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Measuring the parameters that control the deformability and strength of soils through either laboratory experiments or in situ testing is critical for numerous applications in geotechnical engineering. While image- and wave-based techniques are increasingly prevalent, there is a perpetual need for techniques capable of sensing local, nonlinear properties, for which mechanical testing is the only viable option. Existing methods for inferring mechanical properties have evolved largely by trial and error, and there is no general, systematic approach for evaluating one possible approach against another. As a first step toward addressing these challenges, this paper describes a quantitative metric that can discriminate between different types of mechanical tests with respect to how well they are able to recover the true mechanical properties of the material. The metric is devised by (1) creating a min-max optimization of parameter sensitivities, considering the local and global topological properties of the forward model, and (2) evaluating the metric for fundamental material tests.