Hacker News Reader

Comment by stg | Hacker News Reader

Sorry for the diversion, but what is/was it like to be able to ace a test without really studying for it?

The only emotion I can ever recall feeling when staring down at an exam is abject fear as every fact I knew drained out of my head.

I was always a relatively bright kid, but never super smart. When I worked hard, I got top grades and when I slacked, I didn't. At some point I stopped working hard and drifted through education, getting a mediocre degree on the way (on the upside, I have great soft skills).

From discussions with other gifted people, I get the impression that most of them worked really, really hard, even if they didn't realise it. But I have heard the odd person who maintains it all came naturally. Is this you?

View on HN

> Sorry for the diversion, but what is/was it like to be able to ace a test without really studying for it?

Fairly anti-climatic. For someone that it comes easy too there is no real emotion or sense of accomplishment.

It would be like trying to explain the color green to someone that was born blind.

> Fairly anti-climatic. For someone that it comes easy too there is no real emotion or sense of accomplishment.

I completely agree with this statement. Personally, I felt like I didnt put in as much effort into my highschool work because I knew that I could easily pick up whatever I missed in class or homework and if I knew I could do it there was no real drive for me to try harder. And this goes back to the original article.

I also went through most of middle/high school not having to really study things but somehow ending up with pretty stellar grades. To be honest, it made me arrogant and caused me to not appreciate the value of hard work in general. The more effortless an achievement, the more I respected it. Those who worked really hard were "try hards." Besides, I got better grades than them anyways.

In general there was an attitude among my circle of friends to try and show off how little work they can do to still pull off a high score. I would say yes, most of the people I know who are considered "gifted" in general do work harder in the background than they let on. They themselves probably want to believe that they can effortlessly achieve in the classroom (and probably in life).

I think for me, at least, what happened was that I would really get into things and work extremely hard for a short period of time (sometimes without realizing it) and then coast for a while and appear as though I'm super talented and naturally good at many subjects. I don't think I was consciously planning any of this, but it just happened that way.

Looking back now, I do think that the attitude was pretty immature and obnoxious.

Tests never bothered me. If I bombed one, I could always study a bit for the next one. So, I rarely studied for them and I rarely completed daily assignments.

But, that said, my idea of skipping school was heading downtown to the GWU library. I started taking AP courses as a sophomore and always had long-term papers to write. I spent much of my senior year in a local wetland taking water samples.

There was definitely a balance. I tended to work hard at things that I enjoyed and completely blow off stuff that I deemed tedious or irrelevant. And overall, the balance usually fell in my favor.

There were students at school who were both smarter and harder working than I. And some of them were accepted at elite universities, where I landed at a top-notch public. But, we tended to have vastly different approaches to life. They live to work and found careers that they love. I work to live and found a career that I don't hate (but mostly, just want to get my paycheck and go mountain biking, kayaking, or something else outdoors).

And like another response indicated, this was all just natural. My peers were all overachievers, most of them naturally so.

I always found tests kind of... interesting. I stressed about missing them, but learned to not worry about taking them. It helped that I was in CS/math/science courses. Questions tended to be semi-fun puzzles instead of memorization.

Actually, one of my favorite memories from university is from an algorithms test. We had to find nearest smallest neighbors, or something like that, in O(n lg n) time. Our professor was good, and an algorithms guy, so I was surprised when I realized it could be done with just two sweeps across the list [O(n)]. When I showed him (I was wondering if the question mentioning 'divide and conquer' was a hint or a restriction), he couldn't believe he'd missed it.

Thanks for bringing this up. I cant speak for everyone else but I can tell you that I didnt always use to be good at test taking. In fact, whenever I get on this topic, I always talk about the story about a time when I moved to a different country in the middle of a school year and I moved there just it time for the comprehensive mid-year test in which I got the lowest test scores of any test in my life. And I mention that because after that, I had a bit of a revelation as far as how to prepare for tests.

I picked up the knack for listening to what teachers emphasized while teaching and correlated that to the home work, drew parallels and 9 times out of 10, most of what they had in common was on the test - so no extra studying needed. It was easier for things like Maths, Physics and Chemistry because you have a formula to use - and all the questions that revolved around these forumlae had keywords as far as what facts you have to use and what you need to find. Once you see the pattern, you can apply the forumula (which you've probably seen at least a dozen times in class and/or homework) at this point and its just applying it.

As far as things like vocabulary or other word definitions go, I've learned how to photographically remember things so I could breeze through a textbook and remember key words and/or key dates and look for those in questions on the test.

I dont mean to say that it is either hard or only gifted people can do it, I think everyone has their own unique learning style and once they figure out what works for them, tests can be easy.

I think maybe it depends on what "without really studying for it" means? If you show up alert to each class, take notes, ask questions, and do a thorough job on your homework, the amount of specific exam studying that you need to do to ace an exam goes way down compared to if you slack up until the exam. If you've been doing this since first grade, the cumulative advantage by senior year high school is immense.

Agreed! If you pay attention in class and do your homework, you shouldnt have trouble with tests because tests are just a measure of how much you pay attention to the work you've been doing. At least thats the way I saw it.

I really think the answer for this is just going to be dependent on the person. For me, depending on the field, I could either ace it or possibly experience the abject terror. For the subjects that I could ace, e.g. (human) languages and CS, it was boredom/annoyance at even having to take the test. But then again I ultimately quit school and took a software "engineering" position.

Boredom primarily, and a sense of competitiveness in trying to be the first to finish the test. Oddly enough, I get the same emotions filling out the patient information paperwork at doctor's offices etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com