<p>You know you always have one of these people in your class that gets like 98% on a midterm or final whle everyone gets like a C+ and the professor decides not to curve the exam? I am wondering what happens to the average people? Do all of them fail into getting grad school? </p>
<p>And what about those people that gets scores like crazy even though the questions on the exam are insane? do they even need to work hard to go to princeton, harvard, Mit, brown, berkeley etc…?</p>
<p>Simple. They spend 5-15 minutes the day before the test learning Concepts that others neglect to learn while they are memorizing for hours. The Concepts are the key to Success. </p>
<p>Memorizing is a fool’s errand. I once met an engineering grad student who never memorized Quotient Rule, the pythagorean theorem, the quadratic equation, or the equations for volume of a sphere, cylinder, cube, or rhombus. He simply learned the Concepts, which he was able to apply in order to earn Top Grades.</p>
<p>@Whistle, you think in 200 people that only one person understands things from concepts? NO! There aer people who go through proofs and they still can’t perform well on exams.</p>
<p>Au contraire. I find that it’s the students who focus on concepts rather than Memorization that consistently lag behind. </p>
<p>Tests are not designed to capture holistic understanding, rather, they weed out students who have learned the trivial and insignificant details that can only be grasped by raw Memorization. It is the plight of the high IQ, low gpa student, who are the ones trying to learn the concepts rather than Memorize their way to success.</p>
<p>Intelligence is a barrier to high GPA. It is, in essence, a distraction. When you have real, complex thoughts, how can you perfect the art of one dimensional Memorization?</p>
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<p>That’s exactly right. It’s the proofs, the creative thoughts and brainpower churning and digesting information that distracts the mind. Memorization is the fodder of successful test taking. The Conceptual Mind is its folly.</p>
<p>I have the exact opposite experience, it is the people who do the work ahead of time that get the top grades.</p>
<p>It depends on the subject. I got easy A’s / A+'s in math, physics, and chemistry by cramming the mathematical concepts shortly before tests. In other subjects (Anatomy & Physiology, and history, in particular), I could do no such thing.</p>
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<p>The Conceptual mind is the folly of the fodder of successful test taking?</p>
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<p>It doesn’t matter when one does the work. Whether you spend 15 minutes learning the Concepts 3 weeks in advance or 15 minutes learning the Concepts the day before the test, it’s still getting done. It’s the memorizers who have to start working ahead of time in order to commit enough of the material to memory to earn a barely-passing grade. College is about Time Management. By learning Concepts instead of just memorizing and spitting facts out of a book, you increase your understanding and free time dramatically, so you can engage in extracurriculars and have a social life.</p>
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<p>Sounds like you are great at learning Concepts if you just study the day before. I don’t know many memorizers with much higher than a 2.5. It sucks too because they have no social life due to all the time they spend memorizing haha. Hey what’s your SAT and GPA if you don’t mind my asking?</p>
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<p>Especially in the case of Proofs, it’s all about your Conceptual understanding. memorizing does nothing when you have to think outside the box at a new, dramatic, and beautiful proof on test day.</p>
<p>Ive noticed that too. In my school at least with the other engineering students, they just memorize a crap ton of stuff in one day and I study for an entire week trying to get the concepts for a class like Thermo and still not do well at all while they end up getting average grades. It sucks for me since my brain just cant memorize something unless I can put it with something else or see a reason to it</p>
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<p>The Conceptual Mind is the folly of test taking. Hopefully this will disambiguate the statement.</p>
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<p>This is the classic nonsense that low IQ, high GPA students throw out to make their GPAs seem worthwhile. They hope that by reiterating how GPA identifies Conceptual Understanding, they can justify their one-dimensional life accomplishments that have focused entirely on academics. </p>
<p>Ironically, these students preaching Conceptual Understanding are actually the Pure Memorizers. They tell other to “slowly read the book” because this is how you gain “Conceptual Understanding.” In reality, it is this slow and repeated reading that allows them to–step by step–memorize all pertinent information that they then regurgitate on tests.</p>
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<p>That’s right, Magneto. While you’re trying to work out the higher level Concepts and figure out the inner workings of a problem, they’re already halfway through the nitty gritty details. </p>
<p>Ultimately, it’s only the details that come out on the tests. The professors assume that everyone learned the Concepts, and that these details are simply singling out the students with a Higher Understanding. In reality, it’s only the Pure Memorizers that pounded these trivialities into their brain. </p>
<p>Whistle is right, college is a game of Time Management. There isn’t enough time to understand the deeper Concepts, so successful students compensate by rote Memorization. Those that waste time learning lag behind.</p>
<p>Of course, the high IQ/low GPA students that gained a Conceptual understanding of the material are busy pursuing their passions. They’re usually extremely capable people who already have a direction in life, so they don’t waste time playing the Memorization game. Thus, they don’t care about GPA debates and don’t waste their time refuting the ridiculous claims of low IQ/high GPA students. </p>
<p>This leaves only those same low IQ/high GPA students to claim that their GPA measures some sort of real Understanding without any practical people refuting them.</p>
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<p>Exactly, everyone can understand the concepts if they got the time, but the pace is too quick, like even if you study day and night, it’s the next thing already and it is over and done with.</p>
<p>I always thought that if you had the inner workings of what was going on then everything would fall into place. Well boy I was wrong. Time employ this strategy and see what happens</p>
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<p>Which is why the Memorizers triumph. Trust me, there is no such thing as a college education–it’s a myth. There are those that learned nothing and got a 4.0. Then there are those that learned until their GPA dropped so low that they are no longer in college.</p>
<p>Next time you see some 4.0 student giving you advice on how to learn effectively, remember that they are actually Memorizers. **The sad thing is, most of them don’t even realize that they’re Memorizers. They’re too dumb to know they’re dumb. ** So they’ll give you these helpful hints that they think leads to Conceptual Understanding. They’ll tell you to read slowly, use flashcards, study long before the test, etc., </p>
<p>Why do these methods work? These are Memorization Tricks. Why do you think the same flashcards that help students memorize words in foreign language class also help you learn Thermodynamics? Do you think that these subjects are similar? NO. But they both can be memorized.</p>
<p>What if it is something like Math? Because this happens a lot…you know one guy gets 100% while everyone gets a C+ and the prof can’t curve the exam because of that one person…</p>
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<p>First of all, deriving formulas for volumes of shapes requires calculus. I find it hard to believe they did that every time (not that shape equations come up very often, but you should know spheres). Secondly, the Quotient Rule is pointless. It’s basically just a combination of the product rule and the chain rule. And if you don’t know those, you don’t know differential calculus. Most importantly though, how can you get to grad school without knowing the pythagorean theorem? It takes absolutely no effort to remember it after just using it a few times. That’s like not memorizing your times tables or what 2 + 2 equals.</p>
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<p>Are you sure that you have the Concepts down? If you have Conceptual understanding of the four main laws of thermodynamics, you should have the ability to look at any problem and critically think your way to the solution through simple application of Concepts. You don’t even have to look at equations to study for a lot of problems if you truly understand the Law of Conservation of Mass-Energy. The fact that matter cannot be created nor destroyed is kind of a big deal when you really think about it. You might be getting trouble by just memorizing the words “matter cannot be created nor destroyed” verbatim without truly understanding the underlying Concept.</p>
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<p>I don’t know what to tell you other than it’s pretty clear that the person getting the 100% has superior Conceptual understanding.</p>
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<p>This is one of those classic pseudo-genius kids. The guy has been learning Math since his dad first tried teaching him Linear Algebra when he was 3. </p>
<p>You think that a student setting the curve must be a Conceptual Learner. In reality, the guy has had 7 years to practice the material that you had to master in 1 month. He certainly might be a Conceptual Learner–in this case he would be a true intellectual like all Conceptuals are. But the reason he got the 100% is simple: not only did he Memorize the material, but he’s been Memorizing it for 7 years. So, naturally, he beat out the Conceptuals AND the Memorizers.</p>
<p>It’s not too hard to write a proof showing that set A is contained within set B when you’ve been working through various fields and subsets for 10,000 hours.</p>
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<p>Obviously. It’s just another 4.0 GPA Memorizer creating bull crap stories to justify his theory that “Conceptual Thinkers get the high GPA.”</p>
<p>All grad students have memorized the Pythagorean Theorem. They’ve also memorized the formulas for volumes of all kinds of shapes. They’ve been memorizing anything they can get their hands on for the past 4 years. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have made it to grad school.</p>
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<p>I’m not sure he does it, I just assume that he’s thinking on a Higher plane than I am capable of. I think he gets what Quotient Rule is, it’s just that he never bothered to sit down and memorize it since he already understood the Concept.</p>