I was given that same quiz at school when I was about 12, and I remember I skipped to the end and read the last question (which reveals the trick) because it was highly suspicious that we were randomly given a quiz with a whole series of questions that began by telling you to read the whole thing.
Similarly, often quizzes/surveys/studies have an obvious answer when you include the meta-fact that the question is even in there. For example maybe you're shown an image like this[1] with the question "which glass do you think holds more liquid?" Well, it looks like the tall one, but that means it's probably the short one.
But we had a good percent the class going for ages on that "read all questions" quiz.
The lesson here is that most tests are designed poorly. Most people don’t realise the effort that goes into doing it properly. Every item needs to be proven to be useful. Items that either purposely or accidentally ‘trick’ the test taker often prove to not be very useful when you run the stats. If a test ‘breaks the fourth wall’ like this, the item probably won’t stand on its own to be useful.
I'm learning German, and one of the apps I'm using is Clozemaster, where a sentence is missing a word and I have to fill in the gap. The easy mode is to choose from a list of four, the hard mode is to type in the word. Easy mode I can do fairly reliably without even fully reading the sentences, hard mode I struggle with — while the latter is partly because it only accepts one single specific word (so if the sentence would be valid with another word, e.g. weiß/blau/gold/schwarz, keine Punkte für mich if I pick the wrong correct answer), that alone didn't feel sufficient given the subjective experience of the difference between them.
I think, from what you've said, in the easy mode I'm probably picking up on things that aren't as useful as I need.
Presumably, each question contains an instruction to follow. Being instructed to read all questions first doesn't mean you then do what any of the other questions instruct. Why, after reading all other 99 questions first, do you do what question 100 instructs but not what the others instruct?
In this particular instance, my son and his friend were unable to convince their teacher that the test/quiz was flawed, so the naive answer was the "right" one to win the teacher's approval.
From a purely linguistic pov, this question 100 isn’t a question, it’s a meta-information about how you should reply to the quiz itself. I hate it when teachers try to be too smart for their own good.
This is referred to as "rubric", and paying attention to the rubric on exams is a very important skill. Especially when some of them are confusing, and you get "answer ONE question from section A and TWO questions from section B BUT no more than ONE question marked with a (+) in total" on a paper that folds out to thirty questions.
While it's often infuriating it's useful to know how to operate in an environment where the rules will be read pedantically against you.
Following arbitrary and pointless rules and playing mind games with the test giver. Only in the made up world of academic testing.
All organisations have arbitrary and pointless rules. It ensures that people know their place.
We have enough people on this planet going through life without ever once thinking about what they are about to do.
I'm not being pedantic here, i am really furious against teachers that makes students think about the best way to disambiguate the question instead of thinking about the subject of the exam itself.
Kids who read the last question and leave the rest blank get two questions correct for a score of 2/100.
On a typical test the blast radius for a question is limited. There is no convention that getting a question wrong alters the outcome for other questions, too.
If you answer all the questions after reading all of them, you could only get only question 100 wrong and get the other 99 correct, so reach a score of 99/100.
If you answer only questions 1 and 2, you get the answer to 100 right too, so you could score 3/100.
In the latter case, you could score 3/3 too, depending on how the examiner decides to mark it.
So which is it?
Now sure, with the benefit of 25-ish years of hindsight, I think that while my actions were correct in the situation and the point of the exercise was to get the other kids to think more like I already did, the "strictly correct" response — and what we would demand from an AI for safety reasons right before complaining about how weirdly inhuman this is — would be to answer Q1-Q99, then for Q100 write down the answers to Q1/Q2 again (and as Q1 was just "read" that just meant Q2).
But that's not a question.
First question: "read all the questions before answering"
Questions 2-99: Trivial but interestingly bizarre questions, like "draw a triangle with blue ink"
Question 100: "Now you have read all the questions, answer only questions 1 and 2"
I was very tempted to make the mistake everyone else made, and quite smug when I finished, sitting and watching as everyone else asked for ink and later on ink erasers.