In my time as an instructor our department hired a guy who was an expert at computerized adaptive testing. I sat through a number of his presentations and one thing remains, that shares a theme here. The first actions determine the whole course of the test as similar to your first decisions in a crisis affect your outcome.

Get the first question or two correct you are tracked to do well miss them and you are tracked to not do well. So my colleague’s assertion was the challenge to creating an adaptive test was to choose the first questions with a lot of attention to make sure the difficulty level is proper.

Every decision you make can be thought of as a first decision. Fortunately, most decisions placed in front of us are not immediate life or death ones.