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by Retric
58 days ago
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It’s not a bias on the educational side, it’s the inherent requirement for knowledge before you can learn skills. Memorization creates a Rosetta Stone the enables people to start reading. You need to know what happened historically before you can have meaningful opinions about it. You need to memorize mathematical symbols meaning before you can use them etc etc. The only bias here is people disliking memorization. It takes effort and has concrete right and wrong answers so you can fail in a way that doesn’t happen with skills. But disliking something doesn’t mean it’s actually wrong. |
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There have been classes I’ve taken where ~half of the evaluation is brute memorizing dates/event names. Ive also taken classes (machine design) where the majority of the evaluation is open book and about solving problems. Most classes land somewhere in the middle.
I think there is a bias towards memorization-based testing because it’s easy. Coming up with trivia questions is easy. Grading those answers is easy. A students can’t complain about marks when they get a date wrong.
Coming up with problem solving questions is hard. Grading them is ambiguous. Students will complain that their mark should be higher. Everything is harder.
If the testing is memorization based, students will get good at memorizing facts and spitting them out on the test. If the test is problems solving, students will optimize for that.