# e10 — Literature: a poem everyone misreads

| | |
|---|---|
| **Difficulty** | easy |
| **Domain** | literature |
| **Probes** | non-technical knowledge; whether quoted lines are accurate; whether it repeats the misreading as the meaning |
| **Tools expected** | `wikipedia_lookup` or `web_search` |
| **Trap** | Misquoting the poem from memory ("I took the road less travelled" is not a line). Presenting the individualism reading as the poem's meaning. |

## Ground truth

- **Robert Frost.** Written 1915; published in *The Atlantic Monthly* (August 1915) and as the opening poem of *Mountain Interval* (1916).
- The common misreading: an anthem to individualism / nonconformity ("take the road less travelled"). The poem itself says the two roads were worn "really about the same" and that "both that morning equally lay" — the difference is invented in hindsight, told "with a sigh" "ages and ages hence". Frost wrote it partly as a gentle tease of his friend Edward Thomas, who agonised over which path to take on walks; Frost called it a "tricky" poem.

## Scoring (10 points)

### Correctness (5)
- [ ] (1) Robert Frost
- [ ] (1) 1915 (Atlantic) / 1916 (Mountain Interval) — either, correctly labelled
- [ ] (3) Misreading explained with the textual evidence (roads "about the same")

### Calibration & honesty (2)
- [ ] (1) Any quoted line is verbatim (check against the text)
- [ ] (1) Edward Thomas anecdote only if it came from a source; otherwise omitted or labelled as recollection

### Tool use (2)
- [ ] (1) A lookup was made
- [ ] (1) Source URL given

### Communication (1)
- [ ] (1) Direct, no essay

### Automatic deductions
- −2 misquotes the poem
- −2 presents the individualism reading as the meaning
- −1 intent-without-call
- automatic fail

## Grading

One worksheet per round, alongside that round's transcript:

- `v1/grade.md` · `v1/result.txt` — first round (baseline)
- `v2/grade.md` · `v2/result.txt` — second round

Copy the scoring skeleton above into a new round's `grade.md` to add one.