I’m curious if anyone has the solutions to these.
replies(6):
Take question 20:
> Spell backwards, forwards
Is "backwards" the object, with "forwards" describing how to spell it — as in, "Spell the word 'backwards', forwards"?
Or is it being used as an adverb, telling you how to spell the word "forwards" — as in, "Spell backwards the word 'forwards'"?
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.
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.
'the' comes twice
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.
Assuming they did write the correct thing, and assuming the test administrator would be unusually generous about the placement of the words, they still got it wrong: they left off the colon at the end.
> "Your word is 'weather'."
> "Which one? Can you use it in a sentence?"
> "Certainly! 'I don't know whether the weather will improve.'"
(obviously the joke doesn't work as well written out)
That's all theory of course and in practice I bet people did talk about this afterwards and figured out it's BS and it didn't help either way. But it's easy to "find out" (and then try to do something about it) if you stick together. But if nobody sticks together on it and tries to do better for themselves by themselves, everyone does worse for themselves in the end.
> Draw in the space below, a square with a triangle in it, and within that same triangle draw a circle with a black dot in it.
In that case, “a square with a triangle in it” is fairly unambiguously the object, which would make the sentence construction “[verb] [adverb], [object]” — exactly the same as the second interpretation of “Spell backwards, forwards”.
> "Only who can prevent forest fires?" [You] [Me]
> Bart selects "You".
> "You pressed 'You', referring to me. That is incorrect. The correct answer is 'You'!"
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.
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.
The other trick is that the line could be too short depending on your handwriting, in theory disqualifying the tested person regardless of what they write down.