The state of Texas is trying to give away a business opportunity valued at roughly $10 billion. To win, all an applicant has to do is score highly on something like a standardized test.
The applicants — in this case, health insurance companies vying for a chance to collect premiums for covering elderly, blind or disabled adults in the state’s Medicaid program — spent months answering test questions that spanned almost 60 pages, comprising mostly essay prompts and a few true-false questions.
There’s just one problem, according to some of the test takers: More than 30 people were responsible for evaluating the responses, and they couldn’t even agree on the answers to the true-false questions, let alone the more subjective ones.