I think the fact is that amphetamines can help you cram, but they don’t help with long-term retention or better comprehension (to say nothing of the more obvious harms). After the test, the stuff you’ve memorised evaporates like yesterday’s breakfast order in the mind of an underpaid waiter. I’ve known people who do this, they don’t retain anything.
I would really prefer that we adopt a more naturalistic vetting method for students than standardised testing. Instead of having professors double as test proctors, there should be a sort of structured interview and staff whose whole job it is to probe student understanding. Test design theory is admittedly quite advanced around multiple choice, but I don’t think they’re fit for task anymore in the age of LLMs and performance ‘enhancing’ drugs.
I don’t know. Maybe my idea could work, but all I know is the way we do things now doesn’t.
We can thank No Child Left Behind for the binge and purge learning that is the national standard now. Even though I was a child when it was enacted, my mom worked in education her whole life and often cited NCLB as the start of the downfall of education in our state.
Teachers had to start “teaching to the test” instead of teaching what actually mattered. I don’t mean the classroom’s test, I mean the standardized test that we all had to take once a year and everyone hated.
If you hated those tests, you misunderstood how much power they gave you. Until my Sophomore year in high school, the campus was open. This meant that we could walk across the street and get lunch at McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Dairy Queen, or Kroger. Then the school board decided that they didn’t have enough control of us during our lunch period if we could leave the campus, so they attempted to close the campus.
That lasted all of about 4 days. The smartest seniors in the school came around and got the top 5 testers in each grade to agree to boycott the standardized tests, and we started holding sit-in protests. Just 20 kids.
The thing the seniors knew, and explained to us is that those tests didn’t affect us at all. Universities don’t look at those test results. Only the government does. By the 20 of us threatening not to take the test, their scores would have plummeted that year, as would their federal funding. Needless to say they waited until every single middle schooler and high schooler that was attending at the time had graduated before they tried that shit again.
Cramming or vomit learning is how i passed most tests even with best grades in uni. I didnt understand one proffessors aproach to logic math so i learned his test questions like 100 pages and aced the test. Did i cry during learning? Yes. Anyhow even if it only helps cramming it does give advantages in tests.
I would even go as far as saying such interview-type tests would be valuable on a regular basis throughout a course, if it could be done. People learn really well during personal conversations like that, and the act of explaining an idea can be a great way to crystallize a body of concepts in a way that merely reading about them might never do.
I know institutions would want to fob this interviewing work off onto an LLM, but I know it would be of meagre benefit.
I think the fact is that amphetamines can help you cram, but they don’t help with long-term retention or better comprehension (to say nothing of the more obvious harms). After the test, the stuff you’ve memorised evaporates like yesterday’s breakfast order in the mind of an underpaid waiter. I’ve known people who do this, they don’t retain anything.
I would really prefer that we adopt a more naturalistic vetting method for students than standardised testing. Instead of having professors double as test proctors, there should be a sort of structured interview and staff whose whole job it is to probe student understanding. Test design theory is admittedly quite advanced around multiple choice, but I don’t think they’re fit for task anymore in the age of LLMs and performance ‘enhancing’ drugs.
I don’t know. Maybe my idea could work, but all I know is the way we do things now doesn’t.
We can thank No Child Left Behind for the binge and purge learning that is the national standard now. Even though I was a child when it was enacted, my mom worked in education her whole life and often cited NCLB as the start of the downfall of education in our state.
Teachers had to start “teaching to the test” instead of teaching what actually mattered. I don’t mean the classroom’s test, I mean the standardized test that we all had to take once a year and everyone hated.
First they came for the arts, then they came for the critical thinking…
If you hated those tests, you misunderstood how much power they gave you. Until my Sophomore year in high school, the campus was open. This meant that we could walk across the street and get lunch at McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Dairy Queen, or Kroger. Then the school board decided that they didn’t have enough control of us during our lunch period if we could leave the campus, so they attempted to close the campus.
That lasted all of about 4 days. The smartest seniors in the school came around and got the top 5 testers in each grade to agree to boycott the standardized tests, and we started holding sit-in protests. Just 20 kids.
The thing the seniors knew, and explained to us is that those tests didn’t affect us at all. Universities don’t look at those test results. Only the government does. By the 20 of us threatening not to take the test, their scores would have plummeted that year, as would their federal funding. Needless to say they waited until every single middle schooler and high schooler that was attending at the time had graduated before they tried that shit again.
I agree with your understanding test idea.
Cramming or vomit learning is how i passed most tests even with best grades in uni. I didnt understand one proffessors aproach to logic math so i learned his test questions like 100 pages and aced the test. Did i cry during learning? Yes. Anyhow even if it only helps cramming it does give advantages in tests.
I would even go as far as saying such interview-type tests would be valuable on a regular basis throughout a course, if it could be done. People learn really well during personal conversations like that, and the act of explaining an idea can be a great way to crystallize a body of concepts in a way that merely reading about them might never do.
I know institutions would want to fob this interviewing work off onto an LLM, but I know it would be of meagre benefit.
That’s how my mind works without any drugs…
Everybody got different needs. Some people need to stop doing drugs, some people need to start!