Speaker 1: Pushkin.
Speaker 2: It's eight o'clock in the morning on a Saturday, a
Speaker 2: little chili deep in downtown Manhattan. Streets are empty. I'm
Speaker 2: standing on the sidewalk with my assistant, Camille Baptista.
Speaker 1: First of all, Camille needs no did you did you
Speaker 1: sleep well last night?
Speaker 3: I did sleep well. Yes, I did not, really I could.
Speaker 1: Almost know sleep.
Speaker 2: And I had a nightmare about the l SAT that
Speaker 2: I left before him so over. I had an exam
Speaker 2: nightmare from high school, essentially a high.
Speaker 3: School See you left before it was over.
Speaker 2: I had a nightmare about the l SAT that I
Speaker 2: walked out before the test was over. Oh but my
Speaker 2: nightmare was just beginning. This is Malcolm Gladwell. I'm back
Speaker 2: with season four of Revisionist History, my podcast about things
Speaker 2: overlooked and misunderstood. This episode is about what happened when
Speaker 2: Camille and I took the law school admissions test. We
Speaker 2: had three number two pencils each, a small pack of Kleenex,
Speaker 2: a package of trail Mix, all in clear plastic bags.
Speaker 2: We lined up outside Pacey University with hundreds of other
Speaker 2: nervous people clutching clear plastic bags. Everyone wanted someday to
Speaker 2: become lawyers except us. We were there in the name
Speaker 2: of science.
Speaker 1: We had to go.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's all been very traumatic and stressful, but I
Speaker 2: wanted to get one last thing. I would like to
Speaker 2: get your handicap on your chances of beating Just tell
Speaker 2: me what you think your chances.
Speaker 3: Of beating me are my chances as a Your mom,
Speaker 3: I would point out, was quite confident you would win.
Speaker 3: My mom is confident in me no matter what, which
Speaker 3: is very nice, but you know, maybe unrealistic. Uh, you know,
Speaker 3: I don't know. Fifty to fifty, Camille, I really am.
Speaker 3: I told you I am twenty four.
Speaker 2: Okay, I can't even I won't even tell you how
Speaker 2: I am. But it's it is a It is a
Speaker 2: large multiple of your age, I know.
Speaker 3: But I don't think it has I don't think it
Speaker 3: has to do with age. I think it has to
Speaker 3: do with reading ability. And you read non stop twenty
Speaker 3: four hours a day.
Speaker 2: I've been an intellectual. I've been in cognitive cline for
Speaker 2: thirty years. It's all going to be exposed. All right,
Speaker 2: we're off, We're going to go. I got the idea
Speaker 2: of taking the l SAT from a man named William Henderson.
Speaker 2: I read a paper that he wrote. It was on
Speaker 2: my favorite website SSRN, which is where academics from around
Speaker 2: the world post their papers and they get ranked. If
Speaker 2: you're a regular listener to this podcast, you'll know how
Speaker 2: genius I think SSRN is. Anyway, this paper was called
Speaker 2: the l SAT Law School Exams and Meritocracy, The Surprising
Speaker 2: and under Theorized role of test taking Speed. Anything with
Speaker 2: the words surprising and under theorized in the title, of course,
Speaker 2: is going to be catnet for me. So I read it,
Speaker 2: then I read it again. Then I had to meet him.
Speaker 4: So just a little bit of a background here. I
Speaker 4: didn't go to law schoolto was thirty five, and so
Speaker 4: I had had a whole career before then.
Speaker 2: Why what were you doing before you became a lawyer.
Speaker 4: I was a firefighter paramedic. I was a union rep
Speaker 4: for a suburban Cleveland fire department. I did that for
Speaker 4: nine years and as a kid, people, and remember, I'm
Speaker 4: kidding as I went to law school because of those
Speaker 4: bastard management attorneys.
Speaker 2: Henderson goes to law school. After that, he gets a
Speaker 2: clerkship with a judge and one day he's in a
Speaker 2: shower and a thought occurs to him. What was the
Speaker 2: aha in a shower? The specific aha was what.
Speaker 4: Was my God? The two most time pressure things I've
Speaker 4: ever done in my life is taking the LSAT and
Speaker 4: these damn law school exams.
Speaker 2: He had been a firefighter paramedic, he had raced to
Speaker 2: the streets of Cleveland to save people on the brink
Speaker 2: of death. And then most time pressure he'd ever felt
Speaker 2: was taking the l set to get into law school
Speaker 2: and then taking the exams once he got there.
Speaker 4: I can remember taking Cass Sunstein's Elements exam my first
Speaker 4: year of law school is a two hour exam.
Speaker 2: Stein used to teach at the University of Chicago, which
Speaker 2: is where Henderson went to law school. He's a genius.
Speaker 2: He asked the kind of questions that you can spend
Speaker 2: months years thinking about. But his exam two hours. That's
Speaker 2: all you got.
Speaker 4: The proctor said time, and everybody dropped their pencils and
Speaker 4: there was this huge ug you know, everybody was like
Speaker 4: groaning that they didn't get more time to keep on
Speaker 4: working on Cass Sunstein's Element exam. It's like, you know,
Speaker 4: ninety people who all dropped their pencil and they're all,
Speaker 4: you know, exclaiming the desire for more time. That was
Speaker 4: a memorable experience.
Speaker 2: Now, I'm sure this is obvious to you, particularly if
Speaker 2: you're an American. You've been tested a thousand times in
Speaker 2: your life, SAT ACT, GRE on and on, and every
Speaker 2: one of those standardized tests doesn't just test whether you
Speaker 2: can answer the question correctly. They test how quickly you
Speaker 2: can answer the question correctly. But I'm a Canadian. I've
Speaker 2: never taken a standardized test in my life, and as
Speaker 2: an hour I have to say the whole system seems
Speaker 2: really weird. Why is quicker better? The L set is
Speaker 2: Exhibit A. It's the single most important thing that determines
Speaker 2: where you go to law school. Nothing else comes close.
Speaker 2: And what is it? It's around one hundred and twenty
Speaker 2: five questions, divided among five sections analytical reasoning, reading, comprehension,
Speaker 2: two sections on dissecting an argument, and one experimental section.
Speaker 2: Everything's multiple choice. You mark your answers with a pencil
Speaker 2: by filling in little bubbles on an answer sheet like
Speaker 2: an IBM punch card. A perfect score is one eighty,
Speaker 2: and if you're a super go getter, you cannot score
Speaker 2: below one seventy five because then you can't get into
Speaker 2: Harvard and if you can't get into Harvard, you're never
Speaker 2: going to get an offer from a big law firm
Speaker 2: or get a Supreme Court clerkship. Your life is over everything.
Speaker 2: The country club, the BMW, the multiple cases of two thousand,
Speaker 2: Chateau Lafitte, Rothschild, it hinges on those five sections, And
Speaker 2: how long do you get to spend on each of
Speaker 2: those five sections? Thirty five minutes, not forty, not fifty,
Speaker 2: not fifty five. And if you finish up one section early,
Speaker 2: you don't get to add that time to the next section.
Speaker 2: When we decide who is smart enough to be a lawyer,
Speaker 2: we use a stopwatch. So that was William Henderson's question.
Speaker 2: What does putting that thirty five minute time limit on
Speaker 2: a cognitive test like the LSAT do? So I said
Speaker 2: to Camille, let's find out, And because we're both super competitive,
Speaker 2: the whole thing got very involved. The first thing I
Speaker 2: would like to do is to understand on a very
Speaker 2: very granular level, what time pressure means for the way
Speaker 2: people take the test, the strategies they use, the kinds
Speaker 2: of mistakes they may specific Everyone told me that there
Speaker 2: was no way I could do well on the l
Speaker 2: set without getting some coaching. So I went to one
Speaker 2: of the top new educational technology startups in America, a
Speaker 2: company in New York called Noodle, started by John Katzman,
Speaker 2: who before this was one of the founders of the
Speaker 2: famous Princeton Review test prep company. I sat down with
Speaker 2: Katsman and two of his top people in a big
Speaker 2: loft building on Union Square in Manhattan. Katzman, Fritz Stewart
Speaker 2: and Dan Edmonds.
Speaker 1: No, but I am very.
Speaker 2: Very anxious not to lose to Camille.
Speaker 5: So I thought he was she born in the US
Speaker 5: or in the UK.
Speaker 2: Oh, she's went to a fancy school, like this serious,
Speaker 2: seriously intelligent woman. But I'm saying US or UK, we US.
Speaker 1: Okay, you have.
Speaker 2: Oh great, I'm too old and I'm from the wrong country.
Speaker 2: It was not an encouraging start. I've done things under
Speaker 2: time pressure before. Of course. I've written newspaper stories on deadline,
Speaker 2: I wrote exams in college. In those cases, though, the
Speaker 2: task required me to be me only with a sense
Speaker 2: of urgency. But the first thing the Noodle guys told
Speaker 2: me was the l set didn't require me to be me.
Speaker 2: It required me to be someone else.
Speaker 6: A lot of it is about helping people understand. They
Speaker 6: don't get to do this at a comfortable speed.
Speaker 2: It's Dan Edmonds right.
Speaker 6: In order to finish these sections, you have to do
Speaker 6: it at a speed that's a little uncomfortable, which means
Speaker 6: you have to hone your instincts by the test rules,
Speaker 6: not by your rules.
Speaker 2: What does it mean to read it at an uncomfortable speed?
Speaker 1: For me?
Speaker 6: It means that if there's something like in a reading
Speaker 6: comprehension passage, if I hit a paragraph that I don't
Speaker 6: fully understand, I don't get to go back and reread it.
Speaker 6: I just kind of have to accept the parts that
Speaker 6: I understand and move on.
Speaker 2: The noodle guys approach the l set like pathologists approach
Speaker 2: a cadaver.
Speaker 7: For me, I'm like, Eh, all right, I didn't get that,
Speaker 7: But if a question asks about it, I will go back.
Speaker 7: But it doesn't bother me as long as I understand
Speaker 7: the topic, sentence of the paragraph, and the overall thrust
Speaker 7: of the author's argument. If I miss a few details
Speaker 7: here and there, or even a chunk of the argument,
Speaker 7: I'm like, all right, fine, who cares, I'll go dig
Speaker 7: it out exactly when I need to.
Speaker 2: Wait. It's okay to miss a chunk of the argument.
Speaker 7: So I don't even aim for a level of what
Speaker 7: we would normally call comprehension, and my first read I
Speaker 7: am out to process the information, not understand it. I
Speaker 7: don't get any points for understanding it. I get points
Speaker 7: for bubbling in the right question.
Speaker 6: I imagine that when you read, there are lots of
Speaker 6: moments where you sort of oh, that's an interesting point,
Speaker 6: and you sort of pause and you think, and you
Speaker 6: let your mind meander a little bit. There's no meander
Speaker 6: time on the alf set, there's no digression time.
Speaker 2: Meander and digression are my whole m. That's what I
Speaker 2: do for a living. What do you think this podcast
Speaker 2: comes from? So then John Katzman gave me a sample question.
Speaker 5: What I would have you do is read this, and
Speaker 5: then for each of these questions, tell me the two
Speaker 5: stupidest answers, too stupidest, okay, the two answer choices that
Speaker 5: you know are wrong.
Speaker 1: WHOA, this is what?
Speaker 5: That's what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: You can't read this on a podcast, No, No, I can't.
Speaker 2: The passage with six hundred words it seemed longer. I've
Speaker 2: just been told that I don't need to understand it.
Speaker 2: I don't need to comprehend it. It's okay if I
Speaker 2: miss chunks of it. In other words, I'm supposed to
Speaker 2: read it without reading it. And as I sit there
Speaker 2: puzzling about this, the three of them debate right in
Speaker 2: front of me. How long this reading without reading should take.
Speaker 2: John said a minute, Fritz said three tops, Dan said
Speaker 2: it depends on the person who's reading. The only thing
Speaker 2: they all agreed on was that I had to hurry.
Speaker 1: Fly and get the bones of the argument.
Speaker 5: Now feel free to spend the time on the question itself.
Speaker 5: And again, all you're trying to do is tell me
Speaker 5: the two worst answers.
Speaker 1: Two worst answers, What do you tell me? I'm on
Speaker 1: your structure.
Speaker 2: Just so, this is on page one two right, already
Speaker 2: got it?
Speaker 1: Okay?
Speaker 2: I read it out loud because I thought maybe that
Speaker 2: would help researcher. People who participate in opinion surveys often
Speaker 2: give answers they believe the opinion surveyor wants to hear,
Speaker 2: and for this reason that some opinion surveys do not
Speaker 2: reflect the actual views of those being surveyed. However, in
Speaker 2: well constructed surveys, the questions are worded so as to
Speaker 2: provide respondence with no indication of which answers the surveyor
Speaker 2: might expect after the passage. There were multiple sets of
Speaker 2: questions to test my understanding of what I had just
Speaker 2: not read. There were pages of them. So if a
Speaker 2: survey is well constructed, survey responders desire to meet surveyor's
Speaker 2: expectations has no effect on the survey's results. The reasoning
Speaker 2: in the researcher's argument is questionable in that the argument
Speaker 2: overlooks the possibility that they must say A and B
Speaker 2: are uh.
Speaker 5: Just across map and move on to the actions.
Speaker 1: Okay, those are the worst.
Speaker 5: Not They're wrong, They're the worst answers.
Speaker 2: The clock is ticking.
Speaker 1: Well, this is such a brutal passage, shine cruel, Jesus bananas.
Speaker 1: What am I aunt? Time wise?
Speaker 2: This is what they meant when they talked about uncomfortable reading.
Speaker 2: I was being forced into a kind of altered, frenzied state.
Speaker 2: The word they used was breathless. You should be a
Speaker 2: little breathless, they said. I was breathless. I kept asking
Speaker 2: how much time has passed? They tell me my heart
Speaker 2: would accelerate. I started to panic.
Speaker 7: Okay, okay, I have no idea what I did great
Speaker 7: timing on that seven minute twenty.
Speaker 5: So this section is how long minutes?
Speaker 1: Thirty five minutes, thirty five, thirty five.
Speaker 5: Minutes And we just did one, two, three, four, five,
Speaker 5: six seven questions you would have had, say, ten minutes.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but I haven't picked any right answers yet.
Speaker 7: But you've done all the harder And that was four
Speaker 7: and a half oh seven and a half seven seven twenty.
Speaker 1: So you're tight.
Speaker 2: Oh man, you're not toast. Oh I'm toast. We did
Speaker 2: another question. I was convinced the answer was B.
Speaker 1: It was C.
Speaker 2: I could feel Harvard slipping away. Great, thank you. Will
Speaker 2: you guys think my aunts are of a beating Camille?
Speaker 6: Do you want the honest answer? I think you're in
Speaker 6: real trouble, buddy.
Speaker 2: On the day of the l SAT, I sat in
Speaker 2: a little class in one of those fixed half desks
Speaker 2: that I last had in grade school. We got our
Speaker 2: test packets. I raced through reading comprehension with time to
Speaker 2: spare sections two and three. I was right up against
Speaker 2: the deadline. Then came analytical reasoning logic games, and I
Speaker 2: looked at the questions and what I had to figure
Speaker 2: out and realized that there was just no way I
Speaker 2: was going to finish in thirty five minutes. I needed
Speaker 2: to slow down, and I wasn't allowed to slow down.
Speaker 2: I glanced behind me and there was Camille with like
Speaker 2: a death stare in her eyes, ruthlessly dispatching question after question.
Speaker 2: Then I looked around some more and saw all these
Speaker 2: kids half my age, beavering away full of purpose, because
Speaker 2: all you Americans, apparently except as Gospel, this idea that
Speaker 2: the smart person is not the person who gets the
Speaker 2: right answer. The smart person is the person who gets
Speaker 2: the right answer the quickest. Mercifully, it ended at one thirty.
Speaker 2: Camille and I stumbled outside into the sunshine, clutching our
Speaker 2: plastic baggies. Our producer, Jacob Smith was waiting. We had
Speaker 2: no idea some people wanted to be lawyers.
Speaker 1: First of all, that was a shock.
Speaker 2: Camille cheated because she she packed my We had to
Speaker 2: have these plastic bags. She packed packed my plastic bag
Speaker 2: for me. But she gave herself like apples and like
Speaker 2: really really lutritious snacks.
Speaker 8: And I got bags, which is the same thing.
Speaker 7: So you had fresh fruit.
Speaker 8: And Malcolm I did Malcolm on Trao Mix from CBS.
Speaker 8: But but but who sharpened all your pencils, Malcolm, and
Speaker 8: packed your little tissues in case your nose runs.
Speaker 9: Right now, after both taking it, who like, what's your
Speaker 9: honest opinion?
Speaker 1: How do you think did better?
Speaker 2: Oh?
Speaker 1: I think it, Camille didn't.
Speaker 2: I was I did so poorly. I was fine, and
Speaker 2: I got really cocky and then I hit the logic
Speaker 2: games and basically I think I got zero right. I
Speaker 2: had no idea what to do. I sat there and
Speaker 2: I was like in a state of complete panic. I
Speaker 2: have I was untested until this moment. Now I have
Speaker 2: been tested. America has taken its measure of me, and
Speaker 2: I'm it's pretty it's pretty humbling experience. Why do Americans
Speaker 2: do this to themselves? Do they play scrabble with a stopwatch?
Speaker 2: In literature class? Do they get extra points for reading
Speaker 2: Tolstoi's War and Piece Overnight? Is there an oscar that
Speaker 2: goes out every year to the movie that got shot
Speaker 2: the quickest? I really don't get it. Okay, time to
Speaker 2: meander and digress.
Speaker 9: I became a grand master at fifteen, so I think
Speaker 9: I became an im right after I turned thirteen. And
Speaker 9: I was a grand master at fifteen, so yeah, yeah,
Speaker 9: that was very very good at the time.
Speaker 2: That's Hikaru Nakamura grew up in Westchester County, outside New
Speaker 2: York City. He's in his early thirties, although he looks
Speaker 2: about half that age. He's one of the best chess
Speaker 2: players in the world. How much chess were you playing
Speaker 2: as a kid?
Speaker 9: Pretty much all the time, so I was playing at
Speaker 9: the Marshall at least I would say two or three
Speaker 9: days every single week, and then I would also be
Speaker 9: playing blitz on the internet chess club. I would say
Speaker 9: at least five to six hours every single day.
Speaker 2: Years ago, I met Magnus Carlson, who is the greatest
Speaker 2: chess player in the world, and I asked him how
Speaker 2: much he used a chess board versus how much he
Speaker 2: just worked through chess positions in his mind, and he said, oh,
Speaker 2: I've practiced mostly in my mind. In fact, I'm working
Speaker 2: on an opening right now. Nakamura is a little like that.
Speaker 2: He's incredibly gracious and humble, but even when he's giving
Speaker 2: you what seems like his full attention, you get the
Speaker 2: feeling that there's a whole separate part of his brain
Speaker 2: breaking down. A bus be Fisher match from the early
Speaker 2: nineteen seventies. The first thing I did after my disaster
Speaker 2: with the l set was call up Hikaru, but I
Speaker 2: didn't want to talk to him about chess. I wanted
Speaker 2: to talk to him about time. So my first question
Speaker 2: about this would be what would happen within reason if
Speaker 2: there was no clock? How does the way that you
Speaker 2: approach a game of chess change if I remove the
Speaker 2: time constrained entirely?
Speaker 9: All right, So if you remove time entirely from the
Speaker 9: game of Chuss, every game of trust would be drawn
Speaker 9: because without time, if you have an nast amount of
Speaker 9: time to think about any given move. If I could
Speaker 9: think for thirty minutes on every single move, I do
Speaker 9: not think I would ever lose a game of trust
Speaker 9: to a human. To a computer, I would still lose,
Speaker 9: but to human even Magnus. Yeah, if I had an
Speaker 9: half hour for every move, I don't think I would
Speaker 9: ever lose to Magnus.
Speaker 2: This is why chess games have a time limit. Otherwise
Speaker 2: it's not a game. Tournaments would go on for months
Speaker 2: and everyone would end up tied for first. It would
Speaker 2: be like Little League. Everyone would get a participation trophy.
Speaker 2: So there's classical chess, which is the kind play of
Speaker 2: the World Championships. Classical allots ninety minutes for the first
Speaker 2: forty moves, then thirty minutes for the rest of the game.
Speaker 2: Winning at classical chess involves calculation, working through many possible
Speaker 2: scenarios before deciding on a move. Then there's blitz chess.
Speaker 2: That's what Hikara was playing for five or six hours
Speaker 2: a day growing up. In blitz, each player gets five
Speaker 2: minutes for the whole game.
Speaker 9: When you play blitz chess, it very much becomes about
Speaker 9: finding moves that look good, that are not blunders, that
Speaker 9: you can play almost instantly, where you use a couple
Speaker 9: of seconds.
Speaker 2: In classical how many moves would you go deep?
Speaker 9: It normally would be about five to six moves in
Speaker 9: about three or four branches.
Speaker 2: It's a fantastically complex mental exercise.
Speaker 9: Yes, very much. I mean it's probably at least I
Speaker 9: would say, close to one hundred different different permutations of
Speaker 9: moves or a sequence. Is that you're looking at for
Speaker 9: every single move?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah. In blitz we've truncated that process.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: Everything about Blitz and classical is the same same pieces,
Speaker 2: same board, same players, same choreographed openings, but the time
Speaker 2: limits are different and what happens when you tinker with
Speaker 2: the time limit, you get a completely different set of results.
Speaker 2: A classical chess, Magnus Carlson is number one, he's also
Speaker 2: number one a blitz because he's a genius. Hikaru right
Speaker 2: now is eleventh in the classical rankings. But it blitz,
Speaker 2: he's number two in the world. Why because he's really
Speaker 2: really good at the rapid pattern recognition that's necessary for blitz,
Speaker 2: and he's not quite as good at the complex calculation
Speaker 2: that's necessary for classical. Now, who's an example, a good
Speaker 2: example of the opposite.
Speaker 9: Uh Fabiano Fabiano Karjuana is actually he's probably the best example.
Speaker 9: I can't even think of anyone else who is that
Speaker 9: much better at classical chess than they are at blitz
Speaker 9: and wrap.
Speaker 2: Why do you think he's not good at blitz and rappit?
Speaker 9: I think I think with Fabiano he's it's the other way.
Speaker 9: He's very very good at calculations, so when he gets positions,
Speaker 9: he's very good at calculating and understanding what the possibilities
Speaker 9: are with with more time, whereas when he doesn't have
Speaker 9: time to calculate the long sequences all the way through
Speaker 9: his intuition has to take over, and his intuition and
Speaker 9: natural feel are not as good as as everyone else.
Speaker 2: Fabiano is a tortoise, slow and steady. Hikaru is a
Speaker 2: hair ear's back speedy. You can struct your chest that
Speaker 2: favors the tortoise, or you construct your chess so that
Speaker 2: it favors hairs. I think you can see where I'm
Speaker 2: going with this. If we had a blitz tournament for
Speaker 2: the World championship, you know, in two months, where would
Speaker 2: you put your odds of winning?
Speaker 9: I would put my odds of winning probably around twenty percent.
Speaker 9: I would say I'd put Magnets at about sixty percent.
Speaker 9: I put myself at twenty percent.
Speaker 2: So pretty good odds. Yes, so your your world changes if,
Speaker 2: just arbitrarily, we decided that the standard for international tournament
Speaker 2: chess ought to be blitz.
Speaker 9: Yes, it would change.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you would make a lot more money probably, Yes. Wait,
Speaker 2: there's a third variation, bullet chess. In bullet you get
Speaker 2: one minute for the whole game, and Hikaru is the
Speaker 2: king at bullet. Are you better than Magnus at bullet.
Speaker 9: At bullet yes, a bullet yes.
Speaker 2: Why so what's why wouldn't Magnus. If he's if he's
Speaker 2: so serenely superior at all other kinds of chess, why
Speaker 2: can't he beat you a bullet?
Speaker 9: In terms of the calculation, what he does is like
Speaker 9: the sort of well it's not an algorithm, but sort
Speaker 9: of the way that he find tunes are the way
Speaker 9: he thinks about I think it takes a little bit
Speaker 9: more time to come to the conclusions.
Speaker 2: What strikes me is that the chess hierarchy formal chess
Speaker 2: hierarchy is an arbitrary function of the amount of time
Speaker 2: we have decided to spend on a chess match. Right, Yes,
Speaker 2: Like I said, I think you can see where I'm
Speaker 2: going with this. Hikaru is a hair, not a tortoise.
Speaker 2: And what is the l SAT It is a test
Speaker 2: that rewards hairs over tortoises, which means that if the
Speaker 2: Elsat ran the chess world, they would consider Hikaru the
Speaker 2: greatest chess player in the world. They would crown him
Speaker 2: champion over Magnus. El sat logic is that the best
Speaker 2: player is the one who solves the hardest chess puzzles quickest,
Speaker 2: and that's Hikaru. But that's insane, not even Hikaru thinks
Speaker 2: he's better a chess than Magnus. What Hikara would say
Speaker 2: is that he's a different kind of chess player than Magnus.
Speaker 2: And I haven't even mentioned puzzle Rush. It's an online
Speaker 2: game where you get a series of endgame chess positions
Speaker 2: and you have to get to checkmate as often as
Speaker 2: possible in five minutes. Puzzle Rush is insanely popular. Do
Speaker 2: you play a lot of Puzzle Rush?
Speaker 9: I have the highest score at it.
Speaker 2: So yes, I yeah. So what's your score?
Speaker 9: My highest score is fifty.
Speaker 2: Five, and what's the second highest?
Speaker 9: I think there are two people with fifty four, and
Speaker 9: then there are couple with fifty three, and it falls
Speaker 9: off from there.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah. We have most of the top players in the
Speaker 2: world played puzzle Rush.
Speaker 9: Most of them have.
Speaker 1: Yes, as Magnus plays change.
Speaker 9: Not officially, not officially, might be playing and hiding a
Speaker 9: sea he probably has.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you get any award for being
Speaker 2: the number one on puzzle Rush?
Speaker 1: No?
Speaker 2: They don't like crown u King of Puzzle Rush. There's
Speaker 2: a three hour video of a car crushing puzzle Rush
Speaker 2: on YouTube. It is one hundred and thirty thousand views.
Speaker 2: This actually might be the most hotly contested form of
Speaker 2: chess you've ever played. You've never played something where millions
Speaker 2: of people are in the same tournament.
Speaker 9: Yeah that's yeah, that's true. This is right.
Speaker 2: You could make an argument this is your greatest accomplishment.
Speaker 9: I guess, but I have one thinking it that way.
Speaker 9: But yes, you're right.
Speaker 2: Yes, the only reason we don't consider that your greatest
Speaker 2: accomplishment is we've arbitrarily decided only to honor chess played
Speaker 2: under these archaic rules in a tournament atmosphere. That puzzle
Speaker 2: rush is a I mean, if we decided to say,
Speaker 2: that's what chess.
Speaker 9: Yes, right, yeah, if you arbitrary decide yes, that's that's true.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 2: It has many advantages. Chiefly is it allows the entire
Speaker 2: world to compete on an equal right. Right, so you
Speaker 2: went against the entire world and you won.
Speaker 9: I don't know, yeah, yeah, I've never thought about that,
Speaker 9: but yes, that is true.
Speaker 2: If one thing comes out of this, it is I
Speaker 2: hope you you give yourself a pat on the back.
Speaker 2: The order in which people finish in any cognitive task
Speaker 2: is an arbitrary function of how much time is given
Speaker 2: to complete that task. You can make it fast or
Speaker 2: you can make it slow. The chess world has chosen
Speaker 2: to reward the tortoise. The el sat has chosen to
Speaker 2: reward the hair. They've decided to play puzzle rush and
Speaker 2: reward the Kors of the world, and not have us
Speaker 2: play classical and reward Fabiano. What does the legal world
Speaker 2: have against Fabiano? As I mentioned earlier, there's going to
Speaker 2: be a second part to this examination of the l set.
Speaker 2: Of course, there is why would I rush? In the
Speaker 2: next episode, I'm going to visit with the folks who
Speaker 2: administer the l set, the Law School Admissions Council of Newtown, Pennsylvania.
Speaker 2: But that can wait. Let's go back to William Henderson,
Speaker 2: who started me wondering about time and tests. The great
Speaker 2: justification for the l set is your score is supposed
Speaker 2: to be a useful indication of how well you will
Speaker 2: do in your first year of law school. It's a predictor.
Speaker 2: But Henderson's great question was what if the l ST
Speaker 2: only predicts law school grades? Because law schools make the
Speaker 2: same mistake that the lset does. In most law schools,
Speaker 2: grades are based in large part on how well students
Speaker 2: do on exams where they are deliberately not given enough time.
Speaker 2: You take Cass Sunstein's elements exam, where you engage with
Speaker 2: the ideas of a legal genius, and you have two hours.
Speaker 1: That's it.
Speaker 2: Henderson wondered if a law school doesn't rely so heavily
Speaker 2: on its students doing things quickly, if the school relies
Speaker 2: instead on take home exams and essays, what happens to
Speaker 2: the usefulness of the L set as a predictor? And
Speaker 2: he found that its usefulness declines. I'm quoting the data
Speaker 2: show that the l SAT was a relatively robust predictor
Speaker 2: of in class exams and a relatively weak predictor of
Speaker 2: take them exams and papers. In other words, once you
Speaker 2: stop racing against the clock, then the people who do
Speaker 2: well on the l set no longer are the best
Speaker 2: at law school, which is exactly what every chess player
Speaker 2: in the world would have told you. What happened. So
Speaker 2: what did William Henderson do when he became a law
Speaker 2: professor at Indiana University. He changed the way he evaluated
Speaker 2: his students. He started placing more emphasis on take them exams,
Speaker 2: and when he gives an exam in class, he makes
Speaker 2: it four hours, not two.
Speaker 4: That's completely open book and I give out one of
Speaker 4: the questions in advance. I say, here's three questions. I'm
Speaker 4: going to test you on one, so you've seen one
Speaker 4: of the questions already. And then four hours is plenty
Speaker 4: of time to do the issue spot or and I
Speaker 4: give a word limit. And I did that as a
Speaker 4: direct result of that LSAT study that I did, because
Speaker 4: I was acutely aware that you change the ordinal ranking
Speaker 4: when you pick a testament. And I say, you know,
Speaker 4: I don't think anybody will need all four hours, but
Speaker 4: if you if you want to take four hours, you're
Speaker 4: free to take four hours.
Speaker 2: Not long after he started grading that way, a student
Speaker 2: came to see him.
Speaker 4: This kid got an A on the exam, and so
Speaker 4: he comes in. He wants to talk about exams. I said,
Speaker 4: I've been here for three years. I've never done this
Speaker 4: well out of the exam before, and I want to
Speaker 4: know why I did this well. And I pulled out
Speaker 4: his exam and it was an eight hour take home
Speaker 4: and I go, look at your first paragraph. You hit
Speaker 4: every single issue here in the first paragraph. It's just
Speaker 4: a well organized pearl. The light bulb went on for him.
Speaker 4: It's just like if I had had more time. All
Speaker 4: my exams would have been disorganized.
Speaker 2: You have a student who the system declared was of
Speaker 2: average ability. The student believed it, why wouldn't he. But
Speaker 2: then someone came along, someone by the way, with the
Speaker 2: great benefit of being a firefighter from the suburbs of Cleveland,
Speaker 2: who had the freedom to think a little differently, and
Speaker 2: he said, wait, maybe you aren't of average ability. Maybe
Speaker 2: you only think your average because we have chosen an
Speaker 2: arbitrary system to evaluate your ability that makes you look average.
Speaker 2: You are Fabiano and we have been making you play
Speaker 2: puzzle Rush. I know what you're thinking. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: but who won between you and Camille who got the
Speaker 2: higher score in the l SAT No stop racing ahead,
Speaker 2: you are engaged in uncomfortable listening. You'll have to wait
Speaker 2: until the next episode. What I want you to think
Speaker 2: about is that student of William Henderson's and his miraculous
Speaker 2: revelation that he really was a good student. After all,
Speaker 2: there are a ton of tortoises like him out there,
Speaker 2: not just taking the elsat in city in law school classrooms,
Speaker 2: but competing for places at any number of schools and
Speaker 2: professions that have decided to tell their applicants whether they
Speaker 2: are or are not any good. And what I don't
Speaker 2: understand is how the hairs got to set the rules.
Speaker 2: I thought the whole point of the story of the
Speaker 2: tortoise and the hair was that the tortoise one. Clearly,
Speaker 2: the kind of person who is most disadvantaged by this
Speaker 2: system is the tortoise. I realized, after my experience with
Speaker 2: the noodle guys and my time with Hikaru, that I'm
Speaker 2: on the side of the tortoise. I feel for the tortoise.
Speaker 2: I might be a tortoise. I come from tortoises, and
Speaker 2: we've all met tortoises in our lives. Who will not
Speaker 2: My mother is a little bit of a tortoise. She
Speaker 2: will not be rushed under any circumstances. She will not
Speaker 2: She does not make mistakes. She goes over things five
Speaker 2: times to make sure that they're perfect. She is ideal
Speaker 2: for a certain kind of work. She'd have a problem
Speaker 2: with the eel set. She would say, why are you
Speaker 2: rushing me? And she would you know, and she wouldn't finish,
Speaker 2: And she would never guess. She can't guess. She's incapable
Speaker 2: of guessing. So my mom could never The profession is
Speaker 2: putting up a barrier.
Speaker 1: To my market.
Speaker 2: You put a stopwatch on thinking whatever, you rigged the system.
Speaker 2: So Camille wins fine, but when you go after the Gladwells,
Speaker 2: then it's personal. Revisionist History is produced by Mia Lobel
Speaker 2: and Jacob Smith with Camille Baptista. Our editor is Julia Barton.
Speaker 2: Flon Williams is our engineer. Fact checking by Beth Johnson.
Speaker 2: Original music by Luis Kiera. Special thanks to Carle Migliore,
Speaker 2: Heather Fein, Maggie Taylor, Maya Kanig, and Jacob Iceberg. Revision's
Speaker 2: History is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. I'm Malcolm
Speaker 2: gladwa But Camille, Camille is like a smarty pant. She's
Speaker 2: going to do don't you think she's going to do? Yes?
Speaker 5: Yes, Well, Camille has a natural.
Speaker 9: Uh.
Speaker 5: She she naturally prepares and is naturally persistent and determined.
Speaker 5: So I think those things will really help her a lot.
Speaker 2: Should I should I be worried?
Speaker 5: I think you should be worried. I think you should
Speaker 5: be worried.
Speaker 8: Yep