Sorry, while I don't think either answer is necessarily wrong, I'm sticking with 288 being right.
You guys are trying to apply the distributive property to this equation and it doesn't apply. The distributive property applies to multiplying a polynomial by a monomial. 9 + 3 is not a polynomial and thus the distributive property does not apply.
It's a badly written equation for sure, but to claim that 288 is "wrong", is just well, you know what ...
