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These problems were designed to prevent Jewish people from passing (2011)
- seibelj 9y agoAlso worth looking at are literacy tests for voting rights given to African Americans in the Jim Crow-era southern United States. http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2013/06/28/voting_rights_and_the_supreme_court_the_impossible_literacy_test_louisiana.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2013/06/28/voting_right...
- a_bonobo 9y agoOr the English test questions the current Australian government wants to introduce for potential citizens: https://theconversation.com/could-you-pass-the-proposed-english-test-for-australian-citizenship-79269 https://theconversation.com/could-you-pass-the-proposed-engl...
- Cyph0n 9y agotl;dr Australia wants potential citizens to get at least a 6/9 on the IELTS English exam (similar to TOEFL).
- dogma1138 9y agoYou need to do it in the UK for any type of long term visa unless you are from EU/EEA. For citizenship you need both the English proficiency exam and the life in the UK test which is now actually hard even for natural borne Britons to pass.
- viraptor 9y agoFor the citizenship, a British University degree is also accepted instead of an English test. (Or at least was ~3 years ago)
- ZeroGravitas 9y agoThere was a recent story that suggested they were using AI to score these tests and it was failing people with Irish accents.
- nisse72 9y agoSo does New Zealand. I don't see how it's an issue that they expect skilled migrants to speak the language. But Australia has had (and possibly still has) bigger issues with discrimination and xenophobia. Consider that the official immigration policy was called "White Australia" until the mid 1960s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Australia_policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Australia_policy
- jfaucett 9y agoThe reasons for and way in which they administered that are appaling. Still it made me think doing this the other way around would be interesting: would making would be politicians pass some form of unbiased well-designed test on the constitution, political system, financial principles, ethics, etc. have a positive effect on their performance? My guess is probably not but I do wonder what you could do if you let anything go.
- sinxoveretothex 9y agoIn the context of tests being biased, I'll just note that your idea amounts to (unbiasedly) testing the test designers. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
- sampo 9y ago> would making would be politicians pass some form of unbiased well-designed test on the constitution, political system, financial principles, ethics, etc. have a positive effect on their performance? Who would be the authority that either makes these test questions, or monitors that they are unbiased?
- astura 9y agoThere's no such thing as an "unbiased" test.
- maxxxxx 9y agoWow, neither I nor my PhD girlfriend could do it on time. I bet if they had given it to all voters less than 1% could have voted.
- kirillkh 9y agoI did it exactly on time. I'm not sure what's meant by an "interlocking part" of circles in Q30, though.
- aluminussoma 9y agoAn alternate title would be: Jewish students were given more difficult math problems than their Russian non-Jewish counterparts Otherwise, the title implicitly implies that Jewish and non-Jewish students received the same questions. That would be interesting!
- ajmurmann 9y agoYes, from the title I assumed exactly that. I spent several minutes reading the paper till I realized that different students received different tests which made this much less interesting.
- mcny 9y agoThis is something I've heard people say about the SAT (a test high school students planning to go to college take in the US) that more affluent people tend to do better. I'm not sure about the specifics though.
- eropple 9y agoIIRC this tends to be borne out--more affluent people are both more likely to have had the kind of structured education that lends itself to high SAT scores and more likely to be able to afford (both in terms of time and money) prep courses.
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- blfr 9y agoThis matters much less than people think it does. First, test prep has only a modest effect on test scores, on the order of 20-40 points combined ... The average SAT score among those with a family income of $20,000-$40,000 is 1402 while the average score among those with an income $100,000 higher, $120,000-$140,000, is 1581 for a 179 point difference. Even if every rich family had a private tutor and none of the poor families had any test prep whatsoever, test prep would explain only 20% of the difference 37/179. If rich families rely on tutors and poor families rely on high school courses, the difference in test prep would explain only 6% (11/179) of the difference in score. The second surprising fact about test prep is that it doesn’t vary nearly as much by income as people imagine. ... The third fact is that test prep varies by race in the opposite way that people imagine. In the quote above, Chris Hayes suggests that whites use test prep much more than blacks. In fact, blacks use test prep more than whites ... http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/03/the-sat-test-prep-income-and-race.html http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/03/the...
- zitterbewegung 9y agoMakes you wonder what kind of similar things that are designed to prevent access that we have from other groups in the past, present and future.
- lithos 9y agoProbably all the typical bad programming interview questions. The ones that target people who can set aside a month of no work, no family, and no 'other responsibilities' to study tangentially related riddles and similar. Culture fit probably. Though it'll just be replaced with something similar.
- zitterbewegung 9y agoAlso, insane hours would probably just select for people who can do 60 hrs plus a week. You just intentionally burn out everyone else and your left with a team that can do it. Note, I am making no claims that this is a good solution or even effective.
- sinxoveretothex 9y agoI think you have to just assume that there is a lot of stupid in any system, so it can't be _all_ of those questions. The people out there who drive drunk or without insurance aren't doing it with the intent of killing people or not having to pay for their damages: they're doing it because they "didn't think about it". Hanlon's razor tells us that a similar phenomenon is at play in many "bad interview questions".
- tptacek 9y agoOr, the emergent result of our hiring processes (alienating and near-untenable interviews coupled with fast tracks for sponsored candidates) is that cultural outsiders (women, people of color, older workers) are effectively locked out of higher-status resume-building jobs, and when companies try to fix those processes even a little, engineers are confronted with culturally unfamiliar potential coworkers and experience the human default of hypervigilance in unfamiliar social situations, which creates a false perception that reformed, rationalized hiring processes are "lowering the bar" when in fact the opposite would probably be happening, with a long term net result that nothing changes, and our industry remains structurally biased against people who can't pass for proto-Zuckerbergs.
- erdbeerkuchen 9y agoWhat was the percentage of Jewish applicants passing these examinations despite all these efforts?
- dia80 9y agoI recall reading elsewhere it was zero, they simply weren't allowed to admit Jewish students and these problems were just to try and cover up the discrimination.
- betaby 9y agoNot true at all. How that explain then world known physicists and mathematicians from USSR with Jewish names?
- lohankin 9y agoIf not for this quota, you would have much greater number of "known physicists and mathematicians from USSR with Jewish names" LOL In some places (Moscow University math dep-t) the target was about 2%, but I heard some technical schools didn't accept anyone (after Natan Scharansky affair. Long story...)
- dia80 9y agoI recall it was Moscow state university they wouldn't admit any, other schools would
- wolf550e 9y agoThere was a quota, like in the US in the 1930s. In the USSR, about 2% of population was Jews, so university was allowed to admit 2% Jews every year. But because of culture of education and desire to avoid conscription to Red Army[1] and non-uniform population density, it was very difficult for Jews to get admitted in the good universities in Moscow and Leningrad (the two largest cities with most prestigious universities). 1 - The Soviet military was bad for everyone, but Jews tended to get hurt more. Students accepted by a university would not be conscripted and would be listed as reserve officers, having never spent time in uniform
- aluminussoma 9y agoThis situation slightly reminds me of the interview process at some tech companies. Over the past year, I have interviewed on-site at 10 different companies. Two of those companies had one interview where the questions were extremely difficult and uncommon. When I told my friends those questions, many also thought the questions were bad interview questions. It is important in any selection mechanism, like interviews, that we have a fair and consistent method of selecting applicants. Yet the questions need to be varied enough so that candidates cannot cheat by hearing the questions ahead of time.
- drharby 9y agoThat presents an interesting problem for job seekers to solve. Can't do gov. Regulations effectively. I'd imagine a more thorough version of glassdoor would help job seekers identify when they are being gicen harder than normal questions, but that would require diligent community participation
- tdy_err 9y agoYou just look at hiring trends.
- tptacek 9y agoThis totally does happen. The way it works is straightforward: the default set of interview questions is almost untenably hard, but sponsored candidates get abbreviated interviews. Especially in small-to-midsize companies, a significant chunk of hiring is network hiring, so this works for awhile.
- aluminussoma 9y agoI did get and take an offer at a solid tech company. On Glassdoor, there were some impossible questions listed. I was referred to that company and I didn't get asked an impossible question. I attributed that to being lucky, but perhaps I lucked out in getting an abbreviated interview.
- pvg 9y agoPrevious discussions: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=jewish%20problems&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=jewish%20problems&sort=byPopul...
- kelukelugames 9y agoI grew up in the 90s and wondered why every single Russian person I knew was Jewish. The wikipedia link is interesting. [1] One non-Jewish person claimed there was no anti-Semitism. Everyone wanted to escape the Soviet Union and people just resented Russian jews because it was easier for them to leave. So I thought maybe anti-Semitism is so engrained that they didn't even notice it. Kind of like how some white Americans don't believe racism exists. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Russia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Russia
- thriftwy 9y agoWasn't that also true, though? In the 90's, most of jews packed their things and promptly moved out. Same for a million "germans" who last were to Germany five generations ago. But russians were stuck, nobody wanted russians (other "mundane" people of Russia, too). I wonder if that's also racist.
- kelukelugames 9y ago1. It is possible both are true. But my problem with him is that he denied discrimination also existed. 2. I suspect it is due to the US government. We really don't want communists in our country. Source: my partner and I immigrated from different "communist" countries.
- myegorov 9y agoFrom what I observed (and learned from others), state sanctioned discrimination against Soviet Jews did not exist at the time of the last wave (say, 1989 onwards). Don't have an axe to grind as I came around that time to the US as a Jewish refugee myself. PS: To put the OP in context (not to condone the practice in any way), the discrimination was directed not just against the Jews, but more generally against any graduates of a select few top specialized physics/math schools (most had over 50% Jewish students). From what I understand, the driving factors behind the discrimination were along the lines of: These schools at the time (70s through mid-80s) were viewed as disloyal; their graduates likely to emigrate to Israel/US post-graduation, overrepresented at top programs etc.
- dorfsmay 9y agoFrom the pdf we know these were still in use in 1975. Anybody knows until when this went on?
- garrybelka 9y agoAt least, until mid-eighties. Some years were worse than others.
- betaby 9y agoSimilar problems were given to everyone on the oral entrance exams in late 90s. They has nothing to do with ones ethnicity though and were given in case if there was disagreement if contestant deserves "5" or should be given "4". If problem(s) were solved "5" was given. (5 was max at that time)
- k__ 9y agoI was hoping for questions they couldn't answer right because of their beliefs.
- kirillkh 9y agoMost of the kids applying were atheists or agnostics. They were Jews by ethnicity, not by religion.
- k__ 9y agoI thought every ethnicity had jews
- kirillkh 9y agoThis is a source of major confusion. Ultimately, it boils down to how one identifies him- or herself or, alternatively, how one is identified by others. Jews in USSR were officially considered an ethnicity like any other, based on blood. The Judaism as a religion was suppressed under the Communist rule. But even before that, there was a lot of assimilation and secularization going on. Ultimately, in the 1970's there were very little Judaism practitioners left. The word "Jew" ("Yevrey") in Russian usually refers to the ethnicity. They use a different word ("Iudjey") when they want to describe someone as a Judaism practitioner.
- imogold 9y agoUnfortunately, these "ideas" for the problems are low quality. Problem 2: "use derivatives". How the heck that helps if F does not have to be continuous, let alone differentiable.
- sampo 9y ago> How the heck that helps If you look at the solution, you'll see how the idea of a derivative helps in that problem.
- imogold 9y agoLet's put this in the context: the article is about problems which are supposedly killer problems because they require some hard-to-get hint to solve. Therefore, a hint is low quality, if another hint exists that is simpler, more elementary, or the problem is solved straightforward anyway. In this case, a simpler hint is: "Do not use derivatives or anything fancy really. Only solutions are constant functions. Proof by contradiction. Use binary search". One may only wonder what level were the problems given to regular candidates.
- stablemap 9y agoIt suggests that F is differentiable, and as soon as you form the difference quotient you know everything. With the hint I think it’s a really cool problem.
- imogold 9y agoCertainly, but if the examiners would be accused of asking a too difficult question, as the article alleged, this would be defended by showing a more elementary approach. Or both of them, wouldn't hurt to have more ways of solving it. Unless the Soviet science was banned from using reductio ad absurdum proofs in some math version of Lysenkoism. Out of curiosity, I've searched it and this article was posted to HN at least four times. Opinions aside, turns out it was merely a footnote in the exam pipeline https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4761846 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4761846
- eighthnate 9y agoReminds me of the white australia policy. You were given tests in european languages that the immigration officer chose. It was primarily meant to keep out the chinese and japanese, but also used to keep out southern/eastern europeans and of course jews. A famous example was of Egon Kisch who was fluent in many european languages and kept passing the dictation tests in many european language. So they finally gave him a test in scottish gaelic and he failed. He was able to sue the government and win the right to stay in australia eventually. "Jewish political activist Egon Kisch from Czechoslovakia, who was exiled from Germany for opposing Nazism, arrived in Australia in 1934. The Government of Joseph Lyons went to extraordinary lengths to exclude Kisch, including using the dictation test. Kisch was fluent in a number of European languages, and after completing passages in several languages, he finally failed when he was tested in Scottish Gaelic." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Restriction_Act_1901 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Restriction_Act_19...
- akras14 9y agoMy dad was a mechanical engineer in USSR who got his education in late 70s. The discrimination was worse in some areas. Moscow - forget about it. My dad got his degree in Minsk, and had many jews from other "states" move there just so they can get into college. That is why there are somany known Soviet mathematicians with Jewish names. They still had paths to persue higher education, just not in Moscow and other desirable areas.
- thriftwy 9y agoWhat's the funniest here? Jews that were rejected from MSU went straight across the street to Institute of Oil. And were promptly admitted. Guess it helped them in post-Soviet times.
- ll931110 9y agoFor those who are interested, Edward Frenkel's book "Love and Math" chronicles his personal experience of taking such a test, and being denied entrance to Moscow State University despite superb performance in the exam. (He later got Math PhD in Harvard at age 23 and became a professor at UC Berkeley)
- stablemap 9y agoSome of his story is in this article from the Notices. http://www.ams.org/notices/199910/fea-saul.pdf http://www.ams.org/notices/199910/fea-saul.pdf
- ohcomeon 9y agoJews in general seem to have done just fine in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_and_religion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_and_religion
- forapurpose 9y agoIt wasn't just the USSR, though AFAIK it was much worse there (and still is in Russia and parts of E. Europe). In the U.S., I know a Jewish family that in the 1950s changed their last name to something not associated with Jewish people so that a child could get into college; there were quotas.
- smm2000 9y agoPretty much exactly the same thing happens with Asian students in US universities today - admission standards vary widely by ethnicity/race. Jews were 2% of population but 10-20%+ of university students. Reverse discrimination was a thing then and is a thing now.
- vajrabum 9y agoI guess they have "reverse discrimination" in handing out prizes for intellectual contributions too. From Wikipedia: "While only about 2% of the U.S. population is of full Jewish descent,[1] 27% of United States Nobel prize winners in the 20th century,[1][2] 25% of Fields Medal winners, 25% of ACM Turing Award winners,[1] 9 out of the 19 world chess champions, and a quarter of Westinghouse Science Talent Search winners have either full or partial Jewish ancestry." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligence
- uiri 9y agoThat 2% figure includes full Jews. But what percentage of the population has partial Jewish ancestry?
- zingmars 9y ago>reverse discrimination No such thing. Discrimination is discrimination, no matter which way it's applied. I wish people stopped saying "reverse (discrimination|racism)" whatever as if these words meant discrimination against specific groups, but not others.
- akira2501 9y agoI think it's meant to imply the reasoning behind it. "Standard discrimination" is done out of fear or hatred, and "reverse discrimination" is done out of ignorance and a misguided desire to "help."
- astura 9y agoNo, it does not happen in US universities today. "Select applicants" are not given trick questions "distinguished by having a simple solution that is difficult to find" in the US.
- davidf18 9y agoNobel Prize Winner in Physics Richard Feynman was turned down by Columbia University because of the Jewish quota (he went to MIT). Nobel Prize Winner in Physiology or Medicine Arthur Kornberg was one of three successful Jewish applicants to medical school out of his class of 200. Kornberg's son, Roger, later won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
- hahahaha23 9y agoToday, Asians are required to achieve higher grades to be accepted to colleges. How is this different?
- mikek 9y agoAsians are accepted to colleges. The point of these problems is to prevent any undesirable groups from passing the exam ever.
- linkmotif 9y agoJust sent this to my mom who’s told me how this happened to her. > Wow wow wow. I knew I was not the only one, but it still hurts. I looked at some problems: the most horrific part was that the guy next to me was asked what is the tangent. He got 4(/5). I got 3.
- boards2x 9y agoDefine “Jewish”. Most Russian jews are not that. If fact, it is accepted in Israel that about 30% (beyond doubt) of the economical immigrants dragged into Israel by then right wing prime minister Shamir, in order to manipulate its demographic composition (20% Arabs both Christian and Muslim), are Christians. Nothing wrong with that, only no need to pretend. Whatever the Eastern European jewery is/was, is mostly a hated group with its origins never fully understood. What does a Russian or Eastern European jew has to do with a group of people from the Middle East? They don’t “look the part” ie “Jewish”, and very likely that even if they do descend from Jews, they’ve assimilated to a degree which makes their origin completely anacdothal.
- bitL 9y agoAnd now they are given to programmers at large companies during interviews... We should revolt as well ;-)
- dannylandau 9y agoStrange to hear, my father got into Michmat (Moscow State University Math Department) in the 70's. In 80's we immigrated to Israel.
- louprado 9y agoJesus' full fish basket has a capacity of 0.1 cubic meters. Each fish in the basket has a volume of 0.0008 cubic meters and a packing density of 1.25. Jesus then distributes 33 fish. How many fish remain in Jesus' basket ? Since the title of the post doesn't properly describe the article, this comment feels appropriate albeit insensitive.