I seem to have a vague memory of a thread like this, but I looked and did not find anything. Please close if it is, in fact, a duplicate.

I got back a math test today and noticed I got an 81 on it, which was upsetting. I was looking at the questions that I got wrong and one in particular ticked me off. I got the answer right, but I only got 1 out of 5 points on it because I didn't show my work. Nowhere in the question did it say to show work and it is not one of those big questions where you have to show every single thing you did. It was a distance question. I have my own way of finding the distance, which is different from what the teacher taught us. I did ask the teacher though, and she (unhappily) said that it works and that I can use it. So that is what I did. She supplies us with whiteboards that have a graph on them to help us out. So I did my way on the whiteboard, got my answer, and wrote it on the test. But she took away 4 points.

What do you think of having to show your work? I think it is just dumb. If we get the right answer what does it matter? I would like to hear the teachers' opinions on this as well, maybe one of them can explain why "showing your work" is worth 4 points and the answer is only worth 1.

Sorry if I sound mean, but you can probably tell I'm a little annoyed right now.

You're what? Your profile says that you are 14, so I'll assume you're in High School. When you reach high school it is expected that you show your work. They don't need to clarify that you have to because it's just an expectation. Just learn from this and move on but hey, an 81 still isn't that bad.

The showing your work part means that you understand what is going on and how you get the answer. I don't know how to explain it all that well but I'm sure someone else can explain it much better.

I'm not a math teacher, but here goes. There are a few purposes to showing your work. For one, it is about using methods that are proven to work every time. Yes, students might come up with methods that seem to work every time they use it. But I have seen, on more than one occasion, times where a student found method works in some or even most situations, but there is one or some situations where it doesn't work. So it is about using methods that are proven to work all the time.

Another issue is cheating. When all you put is an answer, you might have done all the work in your head or on scratch paper (or whiteboards). But it also just might very well be a student who somehow got the test answers somehow or just copied off of another student's test. There are cheating ways to get just the end answer. But it is a LOT harder to cheat and get full points when you are required to show your work. Lot more to remember if you got the answers from elsewhere beforehand. It is way too much to copy down from someone else's paper without being obvious. So this is also an extra step to assuring that no cheating occurred.

Same reason as to why multiple choice is not regarded as effective. With multiple choice, you can get the right answer without even remotely knowing the answer. Just get it by mere chance. In math, if you have to show your work, it takes that away. Some math questions have multiple choice, but you still have to show your work. When you do that, it shows that you really new it, and didn't just get the right answer by shear luck.

Those, right there, are three more than legitimate reasons. I got others.

rcarter2 :

In general:

More often than not, the student would ask the teacher about their method before using it on a test. I don't know why they would just decide to use it without confirmation that it actually works, but I suppose it's happened before.

A lot of schools now (or most of the schools in my area, I guess I should say) randomize the answers (for multiple choice) and the question order on tests so kids can't look over to the kid next to them and copy their answer. This also helps eliminate cheating between kids in different classes that already took the test.

The way that a lot of schools do it (again, in my area) is that if your answer is supported by your work, even if it is wrong, you only get maybe one or two points off. Is that not just as bad as giving kids credit for guessing?

(Also, you wrote new instead of knew in the last paragraph, and you also wrote shear instead of sheer. Normally I wouldn't point this out, but you always beat me in any kind of debate or argument and this feels like a little win for me XD)

In my case:

My method works. She told me that it works. If you don't believe me, check here. Apparently, most teachers teach their students to do it the way that I do it. She told me that I could use it on tests. She gave me credit for it in the past.

Cheating is never in issue. I am in honors classes, and I have never seen anyone cheat before. Most of the students in the class can do well on their own, they don't need to cheat, and they wouldn't even if they knew they were going to fail.

I feel like I am rambling, so please let me know if what I am saying doesn't make sense and I will try to explain better.

rcarter2 : Per usual, RCarter has it on the nose.  Showing work provides the teacher with proof you did the entire problem.  It shows the teacher your logic and reasoning and how you got to the answer.  Down the road, in real life, support for any answer is required.  I do marketing and membership for a fitness center and every time I make a suggestion or recommendation from a business standpoint, they say, "Show us the math."

And I get out my spreadsheets and excel files and budgets, etc and prove my point.  You're learning the logic of the math and you're showing you know how to apply it even if you know another way.  If you do something counter to what your boss says to do, you may end up with out a job, even if the result is the same.  Rules may not be fun but there is so much legality to the real world you have to follow them.

Show the work.  In history, you make a statement and back it up with evidence.  Science is the same way.  Math?  Exactly the same.

Show your work.  Life goes easier when you do.  You can also see how you arrive at the wrong problem.

Give a math problem.  "Two trains leave Philadelphia and head toward California.  One is going 100 miles an hour, the other 50.  When do they get there."
If you just answer "11:30 pm and 1:00 am" and it's wrong, you can't see where the mistake happened.  Follow the lines of work like a program and you can find your errors and improve.

I understand the idea behind showing work, but it only helps in longer, multi-step problems, like systems of inequalities. If the problem is something as trivial as distance between points, then even if you're wrong, looking back in your work won't really help. Maybe she's just mad that you're doing something a way she doesn't. Unless, of course, the test was only on solving problems her way? I once programmed my calculator to do distance, mid-point, quadratic, etc. and my teacher said it was fine, as long as I knew how the answer was found. Next test, just show your work, but circle it and write "happy?" sarcastically. You would probably get in more trouble if you did that though.

I remember this to be a continuous problem for me in math class during High School, I wasn't the most fastidious of students, or motivated to care about what my teachers thought, AKA a bad student.(I'm not implying you are a bad student)

My sort of rebellion in class was that I knew how to do most math problems in my head, and I would never show work if I didn't actually have to do the physical written out work to figure it out. I never saw the point of it, and I thought the only reason they wanted me to show my work was because they said so and that was that, and it annoyed me.

I also tried to make the point to my teachers that none of this "showing your work" would ever apply to real life, most of the math you have to do throughout the day like figuring out prices at the store, or calculating mileage when you're driving, are done in your head, and the calculator has already been invented. So I continued to get points marked off of tests.

After a while I saw that it was a pointless rebellion and resistance was futile, started showing my work and started making better grades.

They want to you to show your work for a reason, reasons rcarter has already pointed out, and it's important as far as the teacher's job goes, to make sure you understand the process and concepts. If you're going to get points marked off for not showing your work, just show your work, as annoying as it might be.

Well, I already hate math and other than geometry and a few other things, I don't see where I would need to know how to factor a polynomial equation and graph an asymptote or anything like that now, math isn't my strong point and I have an 86 in the class, even my ap grade is higher. But I will say that sometimes when I look at a problem, my brain seems to just run through the whole process until it clicks with the answer and then I end up writing that down, but I forget all of the other show your work parts on that problem. They do it because they suspect your cheating, but it is whatever, I know I got it right and just couldn't put it on paper and that is all that matters, and you shouldn't let it bother you.


I understand where you are coming from though, sometimes the way the teacher's explanation of something doesn't make any sense, so I try to figure it out on my own and I still get the right answer, so I don't think you should've lost that many points, maybe not get all 5, but maybe miss 1 or 2 at max because of work, but 4 is pushing it. Showing your work is a measure to show that you know the material and you didn't just copy (not to say you did, which you probably didn't) from someone else, although there are some math problems that it is hard to show a lot of work for. 


sloanstar1000 : I understand that man, in real life you aren't going to pull out a piece of paper and subtract cereal prices at Walmart or need to show work because there is either technology for that, or it is simple enough to do in your head, so while I just tend to think through the whole problem to get to the answer I forget the whole process involved and I lose a few points. It sucks because the way my math teacher grades quizzes and tests, they are 40% each while homework is 10% which means it counts for squat. All I can say is just get in the habit of trying to put down some work as annoying as it might be, it isn't worth losing points over. 

I really hate these kinds of problems..

I like never show my work and I know how to do those kinds of problems in my head. Those are very annoying and 1 point just for the correct answer doesn't make sense either.

Im in highschool, showing your work is mandatory, but for sometihng simple like (0x3)(9)= 0, do you really need to hsow your work? The answer's extremely obvious but I still have to show my work, why?

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