IIT alumni explains why his company treats people who scored 90% on his test as very ‘low trust’: ‘Anyone who scored that high always…’

An IIT Madras alumni recently went into a furious rant. Taking to the IIT Madras subreddit, a Reddit user revealed how he had come up with a test which he even couldn’t pass with 100% marks. He came across graduates who gamed the system and scored 90% in the test. He lamented that such people are not good hires at all. He said that the best hires scored anything from 50 to 70 in the test. “These genuine guys scored 50-70 percent marks by taking the full 1 hour and performed fabulously in the interviews," he said.

The 90% People Were Cheaters

He revealed that he conducted the test online, and about 150 people scored above 90% marks. Many of them completed the paper within 30 minutes with high accuracy. Which was impossible unless they cheated.

They had to remove all scores who had achieved 90% as being “low trust". He also revealed that all the people with near-perfect scores almost always underperformed in the interviews.


The individual explained that thoroughly reviewing applications from 500 candidates is impractical, even with an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) in place. Consequently, recruiters are often compelled to make preliminary assumptions and shortlist applicants based on internally established priorities and selection criteria.

They further pointed out that the candidate's scores showed virtually no relationship between their CG (cumulative grade) and test performance.

He lamented that the people who are hurt are the people who are missing out despite being talented. 'Genuine guys and girls get poor packages because they couldn't get shortlisted in their deserving companies, and then the companies waste their time and effort interviewing candidates who were certainly not up to the mark…’ he concluded.

Netizens React

The post went viral with nearly 500 likes. One commenter said to screen resumes instead of relying on “OA scores to SL. The P&I team is willingly/unwillingly complicit in these practices.” he wrote.

Another commenter claimed that the firm was one of the rare organisations implementing a more equitable hiring process. They asserted that they saw various candidates obtaining numerous interview chances through deceitful methods, only to underperform in their first interviews before being chosen by different firms on later days. They claimed that the recruitment situation had become so exasperating that obtaining an interview was harder than passing one.

They also condemned inconsistent resume evaluation, supposedly prejudiced selection based on criteria that were never clearly conveyed to applicants, and the unwarranted consumption of time and credits by job seekers. They also challenged the efficacy of current evaluations, contending that traditional online Data Structures and Algorithms (DSA) exams were simple to exploit. Rather, they proposed implementing more abstract, less foreseeable evaluations that would be more challenging to cheat on or performing conventional offline, written exams. They mentioned that they had been shortlisted by each of the three companies that held offline written assessments.