[motohagiography]

This is an issue for clever people on the LSAT, where there is a technique to solving the problems that takes practice, and when you do a course on it, the thing STEM people tend to have to unlearn is solving the problem as a class of problem instead of just recognizing which question form it is and grinding through it fastest. The other trick is to recognize which ones are designed as a time suck. When I saw my first set of logical reasoning practice questions I thought, "ah, a state machine," while the other students had already put down their pencils.

Abstraction solves a lot of hard problems, but it is also costly.

[mtlmtlmtlmtl]

Very good points. I think this is why I loved mathematics in high school, or specifically my mathematics teacher. Because he seemed to recognise this in me and instead gave me more abstract things to work on. I really struggle with geometric proofs for some reason, they just don't mesh with my brain. I'm all about symbolic stuff.

He actually ended up teaching me some calculus so I could grok trig identities, even though we were still in the precalc year. And let me use it on the tests to prove stuff that would have been expected to be proved geometrically.

The other big gripe I have with the way kids are tested is the way people are locked out of life because they're only good at one or two subjects to the extent they fail some of the others. Congratulations, you have failed at school because you, a teenager, can't meet our minimum requirements for being able to write inane, shallow analysis of 19th century poetry, can't run n meters in less than m minutes, and have failed to learn German. Good luck pursing your prolific talents with no high school diploma kthxbye.

[kayodelycaon]

You can fail to get a high school diploma because of lack of athletic performance? What school is this?

I completely failed an English course and still graduated. Even went on to fail classes in college. Had to retake a class but still got a degree.

[mtlmtlmtlmtl]

Norwegian public school system. Certain subjects are required to get a diploma, which is pretty much a hard requirement to even be allowed to apply to a Norwegian university. Those include PE, Norwegian writing(two separate orthographies btw and you need grades in both!) and speaking, English, a 2nd foreign language, history, social studies, some math, and first year science class. Then there's addon elective stuff. I did theoretical math, physics, chem and biology. And I pretty much nailed those subjects

What's even worse though, you can show up, pass the final exam for a subject and still fail the subject due to "insufficient attendance" throughout the year. Which is what happened to me. I was skipping class too much to write code in my room, which ironically meant I couldn't get into a CS course even though I could code circles around the well-behaved neruotypical kids who showed up for class and did their homework.

[greentext]

How does one master this?

I haven't taken a test in years, but the number of abstractions my mind would cycle through was a major disadvantage on timed tests.

[ylee]

>Abstraction solves a lot of hard problems, but it is also costly.

This may explain what happened to me. Of the various standardized tests that I have taken in life (SAT in 8th grade, SHSAT, PSAT, SAT, ACT, LSAT, GMAT), the LSAT is the only one that I did not score in the 99th percentile on, and its logic games section was my weakest. I have never had any test prep training of any kind other than taking old exams; if I had taken an LSAT class perhaps I might have approached the section differently.

[quickthrower2]

Exams are designed to make bulk assessment easier. Ideally you would give students a day to do what is in a 2 hour exam and access to internet and papers - but making that work would be very expensive to avoid cheating.

At work you get stuff done rather than answer questions in a obscenely short amount of time