An attempt at a short no-prerequisite test for programming inclination

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?

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 article said (emphasis added):

The literacy test—supposedly applicable to both white and black prospective voters who couldn’t prove a certain level of education but in actuality disproportionately administered to black voters—was a classic example of one of these barriers.

Blacks may have had an unremarkable failure rate, but if (proportionally) more of them were tested, then (proportionally) more of them would have failed.

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.

Because it was disproportionately administered to blacks, and you failed if you got a single question wrong.

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 :

Then the test — and how it was graded and administered — got even more insidious. Check out question 21. It says: "Spell backwards, forwards". If a Black person spelled "backwards" but omitted the comma, he/she would be flunked. If a Black person spelled "backwards," he/she would be flunked. If a Black person asked why, he/she would be told either "you forgot the comma," or "you shouldn't have included the comma," or "you should have spelled 'backwards, forwards'". Any plausible response by a white person would be accepted, and so would any implausible response.

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.

Their main claim was that a particular test at the beginning of the course accurately predicted the outcome of the course in terms of their grade. Someone else mentioned that in the later papers, they say that their test is no longer predictive.

It's possible that people are enough more used to computers that some elementary concepts (like that the computer responds to simple cues rather than having any understanding of what you mean) are much more common, so those concepts aren't as useful for filters.

My model is that there is something (I am not sure what it is) that is necessary for programming, but we don't know how to teach it. Maybe it is too abstract to articulate, or seems so trivial to those who already know it that they don't pay conscious attention to it . (Maybe it's multiple things.) Some people randomly "get it", either at the beginning of the class, or usually long before the class. Then when the class starts, those who "have it" can progress, and those who "don't have it" are stuck.

The study suggests that this something could be: expecting the same actions to have the same results consistently (even if the person is wrong about specific results of a specific action, because that kind of mistake can be fixed easily). Sounds plausible.

Assuming this is true (which is not certain, as the replications seem to fail), I would still describe it as a failure of the education process. There is a necessary prerequisite skill, and we don't teach it, which splits the class into those who got it from other sources, and those who didn't. -- It would be an equivalent of not teaching small children alphabet, and starting with reading the whole words and sentences. The children who learned alphabet at home would progress, the remaining children would be completely lost, we would observe the "double hump" and declare that the difference is probably innate.

The disappearing of the "double hump" (assuming that the original result was valid) could hint at improving the educational methods.

Even with perfect education, some people will be better and some will be worse. But there will be more people with partial success. -- To use your analogy, we would no longer have the situation where some people are basketball stars, and the remaining ones are unable to understand the rules of basketball; we would also have many recreational players. -- In programming, we would have many people able to do Excel calculations or very simple Python scripts.

If consistence really is the key, that would explain why aspies get it naturally, but seems to me that this is a skill that can be trained... at worst, by using some exercise of giving students the same question dozen times and expecting dozen same answers. Or something more meaningful than this, e.g. following some simple instructions consistently. It could be a computer game!

Ok, I will.

The trick is to evaluate right to left.

I didn't. Instead, I just kept taking the least-condition-laden part of the instruction, replacing it with a number, and repeating the operation on the newly simplified sentence.

I didn't invent notation, but I did write

number whose number [redacted] box whose number = [redacted]

so that I could keep track as I worked from bottom to top.

I think there's a category missing between moderate and non-programmer. I got halfway through Eloquent JavaScript and maybe a tenth of the way through Learn Python the Hard Way. I have way, way less exposure to programming than palladias but almost infinitely more than the modal person. I suggest novice/glancing familiarity. I did the poll as moderate.