On the Bitcoin testnet, will transactions with higher fees get mined quicker? I wonder if anyone here has spent enough time on the Bitcoin testnet to give me some insight on how the market forces there work. I am a teaching assistant in a university blockchain course with ~75 students, and I plan to start an assignment in a few days where students acquire testnet BTC from faucets and start crafting transactions. There are currently about 14,000 unconfirmed transactions in the testnet mempool, and I wonder whether you can avoid waiting long if you increase your fee. Larger fees would obviously help on the Bitcoin mainnet, but I'm less sure about how miners behave on the testnet.
Because the testnet bitcoins have no financial value, the transaction fees aren't really an incentive for miners there. But we assume that miners will run similar software to that on the mainnet and make sensible decisions regarding the fees they put in a block, so higher fees should make the transactions mined faster yes.