tim's experiment

An unlikely offering cropped up in our local bookshop the other day: a volume entirely devoted to tricky questions posed in university admission interviews.  It is by John Farndon – a prolific man according to his blurb but previously unknown to me – and is called “Do you think you’re clever?” which is apparently one of the questions used by sadistic interviewers at the Cambridge U Law Department.  This book sheds an interesting light on what happens when obscure middle-aged men suddenly find themselves in a position of power. There are some trick questions: “How many animals did Moses take on the ark?” Answer, none – the guy with the ark was Noah. There are some impossibles: “What is fate?

Some questions are actually rather specific to a particular department. “Do you think Chairman Mao would be proud of today’s China?” was posed to Oriental Studies candidates, who might have been expected to have some idea on the matter.

Most of the examples are from Oxford or Cambridge, which came as a surprise to me, because when I was interviewed for the former the questions were quite conventional, though not in all cases easy. Mr Farndon appends a little essay on each one by way of the answer you might have given if you had had time for some thought and research. I suppose he picked questions which looked usefully provocative for this purpose. So some of the most tricky ones are only mentioned in the preface. I particularly enjoyed the (suspiciously entertaining) story of the Philosophy interviewer who opened the proceedings with “Is this a question?” to which the intended victim replied “”Well if this is an answer I suppose it must have been.” Philosophy departments seem to spawn stories of this kind. When I was a student we all heard about the philosophy exam question which went “Why?” According to the legend one examinee had scored a First for the answer “Why not?”

As luck would have it one of my bursts of interviewing came up while I was reading the book. No doubt you will be wondering if I succumbed to the temptation to baffle a few future MA students with some variation on “Can a computer have a conscience?”  or “If God is omnipotent, can he create a stone he can’t lift?”‘ Actually I was not tempted. Different people have different interviewing styles, and mine tends to the pleasant fireside chat end of the spectrum. This is no doubt partly because Hong Kong universities do not put a lot of stress on the interview and the interviewer does not have to worry that his fugitive impressions of the candidate are going to make a great deal of difference. Partly it is because I learnt a long time ago when doing a postgraduate education course that interviewing is extremely unreliable and research has disclosed that the predictions of interviewers are hopelessly unreliable. As this was the conventional wisdom 40 years ago you might think universities would have come up with something else by now. You would be wrong. Academics make a great fuss about the research they do themselves but they take no interest at all in other people’s research into their own activities. Nobody outside departments dedicated to the subject reads education research.

Interviewers with more power or a larger applicant to place ratio no doubt feel the need to be more inquisitorial. Jimmy Carter – the former president – never forgot his unsuccessful interview with Admireal Hyman Rickover, the father of the American nuclear submarine fleet. The opening exchange went along these lines:

“You graduated from the Naval Academy in 19XX?”

“Yes Sir.”

“Were you first in your class?”

“No Sir.”

“Why not?

At the other extreme, job interviews in the journalism business are often a formality designed to preserve the fiction that the editor decides everything. In these cases the real decision has been made by the head of the relevant department and the interview is often conducted in a pub — or it was in the old days; I understand journalists do not drink so much, now.

Oddly enough there is some evidence that interviews can be useful, if you are careful. I am indebted for this observation to another highly recommendable book: “Thinking, fast and slow” by Daniel Kahneman, who is famous as the psychologist with a Nobel Prize in economics. Mr Kahneman, in his youth, was in charge of the interviews used to allocate conscripts to different parts of the Israeli Army. He had, it seems, heard the same stories I had heard about the uselessness of interviews, and also had the benefit of looking at the records of previous interviewees, which showed that the interview was not detecting anything useful. To try to make the whole procedure more effective, he standardised it. Particular topics were to be addressed in the same order, using the same questions. The results would be turned into numbers but the interviewers would not give an overall score. The adding up was done by Mr Kahneman afterwards on a very simple basis. This procedure improved the results, which now gave useful indications of who would be good at what. But it upset the interviewers a great deal, because they felt they were being turned into automatons. In the interests of good relations Mr Kahneman then invited the interviewers to give an overall score at the end of each interview. Interestingly the overall score resulting from this procedure also proved quite a useful indicator. The message is simple. If you want to get meaningful results from comparative interviews you should standardise the procedure so that every candidate gets the same interview and is scored in the same way. This is crude and boring for the interviewers but works. I fancy, though, that we shall not see universities adopting it any time soon. People’s ability to deceive themselves in matters of this kind is almost unlimited. So applicants to the older universities should continue to brace themselves for pearls like  “Is Nature natural?” or “What happens when I drop an ant?”

But they will not get that sort of thing from me. Many of my colleagues regard interviewing as a chore,  but I rather enjoy it. This may be because journalism attracts a lot of female students, so one tends to spend quite a lot of interview time contemplating a pleasant sight. I am old-fashioned enough to believe that one should try to make the experience as pleasant as possible for them also, although some of the people I interviewed for undergraduate purposes were clearly terrified. Sometimes they looked at me with such apprehension that I wondered if they had ever talked to a foreigner before. Sometimes — it seemed a harmless enough question — I did actually ask if this was the case. Usually, to my surprise, the kid concerned had never talked face-to-face with a foreigner before. This is a problem easily solved. I urge anyone approaching a university interview with this gap in his resume to wander down to Central, grab a foreigner and talk to it for a few minutes. We don’t eat people.