Everyone loves an impossible maths exam question

[noblegiraffe]

This one, from this year’s KS2 SATs apparently had children in tears and was described as ‘obscene’ by one teacher.

TBH it took me longer than I’d expect a one mark maths question for 10 year olds!

I'm sorry but I did that in about 3 seconds and I'm shit at maths

Embarrassed to say I can't do that later n one. I have a maths degree.

Definitely not one of the tricky ones!

Stealth you mean the car park one? You need to approach it from another angle

I enjoy things like this and got it within a minute . Thank you OP.

@StealthPolarBear

Yes can see it now.

I enlarged the picture. I did initially struggle

Give us more!

Most of the yr6 children in my class got it right in their Sats (was walking round the room glancing over their shoulders).

@Knockout that's a cruel one! I stared and stared at it but yep, found myself googling 🤦‍♀️

No not the car park one. The shape we're meant to turn into a square and two triangles. I'd appreciate a solution from someone who can do it

Oh I can do it now. That was hard imo.

I guess good for exam technique- it’s one mark do if you can’t do it, leave it and move on.

I suspect a lot of problems would have been avoided if they had made it clear that the cuts didn't have to go right across.

For the second one - a square has four right angles and the two lines you draw will create at most three right angles, so you need to find at least one right angle in the shaded area already. Then it's easy - but that might not be an obvious chain of reasoning.

I like these questions a lot; they're genuinely about mathematical thinking rather than just following a set of rules.

I'm not brilliant at maths but got both the problems very quickly (less than a minute). I thought the triangle one was easier.

I'm out of touch with what children are taught in KS 2 maths now, but Knickerofsocks and Poptart's replies suggest a) that that they must have been taught how to approach that type of problem and b) that it wasn't too difficult.

I absolutely agree that that question should not have stressed children. As others have said, they'll have known it was worth only one mark so it didn't really matter if they couldn't do it. I'd be very concerned if children were being led to believe that they would find every question on every test easy.

They don’t really need to avoid problems by giving you half the answer. It’s a test. There are supposed to be questions that are difficult or challenging. Sometimes they’re an unexpected 1 mark question. In this case it seems to be a question that children (and year 6 teachers) either got straight away or had to spend some time on.

Watching a small number of children forgetting exam technique and spending way too long on it rather than just skipping it is what seems to have caused most angst from what I can tell.

There are supposed to be questions that are difficult or challenging, but this one people either seem to find more difficult or easy depending on their assumption when they read the question. I’m not entirely sure what mathematical skill it is testing - I can’t think of any questions like this that have appeared at GCSE.

Reasoning and problem solving. It’s more the process of trying something then trying something else when that doesn’t work.

Honestly, this is just this year’s ‘maths SATs are making children cry, we should scrap them question’. Next year it will be something else.

Well my 7 year old just got them both right - but I think that they can tend towards being those kind of questions where if your mind works in that way they're easy and if it doesn't they're bloody hard. My mind doesn't particularly work in that way so I struggle with it and my kid with poor spatial awareness skills would be buggered.

The car park one I've seen before and got straight away - obviously my mind is working at a strange angle and is probably drunk.

I don’t think it is really testing reasoning and problem solving though - it certainly doesn’t seem to distinguish between better and worse mathematicians. You could reason that given that it makes three shapes not four, that both cuts can’t go across the whole grid, but some people are solving it quickly because they assumed that from the start, not that they reasoned their way there.

There’s a question on this year’s higher non calc GCSE paper, the last question, worth 5 marks. Some of my kids solved it correctly by using an algebraic approach, and others solved it by chucking a few numbers in and happening across the right answer. That makes it a bad question.

Ohh can we have the question ?

I got it immediately, but think it's as much of a comprehension question as maths

siglingor my mistake was making the assumption the squares lines had to be horizontal and vertical. Once I'd realised that was impossible it was easy.
Ivs seen the car park one before, can't remember if I got it, I think i did

This one?

I got all of them straight away, as did dd who took SATs this year. I agree that it depends how you interpret the question.

They don’t really need to avoid problems by giving you half the answer. It’s a test

When they're only assigning one mark to the question, it's reasonable to expect them to give all the underlying information and to remove ambiguities.