[_ea1k]

I had a professor who unwittingly encouraged this kind of rote study. His questions were word questions that required you to describe in details certain concepts from the course material.

All of that is good (in theory), but his grading approach was to mark off a point or two for minor discrepancies. In theory, this meant that if you had the concept, without memorization you would get points.

In reality if you didn't include all keywords from the lessons, you would be docked points. People who memorized extremely well and parroted back his words almost verbatim would do well. People who worked to understand the material and write back their understanding often wouldn't.

Sigh. The sad thing was is that from a classroom learning standpoint, he was one of the best professors there. But I would often end up avoiding his classes (my memory is often terrible at rote learning).