John Hawthorn earned a double major, in philosophy and physics, from Oxford and a Ph.D. from McGill University. But when his wife's work moved them from Hawaii to Pennsylvania, even this collection of degrees couldn't land him the type of teaching job he was after. So the 49-year-old Brit thought about his assets—a deep reservoir of knowledge, an intellectual curiosity, a proclivity toward quizzing young minds—and soon found himself at the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, New Jersey, where for eight years he's been one of the 35 GMAT question writers. "Not a lot of people would want to do what we do," says Hawthorn.
MBA Jungle: Do you think about how people struggle with your questions while they're taking the test?
Hawthorn: Yes, I feel great sympathy for people who have to take the test in a real-time situation. I honestly admire people who do it well.
MBA Jungle: Trace the path of a question from start to finish for us.
Hawthorn: We have 20 or so outside writers around the world who submit material from a broad field of topics they find in reasonably intelligent publications, such as The Economist and History Today. For example, we may use reporting from The Wall Street Journal about a company's attempts to increase its market share by lowering prices. We try to turn that company's decision-making process into a topic for a question, which someone in-house writes up. The question is then examined internally and by outside reviewers—usually business school professors. If it passes this process, it's included in a real test, but it's not scored.
MBA Jungle: Do most questions pass?
Hawthorn: About 40 percent fail to make it into the official test.
MBA Jungle: How many questions do you write in a day?
Hawthorn: Three or four, but I can also sweat and sweat and barely write one.
MBA Jungle: What's the best question you've ever written?
Hawthorn: It's not my best question, but it's the one I love the most. It was about Simpson's paradox—about how the average of averages can be a misleading statistic. I came up with a killer way to construct it, which was something like this: Suppose that oranges are grown in two areas—one that's very fertile and another that isn't. And suppose that over a 10-year period the productivity of each area, measured in crates of oranges per acre of grove, increases. You might think that overall productivity of oranges must also increase. In fact, it doesn't have to. If the acreage of orange groves in the not-so-fertile area has also increased, overall productivity can actually decrease. The question made it into the test, but it sank. No one understood it. I was quite upset.
MBA Jungle: Can you usually tell when you've written a winner?
Hawthorn: Well, it's like business: You come up with a wizard product and think it'll sell like hotcakes, and then it just does all right.
MBA Jungle: What's the salary of an entry-level writer?
Hawthorn: If someone has a Ph.D., usually around $48,000.
MBA Jungle: How do you spend your spare time?
Hawthorn: I sing in a choir. I also like to garden and cook.
MBA Jungle: Ever run questions by a friend before submitting them?
Hawthorn: No, I can't, because of security concerns.
MBA Jungle: Do you think of questions while you're in the shower?
Hawthorn: I think about them all the time.
MBA Jungle: Really? Then think fast. If the width of a rectangle is increased by 10 percent and the length is decreased by 20 percent, by what percent does the area decrease?
A. 2 percent
B. 12 percent
C. 16 percent
D. 20 percent
E. 21 percent
Hawthorn: Ohhhhh. [Laughter. Silence.] Wow. Nasty. What are my choices again?
MBA Jungle: A. 2 percent, B. 12 percent, C. 16 percent, D. 20 percent, E. 21 percent.
Hawthorn: I'll pick 12 percent, but I'm not a mathematician.
MBA Jungle: You got it.
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发表于 2004-3-4 22:58:00
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