ANYONE who has experienced the trial that examinations can be would remember with some amusement the preference you had for the difficult essay-type question over the difficult multiple-choice ones.
With the multiple-choice question, sure you had a one-in-four chance of getting the right answer, but, conversely, you had a three-in-four chance of getting it absolutely wrong. A wrong answer in a multiple-choice question wasn’t open for interpretation; couldn’t be given the benefit of the doubt.  With an essay-type question, however, you could dance around to hide your lack of knowledge; pad a sentence here and there; present a lean cook-up with nuff rice and only a little meat, and hope that your paper lands in front of a sympathetic marker.  In short, you had the option of the bluff.
Now, I know there were some artful bluffers in my day, and while I personally have bluffed through more tests than I wish to recall, there are some people who took that fine art to a whole other level.
For many of those people, however, the bluff does not stop at school; and a significant number of them seem to have made it into the Public Service.  Seriously, though, I have sat through a great many public discourses and watched as persons basically just bluffed their way the duration of the event.

Let me put forward the position that bluffing may not be a bad thing in absolute black-and-white terms, and while it is easy to develop the tendency to label someone a bluff, it is a brush that tars us all.  This reminds me of the Biblical story about Jesus and the woman who was about to be stoned for adultery by a crowd, and how Jesus intervened and said to the crowd, “He who is without sin, cast the first stone.”  In essence, he who hasn’t bluffed in his life, feel free to accuse others of doing so.
But bluffing can be a useful tool assessment. For example, the person who is as good at bluffing may not be as incompetent in a particular area of knowledge as you might suppose – a bluff is  only as effective as the system it is tested against, and if you succeed in doing that in a sound system, then you not only get points for a certain quantum of knowledge but for ingenuity and intellectual dexterity as well.  In school, you get the results of your exam and you see that you score near perfect marks on a paper you told yourself that you bluffed through and you smugly pat yourself on the back for getting away with it – the person marking the exam had to have been some ‘mook’, some ‘paccoo’, right, some sweet old lady in glasses deciding to give you an A for the effort.  It never occurs to you that maybe it is that hard-marking teacher, that one who is anything but a stickler for nonsense and who, following a clearly defined code of assessment, has given you that high grade.
In adult life, very often it is the same thing.  The great bluff gets the promotion because that bluff not only possesses a basic knowledge of the challenge presented but is ingenious and committed enough to at least offer a solution to it.  I confess to being an occasional bluff in this sense.  If it is that  I am completely out at sea in a situation, what I do is  ask for time to assess the situation at hand and then re-engage at a later date.  Otherwise, if it is that I am not au fait with every single aspect of the issue, rather than  stall the process, I bluff my way through and I end up learning from the other more knowledgeable persons involved.  The same principle applies in what we call immersion learning in language – instead of a structured teaching environment where a person learns, say, Portuguese by books and lessons alone, you just dump that person in a Portuguese speaking environment armed with only rudimentary Portuguese and soon that person will move from bluffing in conversations to actually having them.
Of course, all that said, there can be absolutely no substitute for complete competence and preparation – it has to do with the degree to which you bluff and knowing when to stop.  I know that I haven’t visited U.S. politics for a while, but I can cite the example of presidential hopeful, Mitt Romney who has made a great deal of money on Wall Street and who is running on his record to manage money in order to turn around the sluggish U.S. economy – Romney, although clearly bright in financial matters, has now had the myth of his financial wizardry being torn apart in article versus article.  For example, Matt Taibbi, in a searing expose entitled “Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital”, published in this month’s issue of Rolling Stone, writes:
“Everyone knows that he is fantastically rich, having scored great success, the legend goes, as a “turnaround specialist,” a shrewd financial operator who revived moribund companies as a high-priced consultant for a storied Wall Street private equity firm. But what most voters don’t know is the way Mitt Romney actually made his fortune: by borrowing vast sums of money that other people were forced to pay back. .. By making debt the centrepiece of his campaign, Romney was making a calculated bluff of historic dimensions – placing a massive all-in bet on the rank incompetence of the American press corps.”
While that bluff seems to have gotten him through the Republican primaries, it seems to be an increasing hurdle as his record with Bain and the issue of his refusal to release his taxes becomes more and more glaring.
The lesson is that bluffing can only get you so far – if you’re lucky enough to have gotten away with one in a surprisingly sticky situation, the solution is not to bluff again but to make sure that you’re not in that same position.  In past instalments of this column, I’ve argued for better preparatory work to be done in a wide range of areas, from systematic orientation of persons appointed to state boards, to research support for parliamentarians to general public service training.  If the question is whether to bluff or not, my answer is to bluff if you can do it well, but prep yourself so that you don’t have to do it all.