Where did anyone say they were an optiver trader?!?!?
My Experience with Optiver was at University Career's Fair, they tested people with the Barrier Test. It was a combined Question/ Answer Sheet. As you noted a seperate answer sheet consumes around 2 seconds a question so with answering at 6 seconds a question you can do all 80 questions but if you have a seperate answer sheet which takes an extra 2 seconds a question you can only do 60 questions. This was run with negative marking of -1 for each skipped or wrong answer.
the barrier test was run at 20 universities around Australia with the ones who made the cutoff getting invited in for further testing/interview at their office.Highest mark in barrier test won iphone, must be a company thing everyone there had iphones. I was invited in for further testing and had to forward my academic transcript. We had 26 people on my day and there was at least 2 extra days of testing/interviews.
We then sat the 2nd test which for us was 40 questions harder than the first test in 12 minutes. This one most people managed to complete in time. This one also had negative marking for skipped questions and wrong answer on a -1 scale.
The 3rd test was the sequence test which was 26 series in 30 minutes. Negative marking for wrong answers but nothing for skipped questions.
http://www.trade2win.com/boards/trading-firm/13390-optiver.html same kind of testing as these guys had
Everyone then got interviewed in turn and while waiting we stayed in the Games Room, quite awesome in Australia with Pool Table, Xbox on 4 combined tvs, car racing and foozball, with open fridge. In this stage we discussed our marks in the barrier test and there was 4-5 of us with marks above 70 so I highly doubt there was 'only 5-10 in whole 22 year history of optiver'
I was unsuccesful in the technical part of my interview and eventual feedback was I had high test scores but low academic marks and struggled in the technical part of interview. At the end of the day we had a tour of the office and then they gave 3 offers out of the group of 26. So getting to interview is not a definite job by any stretch. The next day they had another group of similar size which only had 1 job offer at the end.