From the annals of effective course design:
I recently read about real-life Dr. House competitions, aka “clinicopathological conferences.”
C.P.C.s work like this:
A doctor is given a case study of a real patient.
The would-be Dr. House is told the patient’s initial symptoms and lab results.
The doctor can then follow up with more questions, and if the data is known (eg. more lab results or more background info is available), then he or she is told what those are.
The doctor probes and narrows in.
Eventually, the goal is to make the right diagnosis of what actually ailed the patient.
The key thing is, since these are real-life case studies, the right diagnosis is known, because pathologists on the case actually found it, often in an autopsy.
(I checked just now and some of the correct diagnoses in these Dr. House competitions included “tertiary syphilis with mercury poisoning,” “intestinal anthrax,” and “wrong-site surgery.”)
In this way, the doctor is either proven right, meaning the diagnostic process was on point, or wrong, in which case the diagnostic process was lacking in some way, and there’s learning opportunity.
The article I read about this called C.P.C.s “the gold standard of diagnostic reasoning; if you can solve a C.P.C., you can solve almost any case.” Because of their design, C.P.C.s have become so popular as a teaching tool that the New England Journal of Medicine has been publishing transcripts for more than a century.
This caught my attention because I recently asked myself about other domains where I could apply the mechanism behind my Copy Riddles program.
The basic mechanism behind Copy Riddles is the same as the one behind the C.P.C.:
There’s starting data… there’s a nonobvious final result… which is in some way validated or proven.
In the case of Dr. House competitions, the starting data is symptoms and lab results. The nonobvious final result is the correct diagnosis, as validated by pathologists.
In Copy Riddles, the starting data is dry and factual source material, from a course or a how-to book. The nonobvious final result is a sexy sales bullet, as validated in a sales letter by an A-list copywriter, with sales across millions of households, often following an A/B test against other top copywriters.
I had a few ideas for other domains in which the same kind of mechanism could work:
– Comedy writing (take a premise, then come up with a punchline, compare it to one that got laughs)…
– Subject line writing (obvious enough)
– “Influence Riddles” (a setup where you have to convince someone to do as you want, given severe constraints, and then compare your answer to how it was done for real, in a real-life situation)
Apparently, medical diagnosis is another field.
If you have more examples or ideas for me of how to use this same mechanism in other domains, write in and let me know.
Or, if you are thinking of creating a course of your own, and are wondering how to best organize it, then consider the above “gold standard” approach.
Or, if you are simply interested in the gold standard among courses that teach you how to write sales copy, you can read the full story of Copy Riddles here: