You did skip the part where I said I would need to see the rest of the test or at least know the actual grade of the student or the curricula at hand.

The very fact that I was not the only person to come up with five times five and five divided by 5 kind of goes to the point about the ambiguity and the expectations being isolated by the way it was presented in the post.

Honestly this screams "we did a specific exercise in class, recall and repeat that exercise at home."

Lmao physically printing off a multiparagraph reddit argument is such a funny move

I think this is a very, "too much distracting unneeded info" kinda question. Ironically those tend to be better solved by kids who don't know what to do with all that extra info anyway

This problem is what my professor sees when i forget to write "Let ε > 0"

This problem is an equivalent of a Rorschach test.

I'm the pinecone that posted this to Reddit. It's interesting to see how different people interpret this problem, I was trying to think through the number of sides, but in retrospect the solution most people seem to have arrived at makes the most sense. I blame my engineering brain; I looked too deeply for patterns that weren't there.

My major issue with this problem is twofold: 1) the ambiguity in the problem statement itself doesn't provide any meaningful context to help the student work out the intended solution, likely leading to confusion... and 2) as a conscientious 2nd grader, my sister felt discouraged by this ambiguity and expressed doubt in her math skills, something I certainly don't want her taking away from something this trivial. Problems like this pop up from time to time on my feed, and every time I feel as though the only thing they accomplish is making kids feel lesser, confused, and even that they hate math. Not a good lesson, to be sure. Thankfully I was able to reassure her that, even with my PhD, I had no idea what they were getting at and that she'll be just fine. And that math gets a lot more fun :)

This feels like it may have been like the 6th question in a list of questions that all had a similar theme and probably made the meaning clearer

As an autistic child, problems like these were the worst.

Problems that required you to throw away or ignore information given, and to try and think what the teacher is actually wanting you.

Instead of.. the specifics of the problem itself.

This is one of the worst math problems we've seen, because it's introducing geometry-based noise into the problem.

People don't realize how much you go through when teaching.

When I had to explain rotations,one of my example was opening a faucet. When I asked which motion they do, one pupil did a lifting motion and I burst into laughs, because it was unexpected yet totally correct.
I still picture a faucet with old turning knobs, but today faucets have a vertical lever or have a sensor.

So, you've to take home that learning and adapt.

honestly, if it were fruits instead of shapes, I feel like there would be no arguing whatsoever

You are overthinking
1 × 2 = 3
4 ÷ 5 = 6
The problem just asked to look at the picture (done), and fill in the missing numbers (done). It did not ask for the numbers to be connected to the pictures, or for the equations to make sense. To be safe, i'd also write numbers inside the shapes -- in my opinion all the shapes are missing a number.

Me, watching this video:

"What do we have here? A picture with shapes. Wait, there's all this discussion. He's going through all of it? Well, at least he's fast-forwarding. But...on paper? Why on paper? He could be just scrolling through it all on screen. Scrolling... He's scrolling through online comments with paper? Wait...scrolling... Where does that term come from? Ancient scrolls. Which were paper. OK then.

Oh, and there's math..."

As an autistic person, yeah this question sucks. I did get the 4*5=20 thingy, but still. Things that are even slightly ambigously worded where like one tiny detail isn't 100% clarified trips me up, this kind of thing is just ridiculous imo. It reads more like an IQ test question than a math question

BitOBear sounds like a guy who would argue about the number of days in a week in a bodybuilding forum

It's a Rorschach test masquerading as a math problem, change my mind.

That Reddit Dialogue had me rolling 🤣

I had the same initial intuition as BitOBear but I immediately thought "well that can't be right"

Dude, you're looking for zebras, when you obviously looking at a horse!

10:13 Thank you for explicitly stating non-square rectangles.