How to Cheat at BuzzFeed Personality Tests
Want to get an A+ in life? Sure you do. Here’s how.
Personality surveys are everywhere these days, right?
Well a friend of mine just posted a link to "What Grade Are you Getting in Life" on BuzzFeed. Unfortunately, he got an F... But I want him to get an A+ because he's awesome!
So instead of writing a pep talk I went ahead and figured out how the surveys work. If you want to get an A+, just click on the survey responses that match the images below. For all the other questions, answer anything you like.
“Random? Really?”
Yes, really. Random answers are just fine as long as you click on the items I’ve shared.
“Wait. How does this work?”
The BuzzFeed survey (and most other surveys of the same sort), just a simple bucketing system for questions and answers:
- For each question, there answers. Let’s think of answers as walnuts.
- For each survey there are a number of possible results. Let’s think of the results as buckets.
- As answer survey questions, you’re dropping a walnut into one of the buckets.
- At the end of the survey, the bucket with the most walnuts determines your result.
There’s no special math or anything. No statistical hoop-te-doodle. Drop your nuts in a bucket and win a prize. And everyone wins a prize!
“Ok, so how do I cheat?”
You do it like Captain Kirk did. You look at the code. You figure out how it works. Then, you rig the rules to win.
The Kobayashi Maru is a test that all Starfleet cadets take. It is a no-win scenario designed to test cadets character under fire. Kirk didn’t like not winning. Who does?
So, he took the test three times.
Before the third attempt, Kirk reprogrammed the simulation so that he could win. You’d think he’d get in trouble for that but instead of getting the boot he received a commendation for original thinking.
Cheating? Of course! It’s also called getting an A+ in life.
Unraveling BuzzFeed
So, I’m not going to go through all of the survey code. It’s a bit of a spaghetti pile. But I will give you the easy way to pick and choose your own BuzzFeed results.
First, when you’re on a survey, view the HTML source of the page. You usually do this by right-clicking on the webpage and selecting “View Page Source”.
Once you’ve done this, search the code for the phrase “quiz_result_area”. You should see something like this:
Below this bit of code are all of the results for the survey/test. The results are stored in an ordered list that begins with <ol>. Each result is contained in a list element <li>.
The one we want “A+” happens to be first on the list:
The position of the result in the list correlates to a number that BuzzFeed calls a “personality_index”. If you search the code for the phrase personality_index (underscore included) you should find plenty of answers scatted throughout the code. What you want to do is search for your desired result. In this case, it’s the number zero (0) since A+ is the first item in the list of possible results.
If I look for the phrase personality_index=“0”, I can easily locate all of the right answers to get my A+ in life.
The answer itself is the <img> tag highlighted below:
All you need to do is take a look at each each image answer. Soon you’ll have a key to all of the right choices you need to make in order to achieve an A+ in life… or at least an A+ in BuzzFeed surveys.
