Grading Oddities

The homework question was, in essence, "Why wouldn't we generate a random number from 0-5 to simulate the number of boys in a family with 5 children?"

At least four students said that we should change this to 1-5, since there were 6 numbers and only 5 children!!! Ummmmm.... Yes. So, it's apparently impossible to have five girls in a family with five children. Not to mention that they missed the whole point, that it is less likely to have either all girls or all boys than to have a mixture of the two, so that this simulation would not match up with reality.

I also had one student think that the simulation was reality and the real world situation was...something else. Weird.