Trusting your gut

[Deleted User]

So here is something that I struggle with when taking practice exams. Trusting your gut!! Now I've taken a ton of certification exams as you can see but everytime time I take a practice exam, I always struggle with the fundamental concept of trusting your gut. How do you guys do it when you have to trust your gut?

PCTechLinc

When it comes to practice exams, it's much easier for me because I can read the answer and rationale afterwards. Then I can see if my gut was right or not. Can I JUSTIFY why the answer is what it is?

When it comes to real exams, it just comes down to "what's the worst that can happen?" Usually the worst is having to take the exam again, except in the cases where your job depends on it. In the end, you have to decide whether to trust your gut or not. That's the advice I give myself, and it's worked fairly well for me (and my students).

gespenstern

Eventually, there's no "gut feeling".

What is the "gut feeling" in general? Human brain works similar to machine learning (actually it's vice versa, but because it's harder to understand your own thought process than the technology I'm using this analogy). If you feed a human with a set of anecdotes where certain event eventually produces a certain outcome, the human brain eventually catches the consequential link of cause and effect not even necessarily consciously. In a similar case the human brain after such a training would expect the learned effect to kick in, almost automatically without much thought put into it. That's how experience beats abstract knowledge, often an experienced person doesn't even realize how they come up with their solution quickly as opposed to a person with a purely theoretical knowledge who has to think about it and weakly guess what's going to happen given the circumstances.

However, if an experienced person likes to think about their metacognition and track down their own thought process they eventually learn how it works and what leads to what, thus, "disassembling" their own "gut feeling" and become cognizant and aware of it. Eventually this boils down to understanding that this exact input is going to produce this exact output because of a, b and c and what are the variations, let's say, if we replace c with g and to what extent. That's an expert level.

When I see a question I can very quickly come up with an answer and I am fully aware with how I ended up with this solution and because of what considerations and what's gonna happen if the question gets slightly changed in this or that regard.

PS. This kind of skill eventually becomes essential on a higher level. Let's say you are an architect, you devised a solution and you aren't just simply getting a "go-ahead" from the management. You more often than not have to defend it before the change approval board, before the architecture team and sometimes before outside consultants. Often they make sure you haven't made any stupid errors and in order to succeed in such a defense you HAVE to be cognizant of all the decisions made and WHY they are made and WHY they are better than any other alternatives.

TLDR: there's no "gut feeling", only thorough knowledge of all cause-effect chains of how things work.

E Double U

Not much too it. When the exam doesn't allow going back (Cisco) I go with my gut and move on. If I can flag questions I am unsure about (ISC2, ISACA) then I will go back to it and really think about it. Whatever answer I choose I will stick with. I am against changing answers.

shochan

Never trust a beer gut...bad decisions will be made 8^D

DatabaseHead

https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/healthy_aging/healthy_body/the-brain-gut-connection

Interesting article about how the gut has dendrites and communicates with your brain......

Echo64

I agree with this 100%, failed an exam recently by ONE point, I'm sure I would have passed if I hadn't gone back and changed an answer at the very last second.