1540 How to Take a Test

Friday, November 9, 2007

It's about 4:40 am and I'm wide awake, because without thinking about it I drank a frappuccino at 11:30 pm, and because my nose was running so badly in bed. I'm beginning to think I may be allergic to something in my bedroom. Anyway, I'm going to be awake until the antihistamine I just took kicks in.

While staring at the ceiling, I was thinking about taking tests. I can take a multiple choice test on almost any topic and pass it. Not because I know the topic, but because I know tests. When people ask me "What's Mensa", I don't say it's a high IQ society - I say it's a social club for people who do well on multiple choice tests. And if you get to know a few Mensans, you'll find that is a more accurate description. Some of us are otherwise incredibly stupid.

One of the Mensa Yahoo groups has been passing around a 10-question "business in history" test (found at http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/21657377). Most of those taking it got 7 or 8 of the ten answers correct. The question that the most people got wrong was:

3. Because of its importance to the 19th century economy, what is the state animal of Connecticut?
a) Sperm Whale
b) Husky
c) Beaver
d) Clydesdale Horse

(You might want to take the test yourself before reading further.)

You don't have to know the answer to a question if you can figure it out. The key words here are "the 19th century economy" and "Connecticut". The husky might have been important in Alaska, maybe, but not to "the 19th century economy" in general. The horse would have gotten merely a shrug, and Clydesdale is much too specific anyway. That leaves us with the beaver and the whale. The beaver may have been pretty important in the early days of the colonies, but probably less so in the 19th century. To cap it off, what do we know about Connecticut? All those whaling villages. Ahah! That fits with the 19th century, too.

I can't imagine how anyone could miss this one, but most people did.

That reminded me of the mid-'70s, when IQ tests were heavily attacked as being culturally biased. Some woman, a teacher representing students from the inner city, was interviewed on a local news program attacking the school system's use of IQ tests to group students. She chose an example from a test to illustrate her claim that the tests were biased toward culturally-advantaged suburban kids. The example was very similar to this:

The opera The Axe of the Fireflies by Joseph Hill cannot be performed in a small theater because
a) it's too loud.
b) it's too popular.
c) it requires an enormous cast.
d) it's too long.

Her argument was that inner city kids are not exposed to opera, their parents don't take them to operas, and therefore they are unlikely to have any knowledge of this opera, they have no way of knowing if it's too loud or if it's popular or whatever, and therefore the question is culturally biased. And the other panelists and the reporter all pursed their lips and nodded in agreement.

I totally freaked. I was yelling at the TV. You don't have to know anything about opera to answer that question! In fact, there is no such opera! All it takes is the power to reason, which is exactly what the test is measuring. Simple reasoning (and the ability to pick out the important parts of the statement) will give you the correct answer.

(By the way , that's one of the things the dreaded fifth-grade math word problems teach - the ability to separate the important information from the extraneous. A very useful skill. You end up in your later years yelling "that's a load of bull poopy" at people on the telephone.)
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