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Sunday, October 10, 2010

Nicholas Kristof has forgotten the SAT.

I know he was once very familiar with it, since he is a Harvard Graduate (class of 82 just like me). But in his pop quiz on religion, some correct answers are not among the options given. Those correct answers are "all of the above." He gives multiple choice answers a,b and c. The rule is that one or three are true statements. This rule can't be deduced given the implicit "or"s for either inclusive or inclusive or.

I scored 8 out of 13 which I consider not bad (even though I am an atheist and we are supposed to know more about religion than the religious). For two of the questions which I got wrong, the correct answer was "all of the above." However, I answered "all of the above" correctly once. That was when I knew for sure that all of the above was correct. The others I assumed it couldn't be.

My guess is that answer d "all of the above" was removed to save ink and paper. A single line "in each case either only one of the answers is correct or all three are correct" would have helped without killing all that many trees.

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