Ambiguous: 1 10 11 20 21 22 26 27 Ambiguous execution (e.g. "draw a line around"): 4 5 7 8 9 12 14 Easy on the face of it: 2 3 13 15 16 17 18 25 Nonsense: 6 23 24 28 29 30 Difficult to execute (e.g. "draw this complicated set of shapes in a small space while under time pressure without making any mistake"): 19
That's just my quick assessment and might vary for you but I probably took more than 10 minutes just to think about this. At best (and I was generous) 7 out of 30 questions are clear.
And that is assuming the questions have been formulated in good faith, which is evidently not the case. Question 2 could mean just as well instruct you to draw a line under the whole expression "the last word" in that line, or a line under "the last word in this line", or just under "line". Who's to say?
Oh wait, it could also refer to "the last 'word' in this line", so you would need to underline "word".
If it was this, there would be quotes around "word".
> No, wait, you needed to underline every occurrence of the word "line".
If it was this, it wouldn't say "last".
This particular one is not ambiguous.
> I was preparing for my last major standardized test, the Graduate Record Exam, or GRE. I had already forked over $1,000 for a preparatory course, feeding the U.S. test-prep and private tutoring industry... I wondered why I was the only Black student in the room...
> The teacher boasted the course would boost our GRE scores by two hundred points, which I didn’t pay much attention to at first— it seemed an unlikely advertising pitch. But with each class, the technique behind the teacher’s confidence became clearer. She wasn’t making us smarter so we’d ace the test—she was teaching us how to take the test....
> It revealed the bait and switch at the heart of standardized tests— the exact thing that made them unfair: She was teaching test-taking form for standardized exams that purportedly measured intellectual strength. My classmates and I would get higher scores— two hundred points, as promised— than poorer students, who might be equivalent in intellectual strength but did not have the resources or, in some cases, even the awareness to acquire better form through high-priced prep courses. Because of the way the human mind works— the so-called “attribution effect,” which drives us to take personal credit for any success— those of us who prepped for the test would score higher and then walk into better opportunities thinking it was all about us: that we were better and smarter than the rest and we even had inarguable, quantifiable proof.... And because we’re talking about featureless, objective numbers, no one would ever think that racism could have played a role.
> Excerpt From How to Be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi
Things like this were at the heart of what Jim Crow was in America. Selective and capricious enforcement of the law to disenfranchise and disadvantage black people at best, enable unaccountable violence against them at the worst.
As the judge of this test, I interpret your answer as incorrect. I expected the phrase, "the last word in this line" to be underlined. Test failed, no cheating required.
(Note that had you underlined the phrase, "the last word in this line", I would have still judged it incorrect, claiming that "word" or "line" should be underlined. Again, this requires no cheating.)
And who would you argue this to? The guy giving you the test who has the freedom to fail you for any reason they want?
There's no appeals court. These tests were not tests.
If there were quotes around those 6 words, it would make the question unambiguous, sure. But without the quotes, my interpretation and judgement is still valid.
> The quotes are needed to change this sentence from its clear meaning to these other ones.
Actually, they are optional for that purpose, not required. Without them, the meaning is ambiguous. Just as you claim your interpretation is the "clear meaning", others have exactly as valid a claim to their interpretation being the "clear meaning".
Quite frankly, I doubt they even bothered with even that token effort to find excuses for failing people. They didn't need them. Everyone knew the game; if you were black under Jim Crow, you pretty much failed the moment they forced you to take it, regardless of your answers.
Literacy tests were only meant to give the threadbare illusion of objectivity to their disenfranchisement efforts and make that effort more efficient in the process. It's unlikely any state or county ever bothered to assemble a common "official" literacy test, or that officials ever put much effort into crafting a perfectly ambiguous question no one could every answer correctly. There was no need, and to the extent any did, it would likely have been just to make taking the tests as painful and humiliating as possible to punish the test-taker for not accepting that the fix was in, and to further discourage anyone else from bothering them.
Truthfully, the humiliating aspects of the various disenfranchisement mechanisms were almost certainly quite intentional. Fury over the perceived humiliation of the loss of the Civil War, and the changes wrought by Reconstruction, was the constant underlying theme of Redeemer[1] messaging. Simply regaining political power wasn't enough to slake that anger.
Of course, there are historical reasons for why the average black family is not as wealthy as an average white one, but the testing is not it - i.e. a poor white family is just as disadvantaged as a poor black family, according to the test - and Kendi was not so disadvantaged, by his own account.
I struggle to imagine why you would believe this to be the case. (I say this as someone who wrote, and did quite well in, several high school math competitions without making any particular effort to prepare for them.)
>giving us an unfair advantage that we false attribute to intelligence.
I struggle to imagine why this would be considered unfair, or not an actual sign of intelligence (assuming that the training worked).
I will refrain from providing the bulk of my rebuttal to Kendi, except to note:
> And because we’re talking about featureless, objective numbers, no one would ever think that racism could have played a role.
... Yes, that is exactly why racism could not possibly have played a role. The kind of "disparate impact" that Kendi seems to be alluding to here, is simply not compatible with the lay understanding of the concept of "racism", but only with a specialized academic one; but the potential for moral outrage attaches to the lay definition. The conflation that Kendi attempts is a classic example of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy .
From what I have been able to understand of writers like Kendi (see also e.g. Robin diAngelo), this statistical fact is itself, inherently, considered to be an example of "racism" (hence terms like "systemic" or "institutional" racism); and the ensuing (supposed) bias of the test towards the wealthy, another one (simply because it is ensuing).
This makes you a cheating administrator in this hypothetical,
>I expected the phrase, "the last word in this line" to be underlined.
... because this expectation is not valid.
Quotation marks are not merely needed to make the question "unambiguous"; they are needed to make your interpretation possible.
Actually, it doesn't.
> this expectation is not valid.
Actually, it is.
> Quotation marks are not merely needed to make the question "unambiguous"; they are needed to make your interpretation possible.
Actually, they are optional for that purpose, not required. Without them, the meaning is indeed ambiguous, with my interpretation indeed being valid.
The fact that we came up with 2 different, equally valid interpretations, just goes to show that the question is ambiguous.
Some other equally valid interpretations are explained by another poster here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41912790