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Comment by akira2501 | Hacker News Reader

That comment is a reflection of my pedantry and I don't think we're actually disagreeing.

It's not possible to know the right answers because there never were any. This means the test has no predictive power, not that it's impossible, and again, since some Whites unable to prove education did have to contend with this, it was designed that way intentionally.

I feel "near impossible literacy test" is a terrible description. The "intentionally ambiguous literacy test" would be more apt.

More worrying is I am unable to find a definitive provenance for this document. It suggests it was used in the early 1900s but the print quality and format seems unusual in several ways to me. Which is why I attempted to reduce it in favor of considering the rest of the system.

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The reason that it is impossible is that there is no possible set of answers that would require the test-giver to acknowledge that a test-taker passed the test. Anyone the test-taker does not like can be failed.

That's the point. Have you never applied for any sort of license or permit or anything that the government agency really doesn't want to hand out? They're all structured and written this way.

Cite an example? This claim seems extraordinary, since people will sue over almost any process any local, state, or federal government creates.

Prior to the ruling in NYSRPA v. Bruen putting a stop to the practice the LTC application processes in the less permissive towns in Massachusetts were well known to have forms of this sort in addition to the basic state form as well as undocumented "soft requirements" and "nice to haves". In Boston proper you basically had to write an essay, or maybe that was Cambridge, I forget.

This test is a caricature of the type of test mentioned in the post above yours, but yes, on many federal tests I have taken, there are a lot of questions that are intentionally tricky or have no correct answers, only less wrong ones.

Most notably, pilot examinations for aviation and maritime certifications.

I think they use these types of questions to exclude rule memorisation and test the ability to reason about the intention or relevant effects of rules and principles of the art involved.

It seems like the intention is also to penalise the inability to reason about ambiguous situations, ensure that the subject can effectively divide attention (if you spend too much time focusing on these ambiguous situations trying to find a nonexistent perfect answer you will fail the test), and to filter out low cognitive ability in general.

I’m not a test design expert, however, so ymmv.

"Impossible" is apt, because it is not possible to answer all the questions on the test in an unambiguously, objectively correct manner.

"Impossible" also refers to how the test administrators used it: in order to make voter registration impossible for some people.

> That comment is a reflection of my pedantry

Stop with this sort of thing, please. It's just noise, and doesn't add to the discussion.

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