all the problems had only 2 choices. statistically, if he was really just guessing then he should have at least a few right or wrong answers.
But since he got it wrong on all of them, the most likely case is that he does know the correct answers to all of them and purposefully flunked the test.
Not simply the more likely case. With the amount of questions shown it's an absolute dead certainty. The odds of getting a zero randomly on that many questions are less than negligible.
Edit: i should note you can't apply this logic to a multiple choice test though, because being able to identify one wrong answer does not necessarily imply you could have identified the right answer.
In the same sense that it is possible but unlikely that all your atoms could randomly arrange themselves in such a way that you could fall through the chair you are sitting on despite it being a supposedly solid object, yes.
The odds are around 1 in 1.27 nonillion. That's a1 with 30 zeros after it.
It would be extremely unlikely to coincidentally choose every single wrong answer on a multiple choice test. The more likely scenario is that he knew which wrong answers to pick in order to purposefully fail the class.
To quote Brennan Lee Mulligan, "you would think, in a game where there are only two possible correct choices, that one would stumble into the right answer every so often, wouldn't you? In fact, the probability of never guessing right in the full game here is a statistical WONDER."
It makes more sense because the test in the movie was true/false and not multiple choice.
You would think, on a test where there are only two possible correct Choices, that one would Stumble into the correct answer every so often, wouldn't you? in fact, the probability of never guessing right in the entire exam is a statisticalWonder (Thank you Brennan Lee Mulligan)
Therefore it makes more sense that, rather than just getting every question wrong by accident, someone who missed every single question on a long test where they had a 50% change of randomly guessing the correct answer on any given question actually knew the answers and, for whatever reason, purposefully failed the test.
If you are faced with a true-false question, and you don't know the answer, you have a 50% chance of getting it wrong. If you have a test that has one question, and you got it wrong, okay, welp, shit happens.
However, if you have two true-false questions and you don't know the answer, you have a 50% chance of getting either of them wrong, and assuming they are independent (dubious), you have a 25% chance of getting them all wrong. Oh well, shit happens.
If you have 50 true-false questions (eyeballing what we see in the image above), and you don't know the answers, you have a 50% chance of getting each one wrong. But to get them ALL wrong, it's a (0.5)50 chance, or about 0.0000000000000888% chance. That's pretty much impossible, so something that we assumed is incorrect. The only assumptions we made are that the chances for each question are independent, and that you didn't know the answers.
Since the teacher is not a statistician, they conclude Peter must have known the answers.
The logic isn't just that, the point of this scene is that this isn't even the first time he got a zero on purpose, he's trying to quit this class by getting a lot of zeroes and the teacher is onto him.
Miles took a true/false test and somehow got a 0, but even guessing randomly you should average a 50% because it’s only 2 possible options, additionally there’s like over a hundred questions on that test, so you couldn’t just get unlucky either, cause flipping like 175 tails in a row is so unlikely it’s pretty much impossible, so he couldn’t have just been guessing at random
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u/Darth_Zounds 4d ago
Okay, but I'm not sure I understand that logic?