Comment by Izkata
6 years ago
My understanding is that your experience is correct, but incomplete - it doesn't account for people who don't know the subject, but do well on the test.
Particularly with multiple-choice tests, this is not only possible, but in my experience common. It became a kind of running joke among my classmates that we know our teachers, not the material - over time we just learned the quirks of whoever designed the test and eliminated the wrong answers based on that.
> learned the quirks
Why waste your time learning that? Just learn the material. I'm often bemused by the effort people put into avoiding learning the material, much more than it would take to just learn the material.
Sometimes the material is absolutely unhelpful when doing a badly designed test, and you may even fail them. I had a Calculus teacher that taught 100% from the books but his tests were always 5 special case questions, that you might very well get wrong in under 45' even if you know the bread and butter.
Still learning how to do "Professor X's questions" was a guaranteed ace. Forget the subject, memorize the borderline cases, max grade. Do all exercises on the text book, also, get a second text book and do all of those too, and you might fail the test.
You completely misunderstood; no effort was put into it. There was no active learning, just recognized patterns from prior tests.
I once asked my history teacher why his multiple choice questions followed predictable patterns. Such as, "all of the above" or "none of the above" were always the right answers.
He laughed, and said the stupid kids needed a break.