School systems across the English-speaking world teach mnemonic devices to help children memorize the order of operations. In North America, students learn PEMDAS (Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication, Division, Addition, Subtraction). In the United Kingdom, India, and Australia, students learn BODMAS (Brackets, Orders, Division, Multiplication, Addition, Subtraction).
These acronyms introduce a misleading visual hierarchy. Many students leave school believing multiplication must always precede division under PEMDAS, or that division must precede multiplication under BODMAS. In formal arithmetic, multiplication and division share equal priority. Neither outranks the other.
To break a tie between operations of equal ranking, the standard convention instructs the user to calculate strictly from left to right. Under that standard modern convention, 8 ÷ 2 × 4 requires evaluating the division first. That produces 4 × 4, cementing 16 as the answer prescribed by modern elementary syllabi.
