Technically, standardized tests are designed so it’s nearly impossible to get a perfect score. Interestingly, getting a perfect score of 0 is also extremely hard.
The thing is, there’s factual answers to two of those questions. Boeing themselves could tell you how many rivets go into making a 747 and I know there are aeroplane compulsives who will have counted them - they exist for World War II aircraft so someone, somewhere will have counted exactly how many rivets there are in a 747 variant.
And there will be an American Association of Petroleum Retailers or something like that who can give you a pretty good idea of how many petrol stations there are in the US - it might not be an exact number but it’ll be within cooee and certainly cromulent as a general indicator.
And having worked in retail, the posters who suggested it as a tongue-in-cheek response aren’t completely off the mark. There are some situations you cannot win - tell a customer they can’t have a new widget because the one they’re holding has clearly been run over by a freight train and they’ll not only complain to head office until someone gives them a new widget, they’ll ensure you get reprimanded in the process.
On the other hand, give them a new widget despite the fact the one they’ve got has clearly been run over a freight train and they’ll likely take a “So you bloody well should have anyway, the customer is always right” approach and then you’ll get reprimanded by head office for not following protocol as laid out in both your employee handbook and the supplementary Customer is trying to return a widget which has clearly been run over by a freight train: Procedures and Processes memo which was circulated on 16/8/2009.
There’s quite a few jobs with competing, seemingly impossible (and therefore unwinnable) requirements/outcomes. Fortunately most of them, at present, don’t involve starships.
I don’t understand this. Can someone fight my ignorance on this please?
Making the lake deeper is equivalent to draining it partially once. The depth of the lake doesn’t influence the average water level over time. (Unless I missed something, not having any formal education in geography beyond high school.)
Is this actually true?
Having a perfect raw score of a zero would be hard, but you aren’t given a raw score. On the old SATs - I think the lowest you could get was a 200 for each section. This would mean probably as much as a 800 percentile wise, but they are people that are trying to get good scores.
If you are trying to pick the correct answer - you only have a 1/4 or 1/5 chance, but to pick the incorrect we are talking 75-80%. I think I could answer enough questions wrong on purpose to do worse than someone would do by chance. If I had done better on those tests I might be able to provide the math to prove it. No one that is TRYING to get a good score - or even just doesn’t care - should do WORSE than chance (ok well enough people just guess the whole thing - then some will do worse than chance).
It’s pretty easy, actually. Take the sheet, write down your name, hand the sheet back. Perfect 0. Booyah !
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No one that is TRYING to get a good score - or even just doesn’t care - should do WORSE than chance (ok well enough people just guess the whole thing - then some will do worse than chance).
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We don’t really do multiple-choice exams here in France for the most part, but in the few exams I took that used the format you’d get docked more points for answering wrong than for simply not answering the question. If you really applied yourself at being terrible you could wind up with a negative final score, even.
This to specifically ensure that the “fling darts at answer sheet” strategy had a significantly lower chance of working than plain 1/5 odds per question. Since this was in med. school, I further expect the “if you’re not sure, don’t wing it” takeaway from the system was deliberate 
I meant the surface level of the lake is going to be the same. Digging it deeper just means more water will be put in. The surface level won’t be lower.
But the interviewee has no access to Boeing engineers or petroleum institutes, just like the Starfleet cadet has no access to the Death Star (yes, I know) which would make the situation winnable. The similarity is that the person being tested simply has no means to come up with the right answer, but neither test is actually expecting success; it is simply a test of other attributes of the candidate.
I’ve sat employment-related tests that were designed not to be anywhere near reasonably possible within the time allotted.
Not really the same thing as the Kobayashi Maru, because I guess a super-genius might be able to complete them - but for ordinary mortals, they were specifically designed to provoke a response to the dilemma of finishing all questions vs getting the answers right.
You means besides looking it up on their smartphone? Seriously, if Fred Bloggs was in a job interview and got asked “How many rivets are there in a Boeing 747?”, it’s ludicrously simple for him to pull out his smartphone and look it up on the internet. It’s not an impossible thing to get an answer for.
Incidentally, the answer to the question (for those playing along at home) appears to be about 1.5 million rivets, based on a cursory Google search.
I sort of had one as a highschool lab project, it was to make a hologram given a laser, beam splitter, mirrors holographic film etc. The problem was that the school was too close to a busy roadway in a commercial area and there was no way to isolate the vibrations caused by this. Since the hologram is caused by interference patterns of the light waves causing basically a ‘standing wave’ which gets imprinted onto the film, any minor vibration would cause that standing wave pattern to change and no hologram produced.
My solution was to turn in the lab report stating the procedure and results (no hologram), and potential reason for this. I got a A on this project, some other students also tried and also could not produce it and they turned in nothing and got a F.
So it was not a total no win situation, as there was a way to win, but that win was by not accomplishing the assumed goal (to produce a hologram), but then again the true goal was to turn in a lab report.
No, applicants can’t look up the answer on their smart phone. They can’t phone a friend. They can’t make a quick trip up to Renton. For the third time, the challenge of the question is that the person does not have the tools adequate to successfully complete the question/challenge, and is being judged by how they perform in a situation they cannot complete satisfactorily.
Seriously, have you all never even heard of these sorts of questions? Do you doubt that they exist? Do you think that when a fresh MBA is being interviewed for his or her first job, he fights the question like you are doing here?
Just some cites to show how common this question is:
http://www.softgardenhq.com/impossible-interview-questions/
http://wallstreetjobreport.com/50-incredibly-annoying-interview-questions/
http://www.integritystaffing.com/blog/?p=5304
But if you don’t have access to The Answer, then your job is to come up with a reasonable estimate - one that’s in the same order of magnitude as The Answer. The intent is not to test your Google-fu, bt your ability to reason and estimate and cope with limited resources.
See Fermi Problem.
When I was in grad school I had to take a Ph.D. qualifying exam. This was a set of four very challenging 2-hour exams, with three of them covering specific subjects (heat transfer, thermodynamics, and fluid mechanics) and one covering general engineering and problem-solving. I recall encountering at least a couple of problems where The Answer would have been impossible to compute within a reasonable amount of time; instead, you scored points by explaining your thought process in as much detail as possible. If you wasted a ton of time trying to calculate The Answer, you wouldn’t have time for the rest of the exam. So it was about setting priorities and demonstrating that you understood how to approach an engineering problem, even if you didn’t have the resources to immediately execute that approach.
This sounds quite a lot like the Kobayashi Maru. I’ve often heard that when things are going badly in the cockpit, good pilots are expected to continue trying to solve the problem right up until the point of impact, even if the problem appears to be unsolvable. If you’re faced with likely imminent death/disaster, do you have the mental fortitude to continue trying to fly the plane, or do you wet your pants and start screaming the Lord’s Prayer? I suspect that is what the simulated windshear events were supposed to reveal.
I can’t answer for the others in the thread, but I have no idea what interviewing for an MBA position involves.
I do, however, know that in my line of work being able to find random bits of accurate information quickly on the internet - on a phone or otherwise - is a desirable skill set, so I suspect if a hypothetical journalist was being interviewed for a job and asked how many rivets in a Boeing 747, pulling out a smartphone and looking it up would be a perfectly cromulent thing to do. “Dunno. Lots?” is not the answer the interviewers would be seeking.
Twenty five years ago I interviewed at one company and after a full day of technical interviews with lots of programming problems the last question was this…
“Design two six sided dice so that the probability of all results from 2 to 12 are equal.” After playing with the equations enough to realize it was impossible, I ended up writing a proof that it was impossible and giving them that.
It sounds cruel but it was a great company to work for (in fact the only company I’ve ever worked for. After leaving there 10 years later I went the entrepreneur route), had very high standards, and we ended up inventing something that most of you now use every day.
Doesn’t it take about 10 seconds to realize that there is no way to equalize the probability of rolling a two?
When I was in Army OCS the last 3 week phase was running squad sized missions against OPFOR. Receive the mission, go through troop leading procedures, run the mission, AAR, start a different mission with a different leader. The final mission was supposed to be special. A large scale mission with an Air Assault. We were supposed to be inserted by Chinook then move to an assault position and take an objective. But as soon as we landed we got hit. The entire LZ was surrounded. It really was a no win situation. I don’t think it was supposed to teach anything, it was after three weeks of lessons and we had already been evaluated. It was basically run around and shoot. I was killed about 30 seconds in but since I was carrying the pig I didn’t mind too much.
Exactly, I had a question like this on a recent interview. “What is the global size of the market for Premium Plastic Additives?” WTF do I know about the size of the Plastic market, or additives, I’m in finance, and I’ve never worked in the Plastics industry. What they wanted was to see me come up with an answer, how I went step to step, what assumptions I made, and how I applied them.
“You are temporarily in charge of a diplomatic post in tinpot dictatorship X. You happen to be standing near the (guarded) entrance when you notice a man obviously running towards it, chased by several goons. He’s shouting that they’re going to kill him. What do you do?”
“Considering that blablahblah and blahblahblah…”
“Too late, he’s already in the embassy. What now?”
I don’t think there was any correct answer.
“I can best show you what a good addition I would be by explaining that this is a pointless question and we’ll both be more productive if we just move on,” said the guy who already had a job.