Why Exams Waste Everyone’s Time

Travel back in time to last semester when you were studying during reading days for that MKTG 101 (or whatever) exam. If you spent a lot of time studying, you probably subscribed to the following steps:

1. Reread the textbook
2. Download and memorize all the lecture slide decks to make sure you didn’t miss anything
3. Create a condensed study guide of everything
4. Go to the class’ review session(s) just to make sure
5. Go the professor’s office hours to doubly make sure
6. Create a cheat sheet if allowed
7. Do several practice exams from years past (acquired from the professor or older students)

By the time you come out of the exam (and realize that you missed a few questions), you would have wasted over 30 hours of your time studying. In that much time, you could have built a kickass app, watched 100 TED talks, created beautiful art, met 30 awesome Penn undergrads one-on-one, or read most of Paul Graham’s essays. I’m not arguing that you are wrong to have studied for the exam because, for many people, the GPA is important . It’s also hard to blame students because they are being coerced by larger companies/schools into doing well to secure the best jobs (but that may be changing especially in light of Google’s recent findings). But still, the onus ultimately falls on you to make the most of your time. Plus, I’d argue for the 80/20 rule when it comes to exams. Study 20% of the time, get 80% of the grade, and use the remaining time to do things that really interest you. A MBA from Columbia University who I met the other day said that big consulting companies love to find students who work on their startups and dedicate so much time to them. So even if the end goal is to secure a great job, I encourage you to think about how to spend your time more meaningfully (and it doesn’t have to be startups).

So I have another question for you: in those 30 hours you spent studying, did you really learn anything? Sure you may remember the difference between cost and actual accounting systems or the descriptions of the six different thinking hats, but will you remember it in a a year from now? Even a month? Or a week? With Google at our fingertips and information becoming easier than ever to search through, we’ll be going online anyway to get these answers. Classes are important in that we should understand the higher level course concepts but exams just don’t make any sense.

So when exams test on knowledge that we were supposed to memorize, I think it’s a waste of everyone’s time. It also wastes our professors’ and TAs’ valuable time because they have to come up with the questions, test them, grade them, curve them, and then regrade them. At Penn, I have met some of the smartest, driven people in the world. People who I know will no doubt be incredibly successful. It just frustrates me that during our college years, we spend so much time memorizing small details rather than working toward something bigger.

So next time you’re about to go to the review session at 6PM in Huntsman Hall, I encourage you to think about what else you could do with that time instead.

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