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Comment by pbj1968 | Hacker News Reader

pbj1968

I’m no genius, but I used to score well on such tests as a youngster. I was handed an IQ test circa ~1996 and got about two thirds through it before I found a question where none of the responses were correct. I brought it to the teacher’s attention. “There is no way you could possibly be right, this test was reviewed first!”

Anyway, blame it on photocopy errors or whatever, but the answers were wrong. Still mad about it.

I took another one ~2007 when I was looking to be a marketing person for a construction equipment rental company. This one was about 30 questions over 60 minutes. I got to question 26, which was some extraordinarily complicated question about how many cuts would it take to chop down a large board into the pieces you needed. After I wasted several minutes methodically writing this out, I realized the true test was realizing it was a time waster question one should skip. 27-30 were far simpler and then the buzzer ran out on me.

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I approach tests by going to the next question if the answer isn't immediately solvable. Then, when reaching the end, I go back and spend more time on the ones I hadn't solved. That maximizes the score.

I apply that technique everywhere. For example, when working the bug list, I'll solve the easy problems first, and the toughest last. That also maximizes the score, as the bug submitter's only care is if the bug is fixed, not how hard it is to fix.

Almost completely off topic but you are good example of nominative determinism !

In the Air Force, my dad's assigned office mate was Major Smart. A line of my ancestors were the Dumbles.

While in the Marines, I knew of a Major Hazzard and a Captain Justice. I really wanted to be there when they first met.

Given a fast enough supply, this means you never look at the difficult bug reports at all.

It also clears the mind if one clears out the easy ones first. It's like when I feel like working on the car, the first thing is clean the garage.

(If the reports come in faster than they can be fixed, of course one can never catch up regardless of the algorithm.)

In (software) engineering you want to take on enough of the hard stuff early on, to make sure you're not painting yourself into a corner with naive solutions...

There is always the concern that one has made a fundamental error. Can't worry about it too much, though, or one will never get anywhere.

I applied this to school tests but not in my work, well sometimes, if I'm procrastinating and need a few quick wins. But for timed tests, it's essential to skip something you're struggling with and get some points on the other questions.

the true test was realizing it was a time waster question one should skip

I remember something similar on the LSAT. Odious practice; if you get a wicked problem in a professional context, you don't have the option of just blowing it off. Of course, you could say it's about learning to prioritize with limited resources, but that's meta-gaming the applicants and selecting for corner-cutters. There's a place for corner cutting; in emergency situations it's sometimes the right thing to do. The problem is that selecting for corner cutters also incentivizes exploiting the system for less noble motives.

I don't see the problem with a corner cutter question located around the end of a test.

It filters people into:

- those who don't manage time efficiently by investing too much energy on a problem.

- those who did cut the corner and as a result got an edge with a few more questions solved

- the genius ones, who solved everything, in whatever order

If the objective of a test is classifying candidates and time management is one of the metric considered, then this kind of testing pattern absolutely makes sense.

I was one of those who never cut corners and just focused on the problem at hand until failure, and now that I am working and need to get things done I wished my teachers trained me that skill.

Worst one I ever saw was a question to prove something that was vacuously true if you got the preceding question correct.

People spent ages trying to find their mistake. I was one of the first to finish because I quickly concluded I wasn't going to find the mistake (after checking a mere 3 times).

Might not even have been a gotcha. They interlace draft questions all the time. They don’t count toward your score.

> Still mad about it.

Why?

they told him it was an IQ test but it was actually a psychological profile to diagnose his anger issues

For the same reason why he brought up his iq tests in the first place.

Because he self-identifies with some definition of iq.

Not at all. The authority figure simply could not live in a world where the question was wrong. A better response, in his role as a school teacher, would have been to tackle the question in depth as a class or otherwise show me how I was mistaken. But given as I was immediately dismissed I’ll never know for sure.

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