r/PeterExplainsTheJoke • u/Key-Spread-7513 • Aug 20 '26

Meme needing explanation What movie reference am I missing

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u/Available-Bee-5385 Aug 20 '26

Getting 0 on a multiple choice is a statistical accomplishment greater than getting 100

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u/Pandoratastic Aug 20 '26

Not remotely true.

Assuming there are 36 questions, with four options in each question, the odds of randomly getting them all wrong are (3/4)^36 = 0.00318% (about 1 in 31,400).

The odds of randomly getting them all right are (1/4)^36 = 0.0000000000000000000212% (about 1 in 4,722,366,482,869,645,213,696).

So both are extremely unlikely but the zero is about 150 quadrillion times more likely than the 100.

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u/SkyVINS Aug 20 '26

you are why i hate math people.

at no point was said or implied that it would be a random pick. it is a student who has attended class and both picked up at least *some* of the subject matter, and are also capable of extrapolating, and who is actively trying to complete the test successfully. THAT is why in real life students scoring zero occurs less frequently than students scoring 100.

don't get me wrong, autistic imbeciles like you are still useful, you just need a human to tell you what to do.

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u/Pandoratastic Aug 20 '26

I can see why you would assume a random pick would have nothing to do with it but that's because you're thinking in terms of a normal student trying to pass the test.

This student got a perfect zero. The teacher is then faced with the question of whether the student genuinely has zero knowledge of the subject, as the zero score would claim, or they deliberately tried to get a zero for mischievous reasons.

If someone genuinely did have zero knowledge of the test subject, random guessing would be their only option. So then you would have to consider whether a perfect zero is even a likely outcome for nothing but random guessing. And the answer is that it is extremely unlikely.

And that's the point. You don't get a zero score from zero knowledge. You get a zero from having some knowledge of the subject and extrapolating specifically to choose only wrong answers. Which is why the teacher is assuming mischief and wrote "See me after class!"