Hacker News Reader

Comment by bsaul | Hacker News Reader

There’s a problem with this quiz. why would question 100 have the special privilege of discarding all the other questions ?

From a purely linguistic pov, this question 100 isn’t a question, it’s a meta-information about how you should reply to the quiz itself. I hate it when teachers try to be too smart for their own good.

View on HN

It's a simple case of teaching the importance (according to the teacher) of reading the instructions before starting the work. It's not that deep.

It's a simple case of willfully hiding important information in the last place anyone will look. Awareness of these tactics is a useful skill to have in low-trust societies, and when used as a teaching tool it will guarantee the outcome to be a low-trust society.

The world is messy and "the rules" aren't often written out for us in black and white. Teaching somebody to deal with uncertainty by way of studying the problem before jumping in without the full picture doesn't seem like it would create a "low trust society" as you claim. I would suggest it creates people who might look before they leap.

We have enough people on this planet going through life without ever once thinking about what they are about to do.

I had a teacher that did this but his whole MO was teaching us good test taking habits. You speed through the easy questions so you know how much time you have to devote to the hard ones. I.e., if that’s the last place you look, that’s an issue.

As a student, i remember very vividly that any potential imprecision in the question of the exam was the source of great confusion, especially since you couldn't ask the examinator for explanation (the test was supposed to be perfect).

I'm not being pedantic here, i am really furious against teachers that makes students think about the best way to disambiguate the question instead of thinking about the subject of the exam itself.

Typically the exam had pointless questions and its only purpose was to teach this particular lesson. I've never seen nor heard of a teacher using this on a test that actually mattered.

> meta-information about how you should reply to the quiz itself.

This is referred to as "rubric", and paying attention to the rubric on exams is a very important skill. Especially when some of them are confusing, and you get "answer ONE question from section A and TWO questions from section B BUT no more than ONE question marked with a (+) in total" on a paper that folds out to thirty questions.

While it's often infuriating it's useful to know how to operate in an environment where the rules will be read pedantically against you.

A rubric should be specified outside of the context of a specific question if it applies all questions.

These are all very cute taxonomical arguments that a) ignore the point of the exercise and b) are only interesting to software developers.

> This is referred to as "rubric", and paying attention to the rubric on exams is a very important skill.

Following arbitrary and pointless rules and playing mind games with the test giver. Only in the made up world of academic testing.

And taxes.

Oh thank you, I needed that laugh.

All organisations have arbitrary and pointless rules. It ensures that people know their place.

Right. Kids who answer the “wrong way“ from top to bottom got answers 1 and 100 incorrect, but correctly answered questions 2 through 99 and score 98/100.

Kids who read the last question and leave the rest blank get two questions correct for a score of 2/100.

On a typical test the blast radius for a question is limited. There is no convention that getting a question wrong alters the outcome for other questions, too.

On a similar level, from a purely linguistic point of view the initial instruction should be "read all the questions before answering any of them". Any pedant could have great fun arguing that reading a question before answering it for the set of all the questions did fulfil the brief of "read[ing] all the questions before answering them"...

It'd be better to name them "Task 1" etc, instead of "Question 1" etc. Especially considering they are not really questions but tasks (i.e. "read all questions.", "do question 1 and 2", "draw <whatever>", etc).

Given this was at least 25 years ago, they might well have been. It's not like human long-term memories are vastly more reliable than things like Stable Diffusion.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com