At a school that asks hypothetical scenarios that isn’t really an option. They want to see your thought process I suppose. I was merely stating that my school considers this to be a useless exercise. We would much rather have a conversation.
But let’s look at a real life example. A surgeon uses a common metal clip during a common, every day procedure. The patient who is the now host of the clip is experiencing some odd symptoms months down the line. She goes to visit her family medicine doctor and after he takes her history, he decides to provide her with something, anything, so that she can find some peace after several attempts to find an answer. He pulls, out of his rear end, the following hypothesis: “I think the hardware from your surgery is causing an allergic reaction”. This simple, uninformed statement, created out of a pressure to say something ended up being not only incorrect, but costly.
As a physician in training who was the beneficiary of a few life principles from a few battle tested physicians early on in my schooling, I would much rather be the physician that says I don’t know than the one that needs to provide an explanation. That is what I meant by the statement that sometimes a mark of true intelligence is the ability to say I don’t know rather than forge an uninformed statement.