The Kobayashi Maru is the test supposedly given at Starfleet Academy for which there is no solution (Kobayashi Maru - Wikipedia); legendarily, Cadet Kirk is supposed to have cheated at the test to make a win possible.
From one point of view it’s valuable to Starfleet to see how a candidate handles a situation so difficult that failure is inevitable - you will see whether the candidate fails by running away, collapsing in a corner, or by attempting to save as many lives as possible.
But in order to be realistic, the failure conditions have to be realistic - it’s perfectly reasonable to see how a candidate fails when faced with a dozen superior ships, crewed by unremittingly hostile aliens. But the way the the Kobyashi Maru is described sometimes, it sounds more like a test where if the candidate somehow manages to destroy the enemy craft, a new enemy craft pops up at just that moment, to carry on the fight - and that situation doesn’t illuminate the candidate’s character more than a game of “Space Invaders” does. The universe may be out to get everyone, but it does it by honest rules, not like a sadistic game master. But that’s the real universe, after all. By Kirk’s lights, a scenario with a guaranteed failure is a cheat to start with, so why not cheat against it.
But a second thought occurs: the excessively rigged depiction of the Koyayashi Maru is much like what Kirk 1.1 (you didn’t think that Gary Mitchell’s Kirk is the same Kirk that dealt with Khan, do you?) faced in “Spectre of the Gun”. Kirk made every effort to evade the gunfight at OK Corral, but just as he seemed to succeed, he was teleported right to the location of the fight. If Starfleet officers are regularly faced with sadistic Game Masters like the Melkotians, the Q, the Nagilium, Trelane, and the like, perhaps they’d better be faced with completely unrealistic situations in training and testing as well. Of course, by that criterion, Kirk handled things just right - if someone’s screwing with reality to mess with you, taking the situation seriously is exactly the wrong approach to take.
It seems to me the Kobayashi Maru isn’t a good test of the candidate’s ability to act under pressure and/or face the no win situation. Certainly the cadets go into the test knowing about it; I’m sure they’ve heard other cadets and recent grads talking about it. If a person going through what amounts to be a psychology test knows what he is being tested for, the results will be skewed.
The really screwy thing about the Kobayashi Maru test is that it isn’t a no-win: There is a single correct response, and yet almost none of the test-takers we hear of take that response. The correct response is to never enter the Neutral Zone in the first place.
Yeah, it would certainly be better to have a random no-win test stuck in with all the other various tests performed. So they never know that they will fail this one no matter what.
The thing is, you don’t know what you’re going to find out there. Sure, they all speak English but when you run up against Apollo, or space Nazis, or have to make a duotronic processor out of stone knives and bearskins you better be able to improvise.
That’s right. If there’s one thing Starfleet has learned, it’s that when you go pushing out into the galaxy, some weird shit will go down. About once a week.
I trust that while the senate gives advice and consent to the person thats appointed the legal rank of captain in Starfleet, Starfleet themselves is going to make sure that the candidate for a captaincy of one of its cruisers is going to be a very small group of heros.
The phrase “England expects all” strikes me as being something thats written in blood, when your in the deep dark and no chance of being reinforced or resupplied or even rescued and you want your captains to reflect that. So how do you choose.
The guys that dont enter the neutral zone, sorry no command track for you. Other guys, might be good at tactical , will never advance beyond division head. Taken in that context, it would probably show who gives up the easiest, and who does what is required, even though it takes losing the ship in a spectacular way.
In the TOS novel Kobayashi Maru (#47 in the Pocket series), we learn how Kirk, Sulu, Scotty and Chekov all handled the test. (I highly recommend the book.) For those who want to know, spoilers are below.
[spoiler]Kirk, as we know, rigged the simulator. In the novel, his solution is arguably even funnier than that of the alternate-universe Kirk in Star Trek: He reprogrammed the simulator so that the Klingons recognize him as having a reputation. When he introduces himself as “Captain Kirk”, the Klingon commander replies, "The Captain Kirk?" and immediately begins helping Kirk’s ship in their rescue. Kirk’s superiors not only gave him a commendation for original thinking, but 99 demerits, just short of the expulsion limit. (McCoy thought this entire story was funny as hell, and “just so in-character” for Kirk).
Chekov blew up the ship, taking four Klingon ships with it. And he heard it from his instructor.
Sulu chose not to enter the Neutral Zone. His crew nearly mutinied over it, but his first officer had his back. (If the book were canon, this would disprove Declan’s theory about weeding such candidates out of the command pool.)
Scotty took it personally and put up one hell of a fight, using every bit of engineering knowledge he could muster. The computer just kept throwing more and more Klingon ships after him. He took out the first three Klingon ships by trial-and-error finding of their shield frequency with his ship’s phasers. He took out five by beaming a canister of antimatter out to them and then beaming back just the canister, leaving the antimatter behind. Scotty destroyed the next group of nine “war dragons” by locking transporters onto the juncture points of the Klingons’ shield systems and beaming six photon torpedoes each into them (which, as it turns out, was something impossible to achieve in reality). His ship then got annihilated by the next wave of 15, but still, he racked up 17 “kills”.
This helped his instructors realize that his true calling was engineering.
[/spoiler]
I have to think Starfleet doesn’t base their posting on one test. But it probably is weighted heavily. It sounds like the KM test is more of a behavioral test to evaluate a candidates leadership style. Are they improvisational like Kirk? Traditional like Sulu? Stupidly courageous like Scotty?
Plus I’m sure no one comes out of Starfleet Acadamy commanding a ship any more than you do graduating from Annapolis.
One thing they don’t take into account that people talk. Apparently they kept the same test for years. You think that no student ever told anyone about it? They all would know about it beforehand and at least try to come up with their own solution.
In William Shatner’s novel Avenger, Captain Christine McDonald of the USS Tobias tells Captain Kirk that in her time, the Kobayashi Maru scenario is no longer used to test character, but rather to evaluate the very “original thinking” for which Kirk had received a commendation. In the new version of the scenario, cadets are charged with coming up with ways to outsmart the simulation by reprogramming it to counter various moves made by the more advanced AI of the computer.
I don’t think there is a truly correct response. (Even though Kirk says it’s a test of character.) I think it’s goal is to try and get the cadets to discover something about themselves. Teach them that they must always evaluate themselves, and seek to improve… whatever.
What I never understood is how can a cadet ever forget that they are really sitting on Terra Firma in San Francisco? How can there ever really be a feeling of danger?
They even did a training scenario with Troi in an episode where she was supposed to order someone (Jeordi?) to do something that would result in their sacrifice-death in order to “pass” the test. But no one actually died! And she undoubtedly knew that no one was really going to die in order for her to get her Bridge Quals.
How do modern militaries deal with that key difference? Do they bother trying?
You’d be surprised how convincing a full-immersion simulation can be when you get into it. Throw enough stuff at the candidate and they forget they are in a simulation for a bit.
I recall a funny scene in another novel where a cadet desperately tried something she’d seen in a movie (or their equivalent) and told the computer to fight the ship by itself when most of the bridge crew was “dead”. Thing is, the “ship computer” is the simulation computer, and since it knew perfectly the actions and intent of both sides of the simulated fight it simulated a perfect battle using ideal defenses and attacks. The simulator basically wrecked itself as it simulated fighting to the last computer-controlled phaser and erg of power.
I recall reading a while back about how a technician working on one of the newer advanced flight simulators fainted when they were testing a crash scenario.
Especially when you think your entire future is riding on the results!
I think an interesting parallel is a discussion going on in another thread about the short story, The Cold Equations. People seem to be getting all worked up over the improbability of the scenario or the engineering or trying to come up with their own solutions for what they would have done to “win”. Maybe that’s the sort of thing the KM test is supposed to evaluate? Can you assess the situation, realize there is no good outcome and do what needs to be done with grace and poise? Or do you freeze up, pout, complain it’s not fair or try to cheat the test so you can “win”?
Or maybe the whole purpose of the test is to teach a bunch of arrogant, overacheiving, insufferable cadets that just because they are Starfleet graduates doesn’t mean they can’t get their ass fucking handed to them out there.
You think he’s not? Other than the different middle initial on a tombstone (later wanked away as an in-joke between Kirk and Mitchell) is there any indication of that?
Anyway, I’m with Kirk on this one. If a test is set up to guarantee failure, that test is itself cheating, thus making cheating on the test a fair play.