Some people said they had to use it on today's MCAT administration. But you are right that it is extremely rare to see such a weird question. It may even be experimental
I don't know of any trick to solve quadratic, except to rearrange into the ax^2 + bx + c = whatever and then solve by (x-#)(x+#) and set each equal to zero (I'm stretching my memory from grade 11 MATH).