[bruce511]

I think there are two distinct groups in play here. And, I would argue, always have been.

The first group are out to get the degree. That bit of paper that gets you your first job. After that your job experience gets you the second job, and so on.

This is probably the larger group, and likely most of the material recognises this, and in some cases optimizes for it.

The second much smaller group are people wanting to get educated, in the sense of understanding the root fundamentals. They suck the marrow, determined to explore the nooks and cranies. They never ask "will this be in the exam?" (Ironically this group often do poorly in exams because they're too busy learning.)

Threads like this one happen when one group encounters the other, perhaps for the first time. If your goal is to learn then cheating is only fooling you. If your goal is to pass, well, there are multiple ways to do that.

[wholinator2]

I'll challenge the point that people who actually want to learn do worse on tests. I've been to two schools for a total of 6 years so far, through 3 different undergraduate degrees with differing students. The people who were interested in the material more than their future job invariably do much better. The kids that just want the job don't try too hard to learn any single thing, they don't learn the fundamentals, they don't learn auxiliaries, they get crushed on exams. Kids who really want to learn go learn those things in their spare time and then crush the exams. There is the occasional student who spends their entire college career learning things outside of the material covered by their courses and then do somewhat poorly on their exams, but almost always those people are just learning the skills to get some other job that doesn't align with their degree title too well. they're just a different kind of job first-gimme paper people, they might make an app, or build a company, but most of them don't even try.

All of these people are fine, regular human beings. But i have literally never experienced a colleague do bad on a test because they were "learning too much". My degrees of experience are computer science, mathematics, and physics though so the people who want to keep learning have to be pretty strong students to make it into the master and doctorate programs they want.

[fragmede]

I've definitely gone off and studied the wrong thing and learned a bunch of stuff that wasn't on the test and done poorly on it as a result. Didn't stop me from getting a degree, but skipping ahead a few chapters and learning that instead and then failing a test on the chapters you skipped is what "learning too much" looks like.

[nothercastle]

When I wanted to learn I’d try to understand the fundamentals. How things interact and get a good understanding of relationships between concepts. When I wanted a good grade I’d drill problems for hours on end till I could flawlessly execute the steps required. Completely different study patterns for different outcomes