How do you answer this question? Is it flawed / impossible?

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This is a question on a job application,

"You never make major decisions quickly
-Strongly Disagree
-Disagree
-Agree
-Strongly Agree "


You cannot infer the intent of the question based on the available information.
This question is missing necessary conditions that establish which answers are right or wrong.
If you do not know if making decisions quickly is good or bad with out having anything that suggests the intent of the maker of the question, then it cannot be answered.

Making a major decision quickly is need in some situations, and not in others.
If I don't know the situation, then I cannot answer the question.

"You never make major decisions quickly
-Strongly Disagree
-Disagree
-Agree
-Strongly Agree "

The question is not asking enough.. or the answers do not have enough
You never make major decisions quickly
(these would be my answers)
I do if this...
I don't if this...
But if... nothing... since it doesn't say, I can't answer because the answers don't mean anything.


---

What do you think?

These questions crop up all the time everyone knows they are horribly vague even the people asking them. The idea is to get a general sense of what a person would normally do of course people know circumstances may change a response under certain emergency conditions but in general major decisions like buying a house, moving to another city, getting married etc would the applicant make those sorts of decisions lightly?
It lets an employer know how you might respond to work related situations like a difference of opinion with a coworker. Would you think it through and work it out or have an emotional outburst. I don't think they are looking for answers to situations like the office is on fire who do you save the client or the boss?

I think the word "never" is the problem. Absolute never? Then only one counter example would do to disagree.

But then I don't understand why there ere two "levels" of disagreement?

A statement is either true or false; if it is false I disagree.
To disagree "strongly" does not make it more of less false. It's an inappropriate qualifier.

I would select "disagree", because I disagree with all the other options.

I wrote an long message.. and as I looked at it, I realized it's best NOT to make major decisions quickly.

A doctor may act quickly to save a life.. but it took years of training for them to make the right decisions.

Very little in life truly needs a snap decision. Only training and knowledge can prepare you to act quickly and correctly... if you act quickly and guess, there is a good chance a person would be wrong.

Go with Agree or Strongly Agree

If making a decision "quickly" is a situational thing for you, then the answer is either "agree" or "disagree".

The use of the word "never" in the question, being absolute, indicates (obviously) that if you answer "strongly agree" you never ever make major decisions quickly. You can infer from that that if you answer "strongly disagree" that you will always or almost always make major decisions quickly. Clearly for you neither of those are the case, so you are left with the two in the middle.

The duties of the job itself probably involve either making decisions quickly, or making them methodically. Whether you should answer "agree" or "disagree" depends on those duties.

The question sucks but it's not impossible. Just tell them what they want to hear.

Haha that was funny.


I guess I could assume in this work place, you won't need to make fast decisions in an extreme situation,
So I suppose the best answer would be Agree to not make fast decisions, but not Strongly agree because with adding strongly, then you take away any possible argument in the question.

I think I need the one in the middle of those two.

the depends answer

Yea if there was a "depends" answer it would be much easier

Because there is not, it's implied that in both of the middle two answers it "depends" to some degree. If, generally, you err on the side of deciding quickly, you would select "disagree"; whereas if you prefer to be more methodical, you'd probably select "agree".

The question has to do with the vagaries, if I understand it correctly. If you have to make a major decision, will you: make it quickly based on "gut instinct" or do you require research, information and options before making your decision? Given this question, I answer (C) for "Agree" that I almost never make major decisions quickly, but not to an extreme extent.


M.

I'm also confused by these questions on job applications online. I asked my job coach and she mention they are gaging if you are a theif or can be truthful. I still hate them though. I agree with my Psychology teacher a good thing would be send a video of yourself (or so that's what she was teaching in class one day)

"Agree" would be my answer as well, and probably the one they'd be looking for I think - though "Disagree" might be fine too in a job that values quick thinking. It is an odd question for a written interview, though, where there's no opportunity to elaborate on your answer. Explaining why you couldn't commit to either answer would make a much better impression.

Either way the extremes seem much more likely to be "wrong" answers for most jobs, because either could be interpreted negatively. "Strongly agree" could suggest you dwell on major decisions too long and waste time, while "strongly disagree" suggests you don't give them enough consideration. The purpose of the question seems like it could be as much about gauging efficiency as it is about decision-making skills.

Either that or the person who came up with didn't put a faction of the thought into it that we are, and it really is just a silly question Not everyone preparing interviews knows what they're doing, I think.

Last edited by Vance on 16 Dec 2009, 11:43 pm, edited 2 times in total.

I HATE questions like that. They are written by people that I only HOPE are making FAR less than minimum wage. I mean they don't really write the REAL question, they IMPLY what it might be. The REAL question might be in someone's head, but WHO KNOWS!?!?!?

If I have all the facts, I will make it QUICKLY! If I don't have enough info, I may NEVER do anything.

Anyone can lie on those things.


One time I was forced to do this by phone, after explaining that I'm hard of hearing.

About five minutes in I started saying that I strongly agree with stealing.

My answer will be agree, and also yours.

The question is: "you never do x"

The answer are:

0% of times
25-50% of times
50-75% of times
75-100% of times

If you do it in a, b, c situation and you'll not do it in d situation the answer is agree.

The problem is not well posed, but test like that usually aren't, you can still answer.

P.S.
and by the way for the same reason they want you to respond "agree" because by the kind of answer is easy to infer that they want someone who is able to make quick decision about important fact without being impulsive (so you must do it many times but not always).

I agree with this.. I think quickly here kinda means "impulsively." In a crunch, "deciding" quickly to do something because you already know what to do in that situation isn't truly making the decision quickly, because it's something you had already thought out before the question came up. Acting quickly in an emergency wouldn't be making a quick decision, it would simply be acting quickly based on a decision that had already been made.

I strongly agree with this post.

I think those Aspie questionnaires are also quite difficult to answer in a way that really reflects the subject's position on the matter - they're not usually as bad as this example but I always wanted to tick between the boxes, and would sometimes have to (practically) lie in order to convey the truth....like "do people tell you that you are X?" - people very rarely tell me anything about myself (chickens!) but if I myself was pretty sure that I was X, I'd tick the box.

Really I think there's no substitute for answering questions in one's own way, as fully as possible, to take into account all the caveats etc. - but we get reduced, codified stuff because it makes the test-giver's job easy.

At school I used to do worse on multiple-choice questions than I did on traditional essay questions.........for example I might remember de novo the equation relating gas volume to pressure and temperature, but if I had to pick out the correct one from 5 similar equations, just reading through them would confuse me, and I sometimes felt they were giving away parts of the answers that I knew, which was helping those who didn't know, at my expense.