In May 2009, while working as a software trainer for an electronic medical records company, I was involved in a workgroup rewriting an open-book certification exam with a 2 hour time limit. We were reviewing a simple true/false question, and someone raised the criticism that anyone could just find the answer in their textbook/notes.
Having read a few recent Bethpage Black profiles, I blurted out "Right, but it gives a huge advantage to the person who DOESN'T have to look up the answer because they don't waste two minutes of their 2 hour time limit. It's like the bunkering at Bethpage. If you have the game to handle hitting toward it, it saves you shots later even though anyone could just bail out and avoid it that way. It's not that you're supposed to miss the question, just like you're not supposed to hit into the fairway bunker on 5. But it will affect you on a later question, like bailing out affects you on your approach."
It makes perfect sense in my head, but everyone looked at me like I was crazy. Still, we kept the question.
I eventually found all sorts of parallels between golf course design and assessment design, which actually fueled a lot of my early interest in GCA.
Who else has used GCA at work? Obviously, using GCA principles in the golf course design industry doesn't really count.