• bl_r@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    5 months ago

    As a kid who had a habit of reverse engineering shit, (malware analysis and ethical hacking my beloved) I genuinely don’t know you can reverse engineer an equation with a question and 4 answers, 3 of them which are wrong. Even with two questions, its still a crapshoot, and the amount of wrong to right answers seems a bit time consuming to use to try and figure out the real solution, much less the equation, in a reasonable amount of time needed to complete an exam.

    • original2@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      It depends on the exam. One exam where it was totally possible was the EEE aero MAT for imperial college London. They have retired it since but i got about 50% (i know someone who got an interview with a negative score) because whenever the answer was a function, i could plug the function into the question ratger than do it from first principles (eg differential equations).

    • webghost0101@sopuli.xyz
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      5 months ago

      Maybe reverse engineering isn’t the right term.

      Brute forcing using the provided calculator and calculated guesswork till i got something that matched one of the answers.

      I sometimes lost points for “something off in my formula” but the answer was correct so i passed overal.

      I have a nack for “visualizing” certain math allowing for calculated guesses. I had a few instances (not on a test) where i literally just told the teacher i had not the faintest clue how to tackle the solution but it just screamed “x=3” and i was kindly told “well done, but no points without formula. “

      • bl_r@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        5 months ago

        That’s making more sense to me, but my view of reverse engineering is 100% tainted by my work in SRE and hacking.

        I work in the same way, but I’ve kinda forgot about using a calculator since the last few math classes I took forbid using calculators