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Comment by delazeur | Hacker News Reader

I'm struggling with whether this is a "good" thing or not. On the one hand, I can see how it might increase the scores of privileged children relative to the scores of underprivileged children. On the other hand, should we really divorce math from the "real world" just to make it easier to cram for the test? In college and in life, you need to use math for applications, not arbitrary one-line computations.

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What's interesting is the number of people posting here who found the questions ambiguous. One assumes that your average HN poster may be a little overly detail oriented (and privileged), but even so... what this seems to be testing as much as algebra skill is correctly parsing the question (assuming there is a single 'correct' way to do that). Shouldn't that skill be part of the reading comprehension testing? Ask any customer facing developer and they will tell you there is no single interpretation for most customer requirements.

My other concern was the answer to #1, namely, "4m + 5b" vs "5m + 4b". I feel like if you know it is in that form (sum rather than product) the two answer choices are just intended to trip people up who are moving through the test at speed.

That's very true. I wonder if the goal of the test writers was simply to make the problems wordier, or if they deliberately created ambiguity to test parsing skills? I don't think the article was clear on that distinction.

Problems that are intentionally difficult to parse fail as tests of "real world" problem solving skills because in the real world it is almost always possible to seek clarification.

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