Her goal here was to provide the students with some general guidelines on choosing the best method for solving a given quadratic equation. She briefly touched on two of the five features of mathematics algorithms (Kilpatrick, Swafford, & Findell, 2001): (1) generality, e.g., the quadratic formula works for any quadratic equation while factoring doesn’t if integral coefficients are desired in the linear factors; and (2) efficiency, e.g., the factoring method would typically work faster than completing the square.