Comment by Fogest | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Fogest | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Some courses seem to put far too much emphasis on the memorization aspect of the courses, which has always seemed silly to me. For so many jobs you are not required to memorize a ton of information and instead can refer to manuals, textbooks, the internet, etc... for those kinds of things. These are also typically the things people forget shortly after the exam, which begs the question of how useful it even is in the first place. For example, I tried out an "Intro to sociology" class. It was a horrible class, and over half the exams questions were things like "Which person came up with xyz theory". Or "What year was xyz theory proposed". So many questions were purely memorization and did little to actually test your understanding of those theories.

What I remember out of most courses is not the things I had to memorize, but instead it is the practical components. Those should be the takeaways and things that get tested. Many people also just sucked at memorizing things like that, and I can totally see why cheating is such a problem on these kinds of tests.

Some of the bests tests I've taken where I've remembered the most material have been open book tests that allowed me to use all my textbooks and notes that I had taken. They were hard tests which really tested the understanding of the course material.

Intro classes (i.e. 101 or just 100-level classes) are designed to weed out people or fill cross-class requirements for majors. My degree required some "aesthetic" classes so I took Dance 101; the class was comprised of a diversity of majors + athletes looking for an easy course. It's also a -lot- of work to grade 150-200 students' tests, and they might change their major anyways.

Nearly every course I took at a 300/400+ level was about demonstrating a fundamental understanding instead of strict memorization. Open-book tests were more common. And it went down from 150+ students to 20 or 4. Considering my degree is a b.a. in media arts, some senior courses had minimal or no testing at all and instead had large projects.

That said, perhaps one of the hardest classes I took was a 300 or 400 level one on Tarantino films, probably to weed out people who were just looking for an easy class. On top of demonstrating understanding through analysis via storyboarding or papers, the quizzes/tests had multiple choice of 5 answers, which always included "all of the above" or "none of the above", and short/long answers/prompts. You really had to have studied each lecture and actually have watched the relevant films. You wouldn't believe how many people didn't watch the films... in a film analysis class. But all of that aside, it was thoroughly interesting and memorable.

Memorization of "raw" facts has become quite easy with spaced-repetition tools like Anki. The best performance on the job always comes from putting together raw memory and deep conceptual understanding. Neither of these is useful without the other.

I think there needs to be acknowledgement that there are two different learning tracks in higher education - one that is facts & figures, and one that is experiential. For better or worse, most institutions treat success in facts & figures as a high quality proxy indicating future success in the experiential areas, which includes everything from how an individual knows how to learn & how to teach themselves, to how they effectively build relationships and collaborate with others. Speaking as someone both liberal arts & technical degrees, and technical & business leadership experience over 20 years in manufacturing & big tech, my assessment is that this is ridiculous. Of course there will always be a need for "human computers" -- people who specialize in functions requiring programmatic, fact-based work -- but most jobs are not like this, and most individuals who prefer this type of work would generally benefit from expanding their comfort and capacity in human-centric skills.

To this end, I agree vigorously that the current state of higher education is both unsustainable and insane, but I think the end game will be more private enterprise & public sector employers deciding to expand intern & apprenticeship programs as an alternative to being constrained in hiring to the pipeline of candidates emerging from top universities. We'll see.

I agree, I think University in it's current form has been more about being able to efficiently cram as many students into programs as possible and keep pumping out the degrees. The goal no longer seems to be too focused on the education itself. I so often am seeing my local universities take people by the boatload in areas that have very little jobs. 100's will graduate with degrees that barely help them and have almost no jobs available to them. What they were taught is so fact/figure based that there is little practical skills they can apply to real life. So many people I find will go and take courses at the local colleges after to make themselves actually hirable. In Canada I believe our "colleges" are equivalent to community colleges/trade schools in America just for context.

I did a minor in psychology and so many classmates went into things like a 2 year program in HR administration at the local college. Because their degree simply led nowhere. Unless they wanted to continue and get into some highly competitive masters programs there was little in the career prospects.

And then I find Universities in general have been suffering from a lot of admin bloat.

I got off on a bit of a tangent here, but overall I think Universities have been ending up going in the wrong direction. Online learning has made the problem of raw memorization for testing purposes an even more prevalent issue. And instead choosing to test using different/better methods, educational institutions would rather opt to keep using raw memorization while adding privacy invasive programs to monitor students.

Students cheated with phones and hidden small speakers at exams that are not about reproducing stuff from memory, the student would tell the friend on the other side the question and somehow the friend would find or know the correct answer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com