I agree that having some kind of a noise test, no matter how unrealistic it is, is better than having no noise test at all.
In terms of getting some kind of good result out of the test, I guess it depends on what actionable item they would take to tweak the settings on your hearing aids to improve your score if they did the test again after whatever tweak(s) they did to your settings. If they did the test just to show you how well (or badly) you score, but didn’t take any actionable item, then you simply would just know what the result is without having the result improved.
If they did some tweaking then test you again after the tweaks to look for better results, then I wonder what they’d do other than cranking up the Neural Noise Suppression value to a higher (or the highest value). It seems like you’d want to avoid tweaking the gain curves too much in the Fine Tuning section because even if it may help with noisy situations, it may adversely affect your experience in normal or quiet situations when there’s no noise. So the most logical and easiest tweak with minimal adverse effects is simply to turn up the Neural Noise Suppression value so that it’d help when it’s noisy, but it doesn’t mess things up when it’s not noisy.
For this, you don’t really need a speech in noise test, you’d just do it (increase the NNS values) and send the patient out to the real world to see if it helps then report back to you. OK, doing an in-office white noise over word recognition to measure for a better result or not is better than nothing. But what I’m trying to say is that even if you get better results from that hokey “pipe noise in one ear, pipe words in the other ear” test, it doesn’t necessarily guarantee that you’d get the same better result in real life.
So I really hope that the QSiN test that @Louie mentioned is much more than the white noise test that @cvkemp described at the VA office.