>From my perspective "communicating mastery" is exactly what you describe. I am limited to the context and expectations of a classroom. So students being able t

>From my perspective "communicating mastery" is exactly what you describe. I am limited to the context and expectations of a classroom. So students being able to pass tests is at the root of "Communicating Mastery" whereas mastery itself would be the ability to do the job in "real life" Even in my own personal life, I often reach a point where I'm internally better at a subject than I can express it even in a natural setting. So I do think there is still a concept of internal mastery and that it does have use for self reflection. Most often this is when debugging some complex application and getting an intuition as to where the application is broken. It still takes more time before I can express my mastery of the issue in the form of a fix and in some cases even more time before I can give a sufficient justification for why the fix works. Recently I fixed on issue by applying a sort to a list being traversed by a function calculating something off of it. It was weeks later before I figured out why the sort was actually needed (when working on a related issue), there was just an intuition that the list needed to be sorted. >The real problem at this point is not how a specific test is run, but rather that our education systems has trained students to think inside a very small box when taking tests, and students become often paralyzed with indecision when asked to act outside that box. Most of my students have never experienced socratic method, and are honestly scared of it. Yep. Helping little siblings with homework, I'll sometimes ramble off topic and they will try to steer me back to helping them get the right answer. So I then tell them "Yes, the teacher just wants the right answer, but the ramblings are going to be what actually helps you later in life." I found that professors who ramble off topic and bring it back on topic are some of the best because they show how all the sterilized knowledge actually matters.