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Split Thread The ability to read and follow exam/test instructions

JoeMorgue said:
Business "team building" classes pull this same thing.

Once in one of them the Navy made me sit through one person was tasked with writing out the instructions to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

But then the person running the "team building" would, oh so hilariously, stop the person at every step and offer some witty observation "But wait the instructions didn't tell you to take the butter knife out of the drawer" or "Wait where did the instructions tell you to buy the peanut butter" and other such droll Bobism level crap.
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I had to do this exercise once.... In third grade.
 
Trebuchet said:
Oh, lord. What a horrendous waste of time those were. In one we were divided into groups and had to determine which Lion King character we were. Hakuna Matata!
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Continuing the digression...
Our HR department recently did something similar, to demonstrate the effectiveness of different styles of communication and the importance of conveying adequate information. Each person in the group had the name of a famous person on their back, so that only other people could see it. You could ask another person in the group "Yes or No" questions to try to identify your person, and you could only ask someone three questions before you had to ask someone else. After a while, the rules changed so that you could ask any question and any number of them, which immediately made things easier and less frustrating.
 
Armitage72 said:
Continuing the digression...
Our HR department recently did something similar, to demonstrate the effectiveness of different styles of communication and the importance of conveying adequate information. Each person in the group had the name of a famous person on their back, so that only other people could see it. You could ask another person in the group "Yes or No" questions to try to identify your person, and you could only ask someone three questions before you had to ask someone else. After a while, the rules changed so that you could ask any question and any number of them, which immediately made things easier and less frustrating.
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Question 1: Could you please hand me piece of paper stuck to my back ?

Answer 1: Yes hands questioner the piece of paper

:p
 
In fifth grade my teacher gave us one of those "tests", with the "read all the instructions first" warning. Sure enough, the instructions said don't do this stuff. And sure enough, the things were stuff like "stand up and say your name" kind of things, to embarrass the kids who fell for it. It was horribly obvious because of the weird stress she had put on "read all the instructions first", a thing she'd never said before. And then you'd think these kids would notice not everyone doing the out loud stuff by times when they definitely should have been by then. Only the dumbest kids fell for it, and I have no idea if they learned a lesson in reading instructions from it because hell, they were the dumbest kids already. The whole thing just seemed like an exercise to humiliate the poor dumb kids even more than they already regularly got.

eta: uh, went a bit dark and removed some stuff.
 
When I did that test in third grade, no-one followed instructions. Not one of us. And yes, it was framed as demonstrating why it is important to follow instructions.

And honestly, it didn't sink in and never has. People don't read and follow instructions, even when it is mission-critical to do so. Time and again at work I need to reject requests because the instructions were not followed, and thus the request was impossible to fulfil.
 
I just suddenly had a flashback to Kindergarten. The teacher took us outside to play Simon Says, and I was the first one eliminated. She just assumed that everyone knew how to play and didn't provide any instructions, while it was my first encounter with the game.
 
The Man said:
Exactly the intended point of the 'test', sometimes attention to detail needs to be overly literal.
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I encountered such a test once in school. Never in school did I encounter a scenario where that lesson had to be taught, or learned.

Even in chem lab, where it's sometimes important to follow instructions exactly to the letter, in the correct order, the "overly literal" lesson never came up. It was always just "make sure you follow the instructions".
 
JoeMorgue said:
Why am I supposed to assume that my teacher wrote an entire page of meaningless questions for no reason rather than just assume the instructions aren't literal machine code.
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One of my assumptions was frequently that teachers were eejits who threw out random, arbitrary instructions, which sums up certain UK-ian schools in the '60s and '70s. And I carried on assuming this when I got to university in the late '70s and gave an answer on one of my finals papers, which was supposed to be an hour of essay writing, 2 sentences long: This is entirely self-evident. This is not an essay question.

Yes, I still got a reasonable degree, as that question was stupid.

So, yes, IME, teachers DO do and say many, many meaningless things.
 
The Man said:
Exactly the intended point of the 'test', sometimes attention to detail needs to be overly literal. Though as students we have (or had) our own attention and details, like the guy in the other row who said "Psst..it's a trick just write you name". I don't think I'd gotten to reading any of the directions before that.
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A much better illustration of this principle in my mind was Van Halen and the brown M&M's.
 
TragicMonkey said:
In fifth grade my teacher gave us one of those "tests", with the "read all the instructions first" warning. Sure enough, the instructions said don't do this stuff. And sure enough, the things were stuff like "stand up and say your name" kind of things, to embarrass the kids who fell for it. It was horribly obvious because of the weird stress she had put on "read all the instructions first", a thing she'd never said before. And then you'd think these kids would notice not everyone doing the out loud stuff by times when they definitely should have been by then. Only the dumbest kids fell for it, and I have no idea if they learned a lesson in reading instructions from it because hell, they were the dumbest kids already. The whole thing just seemed like an exercise to humiliate the poor dumb kids even more than they already regularly got.

eta: uh, went a bit dark and removed some stuff.
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Stood up and said your name, didn't you?
 
alfaniner said:
Stood up and said your name, didn't you?
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Uh, no. The bit I typed then removed after consideration was that this happened in a South Carolina public school in the 80s. South Carolina is a place with many wonderful qualities, but good education isn't amongst them. Nor are its inhabitants reknowned throughout the galaxy for their brilliance. The two years I spent in their public school system...well, I was pretty much left alone to educate myself while the other kids learned to spell five letter words. In fifth grade. I was already done with Tolkien and they were on Clifford, that wacky bastard cousin of the Baskervilles Hound. It's not uncommon for a bright child to believe they are smarter than their teachers, but in this case my parents thought so. After they met my teachers my mom was convinced it was an elaborate prank, and my dad thought there was some kind of state program to employ as teachers people who'd suffered traumatic brain injuries. It was bad.
 
Would have have to actually see a real world example of it and the real text before passing judgment.

Some test writers are idiots.
 
And yet I have found it to be sound advice when, for example, I find myself assembling furniture from Ikea, or troubleshooting computer problems, or constructing wastewater processing plants...
 
Well.

I just now had a real-world scenario:

The thing isn't working. It's a complicated thing, so I google up the vendor's document describing how to correct this particular failure mode.

The instructions they provide are painful. Lots of tedious, error-prone manual steps to un-stuff what is normally a "set it and forget it" automated process.

I really don't want to follow these instructions. But. I really do need to get this thing working again.

So I decide not to follow the instructions. I decide that they don't address the variant failure mode I'm actually seeing. I decide that if I understand my variant failure correctly, I can fix it much more easily and cleanly than by going through all the steps in the instructions.

Just before I go ahead and do it my way, I think of this thread. "Holy crap!" I think. "We were just talking about this! I'm about to not follow the instructions!"

And then I went ahead and did it my way.

Ain't nobody got time for instructions! - theprestige, probably

In my defense, I was right. My way worked, and saved me hours of pain and suffering.
 
Metullus said:
And yet I have found it to be sound advice when, for example, I find myself assembling furniture from Ikea, or troubleshooting computer problems, or constructing wastewater processing plants...
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Lol

It is quite funny.

In a real world test I would pass it. As the normal point of a test is you gain something.

In a real world just putting furniture together there is nothing riding on it so would just go for it.

Would end up with two screws and a washer left over wondering where they were supposed to go. But might come in useful for something else later.
 
Carrot Flower King said:
One of my assumptions was frequently that teachers were eejits who threw out random, arbitrary instructions, which sums up certain UK-ian schools in the '60s and '70s. And I carried on assuming this when I got to university in the late '70s and gave an answer on one of my finals papers, which was supposed to be an hour of essay writing, 2 sentences long: This is entirely self-evident. This is not an essay question.
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Similarly, I had an exam question in college that asked for what fraction of errors an error detection scheme would correct an error. This was a pure error detection scheme, and not detection/correction, so I answered "Never. This scheme is not capable of correcting errors." The prof marked it wrong and refused to budge. The answer he wanted was the fraction of errors that would be detected, which would have required a page of calculations. His excuse was "I told you there would not be trick questions on exams."
 
Ziggurat said:
A much better illustration of this principle in my mind was Van Halen and the brown M&M's.
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Yep, that's a great example. Having been clued into it I've always felt that I probably would have fallen for it had I not overheard the intent. Perhaps that's why it doesn't have such a negative connotation for me. I still rather do things my own way than follow directions but learned to look for those landmines that can trip you up first. Later I came to realize that you have to read things with expectation that the intended context may not be readily apparent or as assumed. That has helped me delve the depths of some of the wackier nonsense that gets posted on these threads.
 
The Man said:
The last direction was that the only thing you needed to do to complete the test was to write your name on it.
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This depends on the exact wording in the test ...

Unless one of the directions was to NOT answer the questions, then answering the questions does not violate the directions.

Unless the directions instructed you to complete the test, then writing your name on the test is not following the directions, although it does not violate the directions.

(My class got hit with this once, and it seemed the test writer just had their own different set of assumptions and reliance on conventions that fell apart when examined carefully.)
 
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