Why Failing An Exam Is A Good Thing
Wait, what?!
We don’t mean failing a FINAL exam is a good thing, but researchers have discovered that taking pretests (testing knowledge before actually learning course material) can help students better focus and retain information on key content, helping them do better overall in classes than if they merely studied as normal.
“[A] (bombed) pretest drives home the information in a way that studying as usual does not. We fail, but we fail forward.”
As an article in the New York Times explains, students who were given pretests during multiple experiments generally scored higher than control group counterparts. Researchers believe that their wrong answers on pretests weren’t just useless shots in the dark; they actually primed students’ brains to receive the information to come, helping them learn and recall correct information more effectively later on.
“The basic insight is as powerful as it is surprising: Testing might be the key to studying, rather than the other way around. As it turns out, a test is not only a measurement tool. It’s a way of enriching and altering memory.”
So how exactly does it help when studying?
Many of us have had this experience: you study hard for an exam, complete with study notes and highlighted text books. And when test day comes, the questions reflect the information you have painstakingly memorized. But you still don’t ace the exam, maybe even far from it. What’s the deal?
“The problem is that we have misjudged the depth of what we know. We are duped by a misperception of “fluency,” believing that because facts or formulas or arguments are easy to remember right now, they will remain that way tomorrow or the next day. This fluency illusion is so strong that, once we feel we have some topic or assignment down, we assume that further study won’t strengthen our memory of the material. We move on, forgetting that we forget.”
In other words? We think we know, but we really don’t. Highlighting, chapter outlines, practice questions: many of the traditional ways of studying might actually lead us to believe we are learning information better than what we actually are. We may grasp the information in the moment, a few days before the exam, so we move on and don’t return to it. We believe that on test day what we’ve read/practiced will magically reappear and we’ll answer correctly. But unfortunately, that’s not always the case.
So is pretesting a possible answer?
Read more about pretesting and how it may improve studying and grades here.
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