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Comment by imilk | Hacker News Reader

> I get that there are a few professions where you're really going to need to know the right answer quickly without looking it up under high-pressure situations

I agree with the premise, but I think you're downplaying this quite a bit. Pretty much any job that you're not doing asynchronous work in front of a computer would apply here.

> If you elaborately cheat your way through all online classes all the way through undergrad, that seems mostly bad for you

Well it's more than bad for just you. It's bad for the university and everyone else with a degree from there since you are degrading the value of having that degree.

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> Pretty much any job that you're not doing asynchronous work in front of a computer would apply here.

It's lame to ask for examples, but do you have any? Because honestly I don't think it applies to many jobs, unless it's something that a) puts you in high pressure situations, and b) requires specific in-depth knowledge. There aren't that many jobs like that, and for the ones that do exist (medical, military), you don't get in just by doing a bunch of multiple choice tests.

> for the ones that do exist (medical, military), you don’t get in just by doing a bunch of multiple choice tests

As someone in the medical field, I would say upwards of 80% of the graded portion of a nursing license and it’s certifications (trauma nursing, cardiac life support, etc), you’re graded entirely on multiple choice questions. People die from mistakes, yet I meet a lot of people who proudly admit to having cheated or googled their way through a much of their studies. Some of them are good and quite a few are downright dangerous at their jobs.

> I would say upwards of 80% of the graded portion of a nursing license and it’s certifications (trauma nursing, cardiac life support, etc), you’re graded entirely on multiple choice questions.

A lot of places won't let you take the exam without practical experience, under the supervision of clinical personnel. Harder to google your way through that.

I can’t speak to the certification exams, but for nursing school, there is a high pressure from administration to pass students as long as they can pass the standardized test, even if the teachers don’t think the student is ready or safe for clinical work. So, although they do have practical experience, it is often limited in scope and students can fake their way through it to a surprisingly large extent (they’re always paired with a licensed staff member). This is anecdotal, but consistent across what has been told to me by staff members of several nursing schools.

I’d argue that a lot of jobs have time that is stressful, high pressure and requires one to have the knowledge immediately.

A truck driver, a crane operator, a musician, a teacher, a chef.

Danger doesn’t have to be physical. Embarrassment, potential failure etc are all reasons to need to know something without looking it up.

None of these can be tested by an online-proctored test necessitating the installation of a rootkit.

The first two have specific government licensing requirements that require in-person examinations in use of the equipment in question.

The third has no need of any sort of proctored test.

The fourth _may_ need some sort of proctored test, but most teaching licences require in-person or otherwise monitored practica—and those are far more viable than anything proctored. Teachers should _often_ be ready to turn to books, depending on what it is they are teaching.

The fifth also doesn’t need a proctored test, and the type of immediate no-book knowledge required when preparing something is something that isn’t readily memorizable, but is instead only something that is achievable via long experience. Most chefs work from recipes and plans.

I don’t think that any of the examples you have given fit the mold.

I think you are underestimating the amount of regulation and qualification that is required for various roles. Health and safety, code compliance and best practice are tested and assessed for a vast number of professions where I am. Certainly teaching, driving, food safety, building etc. I struggle to think of a profession or trade that has no testing or legal requirement for standards (and associated proof of compliance). Many companies require online training to get their own policies across.

Probably a key detail - I’m in New Zealand, and Health and safety is taken increasingly seriously. Company directors face stiff fines/imprisonment for H&S failures and while things have a long way to go, they have also come a long way in a short time.

I’m in favour of (sane) licensing rules. I believe that a number of licences that are offered in many places are _too easy_ to get and need more training, ongoing training, and certification to maintain a licence.

However, health and safety &c are mostly _orthogonal_ to the professional standards of the professions you listed—and in some cases (musician, teacher, and chef), are not the primary responsibility of the professional. (A tour manager / stage manager may have H&S responsibilities around a musician’s show, but musicians themselves have almost no such responsibilities.)

Structural engineers need to know how to calculate the safety of what they are building, but they may (and probably _do_) need to look up the specific regulations and requirements for different localities or structures or materials quite regularly, unless they work on a single type of structure and material in a single location that never changes its regulatory requirements.

Looking up the specifics to an answer isn’t a failure, and our training and certification regimes need to recognize that it isn’t a failure. If having split-second responses to a particular situation is required, then the training needs to focus on what is absolutely required and reflect that (much like military training does with respect to weapon safety).

When I visit a restaurant, I sometimes ask the waiter whether he knows if certain dish contains dairy. There are usually three answers:

    Bad waiters would just have no clue and won't know what to do.  
    Mediocre waiters would offer to go to the kitchen and ask about it
    Great waiters will tell me yes or no, will offer me to cook it with X instead of Y, or give me one of the other options in the menu (they already know by heart) that do not contain dairy

I'm glad I paid $40k to learn to be a great waiter.

I guess I should add "high stakes" to my list of requirements.

A good waiter certainly has great "menu knowledge", however this is actually a situation where the waiter shouldn't be trying to impress the customer with how well they remember ingredients. A customer informing a waiter of a food allergy should trigger a clear protocol (that the restaurant may have established in writing), which will involve talking to the kitchen/chef/manager.

Many places will have waiters follow up the "does X have {{ allergen }} in it?" with clarifying questions as to whether the customer has an allergy or if it's a preference. If they are indeed asking because they have an allergy, it's critical that everyone dealing with that customer's food knows in advance so they can double check all ingredients and prep/handle the food in a way that limits any potential cross contamination.

My suspicion is that for almost everything constantly having to google will be a problem. Maybe a timed harder test is the right way to filter that out and find the people with enough knowledge, but that's harder to get the balance right

And then you reach a point where you don't even know what you need to Google to solve a problem. I can't believe some people are under the impression that being successful at your job is only a matter of translating requests through the Google machine and spitting out answers. It tells me that they have not faced complex problems before.

I think the position being expressed here is more that in the real world Google is now part of many work flows and so a test that asks you to be cutoff from it is actually unrealistic. I don't fully agree though because a test is also unrealistic in that it often gives you more than enough time to solve the problem. And maybe more along the lines of what you're saying because again it's a test it can't really include truly novel problems that won't have known solutions

I completely disagree. Knowledge recollection of school taught concepts is irrelevant to practically every job. Yes, most jobs require you to remember various work-related things, but those are not taught in school, they are taught and reinforced on the job itself.

What this tells me is that you may not have gotten the most out of your education. Sure there are specific tasks that you learn how to complete for particular jobs, but the structure of how you approach problems should have been helped quite a bit by what you learn in school.

Personally I found studying philosophy extremely helpful to solving business problems. Not because there is an exact 1 for 1 concept match. Rather it teaches you how to frame and break down problems so that you can be more adaptable and efficient when faced with various unknowns.

There's always going to be domain specific learning needed for any position. But to dismiss any tangential knowledge as useless is extremely short sided.

You said “studying philosophy” rather than “being tested on rote memorization of philosophy text books”.

I agree that “studying philosophy” is a worthwhile endeavor, but I align more closely with the parents in regards to memorizing the semi-random litany of data bits that show up in a typical exam. The information is ultimately forgotten and is usually only relevant in the context of the current textbook chapter. Nearly every useful concept that applies to my two separate careers was learned on the job. The time spent in the classroom is nearly irrelevant and could have been replaced entirely by several weeks on the job.

I just gave an personal example to flesh out my post. But if, for example, you are a structural engineer who has to consult on site with clients, you certainly need to recall a litany of data/concepts (random or non-random) pretty quickly if you don't want to look like an idiot. You cannot learn this knowledge from a few weeks on the job because the client would be able to see through your bullshit in minutes.

This applies to pretty much any position that needs to communicate in real time about a base of knowledge (doctors, lawyers, logistics, any type of management position). If you believe that any career can be substituted by "a few weeks on the job", you're not really aiming that high for yourself.

I'm curious about the proportion of careers which are not adaptable to asynchronous/remote work, that _is_ best tested through rote memorization (think multiple choice questions) versus active demonstration (think like having an instructor see you do CPR on a dummy)?

Just a thought about how it's weird we argue about how testing should be done online, but not the fact we test online things which are not really online in their nature.

Pretty much anything that requires real time communication involving a deep base of knowledge. I'm not going to list out hundreds of possible roles that this encompasses - but I'm sure you have the imagination to think of a few.

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