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by home_boi 2957 days ago
> mastering an arbitrary test

If the test is based on the standard middle/high school curriculum (if there is one), then it can be a fairly good predictor.

Otherwise, even if it is an arbitrary test, it takes study skills and discipline to be able to master it. I imagine that both of those traits correlate with performance at school.

1 comments

> If the test is based on the standard middle/high school curriculum (if there is one), then it can be a fairly good predictor.

I doubt that, humans are capable of overfitting standardized tests extremely easily. Just doing a single practice run will usually give you significant advantage. You would have to "regularize" by changing the test structure/types of questions/whatever every year, which is not really feasible.

> Otherwise, even if it is an arbitrary test, it takes study skills and discipline to be able to master it. I imagine that both of those traits correlate with performance at school.

Sure they do - except now you have got students training for a significant part of their middle school life for an arbitrary test instead of some "real" education.

Creating a new test each year is very doable. Especially if it consists of many parts (for different classes/subjects - maths, literature, biology, etc).