In my experience, the latter can pass the interview with some coaxing. Someone who knows the right answer but who's frozen due to anxiety can often complete a t

In my experience, the latter can pass the interview with some coaxing. Someone who knows the right answer but who's frozen due to anxiety can often complete a thought that's already in their head if someone else starts verbalizing it. On the other hand, no amount of hints can help the truly incompetent liar, since they can't produce any thoughts on how to solve the problem in the first place. The problem is that many (most?) interviewers have no idea how to effectively coax a candidate along. They usually sit there in silence for an awkwardly long period of time and then fail the candidate, or offer totally irrelevant hints that don't reflect how someone would actually think about the problem.