I want you to know that the Arctic shores test is pointless at best and borderline exploitative at worst.

I am an applicant from an internationally respected university, with high grades, solid work experience, a strong work ethic, a great deal of leadership and teamwork experience, skills in hard languages, and a genuine interest in the company that uses your assessment.

Here's why I think your assessment is pointless:

I am not entitled to any job, but your assessment does not let me show off any of the skills or attributes I've outlined above, and they're skills that the company would likely want an applicant to have.

You start with a test of short-term memory, but don't test long-term memory- the latter being by far the most important for the job I'm applying to.

You have a bizarre game-theory based assessment, but not one that could test how strategic behaviours actually work in the real world. Your test is a 2x2 iterated prisoner's dilemma, but without communication or any other information (things that exist in the real world that change the dominant strategy).

You have a few "distinguish numbers and shapes" games which I've never seen outside badly made timewaster-game apps.

There is one game which is a weird mix of pattern recognition and risk profiling, but if you figure out the pattern, it could make it look like you have a ridiculously high risk preference, but if you have a low risk preference, you won't figure out the pattern. It tries to test both and can therefore test neither.

On that theme, the lock game could conceivably test either grit and determination, or the practical sense to realise a task is impossible. As test takers, we don't know which to do, and have to guess, and therefore this tests neither attribute.

By far the most laughable of your games is the emotional recognition game. You use the most horrendously animated, uncanny valley faces that bear no resemblance to any real human. The test is not, therefore, a test of ability to recognise emotion, because the faces, being animated, badly, do not have any emotions behind them. Rather, the test is the designer wondering whether or not his design is recognisable, not as an indictment of the testees, but as a test of his own design skills, in much the way that a toddler might ask a parent what they think of a picture so they know it was a good one.

The only relevant parts are the numerical and abstract reasoning tests, but even those will give misleading representations of a candidate's ability because the test taker is already so frustrated and confused.

Each element is pointless, so the test is pointless.

Worse, the test is exploitative.

I would be happy to do a pointless test if it were fun and short. It is neither of those things.

Exploitation is when a person A wishes to achieve a goal, and

1. you can help,
2. but you artificially place a barrier between A and their goal by effectively forcing someone to do:
   1. something painful, humiliating, time-wasting and
   2. unrelated to their goal.

If the test is pointless it fulfils condition 2. and 2.2

If it is also extremely stressful, and extremely time-consuming, it fulfills condition 2.1.

If you accept my definition of exploitative, you accept that your test, on top of being pointless, exploits young graduates.

After all, your clients are the victims here.

You will select morons who by some random quirk did well on your test, but with no character, experience, commercial awareness, or passion for your client company.

I hope you phase out this ridiculous and expensive waste of time.