Randomitis is a type of Starting Point Learning Challenge where the student answers questions at random (usually quickly) without properly listening to or processing the question. This is typically considered the lowest level of student performance.
This can be difficult to diagnose because sometimes there is a “method to the madness” in seemingly random student responses. In this case, it is not randomitis, but rather some other systematic misconception.
The treatment plan usually involves getting the student to recognize that the goal is not to “answer the question”, but rather to understand. Students with randomitis typically believe that “any answer is better than no answer”, and tend to avoid admitting when they don’t know something.
The typical end result of treating randomitis leads to the student being able to verbalize when they don’t understand something rather than guessing randomly by default. So, the treatment to randomitis usually leads to anconcephaly, after which the student can begin the treatment for that.
Randomitis is often found in students with hyperconfidencia.
Example
Teacher: What is 37 times 18?
Student: Umm…5054.
Here, there likely isn’t a systematic mistake that the student is making, or rule that is being misapplied since the correct answer of 666 doesn’t resemble 5054. Additionally, the student isn’t making an “educated guess” by estimating, since in that case they might recognize that 40 x 20 (which equals 800) should definitely be larger than 37 x 18, meaning the estimated answer would be a large number that is still less than 800, which wasn’t the case with this guess.