Goodhart’s Law is useful in better understanding curriculum dynamics and potential training pitfalls. For instance, it can reveal flaws in effectiveness and efficiency when students creatively circumvent key learning challenges in pursuit of superficial success metrics. A concrete example is found in our Shape Replication exercises: If an artist increasingly employs dot indicators along the boundary boxes to quickly achieve greater accuracy, they inadvertently bypass the intended developmental challenge. While accuracy is superficially enhanced, the artist misses the primary goal of cultivating intuitive perceptual-motor connections—such as the perception of a particular angle and reflexively responding with the appropriate mark-making pattern. Instead of strengthening these essential visual-motor associations (which also contends with non-veridical vision), the artist becomes overly invested in an adjacent task, leading to a reduced emphasis on essential associations, reduced adaptability, and diminished skill transfer into more complex or unfamiliar drawing scenarios.

