The Problem With a Common Engineering Entrance Test

… is correlation and concentration.

Like everything else, a student’s performance in a test can be divided into two – the predictive component (which can be explained based on preparation levels, general intelligence, ability to handle pressure, etc.) and the random component (which includes and is not limited to illness on the day of the exam, reaching the venue late leading to unsettlement, pure luck (or the lack of it) and so on).

Now, when you have a number of exams, what you expect is for a student’s “random component” to even out across these exams. If he outperforms his “predictive component” in one exam, you would expect that he would underperform in another exam. It’s like the “predictive component” of his performance is the expected “value” of his performance.

Thus, when you have a large number of entrance exams, it gives students the opportunity for their random components to even out, and take luck out to some extent from their college admission process. When you collapse all entrance exams into one, however, a student who happens to get a large negative “random component” on that given day is denied a second chance. Thus, the college admissions process will become much more of a crapshoot than it is now.

The other thing about uniform admission standards is why should every college have the same requirements for the students it wants to recruit? Having a common exam forces this upon colleges, unless they are allowed to change their weights allocated to different sections differently. If this doesn’t happen, it’ll only end up bringing all of the country’s education system to a uniform mediocrity.

P Polie Exclusion Principle

The basic concept is that for any given person, no two romantic partners fulfil the same kind of needs.

Let us take all the possible ways in which a romantic partner (since we are talking about multiple partners for the same person, usuallly happening at different points of time in the person’s life, I don’t want to use the term “long-term gene propagating partner”) can help you out. The kind of needs that she can fulfil. Make a list of them, and represent them as a vector.

And to this, add a vector of binaries. Let us call it the “need vector”. You might have guessed that an element of this vector is 1 if the partner fulfils this particular need and 0 otherwise. So for each of your romantic partners (spanning across space and time), construct such a vector. Yeah of course some of these needs are more important than others so you might think you might want to give weights, but that is not the purpose of this exercise.

The Pauli Exclusion Principle in quantum mechanics states that no two electrons can have the same four quantum numbers. Similarly the P Polie Exclusion Principle in romantic relationships states that no two of your romantic partners have the same need vector. That the needs vector of any two of your romantic partners have a hamming distance of at least 1.

This principle has certain important consequences. Given that any two of your romantic partners are separated by a Hamming distance of at least 1 and using the Neha Natalya-xkcd argument, the number of romantic partners you can possibly have in your lifetime is bounded from above by 2^n, where n is the length of your need vector. So contrary to intuition, this shows that promiscuous people actually have a larger set of needs from romantic partners than committed people.