But, my understanding is that the test is purposefully opaque, so that any answer can be considered “wrong”, at the discretion of whoever’s running the test.
The way something like this was administered, was that tests returned by white people were given a cursory glance and accepted, and tests returned by black people were just rejected and given some random explanation as to why they were wrong, and then the test was chucked in the garbage. Nobody cared what the right answer was, all that mattered was there was some fig leaf explanation for why black voters couldn't vote. Mostly black voters stopped bothering to try after a couple of go arounds here -- not to mention the physical intimidation that went along with it. The point was to inculcate learned helplessness.
This wasn't the SAT, y'all.
At first I thought "oh, they're just using a slightly different, but perhaps reasonable, meaning of "second letter after". But if that's the case, then they used a different meaning of "first letter after" for the first part.
#16 is also wrong: it calls for a black circle overlapping the left corner of a triangle, but they drew it overlapping the right corner.
And for #25, they wrote it out, but all of it did not fit on the line, and did not write the terminating ":" in the text, so that's technically incorrect too. (And it's debatable whether or not they were supposed to write out the text that's inside the triangle, or the "gotcha" of writing out the text in the question.)
I love that they gave up for the last two questions. I imagine most people who were forced to take that test did so too, assuming they even made it that far in the allotted time.
> 26. In the third square below, write the second letter of the fourth word.
Bzzzt. Answer was "h", it's the second letter of "the fourth word".
> 18. Look at the line of numbers below, and place on the blank, the number that should come next. 3 6 9 \_ 15
We said the number that should come _next_. You were meant to write 18.
> 9. Draw a line through the two letters below that come last in the alphabet.
We said to draw _a_ line. You drew two lines.
> 7. Above the letter X make a small cross.
We said above, yours is within the X.
14, 15, 16 that others pointed out.
24. They printed 3 words when a single word was called for. The test is very clear about following the direction exactly, no more and no less. Also "mom" might be wrong, "wow" should be safe.
28. The vertical line is bisected in clearly unequal parts.
#18 is wrong, after the 15 comes 18, so 18 should be written in the blank space.
Bastards.
Would be interested to see what share of population would get all of those correct (if it's even possible). I for one wouldn't.
Sadistic stuff.