It's probably a webdesigner-thing to think of 960 as a nice round number, but that's the first thing I thought upon reading that.
I confess: I thought "960 Times" was a newspaper fixed width stylesheet template of some sort at first.
She tried 960 times
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Re: She tried 960 times
#12I wonder what are the odds of passing the written test with random answers. I assume it's multiple choice.
Here's what we know from the article: (1) 40 question test, (2) Multiple choice, (3) She passed it with "60 out of 100"
My assumptions: (1) It's graded on a simple "percentage right" basis, so 24/40 questions necessary right to pass, (2) 4 options for each question
Her score on an individual test is a random variable X following a binomial distribution with 40 trials and chance of 0.25 for each trial. Her chance of passing by guessing randomly, P(X >= 24), is an infinitesimally small 2.826E-6.
The probability that she fails all of the 960 tests, assuming independence of tests, is (1-p)^960. So the probability that she will pass at least one test is:
1 - (1 - p)^960
However, under the above assumptions, she could practically guarantee her success by combining this guessing strategy with a simple test-taking strategy like eliminating 1 or 2 obviously wrong answers per question, or just remembering the answers to several of the same questions that are probably being recycled from test to test.
Re: She tried 960 times
#13It's probably a webdesigner-thing to think of 960 as a nice round number, but that's the first thing I thought upon reading that.
It's a relatively common number in computing. It's similar to how numbers such as 512, 256 and 1024 are intimately familiar to me.
Re: She tried 960 times
#14I wonder what are the odds of passing the written test with random answers. I assume it's multiple choice.
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Re: She tried 960 times
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
I spoke too soon. On the second page, the article says she did study, but did so "phonetically" and thus didn't understand what she was studying.
This reminds me of something: I saw a documentary about championship Scrabble players and a lot of them aren't English speakers or even Latin alphabet language speakers. They treat Scrabble as a visual pattern game rather than a verbal one.
Pretty much been my experience playing. It's more about memorizing lists of words without really bothering to know what they mean and figuring out which words to use when and how to place them to maximize your point total on each play.
Re: She tried 960 times
#16Off-Topic: Most stories... they'd cover on TV news [or newspapers], [are] probably off-topic. A story that man bites dog I think would be in this category.
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes... anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
That she took the test 960 times is interesting to know, but hardly gratifying.
Re: She tried 960 times
#17This is quite possibly the most inspiring story of human tenacity and sheer grit I've heard in quite a while. It really made me smile.
Clearly her method was not optimal but it... eventually worked for her. Just goes to show that perseverance pays off even when starting from absolute zero.
Good for Cha Sa-soon!
Re: She tried 960 times
#18I wonder what are the odds of passing the written test with random answers. I assume it's multiple choice.
The article says that her scores slowly crept upwards, not indicative of answering randomly.
Re: She tried 960 times
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
This reminds me of something: I saw a documentary about championship Scrabble players and a lot of them aren't English speakers or even Latin alphabet language speakers. They treat Scrabble as a visual pattern game rather than a verbal one.
Pretty much been my experience playing. It's more about memorizing lists of words without really bothering to know what they mean and figuring out which words to use when and how to place them to maximize your point total on each play.
Family scrabble rules: if you don't know a definition for a word (which can be found in the dictionary if challenged) you can't use the word.
Re: She tried 960 times
#20[deleted]