The meaning of the compound approach needs to be explained as it is used by the present
authors and is not part of the accepted terminology in the literature. In solving multi-stage chance comparison problems many students tended to split a multi-stage experiment into several distinct one-stage experiments; then they compounded the results for each stage intuitively without any calculations. For example, consider the two-stage experiment of drawing one marble from each of the two bags, each of which contains some black marbles and white marbles. If in each bag there are more black marbles than white marbles students using this misconception believe that since drawing a black marble is more likely for each bag then drawing two black marbles is most likely for the two-stage experiment. Such a strategy used in chance comparison is referred to as the compound approach.