lol. it's a funny name but I find it hard to believe it's actually a common mistake. my experience is that squaring and multiplying polynomials is done so often in high school that it's hard not to learn this is not true (i studied in an ordinary high school in russia, not any special one).

Me too, I studied it in Romania and it was very basic and well drilled. But plenty of students just blocked out math. I bet the Minerva model learned it on the internet, some bad training example could explain it.