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Comment by lmkg | Hacker News Reader

I think part of this conditioning from taking tests in school. For twelve or more years of your life, in any situation where you are asked to demonstrate your knowledge, a null response is treated in the same negative fashion as an incorrect response, and getting outside help is disallowed. No wonder we try and guess, we've literally been trained for years that it's the best approach! Compounding that, an interview is the one situation in "the real world" that most resembles a testing situation from grade school, which will bring back all those bad habits.

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My graduate advisor is Spanish, but is faculty at a university in the States. In his first year of teaching, he penalized for incorrect answers (as is apparently the Spanish custom). But his students threw fits during office hours, so he caved in the face of potentially terrible teaching evaluations.

After tenure, he said, things will be going right back to the way they were in the old country.

I could see throwing a fit, too, depending on how the weighting is handled for partially incorrect answers. If the question is "What shape is the Earth?", if a student answers "A cube", I can see taking off points. However, if they answer "A sphere", do they also lose points? Do they lose just as many points as the person who said sphere or do they get partial credit for being closer to the correct answer of "oblate spheroid"

To put it differently, would I get a better score in OS design than Linus Torvalds? After all, he wrote an operating system that contains bugs, while I wrote no operating system as all.

That's a general problem with the interpretation of test answers. What an appropriately penalized scoring scheme for a multiple choice tests does is set the expected value of guessing to zero, providing an unbiased estimator of performance for students who guess randomly.

Ah. I didn't realize he was doing this on a multiple choice test. It makes complete sense in that context. The Spanish threw me - none of my language courses had multiple choice exams.

I've seen people try and take this scoring scheme out of the multiple choice arena and into a more general program. However, when the answer space is infinite, the expected value for guessing is already zero, so there really isn't any point, besides sadistically torturing students.

Sorry, I should have clarified-- my boss is Spanish but works in computational biology, not Spanish lang/lit.

In the real world "I don't know" has more utility than a wrong answer. So you can argue that education should follow that route, too.

Actually, the SAT (American college entrance exam) penalizes wrong answers more than non-answers. A non-answer gets you no points, but a wrong answer gets points subtracted.

The SAT is the exception rather than the rule. Most standardized and non-standardized tests reward you for guessing.

The GMAT as well. It's interesting when you work with little kids - you have to encourage them to guess. They're more likely to admit what they don't know.

Barely. IIRC it's 0 points if blank, -0.25 if wrong, so if you eliminate 1 choice it's worth it to guess. I'd like to see it be -5 points if wrong, since this is more reflective of the real world. When I entered the industry as an electrical engineer this was a difficult transition for me. In school, you're incentivized to guess and BS. But in the real world, the penalty for being wrong is HUGE.

> in the real world, the penalty for being wrong is HUGE

In some situations (committing an integrated circuit design to manufacture probably being one), the cost of being wrong is pretty big.

Other situations where there's a tight feedback loop and you can make/propagate changes quickly (say, most web app software development), it's less so.

True. But generally the cost of guessing and doing something wrong is much higher than saying "I don't know" and asking someone else or Googling the result. School, through homeworks and especially exams, trains us to do our best without outside help. I would argue that this behavior is maladaptive to engineering in the real world.

In the real world, the penalty for being wrong is dependant on the risks involved, and sometimes you can manage the risks.

Guessing is a good skill. Managing risk is a good skill. Learning how to situationally value guessing vs. knowing is a awesome skill.

School basically teaches all the wrong lessons for people going into professional work. Memorize minutiae, plug and chug, devalue high level understanding, concentrate on trivial problems, etc. It's a shame that apprenticeship has fallen out of favor, it's such a vastly superior method to teach professional skills.

A comparison with Germany might be insightful here. Apprenciteship is going strong there.

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