Given the context, I imagine what they were doing is making up a number that was bigger than another number they’d just made up. Humans are cognitive misers. A student would correctly guess that it doesn’t really matter if they get this question right and not try very hard. That’s actually what I would do in a context where it was clear that a numeric answer was required, I was expected to spend little time answering, and I was motivated not to leave that particular question blank.
My answer of “never” also took little thought (for me). I thought a bit more about it, and if I did interpret it as assuming the thesis gets done (which, yes, one can interpret it that way), then the answer would be “however many days it is until the last date on which the thesis will be accepted”. Which is also not the answer the students gave.
It’s a bad question that I don’t think it would ever even occur to anyone to ask if they weren’t trying to have a number that they could aggregate into a meaningless (but impressive-sounding) statistic. It’s in the vicinity of a much more useful question, which is “what could go poorly to make this thesis take a long time / longer than expected”. And sure, you could answer the original question by decomposing it into “what could go wrong” and “if all of those actually did go wrong, how long would it take”. And if you did that you’d have the answer to the first question, which is actually useful, regardless of how accurate the answer to the second is. But that’s the actual point of this whole post, right? And in fact the reason for citing that statistic at all is that it appears to demonstrate that these students were not doing that?
Given the context, I imagine what they were doing is making up a number that was bigger than another number they’d just made up. Humans are cognitive misers. A student would correctly guess that it doesn’t really matter if they get this question right and not try very hard. That’s actually what I would do in a context where it was clear that a numeric answer was required, I was expected to spend little time answering, and I was motivated not to leave that particular question blank.
My answer of “never” also took little thought (for me). I thought a bit more about it, and if I did interpret it as assuming the thesis gets done (which, yes, one can interpret it that way), then the answer would be “however many days it is until the last date on which the thesis will be accepted”. Which is also not the answer the students gave.
It’s a bad question that I don’t think it would ever even occur to anyone to ask if they weren’t trying to have a number that they could aggregate into a meaningless (but impressive-sounding) statistic. It’s in the vicinity of a much more useful question, which is “what could go poorly to make this thesis take a long time / longer than expected”. And sure, you could answer the original question by decomposing it into “what could go wrong” and “if all of those actually did go wrong, how long would it take”. And if you did that you’d have the answer to the first question, which is actually useful, regardless of how accurate the answer to the second is. But that’s the actual point of this whole post, right? And in fact the reason for citing that statistic at all is that it appears to demonstrate that these students were not doing that?