Right now, I’m doing lessons towards my 400cc motorbike license test, currently booked for the end of May. One part of the procedure is to do an ‘aptitude test‘, which is a combination of several test sections. The first few are based on spotting patterns and odd ones out, with each section only taking a couple of minutes, and speed/number of responses also being a factor.
For example, in a left side column there may be the numbers 25367, on the right 25637, and you quickly see they’re different, so you put an ‘X’ between them; the next question may be two strings of kanji which are the same, so you put a circle next to them to say they’re ‘correct’.
This fits a test of speed of recognition and decision making. Most of the sections are based on this concept, such as one which tests mental arithmetic, and one which (odd as it may seem) measures how quickly and repeatably you can draw triangles within a square.
The last section is a personality profile section, with just over 50 questions you can answer true, not true, or ‘?‘.
Fortunately for me, for this last section, I was given English translations of the questions, as I’d still be sat there looking up kanji in my WordTank an hour later otherwise. Some of these questions were easy enough to see where the test was going: Have you ever fainted? Do you have problems sleeping away from home? Do you suffer from anxiety easily?
However, some of the questions had me a bit bemused:
Do you often hate the world and want to die?
Do you hear voices?
Even stranger (in some ways), the next question was:
Do you like children?
I have to say, if I was going to kill myself, would I a) write it down, and b) take the trouble to do my 400cc motorbike license first? I wonder what responses they get to this quiz, and what kind of students are in some of these classes.