I feel like the advice in your earlier comment is good for obtaining insight, but I can’t see how it would be useful on a test. I haven’t taken many tests where I have had enough time to solve each problem in several ways!
I’m eager to learn more if I haven’t understood correctly, though.
For harder tests, the benefit is in not ignoring low-hanging fruit, and training to look for any opportunity to get better reliability, performing cheap checks and selecting more reliable of any alternative sub-steps. On the other hand, ordinary exams are often such that a well-prepared applicant can solve all problems in half the time or less, and then the failure would be not taking advantage of the remaining time to turn “probably about 90% of solutions are correct” into “95% chance the score is perfect”.
What do you mean by “going meta”?
I feel like the advice in your earlier comment is good for obtaining insight, but I can’t see how it would be useful on a test. I haven’t taken many tests where I have had enough time to solve each problem in several ways!
I’m eager to learn more if I haven’t understood correctly, though.
For harder tests, the benefit is in not ignoring low-hanging fruit, and training to look for any opportunity to get better reliability, performing cheap checks and selecting more reliable of any alternative sub-steps. On the other hand, ordinary exams are often such that a well-prepared applicant can solve all problems in half the time or less, and then the failure would be not taking advantage of the remaining time to turn “probably about 90% of solutions are correct” into “95% chance the score is perfect”.
Gotcha. That’s much more clear to me—thanks.