In the society of high-stakes and standardized testing, it seems all students do to learn is listen to lectures and take exams. Quite often, these exams require students to work through detailed situational problems without the aid of their textbook, notes, or peers. Memorization may have been praised a half a century ago when detailed records and information were not available for everyone, everywhere. But we live in a new society now.
Memorizing a lot of random facts does not make you intelligent.
Cool, you know the names and birthdays of every U.S president. What about the legislations they pushed for or vetoed? What about the wars they got us into? What about the civil rights movements they supported? Who were they as leaders? People? Fathers? Husbands? Can any of that be answered by their name and birthday? With the entire world at our fingertips, knowing basic facts is quite unnecessary. You can Google any person, any place, any equation, any graph, any theory, and find all the answers you need. It is easy to find the information, but it may be more difficult to apply it to our real-world jobs and careers.
Odds are, you don't need this stuff memorized for your job.
When you graduate college and enter your field of study, there are thousands of resources for you to use every day to complete your jobs. Should you have some knowledge of your topic? Absolutely. But do you need absolutely everything memorized? Not a chance. You have co-workers, supervisors, handbooks, research logs, textbooks, equation sheets, etc. as you work. Whether you are a STEM student, an education student, an aspiring firefighter, or a dancer, odds are, the things you memorized in school are readily available to you in some way at your job.
Knowing how to apply the information is more important to our future jobs.
If I know all of these facts or equations but have no clue how to apply them to the task at hand, how can I be successful in my career? If I cannot take the same information and apply it to multiple situations, how will I be able to grow in my field? I will not be able to complete tasks to the best of my abilities like this. That is pretty scary, since all we are taught as we go through school is how to memorize certain facts and a very limited number of situations.
Let us take open-book exams.
Please. Pretty please. Memorizing years' worth of research and experience in a matter of a few months is extremely stressful as it is. Not to mention how much anxiety tests cause students. I guarantee you that us students just cram a few days before for the exam and then forget the information by the end of the semester. Give us an education that exposes us to the situations we will face and challenges us to grow rather than an education that forces us to regurgitate facts.
Vanessa Coelho
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