That’s what the student is calling it.
I try to encourage a better attitude.
Welp, they’re figuring out the percent of the volume that balls take up in a cylinder… except that the radius of the balls is stuff like 0.02 … and then they add the condition hat you round to the fourth decimal place, which means throwing out a ton of data. If you do as a *real person* would do (this is supposed to be like math in “real life”) you would change your units so you wouldn’t get 0.0001367 and numbers like that. No! We are to round that to 0.0001. If you round stuff right, then your “calculated” percent is 50%.
The *text* makes a point of having students do two separate examples of balls in cylinders, and then have them compare and notice that hey! it’s the same! So Student in Question didn’t do the rounding and got… 2/3 and thought, cool! I know I’m right! Connections made!
… and got the red box with the Incorrect! Try Again!
When they get “you’re wrong!” when you just didn’t round to what it said (ALEKS will tell you — hey, check your rounding)… I tell ’em hey, following directions is important. Fine print is important. However, tHis one … how to justify.. at least he was here so I could confirm that yea, the correct relationship was 2/3… and agree with him that this was an example of “rounding error.”
Resource Room Dot Net Blog 
xiousgeonz
October 5, 2016
To the discerning reader: I did not call it asinine. The student did.
However, I did not defend it; I shared that in reality this is not a good practice and that, therefore, I questioned having this in the collection of problems. We discussed the mathematical reasons that this is so.
Now, the course is Math Literacy, so I stand by my discussion of this kind of rounding with these kinds of units as not mathematically sound — especially when the student is confused by the imprecision and is asking.
xiousgeonz
February 20, 2017
Must duly note that it seems these problems were not present this year. The inane car rental one where we’re told about fixed costs and then told to treat them as variable costs is 😦