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instead of working through it

Loonnnng time ago (25+ years) I remember appearing for an entrance exam of a very famous, hard statistical course. It was a 3 hour exam, with only 7 or 8 questions. The exam explicitly stated that they do not care much for the actual answer, but the path taken to get to the answer (all questions were math problems). As a kid this sounded weird to me, but now it makes sense. Someone with good problem solving instincts will get to the right solution (even if it takes a couple of attempts to get there) vs someone who got lucky the first time (or brute forced their way)



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