6 ms·
Using the brown M&M's as a test to check if the contract was read thoroughly counts as a clever hack in my book.
by dkokelley 17y ago
Using the brown M&M's as a test to check if the contract was read thoroughly counts as a clever hack in my book.
- tyvkiuiyi 17y agoPure genius! I had a lecturer (a Brit) who would insert the phrase 'Rule Britannia' into lecture notes to see if anyone ever read them. There is also an urban myth about some entrance exam for Police/Army/Pilots etc where the instructions say read all the questions first. And the last question says, do not answer any questions just 'do some arbitrary thing' - to check wether you follow instructions properly.
- hieronymusN 17y agoNot an urban myth - that little joke was pulled more than once in US grammar schools in the 70/80's
- snprbob86 17y agoI've had several teachers pull that crummy joke when I was in grammar school in the 90s too. This is more or less the test: http://echochamber.me/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=24333&start=0 http://echochamber.me/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=24333&star... Personally, I don't think there is a lesson to be learned here. It amounts to nothing more than a lame practical joke.
- boredguy8 17y agoThe lesson is: some people really like hierarchy and bureaucracy. Probably appropriate for pre-flight checks. Probably not appropriate for children in school.
- neoclassical 17y agoIt's a cheap shot, but it does cut down on obliviously repeating the process you've been taught. We want people to read directions for any new process, no?
- cakesy 17y agoIt teacher you to follow instructions. The one we had was a set of increasingly complex instructions, and the last instruction saying to just sit there quietly. So you would be working hard at solving the problems, and various people would just be sitting there with a smile on there face. You knew these people, since they were your classmates, so they weren't savants, so how did they get through these problems so quickly. Eventually each one of you realise, and look for the trick, getting to the last question. There is always someone who just keeps going.
- snprbob86 17y ago1) No, it doesn't. The wording is typically "read everything before doing anything". That completely ambiguous. Most exams start with meaningless instructions about which pages you can and can't write on. How to fill in bubbles completely. What type of writing implement to use. It is a complete waste of your time to read initial instructions on exams, just as it is a complete waste of your time to read the initial remarks in most other aspects of life. 2) Even if it did teach you to follow instructions, is that a good lesson? I think I've only gotten to where I am in life by explicitly NOT following instructions.
- derefr 17y ago#2 is not the lesson actually learned. The high-level instructions contradict the low-level instructions, and the lesson is on how to handle that (usually by following the high-level instructions.) This is the lesson that the Swedish military qualification exam posted here earlier tested (with "orders of a superior" as the low-level instruction and "Human rights" as the high-level instruction.)
- steveplace 17y agoHad a college professor do that to me. Said to read all the instructions-- instructions said skip #3 (4 question test). #3 Just happened to be the toughest material of the class, where a mastery of both Haitian witchcraft and the Coriolis effect were needed.
- jamesbritt 17y agoYeah. I got that, and learned, once again, that RTFM was not part of my skill set.
- dangoldin 17y agoI've had that done to me on a test in elementary school. After going through a third of the test doing the most menial problems, I read the last question and realized what my problem was. At that point it was just entertaining watching everyone else struggle through with it.
- vaksel 17y agoNot sure if that rule britania story is applicable, what was being tested? For students to stand up and start yelling U - S- A - U - S - A - U - S - A.
- JDigital 17y agoIt's a serious usability fault, not a clever hack. This test paper fails to comply with the user's expectations, like a webpage that breaks the Back button.
- benmathes 17y agoThis all depends on where the onus lies. If you're developing a consumer-focused web application and your instructions are extremely complicated the onus is on the app creator to simplify. There are plenty of situations, however, where the relationship is really a partnership, and both sides need to fully get up to speed with each other. The Van Halen Case appears to be the latter.
- philwelch 17y agoSometimes people have habits, like following their own expectations and assumptions rather than paying attention to detail and accurately comprehending clear, simple, literal instructions. These are good habits to test for, and good habits to break, in many instances. Not everything in the world neatly maps onto people's assumptions and intuitions.
- jonny_noog 17y agoThere is also an urban myth about some entrance exam for Police/Army/Pilots etc where the instructions say read all the questions first. And the last question says, do not answer any questions just 'do some arbitrary thing' - to check wether you follow instructions properly. I have actually experienced this kind of test. in my case, it was coupled with telling the test participants that they only have a short amount of time to complete the test, thus making it even more likely that the test participants would start answering questions immediately rather than following instructions to the letter. Particularly when this extra time limit trick may be used, I'm not sure what value the test really had. Supposedly, even the police and armed forces are looking for people with initiative who can think creatively and not just mindless automatons who follow orders without question. This kind of test would not seem to align with that goal.
- rosser 17y agoBeing able to notice little details like that is completely orthogonal to an individual's relative initiative and creativity vs. automaton-hood. It's probably often enough that those very details you were "too rushed to notice" are the ones that could kill you in that kind of work.
- jonny_noog 17y agoI see your point but thinking back on the situation as it was framed, it still seems to me that it was a direct test as to whether one will follow the procedure as it was stated or opt to stray from it. What conclusions could then be drawn from that are up for speculation I suppose. Perhaps creativity vs. "automaton-hood" is not the dichotomy being tested and the value of the test really is more to do with following instructions when not doing so could kill you. But the sceptic/rebel in me wonders about those situations where following the instructions may well get you killed. I am not in the military or law enforcement and for better or worse, past experiences have taught me to be suspicious of both.
- DougBTX 17y agoIf you only have a short period of time, even better to skim through the test: to look for the easy questions to start with.
- philwelch 17y agoMy dad gave a test like that to people when he was in the Marine Corps. I'm not sure when he did it or in what unit but he says it was a test of their ability to follow directions. Since my dad had a lot of commands over maintenance, support, and engineer units it makes sense.
- miked 17y agoWhen I was an undergrad, one of the sharper students wrote a paper for a teacher who was famous for not reading the homework. In the middle of the paper he wrote a page or two extolling the virtues of the "come from" statement, and why it was superior to the "goto" statement. She gave him an 'A' on the paper.
- AndrewWarner 17y agoGreat idea. Though let's not deny that there's some rock star ego involved here too.
- jobeirne 17y agoThere's some rock star ego involved in most clever hacks.
- joe_the_user 17y agoAh... Enlightenment! There is a method to the madness of those insane autocrats who demands ridiculous things... The thing is, it is madness all the same...
- ubernostrum 17y agoThen there's the recruiter-checking equivalent of "pink box testing": http://neilbowers.wordpress.com/2008/08/11/pink-box-testing/ http://neilbowers.wordpress.com/2008/08/11/pink-box-testing/
- nostrademons 17y agoBut companies routinely do this in job interviews and then get decried for asking frivolous, irrelevant questions. When Google asks prospective PMs what a binary search or hashtable is, it's not because they actually expect product managers to ever write one. It's because those are a proxy for general CS knowledge; it shows that either they've come out of an academic CS department or they hang around engineers enough to know the basic terminology. This in turn is a proxy for "Won't demand unreasonable features from engineering and can communicate reasonably well with them." This is rather important for a tech company, as anyone who's ever worked under someone with no clue about technology could tell you. Similarly, when companies ask how many gas stations there are in the U.S, they don't actually care what the answer is. Rather, they want to see how you respond when put in a situation where you obviously don't have enough information to come up with a precise answer. They want to see what sort of background information you draw on to make an estimate; this is often a proxy for how open and aware you are to new experiences. They want to see you combine whatever background information you have to solve a problem. They want to see you self-check and see if your answer seems reasonable. Yet for some reason, it's clever when Van Halen does it and pedantic when it happens in a job interview...
- Goladus 17y agoThe M&M test is very specific. If you see brown M&Ms, it means they didn't read the contract carefully or take the details seriously. That in turn means something important and potentially dangerous is likely to be seriously wrong. The snopes article states that experience confirms this prediction. The "how many gas stations in the US" question is nothing like the brown M&Ms test. It is not testing anything nearly so specific, nor is it as easily confirmed by experience. At best you're taking a subjective interpretation of a creative answer and comparing it to subjective performance down the road. And even if you don't consider the inherent subjectivity, it's hard to document a reasonable number of positive and negative test cases; and even then controlling for other variables is essentially impossible. Van Halen used the test to predict performance conditions for a specific date and venue. The gas stations answer is used to predict the behavior of a person for a significant period of time.