Originally Posted by
Landflap
The selection programs that others have referred to aimed, in part, to weed out those candidates who "appeared" to show a higher tendency to stress. Might be "cobblers" to you "Beardy" but the results were pretty good. Hamble had a 500 questionnaire followed by interview with a fully qualified Psychologist. Many thought one test was a co-ordination exerrcise. It wasn't. It looked hard at how candidates might re-act once placed in a high stress situation. Might be "cobblers" to you "Beardy" but I know who I'd rather be sitting behind ; someone who passed formal selection or someone who falls apart at selection questions, like, "What is a half divided by a half" when asked in a stress environment. Amazing how many go red in the face and bleat out " A quarter!".
Is that
really a selection question with no other context? If it is, then some question setters
really are a little bit up themselves unless the purpose of asking it is to remind that clarity is needed in loose verbal or written communication in order to avoid communication errors initiated by those asking the questions. As it stands it is a trick question with no defined context or parameters and thus no definable purpose. If the question was set as what is ½/½ or 0.5/0.5 it would have true mathematically defined context. Otherwise it simply identifies a senseless miscommunication opportunity between the person asking the question and the person answering it. Would you fail a selection candidate who would
of passed
{sic} with better practice at stupid questions, in favour of one who would
have never seen such a question before but happened to see the trap?
I will freely admit that from my totally unstressed chair this morning I did not see the "trap". I think that might be because my brain was long ago trained to be able to answer much more rigorously set mathematical problems. But I have today learned a little bit about potential miscommunication in a cockpit if this is how aviators question each other in 2019 and expect to weed out weakness in others by waiting for mistakes to arise out of sloppiness in their own written or spoken words.
Again if it is a real selection question, at best one would hope the selectors might be looking for an instant retort as a safety check such as "do you mean half of a half or do you mean point 5 divided by point 5?", but in practice what are they really going to get from a control group of even the most unstressed expert mathematicians or engineers?