Which is why PEMDAS is misleading and should be PEMA or PEDS.

How is this under forum games..... these mods man....

I know right?

This is totally mind games, not forum games!

Its only misleading on such a basic level that your 5th grade teacher should have engrained it in you with a dozen of these type of problems, my 9 year old sister got this right, people have posted calculation sites that engineering companies will blindly follow, hell I can take a picture of my calculator giving the exact problem and it will be -9

This is true.
It's also why this "LEFT TO RIGHT" bull**** is dodgy.
And it's the reason that nobody will EVER write down 12 / 4 * 3, because how you interpret that is PURELY convention of writing. Nobody will write it down like that when doing decent math; because it's up for interpretation.

Witten, people will use fractions, putting the *3 where it belongs in the fraction. On a computer, where you type in a line and don't really have fractions, the convention is that the 3 will be put in the numerator. However, most people will still write down (12*3) /
4 or something similar, just because 12/4*3 is silly and difficult to interpret.

I first found out about this when seeing something like 12 / 4 / 3 in an excell document, which equates to 12 / (4*3) = 1.

Without left to right, you'd have to put parenthesis EVERYWHERE.

Or it would be a matter of preference in which case all mathematics will collapse.

This reminds me of how much I hate Matlab. Just the name brings back memories of broken code and unknown errors.

Answer is 9

Also, that guy said "multiplication is division" because, in order of operations, neither of them has priority over the other. You do them from left to right.

Also, dividing by 2 is technically multiplying by .5.