A colleague wrote a utility-safety quiz that hides the right answer behind double negatives and unrelated trivia. What should the instructor do?

When a colleague’s utility-safety quiz hides right answers behind double negatives and unrelated trivia, the instructor should replace trick wording with fair items that align to the published objectives. Fair, objective-aligned items measure safety competence rather than test-wiseness. Keeping tricks so only test-wise operators pass fails measurement fairness and can screen out competent field staff. Adding more trick stems to raise civil-service difficulty fails validity. Scoring the quiz on whether operators complain about wording fails to assess safety knowledge at all. Exam caveat: difficulty should come from the job content, not from linguistic traps. Operational check: rewrite items in plain language mapped to each safety objective, pilot with a peer, administer the revised quiz, and confirm scores reflect utility-safety performance indicators rather than parsing puzzles. Utility-safety competence should be measured with plain, objective-aligned items; trick double negatives reward test-wiseness and can fail operators who would perform safely in the field—the opposite of a fair municipal assessment. Keep the civic standard visible on the rubric so every rater and learner sees what "met" means.