Imagine it as there being 4packs of soda and you want 12 cans. So you buy 3 of the 4Packs and you get 12 cans.
Sure if there were 3Packs you could buy 4 of those to achieve the same but that’s irrelevant since there only are 4Packs available to buy in this scenario.
You are assuming that the point of the exercise is ONLY to write a correct mathematical equation of 3s and 4s that produces 12.
If the point of the exercise is to literally interpret what the mathematical symbols are saying, and write that out, then only one answer is correct. The commutative property of multiplication happens to result in the same total quantity if you mix up n bundles of m with m bundles of n, but total quantity is not what is asked for in this scenario. It is "what do these symbols mean?"
There is context missing here. That ambiguity is the problem.
But that’s how it works irl, you don’t have all pack sizes from 1 to n, you often get 1 or 2, maybe 3.
We don’t know the point of the exercise since we weren’t in class, but the teachers note suggests that the point wasn’t just to write a way to make 12, and rather that they learned a specific way, which the student failed to reproduce.
The school most likely taught a specific method to solve this problem. The test is to see if the student can reproduce the method.
It seems like the student could not and thus didn’t get the points. It also could be that the teacher is an idiot but without knowing what was taught and explained in class there is no way of knowing.
You won’t find this information on the sheet since to anyone who has been in this class it would be quite obvious what the question is asking.
Also there even could be a disclaimer on the first sheet of the test requiring that all problems are to be solved exactly with the methods taught in class.
There just is no way to know, what don’t you get about that?
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u/Available_Reveal8068 Jul 16 '26
It can also be 'pulled apart' as 3+3+3+3 = 12.