A near impossible literacy test Louisiana used to suppress the black vote

A solution is available here: https://mrsjcoonan.weebly.com/uploads/2/3/6/2/23625108/liter...

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.

Their answer to #14 is wrong. They crossed out "m" and should've crossed out "l".

Their answer to #14 is wrong. The first part ("draw a line under the first letter after 'h'") is done correctly, with a line under "i", but the second part ("draw a line through the second letter after "j") is wrong. They should have drawn the line through "l", but they drew it through "m".

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.

It doesn't have answers for the last two and I think the number 16 is wrong (the circle is encircling the right corner). Also 25 doesn't fit on the line.

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.

On 15, shouldn't the dot be above the O?

Also true!

Question 29 is particularly cruel - even if someone somehow managed to provide "good" answers for the preceding 28 questions within ten minutes, then they were surely almost out of time, and just parsing that sentence took me about four readings.

#8 is wrong, T should be crossed out because it's the first letter of "the alphabet".

#18 is wrong, after the 15 comes 18, so 18 should be written in the blank space.

Bastards.

There are many ambiguous ones, but several here that are unambiguously wrong.

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.

Developers are so used to going through leetcode nonsense to get jobs that they're assuming that this is some kind of genuine but poorly written test to test literacy.

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.