I don't understand how these problems would be harder for Jews than anyone else. It's controversial in my opinion to claim that educated Jews are worse at these based on their ethnicity.
edit: wow people responded too quickly, sorry if it was to something I edited out
They're not supposed to be; the goal was to give Jews harder questions which had supposedly simple answers:
> One of the methods they used for doing this was to give the unwanted students a different set of problems on their oral exam. I was told that these problems were carefully designed to have elementary solutions (so that the Department could avoid scandals) that were nearly impossible to find.
They could also give huge boolean formulas, and ask the applicant to decide if it is satisfiable[1] or not. Simple yes or no answer, which is quite a hard (NP-hard) to come by.
While it is obvious that a satisfiable instance will have a simple yes-certificate, it is not known if for any unsatisfiable instance there is a short no-certificate (i.e. SAT is in NP, but believed not to be in coNP). The Jewish problems had to have simple solutions, while it could be hard to find a small proof of unsatisfiability of some large formula.
The Mathematics Department of Moscow State University, the most prestigious mathematics school in Russia, was at that time actively trying to keep Jewish students (and other \undesirables") from enrolling in the department.One of the methods they used for doing this was to give the unwanted students a different set of problems on their oral exam. I was told that these problems were carefully designed to have elementary solutions (so that the Department could
avoid scandals) that were nearly impossible to find. Any student who failed to answer could easily be rejected, so this system was an eective method of controlling admissions.
I had the very same doubt the author of the comment you replied to seems to have had. What confused me is that I thought that the 'directioning' these problems to Jewish people was an implicit scheme.
After all, simply directing the questions to Jewish candidates is discrimination too start with. They took so much care in finding a set of problems they could justify as not discriminative that I though they had developed a clever scheme to implicitly direct the questions.
I mean, the university prepared itself to answer "But the problems aren't hard, check out the solution!" when asked "Why did you give hard problems to Jews?". I would simply ask "Why didn't you give everybody the same set of problems?". What I don't get from having skimmed over the paper and comments is how they prepared to the latter question.
edit: wow people responded too quickly, sorry if it was to something I edited out