The eternal struggle: my students vs. my brain

[gaffetheorist]

Yes, I've been grading again.

The thing I hate most about grading isn't the assortment of plain old wrong answers. Students get questions wrong; I certainly got my share wrong back in The Day. It's the answers that not only aren't right, but couldn't possibly be right.

In this collection one finds phenomena such as:

• Answers written in sentences

Comments

Ooh, ooh, i've got some too!

[trimmje]

I kept running into this bizarreness when testing and quizzing on limits of the factorable sort: they'd factor the bigger polynomial into two binomials, cancel appropriately, and then set what was left equal to zero and solve for x.

[orbifold]

Oh yeah, I've been there. I think my favourites are the people who get negative answers to "find the maximum volume of such-and-such a physical shape".