Wrong answers....

My daughter was laughing her way through Richard Benson's "F in Exams: The Very Best Totally Wrong Test Answers", which is a pretty funny read, and asking me what I thought. Well, mostly I thought the answers were amusing, and the questions that illicited them poorly written. If you ask students, "Where was George Washington born" and they answer, "in a bed", you cannot mark it wrong. It correctly answers the question asked. If you want the name of the city, you have to ask "In what city was Washington born?" And so on. But half the answers in Benson's book are in fact wrong answers, but funny nevertheless, either because they are cheeky, or because they simply reveal an understandable misunderstanding. As it happens, I came across just such an example as I was marking my own exams at that moment. A student who meant to refer to the educational limitations of "rote memorization" wrote instead "rogue memorization" -- an unfortunate slip of the pen, or perhaps a genuine mishearing of what the student thought his/her profs have been saying. But I kind of like the phrase! Yeah, you really don't want your students dwelling on rogue memorization. Given the randomness of some of the answers to the questions posed on the exam, I greatly fear some of my class have in fact experienced rogue memorization when studying for the exam....