Should Exercises Always Have Answers Available?

Many teachers are dead set against providing answers to exercises. I myself had several professors at university who’d regularly rant about this if someone dared ask for clarification. Their most common argument, which is indeed true at face value, is that studies have shown that having easy answers available makes students put in less time and effort. If they have the answers, well, they’re not going to do the exercises! They’ll just look it up!

Without answers, you might have tried to solve that equation for 30 minutes. But if you have all the answers, you’ll try for 2 minutes, then check the answer, right?

I have thought about this a lot over the years. And I’ve experienced many different perspectives from teachers and students alike. I write this article because I finally have a firm answer.

I just explained my professors who were obsessed with asking questions and never giving answers. In high school, though, I had the opposite experience. One of our math teachers—the best I ever had—had personally worked out all exercises in our entire math program and put them online in nice PDFs on his personal website. Even other schools in the region used that. Everyone had all the answers, including how to get there.

Did it ruin everyone’s grades? Did everyone stop doing homework? Did everyone just mess around and do nothing in math class for years?

No, of course not. Even those who were bad at mathematics enjoyed going to his classes. The vibe was nice, it was one of the few parts of the school day I didn’t actively hate, and everyone’s grades improved.

Perhaps to the surprise of some, children want to learn. People want to get better at things. If you give them the tools to do so, they will use them, albeit in their own ways and their own time. Some days, yes, I sat in that class and did no math at all. I’d catch up with other homework, or chat with a girl I liked, or just take a break and recharge. Some days, I had all the answers in front of me, but I still solved fifty exercises myself. Knowing I was right, and seeing subtle differences in how I worked it out, was incredibly helpful for learning.

This experience might even be the reason I ended up picking Applied Mathematics when I was forced to go to university later. I hated the entire system of education, including maths, and I was clearly more oriented towards art and writing. I did, after all, become a freelance artist and prolific author in multiple languages. But I studied mathematics instead and almost had a 100% math score in high school, because of that one teacher who gave us all the answers.

Years earlier, things were quite different. We didn’t have these answers. At least half of my class had already designated themselves “terrible with numbers” and given up on ever scoring a sufficient grade in this subject.

You know what this leads to? The vicious cycle of “guess I’ll just keep making the same mistakes”. You tried to do an exercise, but you couldn’t figure it out. There were no answers available. Your neighbor was equally stuck and dejected. The teacher refused to give the answers, as it was “making it too easy” and “we didn’t try hard enough”. So … we didn’t know our mistake, couldn’t learn from it, and kept making it until we (by rare chance) saw the correct solution.

Of course you’re going to hate a subject if you’re never given a chance to like it or improve. Getting the answer right, or at least knowing if you were right, is a pretty crucial part of every single exercise you’re ever going to do.

So, in short, my answer is yes. Provide all the answers. Make them as detailed, and as good, and as accessible as possible.

You might have more questions now. Good. I have more to say.

But what about motivation and effort?

Yes, it is definitely true that having easy access to a solution will make people look at it. They’ll put less effort and time into solving the thing themselves—and, subsequently, feel less reward for “having solved it”.

It’s comparable to downloading games. A friend of mine once had their Wii (you know, that ancient game console by Nintendo) “unlocked”, so they could now download whatever game they wanted and play it. The result? They couldn’t choose what to play, they only played every game for 5 minutes before moving to another, and they had soon stopped enjoying games altogether. Some time later, when the Nintendo Switch arrived, they bought the console and a handful of games for it—and have been happy with that ever since. They played those games to death and really enjoyed them again.

In a similar vein, I played the games Rollercoaster Tycoon and Age of Empires to death as a kid. I unlocked all those maps, knew all the secrets, was crazy good at them despite only being allowed 30 minutes of “computer time” a day. Then, as I grew up, I got my own computer, games started being released for free (but with ads), and I could technically play waaaaay more. I did so for a few months, until I stopped enjoying games at all, hopping to a new experience every five minutes.

It took me years to realize I should just buy one or two games in a physical store and play those. Having put in the money and effort, it feels rewarding to have those games and to get good at them. It took me years to start really enjoying a handful of games again, precisely because they were hard and challenging, and because I instinctively felt the need to ignore every shiny new game that appeared. Also, I still play RCT1 and think it’s the best game ever made.

The point is that we’ve evolved to both chase satisfaction (“dopamine”) as well as get that satisfaction from putting in effort.

There’s a knee-jerk reaction inside everyone, kid and adult alike, to cheat and look at the answer to a puzzle. There’s also a clear knee-jerk reaction of “no no, I want to do it myself/try it myself first”.

In my experience, after some early stumbles, this balances itself. Time and time again I’ve seen kids still engage with an activity or exercise even if they could’ve just looked up (or even “Googled”) the answer easily. I’ve playtested loads of cooperative board games over the years, mostly with my younger siblings, and seen the same thing. Last round of the game, we were almost certainly losing, but my youngest brother just wouldn’t accept it and actually grabbed a paper to draw out all possible options and found us an action that would lead to victory.

Most children will at least try an exercise for some time, even if the answer is on the back of the paper. If you make the exercise fun enough, if you give them the confidence that it’s worth it, they can be almost obsessed with “doing it on their own”.

And that’s the important part. Challenges only stay fun as long as you are trying new things and believe you can solve them. If a challenge is just too hard, then hiding the answer just means the kid will give up and never learn what they were doing wrong.

So yes, I understand why many teachers and online resources don’t provide answers. There are downsides to providing clear answers at school. Those downsides still apply to basically all educational material we offer at the online store.

But they simply don’t outweigh the massive advantages in practice. For clarity, let me repeat those advantages: challenges are rarely unfun or overwhelming (as you can look up the answer if stuck), you will always learn the actual answer (instead of never realizing the mistake you were making), and it saves parents/teachers so much time if they can just guide an activity without having to solve the exercises themselves first ;)

The Art of Answering

In fact, I’ve learned there’s a true art and skill to providing answers too! Some resources of mine have 2 or 3 stages of “answer reveals”, for example, instead of dumping the entire answer at once. I have never seen this in other educational material, and it baffles me. This is common practice in things like escape rooms or puzzles.

The puzzler doesn’t want to just get the entire solution at once. They want a hint. They want one step forward to get over a hump, and then continue solving it themselves.

Where this wasn’t suitable or necessary, I’ve often worked with “automatic answer checks”. A simple trick or gimmick that automatically makes it clear if you’ve done it right. For example, if you connected the right elements with straight lines, a recognizable image appears. Or: if you solved the formulas correctly, the final number should be 99. It’s nearly impossible to get to this end result by being wrong. But if you’re right, you know it, and you’re doubly rewarded for it.

If you’re going to include the answer key, then I would also recommend thinking a bit longer about how to present it. Just dumping a dry list at the back is the worst thing you could do. It’s hard to parse, while searching for your answer you’ll accidentally see other answers too, and, as stated, incremental hints or smarter tricks are better.

In a way, I think this hesitancy to provide answers comes from this bad “user experience”. Providing the answers to school exercises was often an afterthought, which meant they were either next to useless or gave away too much. The back half of the book was for answers, right? A looong list of tiny tiny letters. Maybe kids had the answers, but it was too much effort to even go look for them :p

Nowadays, I feel people have woken up to the fact that you can provide answers in smarter and more playful ways. And that this is often the right thing to do. I look forward to getting more experience here too, and finding more and more creative ways to supplying answers.

But we can do even better

We haven’t even reached my most important talking point yet: games!

We already have a kind of exercise that simply cannot have an answer. We already have activities and challenges that reward you with clear victory or progress, without having anything resembling an “answer sheet”. They are called games. This is another reason why they are vastly superior learning activities (most of the time).

The only way to figure out if you were doing the right moves … is to keep playing and see if you win. Or see how many points the action scores you. Or see if it indeed blocks your opponent from doing what they wanted.

And if you’re making moves that are against the rules, then other players can simply point that out and it’s no problem. (Half the educational value of games, if well-designed, is simply learning and remembering some simple rules that simulate something from real life. For example, a rule like “you can only place squares on top of squares” only needs to be repeated once or twice before someone knows what a square is and can recognize them easily.)

That’s why I’m fine with designing some exercises and giving away all the answers. Because if this becomes a true issue—e.g. someone refuses to even try the exercise and just copies the answer—then you can stop doing that and simply start playing games! Problem solved!

In practice, I hope my online store achieves the right balance here for everyone. I do create actual teaching material, following common standards and methods, for every single subject. And there is some value to that. A game will teach you deeper understanding of shapes … but you still need something to teach you what a square is in the first place. A Sudoku will make you skilled with numbers and seeing patterns … but you still need something to teach you those numbers in the first place.

A practical, effective curriculum would be something like 90% games and 10% educational material. Give kids the foundation needed, then switch to playing games. Give kids a few exercises (and their answers!), and when they’re bored with those, you can start playing related games.

Because, let me remind you, games don’t have an answer. (It’s actually one of the guiding principles I use for determining if something I make is a game, or just a puzzle/exercise/activity.) There is nothing to spoil. Games are often only improved by giving more tools, hints, and other help to players. Games can do all that, while also being loose enough that you can change rules or allow mistakes without the whole thing breaking down.

Conclusion

There you have it. Twenty years of being in school, thinking about schooling systems, and finally making my own huge online store with educational resources … and I can definitely say you should provide all the answers to your exercises.

Even better, provide them in smarter ways. Provide them in stages (small hint->big hint->solution), provide them in very usable and pretty ways, provide them as “automatic” (if you did it right, you get automatic confirmation).

I would even go so far as to say an exercise without some form of solution check is pretty useless. If it’s so easy nobody needs it, then it’s not an exercise. If the exercise is so hard that many need it, then many will never actually do the exercise and learn from it.

And, as always, I’d recommend a type of exercise that simply can’t be cheated by looking up the answer: games. It baffles me how close major educational providers get to games with their exercises, but never make that final step. Modern school books are full of more gamified exercises and challenges … but in the end, it’s still just “write down your answer and hope you’re right”.

We can do better. It starts by convincing all those teachers that yell you can’t have the answer(s) to stop doing that ;)