I have no background in pedagogy, but I've never understood the point of timed, high pressure tests, especially for children. You really just want to know the child has mastered the material such that they can solve the problems correctly--why is it necessary for them to do them in under 30 seconds, or whatever the bar is? If one kid gets the test done in 20 minutes and the other one takes 2 hours, but they both get the questions right, why does it matter?
There actually is a reason. It is to make sure that kids have mastery of fundamental skills that they will need in the future. If it takes you a long to subtract, for example, it will take you an impractically long to do long division, and eventually you will take so long with more complex concepts that you won't be able to learn effectively.
Additionally, you also want a fair number of problems in any given test to reduce the variance in the grades, and you want the student to be able to finish a significant number exercises that can truly cover the breadth of the content to learn, hopefully with more than one approach as well. If a student takes 2h to solve a problem there is no way they will be able to complete enough of a problem set.
Of course, there are outliers. But personally, especially given my shorter attention span, the ability to do math correctly and quickly was absolutely crucial, and I wouldn't have been able to pass otherwise.
This is a specific example, and the general point is that there a multiple ways of doing things.
If a child can avoid 1 step and skip straight to the result more efficiently, that is a valid way of solving a problem.
Substraction is necessary for long division. Elementary schools force you to learn long division because later when you learn algebra, you need long division to divide polynomials, for example. You also will need substraction to do Gaussian elimination, etc...
Many school systems make difference between the ability to solve a problem, and the ability to solve a problem a certain way. Sometimes the first is all that's asked, but when that way of doing things is necessary later, then the second is asked of you.
The point is that you want to prepare the child for what they will need in the future. Sure, perhaps you are doubly exceptional and will be able to adapt on the fly in the future, but you can't design a school system around extremely uncommon students.
I say this as another 2E student that had very similar issues. There is no good way of fixing it except maybe by giving special accommodations to these students. I repeatedly failed exams exactly because I would skip steps this way, but there is no sense fundamentally changing the entire school system and hurting the majority for that.
even more than that - it's quite possible the one who did it too fast have just recalled most of it from his memory, but the other is likely to have found solution for himself from scratch, which is usually much more valuable. Even the perseverance to find the solution is something worthy by itself...
(obviously, "mileage may vary", but still)
I had a friend in high school who proudly proclaimed that he never memorized trigonometry formulas, he would just derive them from scratch when he needed them. He would often run out of time on our regular 20-minutes long tests. Admirable but not practical.
A time limit identifies knowledge, rather than 'smarts':
An individual who has "mastered the material" can answer quickly irrespective of their smarts: they learnt both the fundamental concepts and the derivatives in preparation for the test, and can commence answering the question immediately from the derivatives.
An individual who has not "mastered the material", but is smart, can start with the fundamentals, work out the derivatives, then commence answering the question: but only given enough time.
So tests which include a time element are, or should be, knowledge tests, and not an intelligence, or 'ability to answer the question', test.
