Comment So what exactly makes a truly good pretext? (Score 2) 82
The full report (pdf linked at the end of the article) repeatedly insists on the importance of the quality of the pretext:
- "a major difference this year was in the quality of the pretexts employed by our contestants."
- As in the previous years, part of our contestants' success appeared to have been related to the choice of pretext
- Our winner this year [...] developed an excellent pretext, and was fully prepared prior to the contest
On the other hand, the report gives close to no information about what makes a good pretext, aside from mentioning that the best pretext scenarios were usually based on posing as an employee, whereas posing as a student or conducting a survey seems to be less promising for collecting relevant information. What would _really_ have been interesting is some details about how the winning pretexts were constructed.