Leader

You may wonder why should our applicants with excellent academic record tend to give boring answers to the interview questions - they should be bright students after all.

The obvious answer is students with a good examination result may not be always the smart ones. They may simply do well in book work but have autistic personality disorder. (Many people do believe that these two traits have a correlation.)

But that does not explain the entire phenomenon. In fact, judging from their subsequent performance in the medical school, many brilliant and shrewd students do - deliberately or subconsciously - give as dull and answer as possible to interview questions.

Why ? It is because they have very good chance of getting in the medical school anyway. The only thing that they need to avoid is irritating the one over the other side of the interview table. A brilliant answer, in that case, is not a good choice - because there is always a remote possibility that it does not suite the palate of that particular professor. A dull generic answer would score you no extra mark (which the applicant does not need), but it will never trigger a negative response.

The situation is a variant of the "reversal of follow-the-leader strategy" in competition analysis.

Go read James Miller, Game Theory at Work.

PS. Once again, it proves my prejudice: It is often difficult to tell an ingenious crook from a complete idiot.