The point of the test wasn't to determine whether or not people who had never been exposed to programming could correctly divine what operation '=' performs in C.
Rather, the idea was to see whether or not, over the course of 20 or so questions, their answers indicated that, whatever they had decided '=' did, right or wrong, they applied their conclusion in a consistent manner.
Thus it was irrelevant whether or not they got the semantics of the operator right; what was important was determining whether or not they had operated as though operators in general have semantics, or whether they operated as though things behave essentially randomly.
It's more or less an attempt to determine whether the test-taker behaves as though the universe is a rational and understandable place or not.
This is sometimes called "procedural literacy" or "operational literacy" (http://grandtextauto.org/2004/06/02/procedural-literacy-an-i...), a sort of meta-programming-literacy that isn't literacy in any specific programming language (or even necessarily programming at all), but rather the ability to reason about how systems behave in rational, programmed manners.
Rather, the idea was to see whether or not, over the course of 20 or so questions, their answers indicated that, whatever they had decided '=' did, right or wrong, they applied their conclusion in a consistent manner.
Thus it was irrelevant whether or not they got the semantics of the operator right; what was important was determining whether or not they had operated as though operators in general have semantics, or whether they operated as though things behave essentially randomly.
It's more or less an attempt to determine whether the test-taker behaves as though the universe is a rational and understandable place or not.