[jmilloy]

I am surprised to see exclusively negative reactions here. For one, the question wasn't marked wrong so much as partially incorrect (and partially correct). Secondly, the question is not "What is 5x3?" and the test is not about multiplication. It's explicitly about a specific process, which the teacher has presumably taught and which the student unequivocally got wrong.

If you were asked in the wood shop to make a drawer using dovetail joins and you instead make a drawer using a rabbet joins, well you shouldn't get full credit because the task wasn't about producing a drawer but about dovetail joins.

The learning objective may read "I can use control structures to solve tasks involving repetition", but if the question is "Use a for-loop to print the numbers from 1 to 10", and you used a while-loop, well again you would get partial credit but not full credit.

Many of us are computer programmers, and we know that many successful code solutions to the same problem are of equal quality. The worst code I work with is by people who never seem to care what the code looks like as long as it produced a correct result. Maybe they were only ever taught by teachers who would mark this 100% correct because they thought that answers matter and concepts don't.

[orless]

The task was about repetitive multiplication strategy. Which was what the child did. Just not by the EXACTLY taught convention.

So your analogy with dovetail joins would be not replacing them by rabbet joins, but setting them just in the different order. And it would have been a complete nonsense to ask for a specific order in a wood shop.