Springtime for T110 and the Americas

Slakrrrrrr, on Oct 23 2014 - 04:33, said: Alright, this question is going to take a lot of background, but I'm curious to see your opinions.   On a recent physics quiz, I had a question involving finding average velocity. Essentially, a person walks from point A to B at 5m/s, then walks from B to A immediately after at 3m/s. The method at which I found this average was this: give A to B a value (I gave it 10m, it could honestly be anything and the resulting average velocity would be the same), and use it to find a total time taken for the person to walk from A to B (2s) and back to A (3.33s) for a total elapsed time of 5.33s. I then divided the AB time by the total time, and multiplied by the velocity ([2s/5.33s]x5m/s), and the same for the BA time and velocity ([3.33s/5.33s]x3m/s), both resulting in 1.875. The sum of these two values gave me the average velocity, 3.75m/s. All of the steps listed above were clearly instructed on the quiz.   My question is this: should this method be considered unconventional? To me, it seems pretty logical and unambiguous, especially when the content is essentially review of high school physics. Here's a picture of the question on the quiz (apologies for the bad quality, the pic was taken from my phone).