I went to three different schools for elementary, middle and high school, and each required that I adapt to a slightly different learning system. I went to elementary school in the United States, but attended middle and high school in India and Singapore. The most difficult transition for me was the jump from high school in India to the curriculum here at the University.
In India, I followed the International Baccalaureate, which was a European system. The entire program was two years long and had myriad requirements, from community service to a 4,000 word essay. End-of-year examinations would ultimately decide whether you would be on your way to college or not.
It was these final examinations that became the driving force behind our learning. Everything we learned in the classroom was geared to help us understand and comprehend the test itself. I remember memorizing the kinds of questions that appeared on previous tests and modeling answers for them. More often than not, these items were indeed repeated, and it was very easy to score the highest points on them. We were taught how to answer the question rather than why the question was being asked in the first place.
Coming to the United States for college was a huge change. My first semester here was nothing short of a small-scale disaster, and I was dissatisfied with my grades. I searched for the root of this problem and came up with no solution other than just keep studying the way I had been, only harder and longer. While that did provide improvement, it wasn’t a drastic change. It was only when I compared my high school study habits to the methods of teaching here that I realized what the problem was.
Test taking in a college curriculum is secondary to what is actually learned in class. Professors teach so as to impart knowledge for the sake of learning, understanding and appreciating the material; they do not teach to ensure you score the highest on a final. The aim is to understand concepts and their applications. There aren’t many past exams to rely on, but what you can rely on is yourself and what your brain managed to soak up during lecture.
Another observation I had was the fact that all my exams for the IB were graded externally by faceless examiners. My work was under scrutiny from many different kinds of examiners — if they had woken up to a particularly bad day, who knew what havoc they could wreak upon poor students. It was this arbitrary element that could either work in your favor or become a curse. College professors try to maintain some degree of uniformity when grading students’ papers. If one student is graded a certain way, it is ensured that the same method of grading is used for other students; the element of partiality is minimized as much as possible.
It was through this contemplation that I realized I had a fundamental problem with learning itself. Simply learning to understand the information and appreciate the subject matter had been pushed out from my brain and replaced with the driving need to prove myself only on examinations, to study only for the test. Once I came here, I realized how hard it would be to change such a mindset.
I also asked myself another question — had I always been this type of student? I only ever finished elementary school in United States and moved onto a different education system in India at the impressionable age of 10. Perhaps my mind had been conditioned once I left for India and had been put into an entirely different system of learning.
Regardless, the human brain is capable of massive amounts of adaptation. Of course with age, it only becomes harder. I can feel it as I start to reintegrate myself back into the style of learning at U.Va. and re-teach myself what it means to learn in an entirely new setting.
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