Argumentum Ad Verecundiam

The questions ares so hard that a passing score is 18 correct out of 50 (thats a 36% for you Philosophers). I got 17, and a reduction in the amount of money in my job offer.

It was still a lot of money, so I took the job.

I found out that one can retake the exam after starting with the company, so long as he/she waits six months. After an unbelievable amount of hoop jumping, I arranged to take it. Nothing lost if I fail, a $7500 per annum raise if I pass.

I took the exam yesterday. They updated it, now it's even harder. Hard enough that I won't mind if I fail for the same reason I wouldn't mind failing medical boards, the Bar, or the CPA exam.

The 18/50 passing score, though, makes it possible that I will pass. You can use the Binomial Distribution to calculate the probability of passing by sheer chance. It's about 6.3%.

I have moderately hight confidence that I got 9 problems right. If we assume I actually got 7 of those right an I'm smart enough to eliminate an obviously wrong answer once out of every two problems you end up with a 35.4% chance of passing, mostly by guessing. If I actually hit those 9 problems, it goes up to about 58%

That's a lot better than Vegas. I took it on Thursday the 14th, under my full moon which might bump it up to 58.00042%

Wish me luck!

Afterthought: How to Calculate the Probability of Passing a Multiple Choice Test by Guessing

While researching this, I couldn't find an easy way to do this on the web. I've included this section in case anyone else out there needs to know to do this. I wrote a little Matlab/Octave script:

%Testpass.m
%By Jamesy
%Computes probability of passing a test by guessing
%testpass(numans, numprob, pscore)
%numans=number of possible answers to each question
%numprob=number of questions on the test
%pscore=number of questions you need to get right to pass the exam

function [prob]=testpass(numans, numprob, pscore);

data=zeros(1,numprob);

for count=1:numprob
data(count)=nchoosek(numprob,count)*(1/numans)^count*(1-(1/numans))^(numprob-count);
end

prob=sum(data(pscore:numprob));