@tedinski @inthehands dealing with high variance like this & difficulty in evaluating related strategies is a very well known classic problem. Instead of acting like learners won't make this mistake it would be nice for meta learning strategies to be taught explicitly, which have shown great benefit for early learners avoiding time suck traps. To me this is very informed by "misconceptions about what studying should look like" research. Software education should catch up and integrate this tbh.