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Recruitment processes often ask to take logical aptitude tests. Here's one such example of a test question:
The goal is to replace the question mark with the image that fits.
I went with Image D, since I couldn't figure out what else it ought to be. Yet I got it wrong.
Why do recruitment process use these tests? What exactly are these tests supposed to measure? And what the hell is the correct answer in the above?!?
It is a pattern recognition assessment
Companies get a lot of applications, so their solution is to whittle down the applications with a barrage of tests with the theoretical goal of finding the smartest people. Companies much prefer to throw away good candidates than to hire poor candidates.
The correct answer is E. You got the wrong pattern for the black ones. It is one clockwise turn, two clockwise turns, three clockwise turns, etc.
I agree with Matthew Gaiser's reasoning for how you are supposed to solve it.
When these questions are set naively there is a trick that sometimes works if you can't find all the patterns. The test setter wants to give you a set of answers that ensure you will get it wrong if you are wrong about the pattern for any one of the features. That means they are tempted to supply, for each feature considered separately, more correct than incorrect answers.
In this case, 4 out of 5 answers have the same line angle. 3 out of 5 have the same white tag position. 4 out of 5 have the same black tag position. E is in the majority in every case.
If I had worked out the patterns for the line and white tag, but not the black tags, I would have picked E over D because of the majority rule.
I don't think this would work on a serious, validated IQ test - the test setters would know that sort of trick and make sure it does not work, at least across a complete test.
Why do recruitment process use these tests?
Companies are inundated with resumes from completely unqualified candidates, perhaps by a factor a hundred to one, or more. As an extreme, NASA receives several thousand submittals for every single astronaut candidate opening. Something needs to be done to filter the completely unqualified candidates from the perhaps qualified candidates.
The formal interview process is very expensive. Hiring someone is even more expensive than is the formal interview process, and firing / laying off someone is more expensive yet. This means that an initial filtering process that happens to reject someone who would have been a perfect fit is okay.
Erroneous hirings are a huge mistake. This makes organizations go out of their way to avoid such mistakes. It is far better to simply reject people who might be bad fits as early as possible in the hiring process. The cost of a false positive (hiring someone who shouldn't have been hired) is far greater than is the cost of a false negative (rejecting someone who shouldn't have been rejected).
As much as I do not like superficial or seemingly irrelevant automated tests, I do understand why they are used. At every step from the initial screening to the final hiring, it is far better to reject someone who is good than it is to accept someone who is not good. An automated initial screening is cheap and fast. That it might reject someone who would otherwise be perfect is irrelevant. The intent is to reject as many as possible who might not be good. False negatives are acceptable due to the huge number of candidates, the vast majority of whom should not have applied in the first place.
I don't have enough reputation to post this as a comment; it's pretty long and not directly an answer:
These pattern recognition tests function well when used naively, but they break down completely once a participant knows something more advanced about math. If you care about this, for every finite sequence S of length N and for every new element E, there is a finite sequence S' of length N+1 that starts with the S and ends with E, i.e. S' = (S, E). You can basically append whatever you want at the end and still be mathematically sound.
Keeping in mind that these tests are nonsense once you see through them, I actually went with D as well when trying to play along. My reasoning is the following: (I'm going from right to left in this)
My reasoning now was the following: It is obvious (...), that the next white position will be 1 away from the last one, which is 4 (or 0 if you're calculating in a clock fashion), so it should be on the right. The next difference for the black ones they wanted to get is 3, so it would be on the right (giving E as the answer). I, however, didn't feel that way (not trying to actively break the test); I was feeling like the sequence of positions should be left. Why? In my calculations, 0 ~ 4 (they are at the same position, as is 12 am and 12 pm on an analogue clock), so I was seeing the positions more like (0, 4, 1, 3) with (0+4 = 1+3). And I felt like repeating should be the way to go. That would give me the sequence (0, 0, 1, 3, 0, 0, 1, 3). Of course, this could also be (0, 0, 1, 3, 2, 2, 3, 1), but that's just the point.
As a conclusion:
People using math that don't understand math to try to get rid of people not understanding math is always amusing when knowing something about math ;)
