> I would be astonished if someone without physics knowledge could 'learn by heart' and get anywhere close to a passing score on one of my college physics tests.
Again, I am not saying specifically that "someone without physics knowledge" can get a passing score on college physics tests. It's a bit more nuanced than that, and it's difficult to compare because I did not study in the US. And passing a test doesn't mean nothing (if anything, it shows that you are capable of passing the test).
But I have the feeling that I myself was pretty good at optimizing for the grades, even if retrospectively, that was not always the most constructive learning experience. As an engineering undergrad, I studied one year abroad, and there I could literally take twice as many classes as "local" students and get the best grades. First I thought "they sucked", and then I realized that the students there did not care so much about the grade: it was easy to pass if you genuinely put the work into it, and it was not uncommon to ask to redo a class on a voluntary basis. They were studying to learn, not to get the best grade. And sometimes it implied going slightly aside from the main course topic out of interest (instead I was doing exactly what was needed to get the best grades and the most classes).
Not to say I'm particularly bad though I had very good grades, or that they were particularly good with bad grades. Of course they had good and bad students, too. It was just interesting to see that it worked completely differently.
Then it made me think about school/high school, were I always had excellent grades: how did it make the other students feel like? Grades give some kind of ranking, which can feel like a competition. And I remember clearly (and saw it again later as a supply teacher) that those struggling to get the average grade would often optimize for that: "I don't have time to understand how to do it, I need to get the average". A bit like software engineers don't have time to "do it right" and write shitty hacks instead: it's not that it doesn't work at all... but that is certainly not the most constructive way. And definitely what I saw as a supply teacher was that some of those students were simply wasting their time in the maths classes, but in a very stressful way because they had to find tricks to get the average without actually understanding the maths.
> The obvious explanation for why people hate leetcode is because it gates them from $200k+ jobs
Admittedly I haven't tried that. But regarding grades, I am most critical of the grading system in school/high school, and I had excellent grades there. Then at university level, this exchange year showed me that excellent engineers came out of a school where grades did not matter so much, so it is possible.
I guess my point about leetcode is that I have seen software engineers who excel at those, but write unreadable and unmaintainable code. Which tells me that leetcode doesn't measure the capacity at being a good software engineer in general.