Using the "flag" loophole to pass every review audit

Question

My question pertains to the review audits that occasionally appear when using the "review" feature on Stack Overflow. I know that if you fail too many of these audits, your reviewing privileges can be suspended. This was implemented (according to Manishearth) because:

A lot of people are blindly upvoting everything in the queue without even reading the posts, just so that they can get the badges. So, some posts in the review queue are designed to catch such users...

However, I think there is a loophole in this system. A user can conceivably pass every audit without reading the post by using the following method:

1. Immediately select "flag" or "Recommend Deletion" without reading the post.
2. If the question/answer being reviewed was an audit, then the results will automatically appear when the user flags the post. Since (as far as I know) the audits are always negative tests; i.e. they are posts that should be flagged or deleted and not posts that should be approved, if the audit results do not automatically appear, it means the post is not an audit.
3. After determining if the post is an audit, the user can ultimately choose not to flag/recommend the post for deletion by Xing out the screen that asks for the reason the user wants to flag/recommend for deletion. They can then approve the post without reading it and without running the risk of failing an audit.

Especially since posts can be flagged within the ~3 seconds during which the system does not allow the user to click "No Action Necessary," this is a simple method to pass every audit while wasting no time in moving through review posts. Hence users can continue to blindly allow posts or edits that should be flagged/deleted/undone to earn badges, to the detriment of the Stack Overflow community.

My question: Wouldn't it be better to force the person to confirm the flag or deletion recommendation before displaying the audit results?

Answer 1

This was a major annoyance as far as I'm concerned. The close and flag dialogues have finally made their review audit debut in build rev 2014.5.15.2250 on meta and 2014.5.15.1608 on sites. In order to fail or pass an audit you now have to actually submit a flag or close vote. Await some robo-reviewer lash back.

Answer 2

Immediately select "flag" or "Recommend Deletion" before reading the post.

If you do actually read the post after that, I don't care if you "cheat". The audits are, first and foremost, meant to be educational - "stop - you weren't paying attention, this is what you missed"; failing an audit means nothing compared to missing an opportunity to catch a real problem.

The folks completing these things in three seconds with the same action chosen every time... If they're cheating, they're cheating themselves, throwing away an opportunity to become a helpful member of the community in exchange for... a brief spell on the leaderboard.

They're also pretty easy to detect, with or without audits.