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It really depends on who is administering the first pass questionnaire and how they have been prepared. When I was doing hiring, a dedicated recruiting team was tasked with doing this first round, which we called "prescreen questions". I spent a lot of time briefing the people talking to candidates for my team on how to interpret the answers, and I encouraged them to keep detailed notes so we could audit what candidates were saying and needed to adjust something. I personally reviewed every prescreen result to make sure we didn't pass on someone who could provide more than the straight forward answer. However, we found that prescreens were most effective when the answers were straight forward and there was only one way to interpret the question (that is, for prescreens, non-essay answers are preferred).

I got the feeling that the uptime question was also inviting an extended answer, because the load figures (last minute, last 5 minutes, last 15 minutes) in uptime seem obvious, but are actually computed as exponentially-filtered averages (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5892104/how-were-the-weig...). In an interview situation, it would show above-average depth-of-knowledge to mention this.

Yeah, honestly even asking for clarification which shows that you really understand the concepts at play is probably as good or even better than providing the intended answer.