Rock, Paper, Scissors Test

Sometimes I do things that perhaps I should not do. This originally posted on September 19, 2008.

Today I covered special ed. Fourth period was the "monitoring" class, which meant that any students who needed to take a test in a resource room did it with me watching. I figured that since it's Friday, there would be a lot of students taking tests. Nope. Just one.

"Which amendment has to do with being able to try a civil case in front of a jury?"

Yeah, nice try. I told the student that he'd have to figure it out on his own. It was a test, after all. So, then he asked me what grade he would get if he got 7 wrong out of 25 total. He figured that was an acceptable grade, so then he went about guessing on those seven that he did not know.

How do you guess when you have four choices? First he asked for a coin. When I told him that I did not have one, he came up with another way to guess: rock-paper-scissors.

I'm not sure how he reasoned it. Something about I was a/b and he was c/d. So, we played. I threw scissors; he threw paper. So, then I was a and he was b and we played again. Sorry, I forget who "won". He did this for three different questions.

Should I have helped him guess? I've been thinking about this. He would have made random guesses with or without my help, and it's not like I was steering him in any particular direction (I didn't even look at the test). I was kind of like a Magic 8 Ball here or a random number generator.

It didn't matter for long. He figured out a way to eliminate answers (which is much better than random guessing). He got some scratch paper, and he managed to finish the rest of the test on his own.

I wonder what grade he'll get.