There was “The Quiz from Hell” I had in some theatre class, which was decorated with flames and devils on it. It included questions like “What is the mass of an 8’ pine 2X4.” After about two minutes he said “Looks pretty hard. Would you guys rather have the real test?”
My dad later used the same idea for the Accounting class he taught, and every other question was something like “An ant is in the middle of a circle with a radius of 2 meters. It walks 1 meter, stops, turns a random number of degrees, and repeats. What is the average distance the ant would walk before exiting the circle?” (Or something like that). After a few minutes he told them to only answer the even numbered questions, and to not say anything if the two guys who weren’t there yet showed up.
In ninth grade, Introductory Physical Sciences, our first lab science class, a mix of chemistry and physics. The teacher pulled both the “read all the instructions first” and the puzzles like “where do you bury the survivors?”. For credit. Actual grades, semester tests. This was the first time most of us had encountered stuff like that. It was fun watching the other students stand up and do silly things while I actually read the instructions.
But that teacher had a warped sense of humor. We had an influx of Vietnamese students some years before, and she told us she once told some of her students that “Bah Humbug” was Vietnamese for “Merry Christmas”.
I wish I could recall the exact problem but it was almost 30 years ago, I do remember that almost everyone go the program to work in general but errors could be induced in the debugging phase which could not be rectified.
The problem may have actually been in the question.
Okay. The test started out with the teacher (Psych, in high school, more than 40 years ago FWIW) saying “This is a test on how well you follow instructions.” The test says, “1. Read through all the questions 2. Write your name…20. Now that you have read all the questions, go back and do only questions 1 and 2.” I don’t know how much clearer it could be. I just don’t see where it’s incorrect. Read all the questions before answering; do/answer only questions 1 and 2.
@Dogzilla and Drain Bead–PR profs seem to really love the old mindfuck. I had a class in Persuasive Speaking and Writing. A couple of weeks before finals week the prof asked for a show of hands whether we would like to have a written final or an oral one, and it was about half and half–maybe a little more for written (or maybe I only think that because that’s what I was for). A couple of classes later he came in and said he’d come to a decision. Since we hadn’t picked whether to have a written or an oral, we were going to have BOTH, but he’d give us a second chance. We had 30 minutes to figure it out. And then he left the room.
Many big arguments started, until we realized that…the class was Persuasive Speaking and Writing. I figured, and argued for it, that if we ALL picked either one OR the other, then we would probably all pass. Because this–convincing our fellow students–was. the. final. And then I (who had been vehemently pro-written) said I didn’t care which one, because I figured if we all decided on one, that was it. And lucky for me, I was right. We all rather quickly voted on oral, and we had no other final, and we all passed.
The number one norm of tests is “put the answer you think the test writer wants you to put”. This over-rides all other norms, including, “follow the test as written”, and “put the correct answer”.
Not really a “trick,” but an unexpected event. It was the second week of AP History in high school. We were all the “smart kids,” but this was the first time any of us had had an AP class and our teacher was going to show us that “AP” meant “even the smart kids have to work their butt off.” She told us to read the second chapter (on the Constitutional Convention) over the weekend, so most of us skimmed it.
Monday we came into class and the desks were in a circle. Odd. When the bell rang our teacher put on a tricorne hat and grabbed a gavel. The smacked it on the desk and yelled, “This meeting of the Constitutional Convention in now in order!” She pointed at one of the students and said, “Mr. Madison, when we last met you were talking about how slaves should be counted for the purpose of representation in taxing and in the House. Can you remind us of your opinion?”
The kid stammered, “Uh . . . I . . . don’t think they should count?”
She replied “Are you feeling OK Mr. Madison? Earlier you had proposed three-fifth their population should count.” Here we all gulped as she wrote something down in what looked like her grade book.
“Mr. Hamilton,” she said pointing at someone else, “I seem to remember you had rejected the Virginia and New Jersey Plans and had another arrangement in mind. Can you elaborate on it?”
That teacher was a pain in the ass sometimes, but man we sure learned.
I’ve had the “don’t do any of the work” test, though as I recall, it was actually something like 4 short essay questions, not doing silly stuff. So if you failed to read the instructions you just did a buttload of work you didn’t have to.
People may say it’s stupid, but I can’t tell you how many times my 8yo has asked for my help on homework, only to proceed perfectly well on her own after I asked her to read the directions to me. She clearly tends to leap ahead and try to assume what the point of the question is.
Anyway, in 10th grade I had a really good team-taught honors class that combined English and history. The textbook they used seemed pretty well done, except that evidently the answer key in the teacher’s edition was FUBAR. Instead of just grading our quizzes by the correct answers, the teachers (informing us ahead of time) graded the quizzes by the answer key, handed them back, and then opened a discussion where we could argue for our answers and show why they were actually correct. This was probably one of the best learning experiences ever offered in my school - so much more profound than barf-it-back memorization and quizzing.
In the same class: one of the teachers was known for having a bit of a short temper. One day he stormed into class, called a kid to the front of the room, and chewed him out, then sent him out of class, and followed him into the hall. . . . Then the other teacher told us to write up our eye-witness accounts of the event, and we later compared them to demonstrate how different and downright inaccurate eye-witness accounts can be, especially for unexpected, stressful events. Brilliant (and yes, the kid who got chewed out was a confederate!).
I had my History teacher, 7th grade, pull a minor one on us (and this guy was definitely known as a joker; I should have known better). I can’t recall the exact phrasing of the question; It was something along the lines of “European pheasants something something something.”
My thoughts : Hrm; I’m a bad speller…I’m pretty sure he misspelled peasants. Ok, true.
Nope; he was asking about pheasants.
Not a class, per se, but I had a very similar experience.
I was a Boy Scouts Explorer in high school, which meant hanging out at the local newspaper once a week for a couple years, learning how to be a fledgling Lois Lane. We had been talking about press conferences and the adviser for the group was a reporter for the paper – not a teacher in any way, but mind you, this lesson is still with me. (So I think it turns out she was a great teacher who worked as a journalist.)
Right in the middle of her set up, which was all about how to be a good reporter during a press conference by making NO assumptions and by verifying details, a sketchy-looking random guy broke into the newspaper’s conference room. He starts yelling and ranting and raving to this reporter about how the story she wrote ruined his life and it was all her fault and he was going to kill her right then and there. he physically backed her out of the room (into the mezzanine that looked out over the press room) and from there, we heard a scream and what sounded like our intrepid reporter being beaten with a baseball bat. (I can’t remember if the guy was armed or had something in his hands to imply he was armed or what.) Well, we were a room full of 15-, 16- and 17-year-olds, so we all just sat there rooted to the spot. :eek: One Hero type guy jumped up from his chair and ran to the door and looked out at the window. I think he thought he was going to intervene. Funny, it never occurred to any of us to call security OR the cops. The kid’s reaction when he turned back to the room said it all: it was a big farce.
The reporter and her photog friend (usually newspaper photogs look as sketchy as any homeless person, for some reason LOL) came back into the room laughing.
We were all visibly relieved until she introduced herself as the County Sheriff and started spouting arrest details of “the intruder at the newspaper.” We realized quickly that the whole thing had been staged for us to see how much detail we could soak up as witnesses and then she changed roles and we had to pelt her with questions and then go write the story. The most interesting thing was, as we reviewed the stories we’d written, the bias was very noticeable. Even though each one of us had witnessed the event, our stories were all slightly different in the details… which is why you ask a lot of the same questions over and over and of different sources, so you can get down to the most common denominator (as close to True as possible) and write a mostly fair story. “Fair” in the journalism world being defined as “presenting as many sides of the story as feasible and possible, all corroborated and verified by at least three independent sources.”
Really great exercise. I learned a lot about news reporting from that experience. That, and the time she dressed up as the first female major league baseball player, chomped on gum, and let us quiz her about her new MLB contract. She was an excellent actress as well and pulled off the arrogant jock routine beautifully. Hilarious.
When I was in high school, our US History teacher had us take a quiz on the Great Depression. The next day, he came into class looking forlorn, and said that as he was driving home, half the tests flew out the window from his open briefcase. For those of us who had our tests lost, we had to take it over again but the ones whose tests weren’t lost, they didn’t. At the end of the quiz, he let us in on the fact that none of the test was lost, but that it was an exercise on how so many Americans’ money just disappeared from banks after the stock market crash, and it was completely arbitrary that some people had their money still and others didn’t.
I had something like that done to me in junior high Biology, an accelerated class. For the first lab we were given some equipment including thumbtacks and a procedure to follow. Turns out, the thumbtacks were deliberately old and rusty, which threw off the experiment, which was revealed to us only after we had tried to write up our lab reports. I think the teacher enjoyed sneering at us, he was like that.
Back when I was working, everyone had to take civil services tests if they wanted to be promoted. And some of these tests included sneaky questions.
When I was a guard taking the sergeant’s test, there was a series of questions where you were supposed to be conducting a disciplinary hearing. They gave you a copy of the supposed report and then had a test where they told you the prisoner had been escorted into your office and what do you do now.
Now one of the things you were supposed to do was check the prisoner’s ID. Most people did that and there would be a note saying that this was prisoner so-and-so with ID number whatever.
A lot of people took this at face value and moved on to the hearing. The prisoner would say he was innocent but not offer any other defense. Most people found him guilty, gave him a sentence of something like ten days loss of TV, and sent him on his way.
But some people (like me) checked on things. We compared the information on the report to the information we got in the questions. And we noticed that while this prisoner had the right name, he had a different ID number. They had brought us the wrong guy. Once you found this out, everything was easily cleared up, you found the right guy, and the rest of the hearing went along normally.
Now that you have read all of the questions, go back and only do #1 and #2.
Why would you do what #20 says (instead of just reading it) the first time through? You didn’t do #19 on the first go round, you just read it.
To do it right, you should start back at #1 and do 1-20, then go back and do #1 and #2 again.
Even if it was worded differently, you are supposed to read only, not do. So you should read what it says and then start at #1, no matter the instruction in #20.
Heh. Exactly. If you’re a computer program, I’ll go out on a limb and say you’re not a student in my class. I have to teach students how to figure out the intention of the test-giver in a situation in which instructions might be unclear or even downright wrong (for example, if the test asks you why the dad is worried about his daughter in paragraph three, but the worrying doesn’t happen until paragraph four, answer it for paragraph four ferchrissakes).
If I gave the fake-instructions test and a student raised any sort of question about which instruction to answer, then of course I’d clarify for them. If they don’t raise that objection until afterward, I’d explain to them what self-deception is, that they’re just trying to justify their inattentiveness to themselves possibly by lying to themselves about what they knew all along, and I’d almost certainly be right to teach them that lesson.
But, of course, the main goal is to teach people to pay attention to directions, which is like pulling teeth, and sometimes a little bit of looking silly in front of their peers can drive the lesson home.
Read all directions before following any directions.
Sign your name to the top of the sheet.
Write down the name of your three favorite sports teams.
Describe in writing the plot of the last movie you watched in exactly one hundred words.
Add up the numbers from one to a hundred and write down the total.
Derive pi to three hundred places.
Stand up, walk around your desk, and sit back down in your chair.
Sing “I Kissed a Girl And I liked It” out loud.
Post something silly on the SDMB.
Do not follow directions 3 through 9.
So if you follow the first direction and read the entire test first, the test ends up looking like this:
Read all directions before following any directions.
Sign your name to the top of the sheet.
Do not follow directions 3 through 9.
Sign you name and wait.
Now if the last direction had been 10. Do not follow directions 3 through 10. then you’d have a problem. You were told not to follow any directions - including the direction not to follow the directions. But if you don’t follow that last direction, then you’re supposed to follow all of the directions - including the last direction. Oh no, what do I do!?!
But you weren’t told this, so don’t panic. Direction 10 was not self-referentional.
Now re-read Direction 1. It said “Read all directions before following any directions.” It didn’t say “Follow all directions.” You’re only told to read all directions (which you did) and follow directions 1, 2, and 10.