From TA:

> Among problems that were used by the department to blackball unwanted candidate students, these problems are distinguished by having a simple solution that is difficult to find.

Could someone explain the mechanism here? I can understand how this would hurt any relatively unprivileged group, by requiring certain "gotchas" that have nothing to do with people's innate ability or level of education.

But is there anything further? I.e. were these problems well-known among students who had already passed through an unfairly discriminatory gauntlet?