Quote Originally Posted by Ionathus View Post
This one is lighthearted, even by the standards of this thread! But it's on my mind so here it is

I took some career skills assessments yesterday as part of a job application, and the multiple choice assessment was made up of ENTIRELY what I call "health class questions" -- so named because they seemed to be the only style of question in my high school Health & Wellness tests. A Health Class Question can be identified by the following format:

Basically, multiple choice questions are useless for anything other than assessing your vocabulary or actual fact/knowledge retention, because any situation where human communication/behavior is a factor is impossible to sum up in four realistic-looking options. Either you wind up with 3/4 obviously terrible options, or you wind up with 4 options that are all equally bad depending on the question asker's interpretation. You can't win.
Feels like a personality test rather than an actual question about skills. E.g. 'will the applicant stubbornly ignore an easy gimme?' or 'how well will the applicant tolerate condescending micromanagement in the future?'. Then there's also the sorts of questions which are like 'I can't believe anyone would get this wrong but somehow like 50% of applicants get weeded out by it' - stuff like 'okay, you need to show us you can open a file from the harddrive in MS Word' or 'you're applying for a C++ programming job, can you demonstrate Hello World?'. Not a fan of either, though.