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I have a buddy who managed to pass his engineer PE without studying and is generally very good at all math and logic based problems without really having to "le

I have a buddy who managed to pass his engineer PE without studying and is generally very good at all math and logic based problems without really having to "learn the test". What he excels at though is breaking down a problem and deriving the solution rather than pattern matching. It isn't a very good skill for a timed test, but it is a very good skill in real life in engineering and pretty much everything else. Teaching the test takes away the learning of this valuable skill to have.

taeric 3y ago
If they passed the PE Exam, they are good at testing. They may also be good at other things, but that is the measuring problem, in a nutshell. How do you build a measuring mechanism that measures what you care about, and not only what it is good at measuring? The best example of this is a car's speedometer. It doesn't actually measure how fast the car is going. Mainly because that is a surprisingly hard thing to do. Instead, it measures something that is easy to measure and converts to what we care about. Specifically, how fast are the tires rotating? Which is all to say, hard problem space. I have no doubt there are degenerate cases out there. My assertion is that is largely in the noise, at the moment. Happy (well, mayhap that isn't the correct word, but interested?) to be shown data that shows otherwise.