I recall, many years ago, possibly in elementary school, receiving a “trick” test or worksheet from the teacher where you were supposed to READ THE DIRECTIONS and see that the instructions told you to simply write your name at the top and turn it in without answering any of the questions, the point being to teach the student to READ THE DIRECTIONS.
I also recall reading years ago of a possibly apocryphal story of an undergraduate laboratory science (chem?) professor whose first lab assignment consisted of using rulers to repeatedly measure mundane objects and recording to what extent repeatedly measuring an object with a ruler changes the readout. The students did the assignment and the professor gave everyone a failing grade, explaining that the rulers that the class had been issued were inaccurate, and that made the results invalid or useless, the point apparently being that you need to check your equipment (most students assuming that if the instructor gives you laboratory equipment to use for a class assignment, then it must be good enough for that use).
Have you ever received (as a student), given (as a teacher), witnessed, or heard reliable testimony regarding an incident of trickery committed by a teacher against a student or students regarding an apparently mundane assignment, whether homework, project, quiz, test/exam, or even thesis or dissertation (I.e. anything that instructors give is in scope.)? I am talking about incidents where the instructor deliberately uses subterfuge, trickery, bald-faced lies, false implications/equivocations, half-truths, other types of intentional deception of whatever nature, or assumptions on the nature of how things work “in the real world” in order to trick students into not meeting the expectations of an assignment, either to make an example of a principle of life (e.g. don’t trust the teacher, investigate yourself), or out of malice?
Aside from pop quizzes given without prior notice and questions worded in a way that requires careful reading, I have never had/heard of teachers doing any of the examples you gave (for the ruler example, I’m pretty sure that I would realize that something was up).
There was a thread on this subject not too long ago. I don’t think this is a good method of education. If students can’t trust a teacher, the educational value of any lesson will be limited. It is not a trick question in the nature of “Where are the survivors buried?”. How is the student supposed to know that the equipment is inaccurate? Was that previously covered in the class?
I had a similar test in a middle school algebra class. The teacher told us to read all the instructions before we started answering any of the questions. I had heard stories about this kind of test before so I was very careful to read everything. Sure enough, the last question’s instructions were something like “Write your name at the top of the page, draw a triangle next to your name and turn the paper face down. Do not answer any other questions.” The kicker, the teacher gave the test with a very strict time limit so anyone who started answering questions right away without reading everything first was unlikely to reach the last question to discover their mistake. I don’t think even half the class passed the assignment.
I had another test in a later math class that wasn’t quite so tricky. I don’t remember the specifics as well, but one question that was worth a fairly large number of points could be solved two ways, one involved using the fairly time consuming methods we hand been studying and that the test was supposed to be based on and the other involved some very basic math to arrive at the same result. The teacher later explained that she was trying to teach us to think about problems before diving straight into them, choosing the best approach for problems rather than just assuming one method is always right and and to not over-thinking things. I’m pretty sure I got most of the way through the long solution before realizing the quicker method would work just as well.
Was there a followup apocryphal story where the pissed off parents of all those students got together and demanded that the teacher be fired for giving failing grades to students for doing exactly what they were told?
I’ve heard of this trick before, and I’ve always wondered: if the last question is mutually contradictory with all the other questions, why should one assume that the last question’s instructions are the ones to be followed?
I was given that sort of test once. It went something likeRead the entire test before doing any part of it.
Do something silly.
Do something else silly.
Do something obviously silly.
Write your name on the test and turn it in.
The teacher expected students to simply turn it in with their name and not do any of the silly things. But it taught me that the teacher had a noticeable lack of logic. Because if one is merely reading the test, one should not do the last instruction, but merely read it.
I had the “Read all the instructions” test in 6th grade. It was the first day of ‘real’ science class…in the lab, with chemicals and fire and everything. The teacher was really trying to stress that you need to read the instructions. She handed out this test. I’ve always been one of the ‘smarter’ kids when it comes to exactly this kind of stuff. I had a feeling I knew what was going to happen and read the last line which said “Don’t do steps 1-20” sit quietly with your hands on the desk." I put my hands on my desk, made eye contact with the teacher to let her know that I understood what was going on that sat back and (literally) watched people “Clap 3 times”, “trace your hand on the back of the paper”, “Hop on 1 foot 4 times” before they got to the end.
I also had a teacher tell me about a philosophy test that he took in college. Long story short on the final the only question was “Why?” he wrote “Because.” and handed it in as others sat around him writing lengthy essays. He got an A, they failed.
Someone pointed it out to me on Snopes so I’m guessing that I misremembered and that he probably told it in the third person about someone else that did it (hence the legend)…but for the life of me, I’d swear he told it in the first person and he wasn’t one to make stuff up.
One of these was mentioned in one of Paul Dickson’s “Official Rules” books. However, the one in the book had a slight problem; instruction 1 was, “Read everything before doing anything,” but the last instruction was, “Do only instruction 2” - in other words, ignore the last instruction that told you to ignore the other instructions (but in that case, you would have to follow the last instruction, which told you to ignore it).
The second one sounds like the problem of the fly and the cars (two cars start 100km apart and drive in a straight line towards each other; one goes 60 km/hr, and the other 40. A fly moving at 100 km/hr starts on the front of one car, flies to the front of the other car, immediately turns around, flies to the front of the first car, turns around, and repeats this until the cars run into each other, crushing the fly in the process; how far did the fly travel?)
The “long way” involves summing series; the “quick answer” is, the cars were moving toward each other at a speed of 100 km/hr, so it took one hour for them to meet; the fly traveled for 1 hour at 100 km/hr, which is 100 km.)
This topic reminds me of a story line from one of the early seasons of Weeds. The youngest son had a teacher that had the class solving a murder mystery, and they worked really hard on it and had trouble coming up with an answer. The kid and his partner put something together and presented it, but they were wrong… Because the real murder was
Nice. I totally went straight to the longer solution when I read that question.
In my case, I think it was some set of functions for which you were supposed to find the area under the curve for a given interval. You could integrate each of the functions over the specific interval for which it applied and get the right answer, but if you took the time to think about the shape of the graph they produced, the functions formed a series of fairly simple geometric shapes, so you could simply calculate the areas of several triangles and rectangles and maybe a section of a circle and add them up to get the total area.
In college, I got an assignment that I thought was a trick question.
It was in an AI class, and we had discussed how it’s often difficult to find a scoring/fitness/optimizing function that does what you want, and some simple ones can result in undesired behavior. The canonical example of this is making an AI elevator that seeks to minimize the amount of time people spend on the elevator, which just never moves and never opens its doors.
So, there was an assignment that had a complicated formulation (it involved a robotic vacuum cleaner), but there was a degenerate solution that just involved sitting in one place and cycling on and off. Once I saw it, I was sure that this was a trick question. It was designed to make sure you saw the flaw in the formulation of the fitness function. Nope. It was just my professor making the same mistake we had been warned about.
I turned in that solution and was promptly given a bad grade, then had to go argue my case (ultimately, the prof changed the problem to remove the degenerate solution and I had to solve the new problem).
The last instruction is supposed say “Do not perform any of the previous steps. Just write your name on the test and turn it in”. I don’t see any excuse for failing this one. The instructions are explicit.
Except the teacher didn’t say to follow the instructions out of order-she just said to read them first. Even if the last instruction says to ignore the other instructions, it is still the last instruction to be followed, creating a paradox.
That doesn’t change anything. The instruction is to “read the entire test before doing any part of it”. You’ve been instructed to read, not do, the other instructions. The last instruction cannot be exempted from the primary instruction of read only, not do.
Nothing so convoluted, but this did actually happen to me. My school (University of Missouri-Columbia if anyone cares) was scheduled to close for Thanksgiving holiday at noon on Wednesday. The instructor for my 11:00 class (who also happened to be a department head) made it known that class would take place and he expected us to be there.
Naturally, most of us bailed on the class anyway. So for the few who did show up, he gave them 10 questions that would be on the final exam. He did not cover any of the questions in any other class and graded the final on the curve, so that the people who answered those questions right were pretty much guaranteed to ace the final.
Read all the instructions before doing any of them.
Do x
Do y
Figure out n
Now that you have read all of the instructions, do not do any of the numbered steps. Sit quietly at your desk and wait.
That’s unambiguous, but the only contradictory one would be a statement of “Do not follow any of the instructions” which would immediately be failed if you had already read the rest of the paper. I doubt that formulation exists, though.
For other methods - if you know that to correctly follow Question #20 you must ignore Question #1-19, then simply ignoring those is the correct response. There is no requirement to answer in order. Now if Question #5 said, “do not follow Question #20”, then you’d have a contradiction.
It wasn’t an assignment, but my stats prof had a story from his time in industry covering that point.
He was contracting with a manufacturer of crankshafts. Crankshafts have to be manufactured such that their weight is distributed evenly around their axis. They can’t be cast to a high enough tolerance for that to happen, so what they were doing was casting them with counterweights on them, and then drilling precise holes into the counterweights to remove enough material to balance the shaft.
The problem was that even after the drilling-out process, something like two-thirds of the crankshafts were still unbalanced. The ones that were unbalanced in the direction of needing more drilling could be sent back for more drilling, but the ones that were unbalanced in the direction of being drilled to much had to be discarded, and they were losing a lot of money on those. They were looking for the my prof to find a way to remove the problems with the drilling-out process to make it more precise and not have so many duds, and they’d been trying for years to get the error bars on the process down, without any success.
The solution was…
…fix the machine that was testing the balance of crankshafts post-drilling. It turns out that even if given the same crankshaft over and over it would get a lot of spread in the results. Turns out that the bulk of the “failed” crankshafts were caused by the measuring process, not any flaw in the crankshafts themselves.
I thought the story was neat, because it’s essentially a “real-life trick question”.
On a related note, there’s the story about Van Halen and the brown M&M’s. Many people have only heard a part of this story and misunderstand what happened.
The part of the story most people have heard is that the band Van Halen required a bowl of M&M’s be waiting in their dressing room before performances and all of the brown M&M/s had to be removed.
This is technically accurate but most people who don’t know the whole story assume this is an example of rock stars being overindulged and making petty demands.
The reality is that Van Halen had a very elaborate stage show with a lot of complicated heavy-duty electronics. They had a complete set of instructions on how the stage show was to be set up properly but they had learned from experience that some local crews would not bother reading the instructions and just go ahead and set things up the way they figured was okay. And this would often cause technical problems in the show.
So the band added a line in the middle of the instruction manual, where they said to leave a bowl full of M&M’s in the dressing room with all of the brown M&M’s removed. No special note was made of this direction and no explanation was given for it.
And then when they arrived at the venue, they would walk in to their dressing room and look for the bowl of M&M’s. If it was waiting there with all of the brown M&M’s removed, they knew that the local crew had read the instruction manual and followed all of the directions exactly as written. If the M&M’s weren’t there, they knew the local crew had set things up without the manual and they’d cancel the show.