I’ve just found out in the special appeal meeting with the Professor this morning that memorising (using my short-term memory) for obtaining high grades is not such a good idea as I had thought.  

Originally, I thought that getting the right answer was all that mattered because this is what we have always done all through our education. However, the Professor asked us several questions which made us think about it differently: 

Actually, the Professor is right, I really haven’t ever thought about it like that. High grades do not really mean a successful career. I’ve never cared about what is behind the grade but only on how to get a high grade. I have heard of something called Criteria-referenced Assessment but I really did not understand it before. It means that in order to get a specified grade you are required to meet specific criteria, and in a university the criteria does not include memorisation.  Instead, criteria like application and understanding, etc. are more important criteria that the University want us to acquire. 

This Professor makes a good point. Maybe, I should think again about learning to understand what I am being taught and the approach I adopt with assessment of my coursework and examinations. 

The results are out. I don’t know what’s going on. I thought I had memorised the notes and model answers perfectly but all I got was grade D’s and D+’s, I even got an F for one subject, what’s going on? 

After talking to some of my classmates, it turns out that most of my class mates were memorizing model answers, just like me. It now turns out that the University is discounting work that is just reproduced parrot fashion, including those found in examination papers. We have memorised model answers since HKCEE and A-level examinations. I can’t see what the problem is. I can’t believe that I will not graduate with a good degree now. How am I going to find a job?  

Memorising is my strength, I’ve become really good at it. I just need the time to do so. In fact, after memorising the notes, all I need to do is to write all that down in the examination. It’s a piece of cake. 

And also the model answers, it’s foolish if I don’t memorise them. Come on, I can do it.

Yeah! I’m the man! I predicted most of the examination questions. You see, I just have to pick the main points of the subject during the class, together with my prediction skills. I can get an A without working hard or even really understanding what I am doing. Seems like a piece of cake for me to get a Grade A. 

Just like today during the examination, if I come across some questions that I don’t really know the answer, I just write as much as I can even though it’s not really related to the question. In fact, I wrote so much that I used the whole answer book. It really looks as if I know what I am doing, and the teacher may not be able to read all that I have written as she has so much grading to do because the class has so many students. 

Oh dear! Why do we have so many notes to study in this semester? How can I finish reading all these in such little time? All I can do right now is to pick a few questions from the previous examination papers and try to answer them. Hopefully, I can predict the right questions. I don’t want to think about the open-ended questions now as I won’t have the time to do so, so let’s not worry about those. It’s more practical to revise the important points and notes from the Professor. If I can predict the examination questions, I should be able to get a C+, or even a B. 

I think the examinations of Semester 1 were quite easy and my grades for the next ones should be fine, but I can’t believe my GPA is actually 3.2, rather than something like 2.4 or 2.8. Even though eight out of ten of my friends got GPA’s over 3.0, and about six got 3.2, I still can’t believe a student like me can get such a high GPA! 

In fact, I never really bothered too much.  I could not believe that I actually got Grade A for some subjects. It was like that because the requirements of teachers in some subjects were rather low? But one thing for sure is that grading is not done according to a normal distribution. So even if my classmates do well, they won’t pull down my grades. Therefore, I just need to do what I normally do: try to predict the exam questions and memorize some model answers. Then I will obtain good grades. I just usually spend a couple of nights before each examination and then I’m OK.  Hopefully the examinations this time will be no different and I can easily pass like before.