This, I think, is the incentive that will get generations to come to stop playing only for grades and diplomas: "I suspect many people implicitly assume that working in a field with bad tests is the price of making lots of money. But that, I can tell you, is false. It used to be true. In the mid-twentieth century, when the economy was composed of oligopolies, the only way to the top was by playing their game. But it's not true now. There are now ways to get rich by doing good work, and that's part of the reason people are so much more excited about getting rich than they used to be. When I was a kid, you could either become an engineer and make cool things, or make lots of money by becoming an executive. Now you can make lots of money by making cool things." -- how many of your software engineers are brilliant, eagerly learning new things and yet didn't complete (or start) their CS degree?
>> Hacking bad tests is becoming less important as the link between work and authority erodes. The erosion of that link is one of the most important trends happening now, and we see its effects in almost every kind of work people do. Startups are one of the most visible examples, but we see much the same thing in writing. Writers no longer have to submit to publishers and editors to reach readers; now they can go direct.<p>This is extremely tech centric view of the world. If your work function cannot be sold with minimal marginal cost - e.g. technical service provider, consultants, or other service industry work - this strategy may not work for you. This is true for most of traditional engineering, or other non-tech STEM functions in orgs.<p>As the cost of customer acquisition over net revenue will be significantly higher for you than the incumbent - so might as well join them - and to do so, you will likely need to hack the bad test.
'All the tests most students take their whole lives are at least as bad, including, most spectacularly of all, the test that gets them into college.'<p>If the SAT were so easily hackable by using the right test-taking techniques, rich parents would have hired tutors to teach their children the tricks, rather than paying people to actually take tests for them, which caused several famous people to go to jail.
There are a few key things here that seems to get conflated:<p>1. Usefulness - Is it a useful thing to study and remember - for an engineer medieval history is utterly useless.<p>2. Interest - is the student interested in the subject beyond grades and usefulness?<p>3. Signaling - you need good grades to get to the next stage in your life.<p>4. Energy and Time - students have other things that they want to do outside of school.<p>Students are making a tradeoff on all these dimensions while optimizing for the grade - this in itself is no easy thing to do.