People keep dodging my analogies, I've given two thus far. I guess one more won't hurt. This one isn't very good, but I hope you'll get the gist of it. You take an art class and you're taught the basics of painting -- color, contrast, texture, shading, etc. Your final exam is to reproduce the Mona Lisa (or pick any equally-daunting piece of art).
Of course da Vinci used the same principles of color and shading to paint the Mona Lisa, but the final exam does not seem to test the skills you were taught -- rather, it tests your innate ability to be a great painter. Undoubtedly, some people will get A's, some will get A-'s, and some will get B's. But if person X has some sort of innate talent that person Y does not have, X has a clear and distinct advantage on the exam -- an advantage that has nothing to do with the class and nothing to do with the teacher.
Consider another example: if a friend of mine asked me to "teach him how to program" I wouldn't give him the building blocks without the caveats -- one of the first things I'd do is tell him that off-by-one errors, for example, are a very common caveat in for loops.
And yet, I've taken programming courses in which this kind of trickery (CS professors love to fuck with you by giving retarded off-by-one puzzles) borders on immoral. I've had friends in said classes that had no experience with programming (unlike me) that received unsatisfactory grades because of this kind of incessant trickery. Thankfully, CS books are written magnitudes better than math books.
Of course da Vinci used the same principles of color and shading to paint the Mona Lisa, but the final exam does not seem to test the skills you were taught -- rather, it tests your innate ability to be a great painter. Undoubtedly, some people will get A's, some will get A-'s, and some will get B's. But if person X has some sort of innate talent that person Y does not have, X has a clear and distinct advantage on the exam -- an advantage that has nothing to do with the class and nothing to do with the teacher.
Consider another example: if a friend of mine asked me to "teach him how to program" I wouldn't give him the building blocks without the caveats -- one of the first things I'd do is tell him that off-by-one errors, for example, are a very common caveat in for loops.
And yet, I've taken programming courses in which this kind of trickery (CS professors love to fuck with you by giving retarded off-by-one puzzles) borders on immoral. I've had friends in said classes that had no experience with programming (unlike me) that received unsatisfactory grades because of this kind of incessant trickery. Thankfully, CS books are written magnitudes better than math books.