As the school year approaches the end, finals and AP tests loom over students with the former being the last chance to increase their grades and GPAs and the latter being a way to earn college credit before graduating. As students navigate the challenges of managing rigorous academic courses with club and school sports, extracurriculars and jobs, they begin to rely on memorization as a tactic to maximize their scores on Advanced Placement (AP) tests and final exams.
With college acceptance rates hitting all-time lows at prestigious universities around the country, students are constantly in search of new opportunities to fill up their schedules and build their resumes with experiences that take up multiple hours per day. To earn an ample amount of sleep throughout the week, the enjoyment of learning new knowledge and taking the time to fully grasp new concepts is being sacrificed. Many are using Quizlet as a tool to build their short-term memory of certain subjects on the night before an exam, focusing on strategies to remember certain facts rather than learn the history or reasoning behind them.
With students becoming more prone to studying just for the sake of memorizing something for a test, the information they studied is forgotten immediately after they take the exam. Once certain topics are revisited in higher-level classes in that subject area, having limited to no memory of them can cause students to fall behind and be easily confused by more advanced concepts and skills. This applies more to subjects like math, where everything builds with everything else, but it is also apparent with history, where knowing more about the timeline of a country connects with facts from certain eras and centuries.
When asked how junior Sally Khoury studies for her spring finals, she explained that memorizing allows her to build up her short-term memory for a specific subject.
“[I’ve relied] partly on memory and I also just go back and study what I learned a while ago,” said Khoury.
However, this constant cycle of studying and forgetting content does not seem like it will stop. The benefits that the letter grade of an “A” has on one’s grade point average and the commitment to challenge oneself academically are more appealing than learning the topic for one’s own knowledge.
Though this seems to work in high school, the consequences could be detrimental in college when memorization simply is not enough and tests need to be studied for well in advance.
