I feel like someone that's not unusually unintelligent should have been able to make the connections between SYN and synchronize or ACK and acknowledge. I don't know why people are defending the recruiter. The process is dumb, but so is an interviewer that asserts himself as an authority when he has to read from a sheet of paper. I don't expect him to be a technical expert, but I do expect him to know when he needs to consult a technical expert about a particular candidate's answers. If this is an accurate representation of his interviewing skills, he needs a new job.
Why the hell is a non-technical recruiter giving these tests? Google engineers or managers should be administering it, not the high school dropouts who make up the recruiting industry. There's so much wiggle room here that have a rote-memorization style test for engineering is completely crazy. I've never had a technical test given to me by a recruiting firm. Its always a call with someone from the company, if not the hiring manager.
Perhaps this is what they give to 'second string' applications to make HR happy while the guys who actually get the jobs are friends of the hiring manager or team leads. Or its a H1B ploy to say, "See Obama, we need tech talent. Look how terrible our domestic talent is. They score 40% on our tests!" Meanwhile Bombay Upstairs University has a wink-wink-nudge-nudge deal with Google hiring managers who accidentally leak the test on a 'forgotten' ftp site.
Everything about this is fishy. I think there's fraud here, not just incompetence. I've been the hiring stooge for shops who have already made their decisions before and its always terrible and, frankly, hurtful. These are the signs of a non-serious 'stooge' interview.
Almost feels like the recruiter was conspiring against you, but why?