Afterwards the teacher chided everyone who didn’t read the entire paper before starting and did the silly instructions. I was bothered because I had read the paper and thought carefully about how I would handle it. I still think that assignment was dumb.
Our grade came in: Zero. Not even 10 out of 20 for answering the instruction sheet.
Add insult to injury, the teacher was a feminist who worked to improve girls’ grades, so a group of girls did the same as us, but recovered their points because “they asked nicely”. So they had 17/20. We got 10/20 “because half an assignment is still half an assignment.”
This worksheet is from the school of thought which sees education as a way to train you to be a better person, and by "better person" I mean "a mindless and compliant drone for some corporate or government bureaucracy".
It's about reading instructions all the way through if you're going to follow them.
If you throw out the instructions that's cool too, but sometimes reading all the instructions instead of discovering them as you go will help things go easier.
You might catch intent behind previous instructions that makes them easier to follow.
Sometimes understanding the entire process is important. When this is important, it behooves the designer of the form to draw attention to the fact, to make it easy to do the right thing, and hard to do the wrong thing.
This, however, is the precise opposite of what the Following Instructions Quiz genre seeks to accomplish.
It would be one thing if teachers consistently used it to apologize for the inane bureaucracy that students will experience later in life. Perhaps this is a lesson students need -- but it's seldom so affirming; the message, rather, is that interacting with this quiz in a natural way is a flaw, you are flawed for doing so, and you would be better if you were a paperwork robot. Conform. Obey. Follow instructions.
Many schools systems have this as an explicit goal, and others do it somewhat implicitly. Songs like We don't need no education didn't spring up out of nowhere.
They were silly things like “sing the first Ceres of your favorite song” or “do 10 jumping jacks.”
But the first instruction was “read all the instructions first before doing anything listed here.”
The last instruction being, “ignore all of the above and hand in your paper.”
About 3/4 of the class ignored the first instructions and went through all the silly stuff. Was pretty funny I remember.