We all make mistakes sometimes...

Test Preparation SAT Preparation
1

So this may seem a little random and silly, but maybe it can be productive. There are lots of authors/teachers and others here who have written their own math problems. Did you ever write a klunker? Now’s your chance to own up. Bonus points if you put it in print or out to students!

But seriously, show us the problem. Then, leave it to others to figure out what the intended answer was and where things went off the rails. Ideally, let’s let students find the mistakes before all of you math pros jump in.

I’ll get things started. Here is one that will certainly be fixed next time I revise my book. But for now, I just have to own it. Here’s the question as it currently appears:

Seventeen students on a school bus bring their lunch to school in a bag. Nine kids on the bus buy their lunch at school. And three kids (unwisely) skip lunch altogether. If there are 25 kids on the bus, then…

a) 2 kids don’t have bags
b) 4 kids bring lunch and buy lunch too
c) 4 kids missed the bus
d) 3 kids don’t have money
e) 4 kids share their lunch money

OK, so what was I thinking?

2

The following is a problem I wrote some time ago (not an SAT problem):

How many ordered pairs (a,b) of non-negative integers are there such that a + b + (a/b) = 2014?
A: 4
B: 5
C: 6
D: 7
E: 8

While the problem is well-defined, the answer I originally put in was embarrassingly flawed on my part. Try to guess where I made the mistake.

I have probably written some broken problems in the past, although I can’t remember any off the top of my head. But the best thing to do is to own up to it, and then either modify the problem so that it doesn’t have a mistake, or toss it.