To add to this, not all students are working on problems at the same rate either. I’d be willing to bet a good portion of fast learners spend more time thinking

To add to this, not all students are working on problems at the same rate either. I’d be willing to bet a good portion of fast learners spend more time thinking about these things. By the time I took my first and only programming class in school I’d already been writing in basic and putting together batch scripts to manage launching games. Of course I picked up pascal much more quickly than my peers because I’d already spent a considerable amount of personal time tinkering in the space. Same with math. I probably spent a lot more time thinking about that than most of my peers. I’d zone out in unrelated classes trying to figure out ways to extrapolate or repurpose math tricks I’d learned because it was interesting to me. So I appeared to be a very fast learner. But was I? I still spent longer than most of my peers on those subjects.