Comment by suraj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by suraj | Hacker News Reader

Most of the students in India lack basic problem solving skills. They tackle exams (even maths) by rote memorizing a set of questions and answers. In real life this has caused profusion of "guides" i.e. books that contain questions most likely to appear in exams.

When these students start engineering studies, they are flabbergasted by lack of "guides" for problems. These students will fail the FizzBuzz test, however will be able to answer questions about C++ quirks. They can not ask intelligent questions because they can neither understand problem nor investigate the root cause. They are studying just to get a degree (which would help them get a job) not to get educated.

Even if we assume that only 50% of the students fit this criteria, there are over five hundred thousand students who are looking for shortcuts! Which should account for these kind of posts.

The education system in India is geared towards producing clerks not free thinking individuals. Sadly, this the is the end result.

>>The education system in India is geared towards producing clerks not free thinking individuals.

When I was in school, I was always told by my teachers to memorize the solution/essay rather than understand them. And whenever I tried to answer a question using my own words I always got less marks because my answer was not as per what's in the book

I studied in a Kendriya Vidyalaya (Government run centralized schools), and it's been my impression that the CBSE board in geared towards problem solving rather than rote learning.

Recently they introduced a new type of question in their exams, which are called High Order Thinking questions. They tend to test the knowledge and problem solving skills of an individual.

But yes, most of the state boards, do put much more emphasis on rote learning

Really? So did I. But without digressing, I felt that KV syllabus was based more on problem solving. Either that or I had been lucky enough to get teachers who encouraged open thinking rather than hitting the books to pointless memorising. Having said that the unit tests - monthly tests - were administered by the teacher for a particular class and what we had found was that some teachers were notorious for ensuring answers matched word-by-word to what was in the guides!

But this was about 18 years ago so things may have changed (unfortunately for the worse) by now, especially to cater for a spike in demand for outsourcing.

Exactly. At least in Pakistan, a huge part of this problem is the insane emphasis of teaching everything in English, even though the people do not really understand English.

Imagine going through 10-12 years of schooling in Spanish, where instead of making an effort to teach you to conversate in Spanish, you just memorize the words in the book with little emphasis on what they mean?

Crazy!! It's like no-child-left-behind times 100.

There's an chapter in "Surely you're joking Mr. Feynmann" about something similar. Students in Brazil achieved fantastic marks in exams, but were unable to translate memorized formulas to practical use.

The chapter is online here http://randomgraphs.blogspot.com/2009/06/feynman-on-educatio...

Most of the students in my engineering and CS dept in the US learned by rote memorization.

I agree. I wrote about this too: http://utkarshsengar.com/2010/01/indian-republic-day-where-t...

These students will fail the FizzBuzz test

Nah, there are guides for that.

> however will be able to answer questions about C++ quirks

Turbo C++ quirks. :)

(edit: not sure why I was modded down. Anyone who's gone through the system in India knows that most colleges are still stuck in 1992 and use an ancient version of Turbo C++ for everything.)

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