yulzari
That a question takes a long time to solve doesn't necessarily mean that it is difficult. It may simply mean that the question is bad and misleading.
Posted from my mobile deviceHi. This is a different topic of discussion. This is talking about evaluating difficulty which does not have much to do with the original comment of official questions.
The impact of time on the performance of the task is an interesting component that has to do with individual skills. Something that is easy for one may be difficult to another - e.g. writing with your non-dominant hand or moving your ears or enjoying quant vs. enjoying history. When you have a large group of people how do you rank the tasks of learning how to master writing with your non-dominant hand, moving ears, or solving complex equations if you don't take time into consideration? In some cases, Time is more valuable than money in evaluating the ROI but before we go there, you are not wrong either. I would say taking a long time for a question in Quant is something you can argue a question that is artificially difficult. There are a few I have seen in quant that are not tricky or unusual but the standard rate/distance/speed question that simply requires an extra step or two to solve. It is an easy and perhaps not a very elegant and rather a crude way of making it more difficult and in that case you can say it is more tedious. It eats your time, so on a simulated test it would make the test harder even though the question is not really complex... I am not familiar of such approach in SC. How would you make an SC long to solve? Do you have an example of an SC that is going to take long to solve? I have seen some equally long official and unofficial questions.
I am genuinely curious curious about the definition of difficulty of a question and what it should involve. Compare 2 tasks: was building the Egyptian pyramids less difficult than putting a man on the moon? One task was done by thousands of people over dozens of years by a primitive society and the other was done by a small group of highly qualified individuals. One was a very long repetitive task and the other one was one of a kind. My guess is you would find putting a man on the moon more difficult than building the pyramids but if it is not difficult, why nobody has done it over or better? Is knowing how to do something automatically makes it easy? Is all sports then easy? Are athletes not really hard workers? Is it easy to earn a gold medal in Olympics?