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Comment by sharkweek | Hacker News Reader

I remember in maybe middle school a teacher giving everyone in the class a piece of paper with a massive list of instructions.

They were silly things like “sing the first Ceres of your favorite song” or “do 10 jumping jacks.”

But the first instruction was “read all the instructions first before doing anything listed here.”

The last instruction being, “ignore all of the above and hand in your paper.”

About 3/4 of the class ignored the first instructions and went through all the silly stuff. Was pretty funny I remember.

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One of my teachers did that in elementary school. I read the whole thing, saw the final instruction, and then got confused about what order I should follow the instructions in. The instructions were clearly contradictory and as a result there wasn’t an unambiguous way to interpret the paper. I had recently started playing with programming, and so I decided to model the task as though I was a computer executing a program. I started at the top and did all the silly instructions. Besides, it was more fun that way.

Afterwards the teacher chided everyone who didn’t read the entire paper before starting and did the silly instructions. I was bothered because I had read the paper and thought carefully about how I would handle it. I still think that assignment was dumb.

That’s when you run around smacking everyone and yelling “undefined behavior!”

I had a class where we would need to write Assembly code on paper, then copy the result into the question sheet and hand it in. Of course, there was a social convention that the program itself would be turned in too, but it clearly wasn’t written in the instruction sheet, and of course I, as a geek, lacked the social conventions, so we respected the absence of instruction and didn’t turn in the Assembly code (The teacher was a miserable authoritarian).

Our grade came in: Zero. Not even 10 out of 20 for answering the instruction sheet.

Add insult to injury, the teacher was a feminist who worked to improve girls’ grades, so a group of girls did the same as us, but recovered their points because “they asked nicely”. So they had 17/20. We got 10/20 “because half an assignment is still half an assignment.”

Yes! Let us give children the world's worst UX, and then mock them for its inevitable failure!

This worksheet is from the school of thought which sees education as a way to train you to be a better person, and by "better person" I mean "a mindless and compliant drone for some corporate or government bureaucracy".

I don't know how you could oveethink this that badly.

It's about reading instructions all the way through if you're going to follow them.

If you throw out the instructions that's cool too, but sometimes reading all the instructions instead of discovering them as you go will help things go easier.

You might catch intent behind previous instructions that makes them easier to follow.

> It's about reading instructions all the way through if you're going to follow them.

Sometimes understanding the entire process is important. When this is important, it behooves the designer of the form to draw attention to the fact, to make it easy to do the right thing, and hard to do the wrong thing.

This, however, is the precise opposite of what the Following Instructions Quiz genre seeks to accomplish.

It would be one thing if teachers consistently used it to apologize for the inane bureaucracy that students will experience later in life. Perhaps this is a lesson students need -- but it's seldom so affirming; the message, rather, is that interacting with this quiz in a natural way is a flaw, you are flawed for doing so, and you would be better if you were a paperwork robot. Conform. Obey. Follow instructions.

Many schools systems have this as an explicit goal, and others do it somewhat implicitly. Songs like We don't need no education didn't spring up out of nowhere.

An English teacher did this to us. The first big problem is about half of the students knew about the trick because friends in one of her earlier classes told us about it. So half the class got 100% not for reading the instructions but for having friends willing to go against the spirit of the task. The second problem was that it was intentionally formatted to look like the instructions were the paragraph at the top of the page and everything below were tasks. The teacher had a huge grin on her face about the whole thing, apparently happy that she was able to outsmart a group (well, half a group) of children. A classroom relationship between the teacher and students should be built on trust and fairness, both of which she damaged that day.

Same here. Probably 80’s. Kids those days too. I was the fastest reader so the first to prance around.

Isnt there a movie called Exam that does nearly the same thing?

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