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Comment by hellerbarde | Hacker News Reader

That's exactly it. I've observed that behaviour so often, I stopped counting. A lot of college/university students under very harsh time constraints learn the material with a focus on what they believe will get them the desired grade (be that passing or highest). Meanwhile, they will leave out big chunks of the necessary foundations, because they won't be tested on their own. And then they mechanically learn the parts that will get tested, without understanding the underlying parts. They pass, usually, but that's more a problem of poorly written tests. (Because if you didn't _understand_ the material, I happen to think that you should fail a well written test.)

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I had a professor who unwittingly encouraged this kind of rote study. His questions were word questions that required you to describe in details certain concepts from the course material.

All of that is good (in theory), but his grading approach was to mark off a point or two for minor discrepancies. In theory, this meant that if you had the concept, without memorization you would get points.

In reality if you didn't include all keywords from the lessons, you would be docked points. People who memorized extremely well and parroted back his words almost verbatim would do well. People who worked to understand the material and write back their understanding often wouldn't.

Sigh. The sad thing was is that from a classroom learning standpoint, he was one of the best professors there. But I would often end up avoiding his classes (my memory is often terrible at rote learning).

From my experience the knowledge of a university course topic should be a reasonable conpromise between full understanding of all concept in detail (which could require too much time) and the study of the key concept, and the capability of apply it. I often found in university course (in Italy) an excess of theory and detail on all the topic and subtopics, and a poor teaching to apply the key concepts that are the ones you would use in practice. (Even if the test require also the capability to practically apply concept)

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