Rounding

I just graded 2/3 of the trig tests. So far so good: scores are generally higher than they have been. And in some cases, students who have really been struggling got A's, which is very gratifying.

But...

There was a lot of trouble with rounding. Again, I keep getting surprised by what they stumble over. They are doing trig like nobody's business, setting up the ratios correctly and all. But all kinds of trouble comes up with rounding the answer.

The test says at the top "Round all answers to the nearest tenth". Some individual questions say "Round to the nearest foot" or whatever. In all classes I specifically called these out, multiple times. "Note that all answers should be rounded to the nearest 10th, unless the directions specifically say otherwise." Still, lots of people missed it altogether, just rounded willy nilly.

Then, there's confusion about when to round. Even though we talked about when to round (at the very end) in class, they are still taking the trig ration (e.g. 0.234576...), then rounding *that* to the nearest 10th (0.2), then using that for the rest of the calculations.

Finally, there's confusion about how to round. Some of them think rounding to the nearest tenth is the same as rounding to the nearest ten. Some think that means using the tenth decimal to round the one decimal up or down. Etc.

The net result being some people lost up to a fifth of the total points on rounding alone. Which I felt really conflicted about. On one hand, the main 'point' of the test is trig, and they are doing the trig basically right. On the other hand, we definitely spent time in class talking about all this (directions, when to round, how to round). And at the end of the day, the answer they are giving is wrong. In the merciless world of standardized tests, there will no grace given for rounding incorrectly. So I want to get their attention now, when it matters less.

Still I feel like an ogre.