terms inside brackets & parentheses
exponents and roots
multiplication and division
addition and subtraction
The parentheses rule does NOT apply to numbers outside the parentheses.
Calculations at the same operations level must be worked left-to-right. Thus, the correct answer is 288.
I thought so, too. However, you and I are automatically inserting the omitted "*", and then performing arithmetic as for computer languages. The rub is that in traditional pencil & paper mathematics, 2X is 2*X with a higher precedence than parenthesis