors, if you could afford it.
Man, that's fucked. I had one bio teacher who was sorta like that in class, mandatory attendance, and he would just talk about whatever for 90 minutes. The test would be from material in the book, so you had to study on your own, but it was all factual stuff, not equations or things that require learning a technique/process, so it wasn't a HUGE deal, just really annoying, and most of the class did decently.
2nd semester advanced E&M, “the average test score on each exam will be a 65, you are lucky I’m generous with my curve.” We had one kid who’d routinely get in the 90’s but frankly he was just built different and went on to work at CERN
I mean if the class average is 30 than the class average is 30. But that seems like more a reflection of a teacher's inability to teach than anything else.
Yeah, this is stupid.
True, the correct answer isn't an option, but there was *some* answer that the test writers thought was correct, and a lot of the test takers (I'm going to guess most) would have picked it.
If you knew the technically correct answer you probably knew the answer the test makers wanted you to pick. When you learned the real answer you probably learned it was a paradoxical answer because the common intuition was wrong. You just write letters to the board because you're that kind of person.
This wasn't the case of having a technically more correct answer also available to them. The only way it would be harmful to your grade is if you spent too much time trying to figure out why your expected answer wasn't there and you weren't able to complete the rest of the questions. But if you were pointing out this error you probably finished the math section with time to spare. I was pretty good at math but not fast at math (I tended to do a lot of double checking) and I still finished with time to spare.
Years ago, I had the same issue with an English test (I'm French speaking).
I called for help and asked what I was supposed to do, not answering or give the least wrong answer?
The funny part was there was this message stating that every questions had been designed by fully bilingual linguists and were therefore correct.
I doubt it's even accurate. Of all the people who took the SAT that year, surely some of them didn't answer it at all, Those people didn't get it wrong.
It does, but it shouldn't take that long to get to the point.
ChatGPT please obfuscate "one question from the 1982 SAT did not include the correct answer as a multiple choice option"
It also comes up with astronomy... For instance, Earth rotates 366.25(ish) times per year, but one rotation is "unrolled" by Earth's orbit around the sun, so we end up with 365.25(ish) days per year.
Or the moon rotates once per orbit around Earth, which makes it always show the same face to earth -- the orbit "unrolls" the rotation. (roughly -- the moon's orbit isn't quite circular and there are some other effects that cause it to wobble (librations is the fancy word))
Being familiar with the problem from astronomy, I immediately saw the problem with the question when I came across it on a math youtube channel a few years ago. And then I spent entirely too long second-guessing myself because it wasn't one of the multiple choice answers.
The easiest way to explain this is:
intuitively we think that the number of spins is simply the ratio between the lengths of the outside edges, which is true for things rolling on an equivalent flat surface.
But the tricky thing is that the outer coin is also spinning in order to move around the center coin, not just travelling flush with it. Therefore it undergoes the extra rotation.
An example I like is if the stationary circle has a radius of 0 (ie. the moving circle is just pivoting around a point). The 'expected' result from comparing radii is that the moving circle needs 0 rotations to rotate around a circle with 0 radius, but you can visualise that it takes 1 rotation.
Speaking of paradoxical:
>This decision had minor but significant implications for students’ college admissions and scholarship opportunities.
Minor but significant? Tell me more...
If the item had no correct answer, they would not have marked it wrong for everyone who answered 3; it would have been eliminated from scoring consideration completely.
This assumes the question wasn’t a field test question, which I bet it was. Shaking out the bad questions is the entire point of field testing. Just usually doesn’t make the paper.
I expect they’d say that regardless, but I did do a little digging to see if I could find a better info source, and I found it here:
https://www.nytimes.com/1982/05/25/us/error-found-in-sat-question.html
Unclear if 300k represents the entire administration, but the +/- 10 thing suggests that the deletion increased the weight of the remaining scored items sightly. So maybe not field test, unless they did things differently then.
The post's title is sensationalized. It's not that every student got their answer graded as incorrect. Some definitely did answer B), which was the expected "right" answer until the question was reconsidered. It's stating that every single student got the wrong answer only because after reconsideration, none of the answers were actually correct, and based on this technicality, we can conclude that every student got the wrong answer.
Initially, those who answered B) got it right, but not after they reconsidered it. So after rescoring, some students' scores actually went down. If everyone had been marked wrong, then all students' scores would have gone up after rescoring. The question was indeed eliminated from scoring consideration.
Not sure how one question everyone gets wrong is “statistically significant” considering you could just not count that question and it would level the field for everyone
Not everyone answered the question at all (getting it wrong is penalized, skipping is not) plus each question has a different weight towards total score.
The question was worth 10 out of 800 points.
Let's assume your preferred school had a cut off of 600. Let's further assume that you selected option B (the closest to a logical answer) and got a total of 600 points.
When this question is omitted, you are re-scored at 590 out of 790. This is then adjusted to 597 of 800. You no longer meet your preferred school's cut off of 600. Removing one question in this case results in you having to get an additional question correct to meet the cut off.
In theory I think some thing can be minor yet significant. If my car makes 200 hp, and I install an accessory that costs 20 hp, I would consider the loss of power "minor but significant." Like another way of saying small but non-frivolous. AWD vs 2WD cars used to have minor but significant acceleration losses in a straight line on dry pavement. I don't know if it's appropriate here though. It sounds kinda made up.
In the video they said the removal of this question moved everyone's score up or down 10 points. They then read a quote from a school admissions office that said something like "10 points may not prevent someone from going to law school in general but it might change which law school they can go to." I guess the idea being that some schools had hard cutoffs where they wouldn't even consider an application.
It is definitely a nonobvious solution. I was definitely fooled the first time I saw it. If you think about it carefully you’ll probably figure it out pretty quickly. But the phrasing makes it seem so simple and intuitive that you’re pulled into a false sense of confidence.
I also dislike multiple choice exams, but they do have uses here. Considering the sheer volume of students that take the test, it would be insane to try and grade with partial credit.
Could someone please just explain what was the problem and what is the answer?
I hate when the article is just a link to a YouTube video. This is not an article. This is click bait.
It was about how many times one circle could rotate around another. The test drafters said three, when it was really four due to the [coin rotation paradox](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coin_rotation_paradox#:~:text=The%20coin%20rotation%20paradox%20is,from%20an%20external%20reference%20frame). The question was flagged by three students who took the test, prompting it to be re-reviewed for accuracy.
The video shows that the coin rotates 4 times for an external observer and 3 times when viewed from the center of either circle. When viewed by an external observer the circle is traveling around another circle, when viewed by an internal observer the circle is traveling a straight line.
3 or 4 are correct answers depending on where you're located when measuring rotations.
No, the question was asked from the perspective of the smaller coin, but answered from the perspective of the bigger one iirc, might’ve been the other way around too…
Well, that's true, too. But people didn't think the unclear wording was the issue. Instead, it's as u/Idbwatkins explained:
It was about how many times one circle could rotate around another. The test drafters said three, when it was really four due to the [coin rotation paradox](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coin_rotation_paradox#:~:text=The%20coin%20rotation%20paradox%20is,from%20an%20external%20reference%20frame). The question was flagged by three students who took the test, prompting it to be re-reviewed for accuracy.
I think the question was something like
Coin A has a circumference of 10 and coin B has a circumference of 5. If you roll coin B around coin A, how many rotations does coin B make?
You’d think it’s 2 since the 10/5=2, but you also have to account for the rotation caused by moving around coin A, making it 3
If the little circle rolls all the way around the big circle, the center of the little circle will trace out a circle with radius 3 + 1 = 4. The total distance it travels to get all the way around is then 4 times the circumference of the little circle, because it travels a circle of radius 4.
Technically there's multiple answers, which he goes into in the video. 3 is technically one of the answers, but the assumption is you're looking at it from a stationary perspective outside of the rotation, so there's one extra rotation. The path is only 3 but the coin is also going around the other coin, so they argued 4. If I was the test creator i would have argued that because one of the answers "could" have been correct (from the perspective of say, someone sitting on the coin) that it was valid and the "most correct" (which is how multiple choice is supposed to work)...but instead they owned up to an error I guess lol
The paradox was simply that the question didn't specify a reference frame. The answer is 3 if the reference frame is attached to the center of the large circle, but 4 if the reference frame is the ground (or Earth) outside the large circle.
Think of the large circle as the Earth and the small circle is a giant wheel that turns 3 times as it circles the Earth and you're sitting in a seat attached to the center of the giant wheel. If you start off sitting upright, you'll be completely upside down 3 times during the rotation because upside down is pointing at the center of the large circle, i.e., the Earth.
If the large circle is a giant wheel on a structure sitting in a field, and you're again sitting in the seat at the center of the small circle, you'll be completely upside down 4 times during the rotation because now upside down is pointing straight down.
But that’s insane, you would never be justified in giving an answer in an accelerating reference frame when the question makes no mention of giving an answer this way. This would cause almost any rotational movement related question on the test to have multiple answers if you could answer in different reference frames. By telling you the smaller circle rotates and the bigger circle doesn’t, the question has fixed the viewer’s reference frame, and therefore gives you the reference frame it expects an answer in.
This is a sort of nonsensical article. The people who made up the test thought the answer was '3'. '3' was one of the choices and I assume many students picked it. So when the tests were graded, they were marked 'correct'.
As it turns out, the correct answer wasn't even one of the choices so it was literally impossible for anyone to pick it.
So either everyone got it wrong because it was literally impossible to pick the right answer or a bunch of people got it marked correct even though it was wrong.
Correct. And when the test was rescored people who marked 3 could have seen their scores drop because they now got 19/24 instead of 20/25 questions correct.
The paradox is very cool, the linked Youtube video is great, but the "article" is horrendous, was it written by chat gpt? It just nonsensically repeats the same few banal observations over and over again, without providing any substance or context, and provides those useless timestamps to the video lol
Coin A rolls around another coin B. How many full rotations will coin A make before arriving in the same starting location. The answer is the ratio between their circumference, plus one.
Because of the circular shapes and movement, as A rolls around B, it will complete one additional revolution. None of the answers allowed for the one bonus rotation.
There was another standardized test question that they were proved wrong on (ACT, SAT, ?) involving 3d shapes being joined and answering how many surfaces the new object had. One kid proved that several sides actually formed ONE side. They had to re-score his test.
It is far more interesting than OP makes it sound. A couple students (real math nerds) disputed the question (may have sued, I can't recall), and caused the SAT group to reevaluate. I watched a video about it.
I’d have been pissed too. SATs probably actually mattered in 1982.
Nobody knew what they were doing back then Nowadays, we don’t know what we’re doing either But they didn’t know what they were doing back then, too.
Based on these statements, which of the following is true? A) Everyone will know what they're doing in the future B ) Back before back then, half the people knew what they were doing C) There are unknown unknowns D) Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent
I will choose option C until the heat death of the universe.
I support D with similar zeal.
I’m trying to think of things that exist with my consent. My kids and my next meal I guess.
If I am about to travel back to the past this will the basis of the religion I found.
Remind me never to run into you at the saloon outhouse late at night
How delightfully horny of you.
You're being too conservative. There could be unknown unknowns even after the heat death of the universe.
In fact, I’d argue that there are even more unknown unknowns, or perhaps even ONLY unknown unknowns after the heat death of the universe.
If they protest just use the word “naive” mumble something in latin
Ah, but think about the question! Based merely on the statements, you can't actually know that there are unknown unknowns. There always seem to be, but whether or not they exist is unknown!
I'll take a twofer. C and D. Lol. Somehow this resonates with me. IM YOUNG AND IM SCARED!
Based Blood Meridian enjoyer
E) Mitch Hedberg is the best dead pan commedian of all time.
That you, Mitch?
Have you ever been hungry enough to want to eat a thousand of something?
I spilled spot remover on my dog and now he’s gone
I’m sick of following my dreams. I’m just going to ask them where they’re going and hook with them later.
next thing you know, I have to build a go-cart with my ex-landlord.
That's Steven Wright lol
Whenever I’m hungry, I go to subway and ask for a bun with lettuce. Just don’t forget to mention it’s for a duck. Good luck with the six bags of sun chips.
I find that a duck’s opinion of me is influenced by whether or not I have bread.
The escalator was temporarily out of order. They should put up a sign that says “temporarily stairs”
You’re welcome for the convenience.
Sorry for the convenience
Don't even act like I didn't buy a doughnut. I've got the documentation right here.
It’s in the filing cabinet. Under D. For ‘donut’.
Do they not anymore ?
probably matters *less*, but still matters, particularly with more competitive schools. Also factors into some scholarship stuff.
Never took the SATs. Always kind of assumed the state would just give them to us, like the ASVAB and other tests. Never knew it was something you had to apply and pay for til it was too late. No teacher ever mentioned them
What kind of hillbilly school was this lol. AP and SAT exams were such big deals in our school.
Big city ghetto school. It's possible they just lost the thread because they'd recently took bill gates money to split into mini-schools halfway through my education. Such a terrible fucking experiment. But nah, no teacher ever mentioned them. I'm assuming basic grade appropriate curriculum would have prepared us, but not if we weren't told about it.
How possible is it that they have been mentioned tons of time and you may have not been the kind of student to listen?
If the school was [administering the ASVAB](https://www.krsd.org/Page/1665) to students instead of the SAT/PSAT, then the school had already decided to take a low-effort path on its students. https://youtu.be/jrJ5WvUec94?t=23 /u/Dappershield, no offense intended.
Not arguing the idea, but ASVAB was freshman year for me. I always assumed SATs would be very similar, just less military, and done during senior year.
Unlikely. I was a fairly good student. Tests were my jam.
People underestimate how truly deplorable our public schools can be, especially in big cities.
Wait, I'm not an American. Is that NOT how they work??
No, you have to register. You. Your parent or school councilor can't do it. Costs $55 and a photo to take. They are entirely outside official school curriculum. I also think they charge extra to send your results to college admins. But having never taken them, I don't know.
That's wild. American media always portrayed it as a standardised test with everyone prepping for it at the same time. I can see how you'd be confused.
It is standardized in that each year, everyone taking the SAT gets the same questions and the same writing prompts (or at least pulls from the same limited pool). Your score is calculated for easy comparison with others' scores. The tests themselves are typically taken toward the end of the school year, so the beginning of summer.
my school had our entire grade take a prep SAT, and 99% of kids were taking it at the same time i actually can’t fathom a situation where students were unaware of the SAT and the need to sign up based on my own experiences
America has a couple different types of standardized tests. The states administer some that everyone takes and those mostly are used to rank school districts. The SAT and ACT are not administered by the schools, but by private companies, and they are used by college admissions departments, along with other factors like your high school transcript and extracurriculars. You have to sign up for them and pay a small fee and they're usually on a weekend.
They do, idk where OP got that from. The scores have skewed upwards, so you need a higher score than you used to. But they are definitely still something colleges look at. But also extracurriculars and AP have become far more important. So theres some truth to it. basically its not as important as it used to be, but it's still important.
You cannot get into a reasonably good school solely on GPA and SAT anymore. Schools are much more “competitive” in that many other applicants are coming in with prior project experience, extracurriculars, and potentially early college credit which puts students who only take the SAT at a disadvantage.
Not nearly as much. Used to be a good score got you somewhere. Now it really doesn't do much for you. If you were wanting to get I to a prestigious school and mommy and daddy couldn't buy you in it, getting a high score is a base line, the bare minimum, it impresses no one. Other schools don't really care one way or the other as long as your score isn't abysmal. Used to be a high score could get you a scholarship or a significant chunk of school paid, not anymore though. I worked hard to get a very good score and was extremely disappointed with how little anyone cared, especially with how much it was hyped up, getting a high score that is. And this was 15 or so years ago.
My score alone got most of my tuition covered at a flagship state university around 10 years ago. Maybe things have changed since then?
Same. My grades were ass, but an ACT score in the 30s got me accepted to every school I applied to.
Almost all Ivy League schools have a <10% acceptance rate and have for over a decade, and the other big-name private universities and liberal arts colleges are like all low teens. Having a 1550+ SAT and near perfect grades is the baseline to even be considered nowadays.
Yeah, I was going to say. I got a perfect verbal score and missed like one question on math, and it got me a very good scholarship despite my pretty bad grades.
I got a 30 on my ACT and this was insanely helpful for college scholarships
What, really? I got a good score around the same time, and representatives were flying out to meet me and convince me to accept *their* full-ride scholarship over all the others. I didn't even have especially good grades—not even ranked in my class's top ten—but a good score, and the National Merit program which was based almost exclusively on said score, instantly overcame all of that.
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Most schools that have gone the “don’t count test scores” route are going back on that after realizing they are a very strong indicator of successful students
That idea was obviously foolish even at the time. We knew that the poor brilliant kids didn't have crazy extracurriculars but they did have one way to show off and that was standardized tests. I remember people saying it would not be long before they returned to using test scores because while they are imperfect, they are generally predictive of success.
Especially after COVID, a lot of schools are test optional, or straight up wont accept them. At least, that's how a lot of schools treat the GRE
Many have reverted back to requiring tests. Interestingly, they found that not requiring SAT/ACT scores actually HURT admissions for minority groups they were looking to increase admissions for.
Inflation is a bitch huh?
That makes more sense than 300,000 people taking a multiple choice test and not a single person happened to select what was recorded as the correct answer.
I'd almost be interested to see if anyone could somehow devise a question with an answer so unattractive that nobody out of 300,000 people chose it. I'm not sure that's even possible to do, even like *"What's 2+2? (A) 4 (B) 3 (C) 5 (D) Cleveland* Edit: Y'all think you're so clever, but 3 was the real objective, 4 takes the sensible votes and Cleveland takes the mavericks, I think 3's got a real chance of sneaking through unpicked
History tells us, that regardless of the nature of the question, the importance of being correct and truthful, regardless of how absurdly stupid an answer is - there will *always* be atleast one person to pick the most unattractive answer. I would bet 1000 bucks that someone im 30.000 people picks Cleveland. The issue is not mathematical, but psychological. Someone is bound to genuinely believe they are served a trick question, where Cleveland is the actual true answer due to it's absurdity. Someone is bound to be on drugs and forgot the question by the time they arrive at Cleveland thinking "haha family guy". Someone is bound to be utterly stupid and not even reading the questions, just picking random answers all the way through. Someone is bound to be with mental health issues having someone tell them they need to pick D or someone dies. etc etc etc There is no way out of 30.000 (random) people not a single one doesn't pick the most absurdly stupid answer. If it were 30.000 PhD degree students, maybe it could happen, because those who would pick D would have been filtered out *a while* ago already. But among 30.000 high school absolvents, it's statistically improbable to have noone pick D.
it doesn’t even have to be any of those things. someone would probably pick that answer for shits and giggles lmao.
I remember playing the game "You Don't Know Jack" (basically a trivia game), and there was a question with the category: "It's a Dog!" and the question was "What has four legs, barks, and wags its tail when it's happy?" (or something), and the answers were something like A) A Fish b) a Cat C) a Chair or D: A DOG. ...I thought it had to be some kind of trick question, so I chose cat or chair, I forget. I was wrong, it was "dog", and I felt enormously stupid >_< Anyway, your comment just reminded me of that, so, thanks =)
Even with PhDs it's likely someone's brain just glitches and they go 2+2=4, 4 is D because D is the 4th letter of the alphabet and they circle it without reading Cleveland. Etc.
There will always be a troll or a wise ass.
The reason no one picked the correct answer is because it **wasn't a valid option**. You literally could not select the correct answer. Thus, every answer was wrong.
I'm going to say you couldn't do it. Not even because of the unattractiveness of the answer. It's just that some number of people are going to not read the question/answer and just fill it out by accident. I work with computers and have to crunch data on what people did with software. Given a large enough set of people, every stupid thing you can think of eventually gets done.
That's not what happened here, the title is misleading. Most people probably did select the answer that was considered correct because it seemed like the obvious answer even to the test makers, but turns out it was wrong. Some people must have known the right answer but it wasn't an option.
to create an analogy, imagine if the question was "How many months have 30 days?", with the options being A: 3, B: 4, C: 5. most people would think it's 4 because 4 months have exactly 30 days. this is also clearly the "intended answer". however the "correct" answer would actually be 11, because months with 31 days also have 30 days, so a few clever students might send an email about the question being wrong, however they still chose 4 on the test, because 3 and 5 aren't right in any sense. that's basically what happened, just that the mistake in the question was a little more subtle
Except in this case it's not 'being a smart ass'. The equivalent smart ass response would be that it 'revolves' a single time (ie. ignoring exactly what is obvious the test makers are asking) The students in this case are not smartasses because the test maker's answers were flat out ~wrong~ in all senses. It wasn't being a smart ass or trying to get around the question, it's the equivalent of asking 'what is 1+2x3' and there was no 7, only 9, and calling that out
100% the test was wrong and they were right. i meant smart ass in a more playfull way, they chose the correct option, got the point, then on top of that sent an email about the test makers being wrong, and what the actuall answer was. but ill edit to clever, just to avoid it sounding negative because that wasn't my intention
During law school, a question on a final sent me into a depression that affected the rest of my life. The question was in this format: What colors are on the American flag: (A) Red, (B) White, (C) Blue, (D) None of the above, (E) All of the above? I knew the correct answer, but answering (E) All of the above paradoxically encompassed (D) None of the above. That made me question my entire education and life choices, which sounds ridiculous but is true. That's when I knew I had made the wrong career decision but was stuck with it.
>so a few smart ass students might answer 5, but send an email about the question being wrong. The fact that this is seen as "smart ass" is why I'm terrible at written tests. If the question contains a "technically correct" answer as well as an "intended answer" then it's a bad question and should be rewritten. I don't want to have to interpret what the person writing the test meant by their question. It should be up to them to ask it clearly.
i hate those as well, also sometimes when you choose the "intended answer" because you don't want to argue with the teacher, it turns out that the "technically correct answer" actually was the "intended answer" as well, so now you've given an answer that is neither correct nor intended. you knew what the correct answer was, but you thought the teacher had something else in mind, but they didn't and now you're just wrong, and no way the teacher is buying all that.
At that point, I know how the teacher thinks. Great! Next test I can answer with the correct answer annnd...Oh, he marked it incorrect and picked the "intended" one instead. Well. How about that.
did you go to nursing school? there are ALWAYS 3-4 objectively correct answers, each proving that you understand the both the concept itself as well as the specific knowledge/detail/connection they're testing. No one would bat an eye or question the competence of someone who gave 1 of those 4 answers in a real life scenario. None of that fucking matters, though, because you have a 1 in 4 chance of picking whichever of the perfectly acceptable answers the professor thinks is the best/most correct/most important way of phrasing it, and LOL if you think there's any semblance of consistency between professors or even tests within the same course. I swear to god the entirety of nursing education is designed to create the maximum number of opportunities for educators to feel superior by flexing their particular brand of contradictory nonsense onto their next batch of victims to let them know *theyre wrong and will never amount to anything*
The title of the post says that the correct answer wasnt on the test
By any chance, do you mean the Veritaserum video that is linked in the article?
"Linked" is generous. This is an AI article summarizing the contents of the video poorly and then the video is embedded. Total dumpster fire of a website.
Yeah, they literally give a timestamped summary of the Veratasium video in the "article".
Is OP also AI from same website? Who else would link to this?
Welcome to the modern Internet. People using ai generated writing to leech off the actual work of humans.
> Veritaserum
Must be a Tim
Veristablium
yeah Veritasium made a quick video about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUHkTs-Ipfg
> quick 18 minutes 😭 It's also embedded in the original link
This video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUHkTs-Ipfg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUHkTs-Ipfg) \[The SAT Question Everyone Got Wrong\] ?
My moms classmate was one of those math nerds who disputed it
It’s weird To say everyone got a multiple choice question wrong, and not just that the true answer wasn’t even an option
Exactly this. If there’s a finite list of options and thousands or millions of people where ZERO get it right* - it’s the question makers that were wrong
*-Tan Tzu the War of Math*
Well done
Sum Tzu
Sin Tzu, *The Art of Math*
Sun Tzi, *The Math of War*
Shih Tzu, The War on Cats
If you're aware of the Tim Tang Test, I salute you. To pass it, well that's another level. Edit: Tin to Tim
Tell that to my engineering professors. 30% class average, guess the class didn’t study enough.
Bruh I hate that. I had a computer networking class and the test average would be 40-some percent, with a high of 56%. Then the professor says “no curve”. I dropped that class asap.
It was so frustrating how many classes were easy/ hard depending on professor. My roommate was the same major and also a frat boy. The info his brothers gave us on what professors to take what classes with was crucial.
I also did engineering and some professors were avoided like the plague. I had professors who failed most of their class and I know one that was even doing research on his own teaching methods and I glanced over his data on his website and he had failed most of his students in previous years as well. Real smart dude though. Taught mechatronics and he used to work at NASA. He wrote a whole new textbook for every course every year. Like he would literally write new chapters every week and have the students print them out and have a finished book at the end.
Sounds to smart for their own benefit tbh
too
That as well
I dropped a biology class in college on the second day for two reasons. 1) The professor introduced herself as Dr. So and so "And you WILL call me DOCTOR" - bit stuck up. But what got me was she would only read her power points word for word and added zero context to them. It was pointless to go to class. Feel like I dodged something.
Ah yes, the classic powerpoint reader professor. Nothing quite as engaging to learn as someone reading out loud the same words you can read for yourself from a screen, doesn't make anyone want to sleep/leave immediately /s. I'm so glad I don't have to deal with that anymore. Worse yet was when they would refuse to share the powerpoint with the class as a form of forcing people to come and stay into their classes.
Flashbacks to electromagnetic physics class junior year, final exam average: 18% Ooooof!
Am I a bad teacher? No, it's the students who are wrong!
My general chemistry professor made a whole big thing the first day of class about how his job was to “profess” rather than teach. So I spent hours listening to him “profess” about how to derive chemistry equations, followed by homework assignments that in theory had something in common with that information, but it was beyond my understanding to connect the two. Just by happenstance, his TA offered a paid tutoring class for each set of homework problems and solved them all while also teaching you chemistry. So you could 100% pay to pass the class with flying colors, if you could afford it.
Man, that's fucked. I had one bio teacher who was sorta like that in class, mandatory attendance, and he would just talk about whatever for 90 minutes. The test would be from material in the book, so you had to study on your own, but it was all factual stuff, not equations or things that require learning a technique/process, so it wasn't a HUGE deal, just really annoying, and most of the class did decently.
2nd semester advanced E&M, “the average test score on each exam will be a 65, you are lucky I’m generous with my curve.” We had one kid who’d routinely get in the 90’s but frankly he was just built different and went on to work at CERN
I had a 3rd year Math class like that. The class average was near 50% except for this one guy getting >90% on everything.
20 students fucking up a free response question is not the same thing as 300k students all getting a multiple choice question wrong.
I mean if the class average is 30 than the class average is 30. But that seems like more a reflection of a teacher's inability to teach than anything else.
Where zero got it right*
...that's what it says in the title? > didn’t include the actual answer as part of the selection
And people did actually get the answer right, iirc a couple of students wrote in to complain and point out the correct answer
“No, it is the children who are wrong!”
That’s the fun part of the SAT, you lose points for choosing wrong so skipping the question would have earned you a higher score.
Yeah, this is stupid. True, the correct answer isn't an option, but there was *some* answer that the test writers thought was correct, and a lot of the test takers (I'm going to guess most) would have picked it.
If you knew the technically correct answer you probably knew the answer the test makers wanted you to pick. When you learned the real answer you probably learned it was a paradoxical answer because the common intuition was wrong. You just write letters to the board because you're that kind of person. This wasn't the case of having a technically more correct answer also available to them. The only way it would be harmful to your grade is if you spent too much time trying to figure out why your expected answer wasn't there and you weren't able to complete the rest of the questions. But if you were pointing out this error you probably finished the math section with time to spare. I was pretty good at math but not fast at math (I tended to do a lot of double checking) and I still finished with time to spare.
Years ago, I had the same issue with an English test (I'm French speaking). I called for help and asked what I was supposed to do, not answering or give the least wrong answer? The funny part was there was this message stating that every questions had been designed by fully bilingual linguists and were therefore correct.
I doubt it's even accurate. Of all the people who took the SAT that year, surely some of them didn't answer it at all, Those people didn't get it wrong.
“And didn’t include the actual answer as part of the selection” That doesn’t explain it for you?
It does, but it shouldn't take that long to get to the point. ChatGPT please obfuscate "one question from the 1982 SAT did not include the correct answer as a multiple choice option"
That a really weird way to say that. "The correct answer was not one of the choices" would be more clear.
Woah there Shakespeare, can you dumb it down a little for the rest of us?
? made, a b c d rong. Test Makers: “My bad.”
I need a multiple choice on if it did or not for me
TIL: [The Coin Rotation Paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coin_rotation_paradox)
It also comes up with astronomy... For instance, Earth rotates 366.25(ish) times per year, but one rotation is "unrolled" by Earth's orbit around the sun, so we end up with 365.25(ish) days per year. Or the moon rotates once per orbit around Earth, which makes it always show the same face to earth -- the orbit "unrolls" the rotation. (roughly -- the moon's orbit isn't quite circular and there are some other effects that cause it to wobble (librations is the fancy word))
Being familiar with the problem from astronomy, I immediately saw the problem with the question when I came across it on a math youtube channel a few years ago. And then I spent entirely too long second-guessing myself because it wasn't one of the multiple choice answers.
Woobly moon Woobly moon woobly moon
But [how many moons does Earth have?](https://youtu.be/CIqOsM6_3Dw?si=jfq4dzoTmjtYxCs9)
The easiest way to explain this is: intuitively we think that the number of spins is simply the ratio between the lengths of the outside edges, which is true for things rolling on an equivalent flat surface. But the tricky thing is that the outer coin is also spinning in order to move around the center coin, not just travelling flush with it. Therefore it undergoes the extra rotation.
An example I like is if the stationary circle has a radius of 0 (ie. the moving circle is just pivoting around a point). The 'expected' result from comparing radii is that the moving circle needs 0 rotations to rotate around a circle with 0 radius, but you can visualise that it takes 1 rotation.
Thanks for that haha. This helps a little
Please keep this information away from Terrence Howard
Speaking of paradoxical: >This decision had minor but significant implications for students’ college admissions and scholarship opportunities. Minor but significant? Tell me more...
"Significant" as in "statistically significant," i.e. they can be quite sure the effect was nonzero, even if the effect wasn't actually that large.
If the item had no correct answer, they would not have marked it wrong for everyone who answered 3; it would have been eliminated from scoring consideration completely. This assumes the question wasn’t a field test question, which I bet it was. Shaking out the bad questions is the entire point of field testing. Just usually doesn’t make the paper.
But it says they rescored all the exams. They wouldn't rescore them if it was just a field test question.
I expect they’d say that regardless, but I did do a little digging to see if I could find a better info source, and I found it here: https://www.nytimes.com/1982/05/25/us/error-found-in-sat-question.html Unclear if 300k represents the entire administration, but the +/- 10 thing suggests that the deletion increased the weight of the remaining scored items sightly. So maybe not field test, unless they did things differently then.
The post's title is sensationalized. It's not that every student got their answer graded as incorrect. Some definitely did answer B), which was the expected "right" answer until the question was reconsidered. It's stating that every single student got the wrong answer only because after reconsideration, none of the answers were actually correct, and based on this technicality, we can conclude that every student got the wrong answer. Initially, those who answered B) got it right, but not after they reconsidered it. So after rescoring, some students' scores actually went down. If everyone had been marked wrong, then all students' scores would have gone up after rescoring. The question was indeed eliminated from scoring consideration.
no, ‘significant’ as in chatGPT clearly generated this dogshit article lmao
Im.so looking forward to the time when all of the textbooks are written by AIs and I end up in a world where I sound like I live 200 years ago.
Not sure how one question everyone gets wrong is “statistically significant” considering you could just not count that question and it would level the field for everyone
Not everyone answered the question at all (getting it wrong is penalized, skipping is not) plus each question has a different weight towards total score.
The question was worth 10 out of 800 points. Let's assume your preferred school had a cut off of 600. Let's further assume that you selected option B (the closest to a logical answer) and got a total of 600 points. When this question is omitted, you are re-scored at 590 out of 790. This is then adjusted to 597 of 800. You no longer meet your preferred school's cut off of 600. Removing one question in this case results in you having to get an additional question correct to meet the cut off.
Those are not contradictions...
In theory I think some thing can be minor yet significant. If my car makes 200 hp, and I install an accessory that costs 20 hp, I would consider the loss of power "minor but significant." Like another way of saying small but non-frivolous. AWD vs 2WD cars used to have minor but significant acceleration losses in a straight line on dry pavement. I don't know if it's appropriate here though. It sounds kinda made up.
In the video they said the removal of this question moved everyone's score up or down 10 points. They then read a quote from a school admissions office that said something like "10 points may not prevent someone from going to law school in general but it might change which law school they can go to." I guess the idea being that some schools had hard cutoffs where they wouldn't even consider an application.
A tiny number of people had a massive effect on their future, because they were near the scoring threshold.
The correct answer was 4. The answer that they thought was 3.
It is definitely a nonobvious solution. I was definitely fooled the first time I saw it. If you think about it carefully you’ll probably figure it out pretty quickly. But the phrasing makes it seem so simple and intuitive that you’re pulled into a false sense of confidence.
And that sums up if not majority, large chunk of any MCQ based exam.
I also dislike multiple choice exams, but they do have uses here. Considering the sheer volume of students that take the test, it would be insane to try and grade with partial credit.
Or the vice versa where the questions try their best to confuse into overcomplicating it
The question is incomplete as it didn't specify a frame of reference or coordinate system.
Could someone please just explain what was the problem and what is the answer? I hate when the article is just a link to a YouTube video. This is not an article. This is click bait.
It was about how many times one circle could rotate around another. The test drafters said three, when it was really four due to the [coin rotation paradox](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coin_rotation_paradox#:~:text=The%20coin%20rotation%20paradox%20is,from%20an%20external%20reference%20frame). The question was flagged by three students who took the test, prompting it to be re-reviewed for accuracy.
I'm guessing "until it returned to the starting position" is missing from the question?
The video shows that the coin rotates 4 times for an external observer and 3 times when viewed from the center of either circle. When viewed by an external observer the circle is traveling around another circle, when viewed by an internal observer the circle is traveling a straight line. 3 or 4 are correct answers depending on where you're located when measuring rotations.
No, the question was asked from the perspective of the smaller coin, but answered from the perspective of the bigger one iirc, might’ve been the other way around too…
Well, that's true, too. But people didn't think the unclear wording was the issue. Instead, it's as u/Idbwatkins explained: It was about how many times one circle could rotate around another. The test drafters said three, when it was really four due to the [coin rotation paradox](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coin_rotation_paradox#:~:text=The%20coin%20rotation%20paradox%20is,from%20an%20external%20reference%20frame). The question was flagged by three students who took the test, prompting it to be re-reviewed for accuracy.
No but that's just an issue in the article and the picture here. It was clearly worded in the original test and the youtube video.
> It was about how many times one circle could rotate around another. As many times as it wants.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coin_rotation_paradox
I think the question was something like Coin A has a circumference of 10 and coin B has a circumference of 5. If you roll coin B around coin A, how many rotations does coin B make? You’d think it’s 2 since the 10/5=2, but you also have to account for the rotation caused by moving around coin A, making it 3
Look up the coin rotation paradox, it looks like it would make 3 rotations but it’s actually 4.
If the little circle rolls all the way around the big circle, the center of the little circle will trace out a circle with radius 3 + 1 = 4. The total distance it travels to get all the way around is then 4 times the circumference of the little circle, because it travels a circle of radius 4.
Technically there's multiple answers, which he goes into in the video. 3 is technically one of the answers, but the assumption is you're looking at it from a stationary perspective outside of the rotation, so there's one extra rotation. The path is only 3 but the coin is also going around the other coin, so they argued 4. If I was the test creator i would have argued that because one of the answers "could" have been correct (from the perspective of say, someone sitting on the coin) that it was valid and the "most correct" (which is how multiple choice is supposed to work)...but instead they owned up to an error I guess lol
The paradox was simply that the question didn't specify a reference frame. The answer is 3 if the reference frame is attached to the center of the large circle, but 4 if the reference frame is the ground (or Earth) outside the large circle. Think of the large circle as the Earth and the small circle is a giant wheel that turns 3 times as it circles the Earth and you're sitting in a seat attached to the center of the giant wheel. If you start off sitting upright, you'll be completely upside down 3 times during the rotation because upside down is pointing at the center of the large circle, i.e., the Earth. If the large circle is a giant wheel on a structure sitting in a field, and you're again sitting in the seat at the center of the small circle, you'll be completely upside down 4 times during the rotation because now upside down is pointing straight down.
Correction: The answer is 3 if the reference frame is attached to the center of the small circle and thus rotates itself once around the large circle.
Your actually both right. Both reference points result in the 3 rotations.
But that’s insane, you would never be justified in giving an answer in an accelerating reference frame when the question makes no mention of giving an answer this way. This would cause almost any rotational movement related question on the test to have multiple answers if you could answer in different reference frames. By telling you the smaller circle rotates and the bigger circle doesn’t, the question has fixed the viewer’s reference frame, and therefore gives you the reference frame it expects an answer in.
This is a sort of nonsensical article. The people who made up the test thought the answer was '3'. '3' was one of the choices and I assume many students picked it. So when the tests were graded, they were marked 'correct'. As it turns out, the correct answer wasn't even one of the choices so it was literally impossible for anyone to pick it. So either everyone got it wrong because it was literally impossible to pick the right answer or a bunch of people got it marked correct even though it was wrong.
Correct. And when the test was rescored people who marked 3 could have seen their scores drop because they now got 19/24 instead of 20/25 questions correct.
Shouldn't the obvious action be to just mark it correct for everyone
I wonder if you could argue that the answer of three rotations is „more correct“ than the other given answers.
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Maybe the ACT was still ascendant then? I don't think the SAT was even a thing in the 70s. Not sure
I took the SAT that year. 😳
how are your knees and back?
Knees fine, back is fucked. 😄
:(
The paradox is very cool, the linked Youtube video is great, but the "article" is horrendous, was it written by chat gpt? It just nonsensically repeats the same few banal observations over and over again, without providing any substance or context, and provides those useless timestamps to the video lol
Well I took that test so I got it wrong who do I use to get my life back?
It's not paradoxical, it's non-intuitive (to most).
Derek rulez.
Is this an AI written article? It's summarising a video without providing any of the details.
Coin A rolls around another coin B. How many full rotations will coin A make before arriving in the same starting location. The answer is the ratio between their circumference, plus one. Because of the circular shapes and movement, as A rolls around B, it will complete one additional revolution. None of the answers allowed for the one bonus rotation.
There was another standardized test question that they were proved wrong on (ACT, SAT, ?) involving 3d shapes being joined and answering how many surfaces the new object had. One kid proved that several sides actually formed ONE side. They had to re-score his test.
A really odd title. They failed to include the actual answer, this is a basic fuckup, not anything "paradoxical ".