The Lesson to Unlearn

[The Lesson to Unlearn]

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| December 2019
The most damaging thing you learned in school wasn't something you
learned in any specific class. It was learning to get good grades.When I was in college, a particularly earnest philosophy grad student
once told me that he never cared what grade he got in a class, only
what he learned in it. This stuck in my mind because it was the
only time I ever heard anyone say such a thing.For me, as for most students, the measurement of what I was learning
completely dominated actual learning in college. I was fairly
earnest; I was genuinely interested in most of the classes I took,
and I worked hard. And yet I worked by far the hardest when I was
studying for a test.In theory, tests are merely what their name implies: tests of what
you've learned in the class. In theory you shouldn't have to prepare
for a test in a class any more than you have to prepare for a blood
test. In theory you learn from taking the class, from going to the
lectures and doing the reading and/or assignments, and the test
that comes afterward merely measures how well you learned.In practice, as almost everyone reading this will know, things are
so different that hearing this explanation of how classes and tests
are meant to work is like hearing the etymology of a word whose
meaning has changed completely. In practice, the phrase "studying
for a test" was almost redundant, because that was when one really
studied. The difference between diligent and slack students was
that the former studied hard for tests and the latter didn't. No
one was pulling all-nighters two weeks into the semester.Even though I was a diligent student, almost all the work I did in
school was aimed at getting a good grade on something.To many people, it would seem strange that the preceding sentence
has a "though" in it. Aren't I merely stating a tautology? Isn't
that what a diligent student is, a straight-A student? That's how
deeply the conflation of learning with grades has infused our
culture.Is it so bad if learning is conflated with grades? Yes, it is bad.
And it wasn't till decades after college, when I was running Y Combinator, that I realized how bad it is.I knew of course when I was a student that studying for a test is
far from identical with actual learning. At the very least, you
don't retain knowledge you cram into your head the night before an
exam. But the problem is worse than that. The real problem is that
most tests don't come close to measuring what they're supposed to.If tests truly were tests of learning, things wouldn't be so bad.
Getting good grades and learning would converge, just a little late.
The problem is that nearly all tests given to students are terribly
hackable. Most people who've gotten good grades know this, and know
it so well they've ceased even to question it. You'll see when you
realize how naive it sounds to act otherwise.Suppose you're taking a class on medieval history and the final
exam is coming up. The final exam is supposed to be a test of your
knowledge of medieval history, right? So if you have a couple days
between now and the exam, surely the best way to spend the time,
if you want to do well on the exam, is to read the best books you
can find about medieval history. Then you'll know a lot about it,
and do well on the exam.No, no, no, experienced students are saying to themselves. If you
merely read good books on medieval history, most of the stuff you
learned wouldn't be on the test. It's not good books you want to
read, but the lecture notes and assigned reading in this class.
And even most of that you can ignore, because you only have to worry
about the sort of thing that could turn up as a test question.
You're looking for sharply-defined chunks of information. If one
of the assigned readings has an interesting digression on some
subtle point, you can safely ignore that, because it's not the sort
of thing that could be turned into a test question. But if the
professor tells you that there were three underlying causes of the
Schism of 1378, or three main consequences of the Black Death, you'd
better know them. And whether they were in fact the causes or
consequences is beside the point. For the purposes of this class
they are.At a university there are often copies of old exams floating around,
and these narrow still further what you have to learn. As well as
learning what kind of questions this professor asks, you'll often
get actual exam questions. Many professors re-use them. After
teaching a class for 10 years, it would be hard not to, at least
inadvertently.In some classes, your professor will have had some sort of political
axe to grind, and if so you'll have to grind it too. The need for
this varies. In classes in math or the hard sciences or engineering
it's rarely necessary, but at the other end of the spectrum there
are classes where you couldn't get a good grade without it.Getting a good grade in a class on x is so different from learning
a lot about x that you have to choose one or the other, and you
can't blame students if they choose grades. Everyone judges them
by their grades � graduate programs, employers, scholarships, even
their own parents.I liked learning, and I really enjoyed some of the papers and
programs I wrote in college. But did I ever, after turning in a
paper in some class, sit down and write another just for fun? Of
course not. I had things due in other classes. If it ever came to
a choice of learning or grades, I chose grades. I hadn't come to
college to do badly.Anyone who cares about getting good grades has to play this game,
or they'll be surpassed by those who do. And at elite universities,
that means nearly everyone, since someone who didn't care about
getting good grades probably wouldn't be there in the first place.
The result is that students compete to maximize the difference
between learning and getting good grades.Why are tests so bad? More precisely, why are they so hackable?
Any experienced programmer could answer that. How hackable is
software whose author hasn't paid any attention to preventing it
from being hacked? Usually it's as porous as a colander.Hackable is the default for any test imposed by an authority. The
reason the tests you're given are so consistently bad � so consistently
far from measuring what they're supposed to measure � is simply
that the people creating them haven't made much effort to prevent
them from being hacked.But you can't blame teachers if their tests are hackable. Their job
is to teach, not to create unhackable tests. The real problem is
grades, or more precisely, that grades have been overloaded. If
grades were merely a way for teachers to tell students what they
were doing right and wrong, like a coach giving advice to an athlete,
students wouldn't be tempted to hack tests. But unfortunately after
a certain age grades become more than advice. After a certain age,
whenever you're being taught, you're usually also being judged.I've used college tests as an example, but those are actually the
least hackable. All the tests most students take their whole lives
are at least as bad, including, most spectacularly of all, the test
that gets them into college. If getting into college were merely a
matter of having the quality of one's mind measured by admissions
officers the way scientists measure the mass of an object, we could
tell teenage kids "learn a lot" and leave it at that. You can tell
how bad college admissions are, as a test, from how unlike high
school that sounds. In practice, the freakishly specific nature of
the stuff ambitious kids have to do in high school is directly
proportionate to the hackability of college admissions. The classes
you don't care about that are mostly memorization, the random
"extracurricular activities" you have to participate in to show
you're "well-rounded," the standardized tests as artificial as
chess, the "essay" you have to write that's presumably meant to hit

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