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Comment by svilen_dobrev | Hacker News Reader

yeah.. most interview procedures/ways in recent ~10+years do not check if interviewees can think. Only if they can "remember". Which is akin to education's problem of last few decades.. there are plenty of machines for remembering now. But dumb-grinding is still the expected way in schools..

While, wait, thinking...

So all this "cheating" is maybe a (bit delayed) response to the above trend..

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I'm curious what education system you are talking about. One of the trends of modern (read post 1900) education was a move to emphasise higher-order skills (such as analysis or critical thinking) over lower-order skills (like memorisation). In some systems this has gotten to the point where kids seem unusually happy about going to school but don't actually learn almost anything while there...

It may not be like everywhere but in the US most of my education (k-12) was memorization. All we did was memorize names, places, dates, formulas, or a series of steps (depending on the class) over the course of ~2 weeks then we'd be tested to see what we could remember. After the test, we'd move on to the next thing and could forget all about what we just memorized.

The only classes I can recall that required higher-order skills were some woodworking, CAD, and CNC/machining classes I took while at an off-site vocational school alongside my required high school classes.

I went to a high school (in the US) that was full of extremely passionate and engaging teachers. After I graduated, I had a conversation with one of them about the curriculum, and she told me that their number one job was effectively to teach whatever will be on the standardized tests used for college admissions.

I've had some amazing teachers whose passion shone through and cultivated students' genuine interest in the subject matter. Unfortunately, there is only so much that can be done when, at the end of the day, your curriculum is designed for the purpose of getting a good standardized test score.

This was my experience as well.

Down to the metal fabrication / woodworking being the most critical thinking I did in K-12 other than programming and reading on my own time

What we are doing is to find simple questions with short answers that require a minimum amount of understanding, but which ChatGPT cannot solve correctly without a lot of prodding.

Example: https://chat.openai.com/share/9179ee63-6461-479b-8a76-1a7af2... (the key part of the correct answer, the word "wait", does not appear in any of the responses, and the answer to the questions about the data loss should have been a short "no" with a justification instead of the long AI rambling).

I've been toying with this idea that the easiest way to catch AI usage is to ask the impossible. "Write a general sorting algorithm in O(n) time" or something similar. Even just minor pushback like "how would you change this to make it more efficient" will trip up most AI.

TBF, memorizing stuff does lead to a model that allows you to understand the world[1]. I do agree that the focus of the education system has been to regurgitate stuff instead of testing students’ understanding.

[1] https://www.pearlleff.com/in-praise-of-memorization

ADHD absolutely kills me in this respect. I wish we better assessed ‘thinking’ for neurodivergent folks who struggle with their working memory.

> most interview procedures/ways in recent ~10+years do not check if interviewees can think

Oh, I remember questions that were ostensibly designed to detect whether an interviewee can think. "Why are manhole covers round?" "How to measure exactly 45 minutes by burning a rope that takes an hour to burn?", and others of that ilk. I believe I was presented with a question of that sort once during an interview very early in my career. I said that I don't do puzzles, and bade farewell to the interviewers.

One of the first job interviews I ever had, the interviewer asked me something like "If you were any animal, which animal would that be?". The nerves from doing the interview must've gotten to me, cause I blurted out something like "Uhhh... I guess an Alpha Lion?", I don't remember the justification I gave him for that one

I remember that era well. I hated the whole concept of using weird puzzles like that. It never seemed like a good filter.

> Why are manhole covers round?

Does it mean I'm an idiot if I have no idea why they would be round instead of rectangular?

There's no actual reason. The test is to see if you can invent convincing-sounding rationalisations on the spot. Or, in practice, to see if you've read any books about interviewing.

No idea. I am as much of an idiot as you are. But questions of this kind were supposed to detect candidates who were able to think.

A round cover wont fall in, but a square or rectangular can.

I find it more likely they are round because piping is round. I doubt they were engineered in any way and it was just a pragmatic solution to capping off a tee.

The interviewer is an idiot. Manhole covers could have all different shapes: round, square, rectangular and other.

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