[kazagistar]

> When you encounter imperfect systems like this in the future a good practice is to ask yourself if you know what the actual desired outcome is, and give the lossy filter the input it needs to get you to the next round.

I feel like this is one of the most fundamental skills I learned in school. You don't answer the actual question, you provide the response that they are looking for, even if those are different. This is doubly true for machine graded multiple choice exams.

We had a biology teacher in high school who, in order to keep things fair, made the system very clear: when answering essay questions, he had a list of a dozen or so points he wanted you to mention, and you were graded by how many you hit. It didn't matter if you had a brilliant thesis or whatever, if you didn't recite the relevant parts of the book and lectures back, you lost credit.

The biology barely matters, but I couldn't have asked for better training in dealing with recruiter (and hard headed managers, beurocrats, etc).

[SZJX]

Well yeah but isn't that exactly where the tragedy lies then.