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On 16 March 2016, Ed Trice wrote a long post on LinkedIn describing his purported battle to have his daughter's standardized math test results changed, as well as the results of all similar tests in the U.S. changed, after her supposedly correct answer to the question What's the largest number you can represent with 3 digits? marked wrong: The first few paragraphs of Trice's story serve to set up the confrontation: Not really between Ed Trice and his daughter's teacher, but between the reader and Common Core system. Trice immediately paints the school's principal as the story's villain, a feckless man who censured Trice's disruptive daughter for daring to challenge the answer to a test question and chastised her father for attempting to comfort her with a hug. The question of whether Ed Trice's daughter was 100% correct as described in this account is far from a settled one. One could argue that exponentiation is a form of multiplication and therefore uses operators as well as digits (even if the former are only implied), leaving the door open for all sorts of answers that would produce even larger numbers, such as 9!^9!^9!. As well, one might contend that the question specified the use of digits, but a value expressed as an exponential employs numbers rather than digits. In fact, this very question (i.e., about the largest number that can be represented with three digits) has been posted to math forums since at least 2002, including versions that present it (just as Trice did) as a scenario involving a student's challenging his teacher, making it highly unlikely Trice just happened to experience the very same event, in the very same setting, several years later. Regardless of what the correct answer might be, Trice claims that he argued with administrators and managed to get them to change his daughter's score on the standardized test, as well as the scores of every other student in the country who took the same test: Again, this account is highly suspect, because national standardized tests are typically graded at central facilities operated by the companies that produce the tests; it isn't within the purview of an individual local school teacher or official to change the score assigned to any student. And if this account were true and Ed Trice really forced an entire federal department to devote tens of thousands of hours of work to fixing a single standardized test question (even though private companies, not the federal government, typically produce such tests), that's a story that should have made the news. Yet we couldn't find a single article mentioning Ed Trice's battle with standardized testing prior to his 16 March 2016 LinkedIn post. Several of the inconsistencies we've detailed here (e.g., that the story has nothing to do with the Common Core curriculum, that the answer to the question under dispute is debatable, that no extant news articles mention any such legal battle) have been pointed out on Trice's LinkedIn page, but he has steadfastly maintained that his story is 100% accurate. Of course, he has also steadfastly declined to provide any proof:
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