This is one of the craziest tests of manual skill that we’ve ever seen. It’s distinctly different from, say, the masterpiece-building required of German craft students because a) there is no design theory involved, and b) it does not rely on previously-practiced skills and focuses only on raw talent, by sandbagging the test-takers with tasks they could never have possibly envisioned or trained for.
Here’s a video of it. This is the “disruptive recruitment process” used by Japan’s Kurashiki Central Hospital to determine who’s got the hands to become a world-class surgeon:
On its surface, these exercises seem to combine the bizarre challenges of a Japanese game show with the contrived drama of American reality TV, but the end goal has nothing to do with entertainment.
“In daily clinical practice, physicians constantly confront difficult challenges,” said Dr. Toshio Fukuoka, Director of the Human Resource Development Center at Kurashiki Central Hospital. “We would like to evaluate the capability of medical students to stay calm and make correct judgments even under these circumstances. We planned this tryout to reveal the potential and uniqueness of the students, which ordinary written exams and interviews could not show.”
http://www.core77.com/posts/52266/Japanese-Hospitals-Disruptive-Recruitment-Process-for-Surgeons-Extremely-Tiny-Modelmaking-and-a-Countdown-Timer