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Memorizing vs Deep Knowledge

I had an interesting discussion with a colleague yesterday, about what and how much to memorize, especially in preparation for essay and practical tests. Both of us got bad advice as teens in school, to just memorize everything. During college and in our careers, we discovered how absurd and WRONG that advice was. LOL we each nearly got busted out of training by examiners who thought we memorized too much and didn't understand things in depth.

Memorize the things you do not have time to look up in books or online. Such things you need to know and apply promptly. For other things, you should know where to where to find the information. In my career, there are a lot of rules and machine limitations we must know dead cold. Examiners would ask a lot of "scenario" questions, where you must talk at length and juggle a lot of different concepts. They wanted rules and numbers memorized, but "how and why" to be understood.

That said, delivering a 20 minute talk or 4000 word essay requires you to deeply understand the topic. LOL I don't mean at the level of a PhD, but as a competent person who knows the field and won't get lost or try to bullshit out of a question. It is different from having things memorized. To sit or stand before an audience and show mastery requires you to cover multiple concepts, explain how they relate to one another, and apply what you know.

Study, but then practice by writing out brief essays on the smaller topics. Work out the awkward wordings or funky logic. Learn the limits of what you know and have a sense of when you are weak in some area, so you can focus you studies there. It is an iterative, "do then do again" process.

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This is what works; schools won't bother to teach you how to really study. It is almost as if they are in the business of letting you struggle. That is unnecessary! It is better to learn how to learn.

This Book Shows You How to Study - It Can Change Your Life

If you are like me, you probably went through school without actually being taught how to study. You probably believe that what works is to pay attention to the teacher in class, read the book, maybe take some notes, and hope for the best when you face testing. That is not efficient or effective in this era. There is a much better way.

Light Up Your Grades guides you through unlocking your potential for learning, with real-world techniques for success:

readiness before taking classes

organized note taking methods

efficiency: knowing what is important and what is not

avoiding burnout

managing focus

dealing with anxiety about testing

test taking strategy

multiple choice vs essays vs practical tests

online resources

software for building your own second brain

People, young and old, are using these methods for smashing their school exams, earning college degrees, and boosting their career advancement. Read "Light Up Your Grades" today and never worry again about being smart enough to pass a course.

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Overcoming My Industrial-Age Education

Before I learned how to study and take tests, school was a struggle. Teachers put information up on the chalkboards, then later on screens, and we students tried to drink it all in, as from a fire hose.

We were basically showered in facts and figures, then told to just remember it. Then, if we could spew it back out on the test, we could pass and get more credits toward a diploma.

Some people, like myself, could write quickly, and took a lot of notes. Others, who were not so quick-handed, took fewer notes or brought a recorder to class.

None of our parents had much advice for handling tough subjects, except "read more" or "work harder at memorization."

It was all bullshit. No one I knew, NONE, had any understanding of human performance factors. No one had a clue as to how we learn or what we should do in order to learn more efficiently.

My big break came early in my career, when "the smart guys" gave up some secrets for success. My break got better yet, when I started reading about note-taking and how experts prepare for certification tests and practical exams.

All of the smart ones, who never broke a sweat during practicals and simulations, were studying with "Pomodoro, Zettelkasten, and Feynman" methods!

Get your copy: Light Up Your Grades

They didn't purely follow any study method purely, but leaned mostly into a method and borrowed techniques from the others. Here is a basic breakdown which works:

Use multiple primary sources: lectures, textbooks, videos, and note collections. Put recorded tutorials or lectures on your smart phone and listen while exercising or doing other tasks.

Take notes and revise notes as you learn more. These are not mere copies of the books or lectures, but your own words about the important concepts, facts, and methods of problem solving.

Instead of paper notes, take electronic notes in markdown format. That's right. Create text files, because text will never become obsolete.

Use a note-taking app which allows interlinking notes and images. You can more easily learn the relationships between different items of knowledge.

Learn the basics first, then build your knowledge in steps; never try to "skip to the end" or "eat the whole elephant."

Break study sessions into a few 45 to 60 minute runs, with breaks to stretch, have a coffee, or just chill for a few minutes. Work toward achieving some kind of progress in a session: a new understanding or skill, to recognize when you have made progress.

Switch to another subject after you achieve progress in one. You want to move around among your subjects, not spending too much time in any.

Don't be afraid of weakness in any topic. Recognize it and work to build your knowledge and skills in areas where you are not strong.

Studying for important subjects and taking tests is never easy. Keep some kind of symbol for your goals, to help you keep your "eyes on the prize."

Do a lot of practice exercises, to develop your problem solving skills.

Study with a classmate or two, and take turns teaching the material to each other. You don't really know the material until you are familiar enough to put it into words, or to exercise the skill and explain what you're doing.

Memorization is for things you need to recall immediately, without time to look them up in the books or get from a web search. For other things, know where to find them, so you can go straight to them and see the information.

Always be ready to jot down fleeting notes. When you get little insights, or the first trace of an idea relating to something you are studying, get it into your fleeting notes. Later, build it up and create more substantial notes in the concept.

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That's right. Put in a few hours of study, the go touch grass. Exercise. Get your mind off of the material and do something manual and physical. Then go back to the studies later.

February 12th, 2023 • Friday

As the end of semester nears, it's important to take care of yourself and not hyperfixate on studying to the point where you overexert yourself.

🎧 Marandhitiyo — Khareshma Ravichandran, Paul B Sailus

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Pay attention to those ephemeral wisps of ideas which reveal themselves for a moment, then disappear. They are outer bounds of wisdom, there for you to pursue and check them out. All great and terrible things are discovered that way.

Your brain’s first thought? It’s not nonsense. It’s genius in disguise. We’re talking brain burps, inner brilliance, and how your weirdest ideas might just be the key to your most powerful self. You in? Tap the link and let’s get untamed.#FierceMillennial

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This is good advice. Schools are terrible in teaching study and test skills; private tutors are not much better. The things in this list can open the doors to success in school and in your career.

I did something similar for my own exams, and hell yeah they work.

Save this, and keep a copy handy for review whenever you have a free moment.

27 Exam strategies from 'Cracking the GRE Premium Edition with 6 Practice Tests, 2020' which can also become life tips

As you become more familiar with the test, you will also develop a sense of “the ETS mentality.” This is a predictable kind of thinking that influences nearly every part of nearly every ETS exam. By learning to recognize the ETS mentality, you’ll earn points even when you aren’t sure why an answer is correct. You’ll inevitably do better on the test by learning to think like the people who wrote it.

You’ll do better on the GRE by putting aside your feelings about real education and surrendering yourself to the strange logic of the standardized test.

You might be surprised to learn that the GRE isn’t written by distinguished professors, renowned scholars, or graduate school admissions officers. For the most part, it’s written by ordinary ETS employees, sometimes with freelance help from local graduate students. You have no reason to be intimidated.

Our focus is on the basic concepts that will enable you to attack any problem, strip it down to its essential components, and solve it in as little time as possible.

In many ways, taking a standardized test is a skill and, as with any skill, you can become more proficient at it by both practicing and following the advice of a good teacher.

Think of your GRE preparation as if you were practicing for a piano recital or a track meet; you wouldn’t show up at the concert hall or track field without having put in hours of practice beforehand (at least we hope you wouldn’t!). If you want to get a good score on the GRE, you’ll have to put in the necessary preparation time.

After all, the GRE leaves you no room to make explanations or justifications for your responses.

However, the difficulty of an individual question plays no role in determining your score; that is, your score is calculated by your performance on the entirety of the scored sections, not just a handful of the hardest questions on a given section.

This strategy is called Take the Easy Test First. Skip early and skip often.

On your first pass through the questions, if you see a question you don’t like, a question that looks hard, or a question that looks time consuming, you’re going to walk on by and leave it for the end.

Sometimes, however, a question that looks easy turns out to be more troublesome than you thought. The question may be trickier than it first appeared, or you may have simply misread it, and it seems hard only because you’re working with the wrong information.

Over four hours your brain is going to get tired.

Once you read a question wrong, however, it is almost impossible to un-read that and see it right. As long as you are still immersed in the question, you could read it 10 times in a row and you will read it the same wrong way each time.

Whether a question is harder than it first appeared, or made harder by the fact that you missed a key phrase or piece of information, the approach you’ve taken is not working.

Reset your brain by walking away from the problem, but Mark the question before you do. Do two or three other questions, and then return to the marked problem. When you walk away, your brain doesn’t just forget the problem, it keeps on processing in the background. The distraction of the other questions helps your brain to consider the question from other angles. When you return to the problem, you may find that the part that gave you so much trouble the first time is now magically clear. If the problem continues to give you trouble, walk away again.

Staying with a problem when you’re stuck burns time but yields no points. You might spend two, three, five, or even six minutes on a problem but still be no closer to the answer.

In the five minutes you spend on a problem that you’ve misread, you could nail three or four easier questions. When you return to the question that gave you trouble, there is a good chance that you will spot your error, and the path to the correct answer will become clear. If it doesn’t become clear, walk away again. Any time you encounter resistance on the test, do not keep pushing; bend like a reed and walk away

You should take the easy test first and you should spend most of your time on questions that you know how to answer, or are reasonably certain you can answer.

As a result, it’s better to guess than it is to leave a question blank. At least by guessing, you stand a chance at getting lucky and guessing correctly.

In fact, sometimes it is easier to identify the wrong answers and eliminate them than it is to find the right ones,

Trap answers are specifically designed to appeal to test takers. Oftentimes, they’re the answers that seem to scream out “pick me!” as you work through a question. However, these attractive answers are often incorrect.

Get into the habit of double-checking all of your answers before you click on your answer choice

The only way to reliably avoid careless errors is to adopt habits that make them less likely to occur.

Every time you begin a new section, focus on that section and put the last section you completed behind you. Don’t think about that pesky synonym from an earlier section while a geometry question is on your screen. You can’t go back, and besides, your impression of how you did on a section is probably much worse than reality.

The week before the test is not the time for any major life changes. This is NOT the week to quit smoking, start smoking, quit drinking coffee, start drinking coffee, start a relationship, end a relationship, or quit a job. Business as usual, okay?

Before you dive in, you might wish to take one of the practice tests in this book or online to get a sense of where you are starting from.

Accuracy is better than speed. Slow down and focus on accumulating as many points as possible. Forcing yourself to work faster results in careless errors and lower scores.