Is it true they set the sim up out of trim to make it harder?
Gawd!
No they don't! It may come as a suprise but there are no hidden tricks in the SIM (for interviews). The Sim assessors want to see how well you fly basic procedures. All they want to see are basic IF skills and an improvement during the sim session.
Note: This doesn't mean you should deliberately poorly early in the sim session so that you can improve later on. You'll fly poorly enough at first anyway!
You can't prepare too much.
Wanna bet? I've seen "more than a few" people fail cyclics because they were so overprepared that when the cyclic "events" didn't happen exactly the way they expected the wheels fell off, so to speak.