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gjm comments on An attempt at a short no-prerequisite test for programming inclination - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (68)
I'm in the "experienced programmer" category. I answered the question correctly and quickly (and without inventing special notations for those repeated indirections). I found it unpleasant -- it reminded me of this "literacy test". Even if this turns out to be effective in predicting who will make a good programmer, I'd hesitate to use it for that purpose, for fear of putting people off unnecessarily.
Well, there's a big difference here in that "failing" the test doesn't prevent anyone from doing anything. The idea is more to encourage people who seem to find this sort of thing natural.
Oh yes, I wasn't suggesting it's evil in the sort of way that test was! That's just what my brain pattern-matched it to.
I'm forced to remind myself that that test was not actually designed to be a literacy test.
It includes riddles/illusions (Paris in the the spring for example), irrelevant terminology ("bisect"?) and unnecessary arbitrary things like knowing the order of the letters in the alphabet. If you became literate chiefly by reading...
Correct. Not an actual literacy test but a tool of oppression. (For a less blatant example at a much higher level, see "Jewish problems".)
I suggest that the history of this sort of thing is part of why the response to "hey, it turns out black people do worse than white people on IQ tests" is often to suggest that there's something very, very wrong with the tests. I mention this only because it's a topic that comes up every now and then on LW.
[EDITED to add: I should reiterate that I'm not suggesting any such sinister motive in the present case!]
You might want to rot13 that, in case people are considering taking the test themselves.
I wouldn't consider that that unnecessary and arbitrary -- I guess most people in jobs requiring literacy need to sort a list alphabetically or look something up in an alphabetic list at some point in their life, especially back then before electronic computers.
Okay fair, that makes sense. But then, why not have the test just say "write down the letters of the alphabet, in order", rather than being tricky. Plenty of very literate people still need to sing the mnemonic song in order to recall the order.
Oh wait, no, the being tricky is testing to see if people are literate enough to understand the fiddly details of the question. Still, I'd say testing that separately from alphabet skills is more efficient etc.
Wow.. that literacy test is something else. I would have thought they would have been slightly more circumspect about the fact that this was just a way of disenfranchising black voters. But no, instead they come up with a test that is obviously just designed to be a giant "Fuck you, nigger". It's not just that the test is unreasonably hard, it's that the questions -- plus the absurdly strict grading criteria -- look like there were specifically chosen to signal unreasonable hardness (if that makes sense).
St. Rev on twitter believes that the test is likely a hoax due to the way to was formatted vs. other tests at the time. There was still likely some test that was aimed at disenfranchisement but given the lack of evidence that it was real I'd say he might be right about this particularly unbelievable one one being a fake.
Maybe it's a hoax, but I'm not sure the formatting proves that. The website itself mentions that the version of the test posted there is a "word-processed transcript of an original". The original is here. Was this guy referring to the original or the transcript when he made his point about formatting?
The test looked like it measured intelligence, literacy, and ability to follow rules. How is that biased against blacks?
There was sufficient ambiguity in many of those instructions to let the pass/fail distinction come down to whatever the test's grader wanted it to be. I bet the folks grading those tests weren't too big on equal rights. At least twenty of those questions were reasonable(if we assume the need for a test of this sort in the first place), but a few were pernicious. Given that even a single wrong answer disqualified you, you don't need many evil questions to make for an evil test.
The function of such tests was to invoke the grandfather clause — anyone whose grandfather could vote was not required to pass the test; thus, native-born whites were largely exempt.
(That is the original meaning of the term "grandfather clause", by the way.)
Grandfather clauses were declared unconstitutional in 1915, so this particular test would not have a grandfather clause exemption.
Are you sure? The Slate article did not mention that as the function. According to the test:
The Slate article doesn't mention grandfather clauses either, instead saying:
The Wikipedia article I linked discusses this; this one mentions Louisiana's literacy test specifically.
The tests were never intended to verify mental competence or education; the grandfather clauses make this clear. Their purpose was to provide a pretext for disfranchisement of former slaves and the descendants of slaves.
Really. The past sucks.
"History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."
Oops. You are right.
The article said (emphasis added):
Blacks may have had an unremarkable failure rate, but if (proportionally) more of them were tested, then (proportionally) more of them would have failed.
Because it was disproportionately administered to blacks, and you failed if you got a single question wrong.
The test is for people who "cannot prove a fifth grade education". I believe that over 80% of fifth grade students would fail is this test -- either make at least one mistake in all those ambiguously sounding questions, or fail the time limit. Actually, I would expect at least 30% of university students to fail.
In other words, the test pretends to be an equivalent of fifth grade, but in reality it is much more difficult. If you have two people with exactly equivalent knowledge and skills, one of them has a "proof of fifth grade education" and other one does not, the former does not have to pass the test, but the latter is eliminated with high probability.
Therefore the test is a "fuck you" for people who "cannot prove a fifth grade education", whoever it was in the given historical era.
I think those figures are overly conservative. I doubt I could pass that test.
Agreed. I doubt I could pass that test (i.e. get every one right) against a fair examiner, given an hour, under no stress. And I'm pretty good at that sort of thing. Getting every question right is just too high a bar. In ten minutes against someone who has discretion to mark your answers on whim and wants you to fail? And your right to vote and self respect are tied up in it? No chance.
We're talking about a time when blacks were far more likely not to have proper schooling than whites. In some states a majority of blacks could not demonstrate a fifth grade education. The same was not true for whites. So literacy tests were disproportionately administered to blacks. Until 1915, even illiterate whites were exempted under a grandfather clause if they could demonstrate descent from someone eligible to vote in 1867 (before the 15th amendment -- prohibiting the denial of the right to vote based on race -- was ratified). These clauses were struck down by the Supreme Court in 1915, but they illustrate the real purpose of literacy tests -- the disenfranchisement of blacks.
The test itself is patently unfair. It tests far more than just basic literacy, and I do not see how it could be regarded as a proportionate substitute for a fifth grade education. You had to finish it in 10 minutes, and getting even one question wrong counted as failure. Under those conditions, I'm not sure even I could pass the test, and I'm pretty literate. Add to that the fact that many of the questions are ambiguously phrased, allowing multiple "correct" interpretations, and that grading was entirely at the discretion of local (white) officials.
There's some more information about it here: http://www.crmvet.org/nars/schwartz.htm#corelittest :