Abstract
Many professions practice certifications as a way to establish that a person practicing this profession has reached a certain skills level. At first glance, it may sound like several years of practice should help a person pass the corresponding certification test, but in reality, even after several years of practice, most people are not able to pass the test, while after a few weeks of intensive training, most people pass it successfully. This sounds counterintuitive, since the overall number of problems that a person solves during several years of practice is much larger than the number of problems solved during a few weeks of intensive training. In this paper, we show that Zipf’s law explains this seemingly counterintuitive phenomenon.
Highlights
The more years a person works on a job, the more skilled this person becomes
The main purpose of this paper is to explain this seemingly mysterious phenomenon and help convince practitioners interested in taking the corresponding qualifying exam to supplement their practical experience with the appropriate comprehensive training
Our explanation of the above seemingly mysterious phenomenon is based on Zipf’s law — an empirical law that describes the frequency of different situation; see, e.g., [2,3]
Summary
The more years a person works on a job, the more skilled this person becomes. This is true for medical doctors, this is true for software developers, this is true for college instructors. In reality, often people with as many years of practice cannot pass the corresponding qualifying exam The main purpose of this paper is to explain this seemingly mysterious phenomenon and help convince practitioners interested in taking the corresponding qualifying exam to supplement their practical experience with the appropriate comprehensive training.
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