Viral Math

When a brain-unfriendly, tricky, or ill-posed oft-elementary math question in a national exam is shared rapidly and widely on the internet, because an obscene number of unhappy students and their clueless parents could not solve it, who blamed the problem poser of the “unfair” question for causing them trauma, nightmare, pain, or suffering, with some even entertaining suicidal thoughts.

Singapore’s high-stakes Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE)—grade six—exam is notorious for setting viral math questions almost every other year—the PSLE math paper via its higher order thinking skills (HOTS) questions acts as a social filter to filter out the nerds from the herd.

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