I’ve heard it said that an attribute of a good officer is the ability to make quick decisions. If they happen to be right, that’s even better.
It was probably a good test for officer material : did he have enough sense to recognize questions that would take a long time to answer, skip over them, and come back if time permits?
My friend was a devoted railroad man. There was no timetable, no matter how fiendish, that was going to defeat him. In other words he was monomaniacal when it came to railroads and very likely would have made a terrible officer (which despite his very high mark on the second of two IQ tests that the Army gave, he never aspired to be).