[samkater]

I would add some nuance to this view. For nearly every undergraduate course I agree - the ability of knowing where to look for resources in a particular subject matter, synthesizing the available information to solve a reasonably novel problem, and presenting the information in a coherent way is a skill/art that should be one of the primary goals of the education.

For advanced degrees, though, I'm not so sure. I expect someone which a masters or Ph.D. to actually be an expert in the subject matter, not just someone who is really good at figuring out how to solve problems. A big part of that is being able to internalize the information so well they you in effect become a resource that could be used by an undergraduate student. This internalization goes beyond rote memorization, but memorization is a big part of it too.

Just a disclaimer, though - I do not have an advanced degree, so maybe I expect too much from those who do? A big reason why I have no interest in pursuing one is that many people with a masters degree I find have little expertise to show for it, they could have just as easily learned the same information by self-study or being fortunate enough to find interesting work. (the hiring landscape is a separate topic)

[flashgordon]

Just as a counter example. I have 2 "advanced" degrees - in engineering and in management (btw I did NOT do them because I was smart - but rather because I was curious and had a lot of time on my hand. I definitely struggled in both of them - though really really enjoyed them both). I am not what you call a model test-taker. I got barely passing marks in all my exams and yet my "assignments" I was consistently a high scorer in (sadly assignments at the time only accounted for atmost 20% of your grade with 80% being what you can cram-and-dump in an exam).

I still cannot "remember" how to perform a discrete-wavelet-transform from memory (my honor's thesis) but i found myself digging into it a couple of months ago (just fiddling on pet projects). An hour on googling got me on the track. Point is there is so much even those with advanced degrees have to know and having to retain it all in memory all the time is both infeasible and wasteful. Yet expecting kids/young adults to do this is truly hypocritical and disingenuous.

[ladams]

I'm a physics grad student, and this is completely wrong. The purpose of graduate classes (at least in physics) is to teach you how to navigate a the standard reference texts. For example, the main thing I learned in my grad E&M class was where to find information in Jackson (aka "Classical Electrodynamics"). Classical mechanics was a mix of Goldsmith and Landau and Lifshitz. Quantum mechanics used Sakauri. And statistical mechanics used Pathria. Also, referring to these classic texts by author is very common, much moreso than by title.

[wespiser_2018]

Valuable comment right here for the autodidact, thank you!

[101008]

My experience with people who are PhD is that they know things you expect to memorize just because they use it a lot. They learn formulas or whatever not because they spend 5 hours memorizing it, but because they needed it once, so they looked it up. The second time they needed it, they weren't 100% sure, so they looked it up again just in case. Every time they search for it, they need it less and less and at the end they know it by memory. That's how you learn most of the stuff these days and that should be for everything. Natural learning. Why memorizing things you dont need to know?If you use it often enough, you'll end up memorizing it. Same for concepts or any type of knowledge.

[twic]

I can tell you the peak excitation wavelengths of a dozen fluorophores. Not because i wrote them on flashcards and memorised them, but because i spent four years in a darkened room sliding filter cubes around to take pictures of slides stained with them!

[politician]

There's a term for this and several software packages to help exploit the effect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition

[barefeg]

1. PhDs don’t “do exams”. You can’t cheat your way to publishing original research (exceptions of course) and have external expert researchers review it and accepted on a reputable journal. Given that that’s a requisite for obtaining your degree, there’s no point on a final exam. Most defenses nowadays are partly ceremonial (exceptions of course). Both the material and your ability to do research has been checked months before by your advisors and graduation committee.

2. Master’s degree courses follow all kinds of schemas for examination. From oral exams, to in person no extra material allowed, to open book, and take home. Being on both sides (taking the exams and creating them) I can say that it really doesn’t matter if you allow people to take the exam home and collaborate among each other. These types of exams are designed to really test a deep understanding and ability of the material. There have been exam questions where an entire class of >20 students are not able to solve it. People that are really good are able to have a shot at it and maybe make some progress, and that differentiates the good from the exceptional.

3. Nowadays undergraduate degrees are a commodity so it feels they need to make sure only the good students get one. But in the end it doesn’t really matter, since most employers (exceptions of course) will want to see how much value the candidate add, which does not correlate with having a degree or good grades

[lutorm]

You can’t cheat your way to publishing original research

Of course you can, making up results is a time-honored tradition!

It does take a certain amount of skill to do it believably, though.... ;-)

[snotrockets]

I felt as if exams in my masters (in Mathematics) were different: they mostly check you understand the definitions, maybe remember some basic tactics for approaching problems. You can't really check the students can solve "real" problems, as those are too complex for the limited scope of an exam.

[rocqua]

When I have discussed this, most people I know argued the opposite (for Mathematics). The undergrad courses are supposed to lay the foundation. Stuff you need so often, and stuff you need to recognize when useful, you should know it by heart.

At graduate level, there is too much stuff. You know the outline, you know where to find stuff. But you don't need to know everything exactly. If you forgot one passage from a definition, that should not cause a failure. Because in 'real Mathematics' you get to look at references.

A nice trick for open book is to make it time-infeasible to just look up everything. But allow students access to the materials incase they have a brainfart.

[Miraste]

It depends on the degree. If you're becoming a medical doctor you'll have to do a ton of memorization, but in other fields doctorates are the least memorization-intensive part of your education, because the focus is on generation and synthesis, on the assumption that you've already learned the rote knowledge. You don't need to memorize anything to write a dissertation but that doesn't make it easy (and you'll end up memorizing everything anyway).

[TheSpiceIsLife]

> medical doctor you'll have to do a ton of memorisation

Which is a load of dingos kidneys.

Gate keeping.

All the good doctors I've ever been to have a wall of reference material and use it, even if only to show the patient, but it's there and accessible.

And besides, it's not like practising medical doctors don't make heaps of mistakes.

The number one cause of complications in a medical setting is medical intervention, so it could be argued doctors should be using more reference material and not relying on their over worked brains.

[skylanh]

Anecdotes in support of this comment:

I lived with a orthopedic surgeon doing a specialization in pediatric orthopedia.

He was very very very good based on my understanding of the places he had worked, the offers he had to undertake his specialization, the change in operation waiting times and his model of how he worked within the hospital, and that immediately after returning to his home country he was head of the newly created orthopedic pediatrics ward.

His description of how he would approach a surgery was straight-forward:

- he would review the surgical referral, his notes from his patient intake

- he would review appropriate notes and documentation from the hospital on the allowed surgeries allowed, including reference texts on that particular surgery

- he would create a full plan for entering, performing, and exiting the operation

- (surgery)

- he would review the plan, add notes on how it actually went

So it's not like he woke up, walked into a surgical room, and ad-libbed it.

As an anecdote, he said he liked B-students for his surgical teams because they had to work hard to get there.

I also was good friends with a very nerdy emergency room doctor. He offered the anecdote that he was "called out" for using Google. His justification was that "once you throw in the appropriate medical terms, all you're getting is the latest research on treatments--and I was attempting to offer the best and latest in proven care". He also made the several changes to the shifts at the ER, including using time-sheet and patient data to show that patient outcomes suffered during longer doctor shift rotations. His anecdote on his schooling; "I was a bad student, and I'm a poor doctor, but my job is to get you stable until we can intervene properly". He funded a startup and wrote (in Java) a medical EMR system.

[why_Mr_Anderson]

But parent post is arguing that to become a doctor you need to memorize ungodly amount of things, which is absolutely true. And about that wall of reference material .. yeah, it's usually there to impress patients, most of those books were never touched :) (I'm from family with too many MDs)

[TheSpiceIsLife]

It might be true, but I'm arguing it isn't necessarily the best.

We need more doctors, if that means changing the culture within the profession so they're more inclined to use those reference material that would be good thing.

[ska]

This is why PhD's typically have comprehensive exams. It varies (a lot!) by university and even department, but panel led oral exams are pretty common. At some places they are even open to the public (no pressure). These are distinct from a thesis defence, which happens at the end of your degree; they are likely to happen about a year in and are meant to ensure you have a solid background.

Overall I think an oral exam run by a skilled examiner is the best of all worlds, but it isn't practical for a section of 500 undergraduate students. It's quite doable for a seminar or manageable up to say 10-15 students, becomes difficult after that.

[g_p]

As you say, different departments and institutions have different approaches, but I'd definitely emphasise that outside of Europe (where I've seen more ceremonial "exams"), there are still robust and vigorous "final" oral viva exams used.

In some European universities, the outcome is such a foregone conclusion that the candidate's family is laying out the buffet, peeling the cling film off the plates, and unboxing the champagne bottles as the "defense" begins.

In the UK however, I've never seen this. It's generally a small room with candidate, an internal examiner, an external examiner from another university who is an expert in the field, and a convenor to record the minutes of the examination. The outcome is by far from a foregone conclusion.

A good student who is an expert in their field, is well-read and up to date on their work and the surrounding literature will perform well and have little to fear. Someone who hasn't written their own thesis, or didn't really have an understanding of the area, and thus isn't really an expert, will have a very unpleasant time, and will likely be failed, or be sent away with major corrections to be completed to the satisfaction of the examiners, possibly including a full oral re-examination.

[gspr]

> This is why PhD's typically have comprehensive exams.

America is leaking again.

[ska]

> America is leaking again.

Ok, from a terminology point of view that's fair - it isn't the same everywhere by any means.

However, most if not all of the graduate programs I know if internationally have something roughly equivalent, whether they are comps or prelims or qualifying or whatever.

The basic idea is that a department (and university, generally) has an interest in maintaining the quality of their programs, and one way to do that is to make sure that your students never leave with glaring holes in their background. The best way to do this is some sort of comprehensive evaluation, and the time to do it is at or near the beginning of a program - otherwise there is no time to address deficiencies.

[twic]

No UK PhD programme has exams like this, that i have heard of.

[g_p]

Some UK programmes differ in that there isn't the same formal concept of "candidacy" like you see in other places. The end-of-first-year review is often a written report, sometimes with a "mini-viva".

The common factor among all UK PhDs I know of is that there is a rigorous viva at the end, where the outcome for the sudent is not a foregone conclusion. Despite the shorter overall duration of the PhD (~3 to 4 years typically), the oral examination can (rightly) cover material far beyond the scope of your thesis - if you are an expert in your field, you will be able to have a knowledgeable and informed discussion as a peer with your external examiner, who will be a recognised expert in the field. I'm definitely a big believer in the importance of being able to have a well-informed discussion around the area of your work, and actually found the whole viva process very enjoyable and cordial - a nice chat about the wider field, my and the examiners' own previous work, some debate of the merits of different approaches, and then onto a run-through of the thesis, chapter-by-chapter, skipping any pages where there were no points for discussion or contention.

Unlike European vivas though, there's no family or friends, no champagne corks being popped mid-defense, and no foregone conclusion of the outcome. I've been at European vivas with the family of the candidate preparing the celebratory buffet at the back of the auditorium while the questioning continues!

[girvo]

> Unlike European vivas though, there's no family or friends, no champagne corks being popped mid-defense, and no foregone conclusion of the outcome. I've been at European vivas with the family of the candidate preparing the celebratory buffet at the back of the auditorium while the questioning continues!

While the UK model is probably preferable in a lot of ways, this sounds much more enjoyable :)

[ska]

Oh, good point, the UK programs I know of are notably ligher in this regard (and PhD shorter) though they do generally require a 1st class honors (honours, i guess!) degree in subject, which includes "tripos" which is roughly equivalent. So in some ways a higher bar for undergrad matched with a lower bar for grad.

At least that's the theory - I don't know if in practice it holds up; most of the grad students and later I knew from that system came from oxbridge which has a number of quirks.

[g_p]

The difference I tend to see is that the outcome of the UK viva (oral) examination is far less of a foregone conclusion, and can still be quite traditional in that students are expected to be able to have a broad and well-informed discussion about their wider field and the context of their work. The thinking is that they will (if meritous of a PhD) have a certain level of expertise, and thus be able to have a discussion with their external examiner (a distinguished and recognised expert) as a peer.

My experience of it was that if you are genuinely knowledgeable and approaching being an expert in your field, it is an enjoyable experience, and just like having a (longer than usual, but not uncomfortably long) conversation with someone about a topic that you both share a deep interest in. There is nothing to worry about, as you can have a nice discussion about an interesting topic, and share interesting ideas etc.

I'm not sure if it's a lower bar for grad as such - I think it's got fewer "formal" requirements, and far more informal requirements. The most common way to "fail" is to simply not submit the thesis.

[MereInterest]

The US frequently merges the masters and PhD programs into a single 4-7 year program, rather than a 2-year masters followed by 2-5 year PhD program. The comprehensive exams for PhDs are typically at the end of the first two years, and cover material similar to that of a masters.

The two are pretty much equivalent, but with different names.

[snotrockets]

To quote my advisor, who was a faculty member both sides of the Atlantic, while the path is different, by the end of the PhD, you mostly done the same amount of work, regardless of which system you participated in.

[reedjosh]

Often the tests at this level are difficult enough that the need for memorization is implicit.

Open book is also fine in this case because without a base of memorized understanding an open book isn't that helpful anyway.