> "How to spot the fake answers put there to fool you" == "how to see when an answer isn't even in the ballpark". That's a useful skill.
It's a probabilistic skill, and in so far as the test is designed to give a measure of what someone knows, and not how lucky they've been, it's gaming the system.
Is it a useful skill? Well, yes. To an extent. So is knowing your addition table, but we expect students to have moved somewhat beyond that by the time they're in secondary education. Just as we'd expect someone educated for five years, six or seven hours a week, 28-40 weeks a year, to have advanced somewhat beyond the need for discarding comedy answers as a viable test strategy.
By secondary level, we'd expect them to know, (or be capable of running the calculation,) to decide among those answers that are actually in the ball park. Approaches for which the cost is more or less constant regardless of how many answers are on the page: You trust your calculation or memory to have given you the answer and discard all others by default.
It's a probabilistic skill, and in so far as the test is designed to give a measure of what someone knows, and not how lucky they've been, it's gaming the system.
Is it a useful skill? Well, yes. To an extent. So is knowing your addition table, but we expect students to have moved somewhat beyond that by the time they're in secondary education. Just as we'd expect someone educated for five years, six or seven hours a week, 28-40 weeks a year, to have advanced somewhat beyond the need for discarding comedy answers as a viable test strategy.
By secondary level, we'd expect them to know, (or be capable of running the calculation,) to decide among those answers that are actually in the ball park. Approaches for which the cost is more or less constant regardless of how many answers are on the page: You trust your calculation or memory to have given you the answer and discard all others by default.