I don’t know! Lord knows, I didn’t design the test, and the burden certainly isn’t on me to explain it. All I did was explain my best guess about what the question was. You don’t have to agree. But I could ask an a similar sequence of questions in response to whatever interpretation you might propose—as indeed, either of us could do in response to whatever the “correct” interpretation is (if it’s something different).
I don’t think “it’s probably supposed to be a test of physical intuition” is all that plausible
Why not? It’s a military exam, for goodness’ sake. Intuition about how mechanical objects act under the influence of gravity seems to me like a perfectly natural thing for the military to be interested in testing.
So I just googled, and it looks like I’m right. It seems to fall into the “assembling objects” category.
Your link doesn’t specifically support that. Maybe you meant to link somewhere where that particular question was specifically classified as falling into that category? If not—if you were just making an assumption to this effect—then I could equally well put it under “mechanical comprehension”.
But even if it’s actually in the “assembling objects” category, how does that refute my interpretation? “What happens when you put these two things together?” sounds like a perfectly good “assembling objects” question to me.
(And surely “assembling objects” requires some “mechanical comprehension” in any case?)
The question is awful. In no way should my revelation of the particular interpretation that happened to suggest itself to me be construed as an endorsement of the reasonableness of this question or any other part of the test.
But I could ask an a similar sequence of questions in response to whatever interpretation you might propose.
Agreed. But I asked those questions not because I think your reasoning was inherently wrong, but because I felt like you were making a post-hoc story to justify specifically the answer A. While some sort of problem-solving logic that happens to generate A provides fairly easy answers for those kinds of questions, generating A post-hoc does not help answer them.
I don’t think “it’s probably supposed to be a test of physical intuition” is all that plausible
Why not?
It would be a pretty bad test of physical intuition of the sort you describe, but a pretty good test of spatial reasoning, and I assume that the army people are competent at designing tests. If it was a test of physical intuition, why change how the objects were attached to each other in each answer? And so on and so forth.
Note: If you asked me “why would they change the relative positions in each answer if it was a test of assembling objects?” I would say “Because changing things around increases the need for spatial reasoning.”
Your link doesn’t specifically support that.
I thought the evidence was strong enough to say that pretty confidently, but you’re right it’s not overwhelming.
Additional note: if you look at the page Unnamedlinked to, you’ll see that the picture is all one piece, and the instructions are down below in text. If the question we got this picture from was similar, that may explain the disappearing instructions!
I asked those questions not because I think your reasoning was inherently wrong, but because I felt like you were making a post-hoc story to justify specifically the answer A
Yes, that’s exactly what I was doing, openly and unashamedly. Recall that I had no idea what the question was until informed that it was a military exam. That information made A a more plausible answer than it would otherwise have been, for the reasons I explained.
I was proposing my best guess at the answer to the question “why is A the correct answer?” As such, my comments were not intended to strongly dispute the idea that there might be a better answer. (P(X|Y) vs P(Y|X) and all that, you know.)
I don’t know! Lord knows, I didn’t design the test, and the burden certainly isn’t on me to explain it. All I did was explain my best guess about what the question was. You don’t have to agree. But I could ask an a similar sequence of questions in response to whatever interpretation you might propose—as indeed, either of us could do in response to whatever the “correct” interpretation is (if it’s something different).
Why not? It’s a military exam, for goodness’ sake. Intuition about how mechanical objects act under the influence of gravity seems to me like a perfectly natural thing for the military to be interested in testing.
Your link doesn’t specifically support that. Maybe you meant to link somewhere where that particular question was specifically classified as falling into that category? If not—if you were just making an assumption to this effect—then I could equally well put it under “mechanical comprehension”.
But even if it’s actually in the “assembling objects” category, how does that refute my interpretation? “What happens when you put these two things together?” sounds like a perfectly good “assembling objects” question to me.
(And surely “assembling objects” requires some “mechanical comprehension” in any case?)
The question is awful. In no way should my revelation of the particular interpretation that happened to suggest itself to me be construed as an endorsement of the reasonableness of this question or any other part of the test.
Agreed. But I asked those questions not because I think your reasoning was inherently wrong, but because I felt like you were making a post-hoc story to justify specifically the answer A. While some sort of problem-solving logic that happens to generate A provides fairly easy answers for those kinds of questions, generating A post-hoc does not help answer them.
It would be a pretty bad test of physical intuition of the sort you describe, but a pretty good test of spatial reasoning, and I assume that the army people are competent at designing tests. If it was a test of physical intuition, why change how the objects were attached to each other in each answer? And so on and so forth.
Note: If you asked me “why would they change the relative positions in each answer if it was a test of assembling objects?” I would say “Because changing things around increases the need for spatial reasoning.”
I thought the evidence was strong enough to say that pretty confidently, but you’re right it’s not overwhelming.
Additional note: if you look at the page Unnamed linked to, you’ll see that the picture is all one piece, and the instructions are down below in text. If the question we got this picture from was similar, that may explain the disappearing instructions!
Yes, that’s exactly what I was doing, openly and unashamedly. Recall that I had no idea what the question was until informed that it was a military exam. That information made A a more plausible answer than it would otherwise have been, for the reasons I explained.
I was proposing my best guess at the answer to the question “why is A the correct answer?” As such, my comments were not intended to strongly dispute the idea that there might be a better answer. (P(X|Y) vs P(Y|X) and all that, you know.)