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Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

I hate to sound like a hopeless optimist, but am I the only one that is a bit disheartened by the focus on studying/acing an exam, rather than actually, I don't know, learning something? As in, a focus on grades distracts students from the real point of an education.

I'm of the opinion that you shouldn't even be at university if you're not foaming at the mouth to acquire the knowledge. Sure, there are classes that you won't enjoy regardless, but tactics to beat them should be an exception, not the rule.

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I'm of the opinion that you shouldn't even be at university if you're not foaming at the mouth to acquire the knowledge.

In principle, I agree. In practice, when a college degree is a de facto requirement for a decent job, you're going to have lots of people there for reasons other than the purity of learning.

And even those who are in there primarily because they want to learn will be very aware that getting a good grade in the exam will most likely improve their job prospects on graduating.

Learning to ace an exam in the minimum time possible frees up the rest of your time to do some actually useful learning.

But how would you quantify the amount of learning that you've actually retained? Would it not be through some sort of question-answer based system on the material that you've covered, and using a weighted scale for each question depending on the difficulty of the question and how you applied the concepts?

As much as I enjoy learning about computers and circuits in class, how would I actually know I understood how they all interact with each other something without testing myself?

Acing an exam easily is a pretty good indication that you've learned the subject material fairly well.

Agreed, there potentially is a need for some sort of "test" as to whether or not you learned the information. I'm just not sure if the standard question:answer format is really the best solution. Some form of essay or project seems like it would be more effective, to me.

I've aced a fair amount of exams in my lifetime, and knowing what I know now about "knowing", learning and understanding, acing a majority of those exams were in fact a TERRIBLE indication of the amount (and quality) of learning that had taken place. For example, all those A's in my electromagnetism and thermodynamics courses, or calc courses -- completely unwarranted. I would say about 95% of it was mindless memorization of formulas and the application of the formulas mostly through the usage of algebra. Testing/performing on deeper conceptual understanding = virtually non-existant (which I can easily prove to myself by the lack of understanding I have at the moment when I actually try to apply the concepts).

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