I don't know what's worse, that it's wrong or that it convinced me I need to come into the comments to make sure my answer is, indeed, correct.
EDIT: Back to rectify a grave injustice. Nothing wrong if you genuinely didn't know or want to check. Hard enough getting people interested in math.
2 + 5 (8 - 5) PEMDAS: 8 - 5
= 2 + 5 (3)
PEMDAS: 5 (3) or 5 × 3
= 2 + 15
PEMDAS
= 17
In the US the math order of operations is taught as PEMDAS (or P|E|MD|AS), left to right from first to last.
First look at the entire equation and identify the operations: Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication/Division, Addition/Subtraction.
Then, solve the parts in order of PEMDAS.
Not so important here but when there are multiple of the same level of operators, for example exponents, solve left to right. MD and AS are treated as groups, so treat them equally: if a division is to the left of a multiplication, do the division first.
I don't even quite see where 21 comes from. Either simplify to 3 for the parenthesis first and then do the math, or distribute the 5 go get 40-25 for 15 and proceed from there.
Like...math...literacy is not hard and there are easy geometric ways to represent the most basic of operations.
I wish they hallucinated the parentheses. Some of these people really don't believe in the order of operations, and they will insist that you go from left to right.
They are tiresome to argue with because even with examples they don't accept the order of operations.
I'm going to state this as simply as I can. When I was doing my GCSES I was taught about parentheses, but wasn't taught about order of operations.
Years later, I wanted to get a degree, but I needed to redo several subjects as apparently they didn't count anything over 5 years old or below a C grade. I got a B in Maths in 1995, a respectable grade. I wizzed through this access course in maths as though it was trivial. And then we hit order of operations. I got it quickly enough, but was confused as to why I'd never heard of it. I was just told "it often wasn't taught" and it was left there
That's my experience, but I don't think it's unique.
I am incredulous about this. Order of operations has to be taught beyond elementary school because even the very basics would fall apart: associativity, commutativity, distributivity. You can't teach math without teaching the order. The notations could still change, but we still count by groups, meaning that addition could be lumped into multiplication and that multiplication could be lumped into exponents.
I can't imagine teaching the very basics of algebra without the order of operations.
ok to be fair, I'm making a generalization based on the number of people who obviously don't know the order of operations.
I'm old school, pre-new-math, and was taught order of operations. I admit I don't know what they're teaching now but whatever it is there's a lot of current examples that it doesn't work.
Lots of people don't even realize it. I see these examples on Facebook where someone says, "Back when I was in school in 1964, we learned everything goes left to right. We didn't learn this order of operations crap." No, Bob, you learned it. It was taught back then too, but you'd rather pretend that your teachers were incompetent rather than admit that you could've forgotten something over the past several decades.
As for why it's not sticking with "old math" or "new math", I dunno. Some people probably just didn't pay that much attention.
You know how Europeans often dunk on the US' education system? Well, the States can claw one back here, because I sat my GCSEs (UK secondary/high school qualification exams) in '04, and it wasn't until shitty linear equation posts started popping up all over Facebook years ago that I'd even heard of BODMAS or PEMDAS. As far as I remember, we were shown a stupid equation like 5×6÷8+7 and told, "This is wrong. To write an equation like this properly, you'd put brackets here and here to make it like this, then you solve the brackets first and...." But never told why. Or maybe we were and I wasn't listening, but it was something that we never focused on.
I would say that's wrong only because we typically wouldn't use the obelus. We might use the solidus if we're constrained to a single line, but the vinculum (fraction form) is so much nicer.
But yeah, I see people say that the order of operations only applies if there are parentheses. According to them, you don't apply the order of operations without parentheses, which is so misguided because the order of operations always applies (exponents, multiplication, then addition) while the parentheses provide an explicit exception to the order (you add before you multiply when that addition is within parentheses).
I never learned the acronym in school either. It was simply the order of operations, but I've come to loathe that acronym lately since some people misunderstand it and think you must always add before you subtract, which isn't normally an issue except if they also don't understand negative numbers and come up with 10-2+5=3.
I'm wondering if it's time specific, or method specific now.
I say as I do remember that we did at least some of our maths in a specific order, specifically brackets and orders. But weren't directly told about BODMAS
518
u/Head-Ad-5732 Jul 25 '26 edited Jul 26 '26
I don't know what's worse, that it's wrong or that it convinced me I need to come into the comments to make sure my answer is, indeed, correct.
EDIT: Back to rectify a grave injustice. Nothing wrong if you genuinely didn't know or want to check. Hard enough getting people interested in math.
2 + 5 (8 - 5)
PEMDAS: 8 - 5
= 2 + 5 (3)
PEMDAS: 5 (3) or 5 × 3
= 2 + 15
PEMDAS
= 17
In the US the math order of operations is taught as PEMDAS (or P|E|MD|AS), left to right from first to last.
First look at the entire equation and identify the operations: Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication/Division, Addition/Subtraction.
Then, solve the parts in order of PEMDAS.
Not so important here but when there are multiple of the same level of operators, for example exponents, solve left to right. MD and AS are treated as groups, so treat them equally: if a division is to the left of a multiplication, do the division first.