from Alexwhite.org:
I didn’t do much of this sort of thing in my college prof. days. Not even sure if these really count as “trick questions”.
A book I used one time had solutions in the back to all the even numbered excercises. I noticed one of them was completely wrong. I assigned it of course. Hardly any student got it right, almost all more or less copied the answer from the back.
I had to explain to the students: I’m not an idiot. I know the even questions have answers in the back. Maybe you should have thought why I asked that one.
I’d also sometimes ask a question that had no right answer due to a contradiction in the way it was phrased. The students were supposed to find and note the contradiction. A useful skill in Computer Science. More of a meta-question than a trick question.
PRR, that’s actually a common enough exercise in Journalism 101 classes that it’s not a trick anymore. The idea is the same; that journalists need to find the impact to their readers or listeners. The reasons are secondary.
I know. I teach it when I teach Journalism 101–but I got it from reading Ephron.
I used to give this assignment to high school freshmen to teach area and volume:
Pretend the room is a rectangular cube- it’s not perfect, but close enough. Use the meter stick for the necessary measurements and then calculate the following:
- The area of the floor in square meters .
- The area of the ceiling in square meters .
- The area of each wall in square meters.
- The volume of the room in cubic meters.
It was great fun watching kids trying to measure the dimensions of each surface. Of course, a few would immediately figure out that they only needed the length, height, and width of the room.
I should add that I switch it up a little, start with new premises (all faculty and staff will have to undergo professional testing, which test will take place next Tuesday between 11 AM and 2 PM, etc.) --the more outrageous I can make the premise, the more students I’m likely to hook into overlooking the lede.
Since a cube, by definition, has equal length, height, and width, I would have assumed you meant for them to only measure one of them, and assume they were all they same.
If the teacher is honestly using the premise of the assignment to challenge student assumptions and/or realistically gauge their knowledge, then even if the instructions are misleading, I think it’s okay.
I’ve done a similar assignment on the first day of class by telling my students to take out a sheet of paper and write down every single curse word, bad word, insult, and nasty thing they have ever said to another person, had said to them, or have heard/seen/read said by one person to another. The students usually balk, thinking it’s a trap, but I explain that it is an exercise in effort and honesty, that anyone who sincerely attempts the assignment will get a 100% for it, and they go tearing into it.
I give them fifteen minutes, call time, and then say “please write your name and heading in the upper right hand corner of your page and title this assignment ‘Language Inappropriate For Classroom Use’.”
The kids groan. One of them once yelled “I KNEW IT!”. Everybody gets 100%, and I get my point across. You don’t curse in my classroom (I make an exception for physical injuries or catastrophic loss of work), and you aren’t mean to anyone. I’ve used it from sixth grade through 12th grade. It works very well.
None of them screams out “Oh, fuck! What a shitty trick!! You goddamned crafty motherfucker!! Blow me!!”?
OK then, “in the shape of a rectangular prism”. Yep, I wanted the area of all the walls, the floor, and the ceiling.
Only in Spanish, and once I prove I know the enough bad words in Spanish to catch the gist, they stop even that.
Gah! No, no, no. The instructions say to read all the answers first. It does not merely say “read all the questions.” Question 20 reveals the purpose of the instructions. If you instead choose to follow instructions 1-19, you’ve shown a fundamental error in reading comprehension. People ARE NOT computer programs. They can realize that questions 1-19 are so ridiculous that they are not intended to be answered.
There’s nothing arbitrary about choosing to follow question 20. It’s basic reasoning, and if you don’t get it, you still rightfully fail the test.
My late stepdad used to be a teacher at a prep school. He knew that one kid was cheating off the smartest kid in the class, who sat next to him. Before a big exam, he took the smart kid aside and said “You know all the material, so here’s the deal: every question you answer correctly I will mark as incorrect.”
The kid who copied the answers was understandably astounded when he failed the test but the smart kid got an “A.” Of course, he couldn’t say anything about it. He stopped cheating, though, and ended up passing the class.
In a speech class in high school, we had a short unit on group communication. A lot of it involved working out problems as a group, like the one where you are astronauts stranded on the moon and have to rank your supplies in order of importance. Typical “team building” stuff.
One day, our speech teacher surreptitiously handed a piece of paper to four students in the class. It was a copy of the next day’s exercise–a hypothetical in which we had to be the judge and determine the sentence for a juvenile offender. There were four options and one was really obviously the “correct” one. Our papers told us to spend the evening thinking up justifications for one of the “wrong” answers, and to stick to our guns no matter what the next day in groups.
The next day, she said, like she always did, that we would only get a grade if we agreed when time was called–otherwise we’d get a zero. And then she split us up into four groups, with one “stubborn” kid in each group. The rest of the class got SO frustrated. At the end, she explained what she’d done. It was a pretty valuable lesson in communicating with assholes.
In high school I had two different Latin teachers. The first one was a delightful gentleman who had to reitre for health reasons. His replacement was … something else. The first day of class, he gave us a vocabulary test of English words that we all failed. The only item I remember is decimate that he insisted always means “to destroy exactly one-tenth of.” That is one meaning of the word, and the meaning of Latin decimare from which it is derived, but it is not the only meaning of the English word. Much worse, he seemed to delight in making us feel like fools for not getting the expected answers. I immediately branded him an asshole, but eventually I moderated my position. I never really liked him much, but I had to admit that I learned more Latin from him in one year than I had from his more delightful predecessor in three.
Senior year in college, last Public Relations class before being unleashed on the real world as PR majors. We were on a quarter system of ten weeks per quarter, plus the eleventh week for finals week. The midterm had been a 40-page PR proposal for the client of our choice; the final was another 40-page financial budget supporting the previous proposal. On Monday of the last week of class, the prof walks into the room and says he’s going to Hawaii for spring break, so instead of turning in our finals (the papers) during finals week (on the designated day) we were to turn them in a week early, on the last day of class. :eek:
That was a non-starter for me. Looking at my finals schedule, I had three other papers due in the same week and a huge, intense final on Monday of finals week. I really, really, really needed the extra few days to focus on my big 40-pager because there was simply not enough hours in the days ahead to push out 4 major papers in four days. (And yes, I’d started on all of them.)
I went to the prof’s office and asked if I could turn my project in to the J-school dean’s office, take an incomplete, and then he could issue the grade during the first week of the next quarter. I thought that was a reasonable compromise. I showed him my syllabi for the other classes so he could see I wasn’t just making things up. I really had no room in my schedule to move things around.
He told me if he did that for me, he’d have to do it for everyone else and, in the real world, clients often move up deadlines and you have to make it happen.
I thought about that for a while and realized that was bullshit. In the real world, if a client does that, you can often get your other deadlines moved back. Or you can call in other people to help so you can meet all the timelines. In college, that’s called cheating. The rules in college are different from the real world rules. In college, you don’t get to blow off your assignments for other classes and getting other students to help you is a no-no unless the assignment is specifically designed for team work.
So I went over his head. I went to the Dean of the school of Journalism and laid out my case. Professor X gave us this syllabus, on which he clearly stated what the deadline would be for the final project. Here are my other syllabi to demonstrate that Professor X’s new requirements are now un-doable. Professor X said he would not accept my paper in this office during finals week. Yes, I understand the real world lesson he’s trying to teach me here, but the lesson is actually nonapplicable, given the fact that college students are unable to negotiate the constraints and/or scope of work required to complete multiple projects. So now what? Take the F and re-take this class, which I need for my major and to graduate? The dean said he’d go talk to the prof.
An hour later, the prof calls me and tells me that I would get what I wanted and I could turn in my paper during finals week.
The very next quarter, I was talking to another PR major and he told me that Prof. X had given his class the same sob story and they were all scrambling to get their projects done. I realized it was a trick. Professor X never went anywhere. He was just trying to pretend to be like a real-world client, but his lesson was bullshit. During the conversation, he implied to me that my grade would suffer for going over his head, because that is often the consequence of going over someone’s head in the real world. I accept that, but noted that I had gone to him first and gotten nowhere.
A couple weeks later, the grades came out. I had gotten a B on the paper and a B in the class. On the first day of class, he told us if we didn’t get an A in there, we’d have no business practicing public relations as professionals. I have to say, I agreed with him there and I never did go into PR as the main part of my job. I ended up taking writing and editing gigs, which required some PR skills, but they weren’t ever PR jobs. After 20 years of working in journalism, not once has a client bumped up a deadline and I’ve been unable to tap on additional resources or rearrange my other responsibilities. There are always ways to work around, but those methods are unavailable to a college student with a “no cheating” code of conduct.
The prof was a brilliant ad man back in his day, and a brilliant comedy writer. His Comedy Writing Secrets class had a waiting list to get into and the people who took it are the funniest writers I know (with the exception of Sarah Silverman, who I think is hilarious). But I thought his trick was bullshit and still do to this day. He passed away a couple years ago, so I doubt this is still being done to the current crops of PR majors at that school.
I swear, we got those “read every question” tests pretty much every year in school since the 2nd grade. The first year I ended up doing everything. The second year I stopped when I got to the first ridiculous question. The third year was when I started doubting the intelligence of my classmates. I would look at them and think, “Really? You don’t remember standing on your desk and yelling your name three times last year?” I found it was a better test for seeing who forgot everything they learned last year than who could follow instructions.
EC1. Define the Universe
*The universe is absolutely everything there is and a little bit more.*
EC1a. Give two examples
* One example is the universe in which this classroom resides. The second example is the one in which Mr. Spock was temporarily marooned in on last weeks episode of Star Trek.*
The extra credit question on a test I took in college in 1973. The teacher was not a Star Trek fan. I (and everyone else who attempted an answer) did not get extra credit.
I had one in high school that the teacher swears was a trick but I have my doubts.
IIRC we were given an assignment to write a program in C (or was it Pascal?) that would do some kind of nested loop/bubble sort of a large array of data and retrieve We worked on it individually for a week, then in groups with an extension. Eventually, the teacher announced that the problem was unsolveable and that he was disappointed that no one had realized the obvious limitations of the syntax.
I am convinced he tried to solve the problem himself before realizing it was impossible.
I had a great physics teacher in grade 13 that had a huge arsenal of “tricks”, one I remember.
He came in dressed in a full protective gear with a big beaker of water boiling in a bell jar and pretend to spill in on someone in the front row.
He could multiply 2 random 7 digit phone numbers faster than you could type them into a calculator.
He could draw a large perfect circle in the blackboard freehand.
Van Der Graff generators, Tesla coils, optical illusions, tricks with numbers, etc… everyday he had something that would either amaze or baffle you, and some his tricks were on the final exam.
Well, since C and Pascal should both be Turing Complete, saying that it can’t be implemented in the desired language is tantamount to saying that it’s impossible in any language whatsoever.
Now, this has nothing to do with how easy it is - you COULD write a neural network in SQL, though you probably don’t want to unless you are doing it for torture.