Usually, the advice given to students by their professors and teachers is to truly understand an academic subject instead of just “mindlessly” learning by heart formulas, definitions, time tables etc.
But I wonder if there are academic fields in which the ability to easily memorize and reproduce huge amounts of facts will be enough to get a degree with decent marks. Let’s assume that the student’s intellectual abilities are average or somewhat below average. But he is by no means stupid.
If by “academic” you mean university level, then no. Rote learning probably has some role to play in learning most subjects, and more in some subjects than others, but at the most, at that level, it is a small ancillary role.
In teh very unlikely event that someone were able to get a university degree, or even pass a course, just on the basis of rote learning (and I doubt that it ever actually happens), that would be evidence that proper assessment methods were not being used, not that the student had actually successfully learned what they were supposed to.
How about mathematics?
What about it? Beyond your times-tables and a few formulae that are useful to memorize, you can’t get far mathematics by rote memorization. Even in elementary school you have to be able to solve problems ferchrissake!
Personally, I thought about it for a few minutes and I can’t think of a worse example than mathematics.
On the other hand, the relatively few times I’ve helped people study for medical-related courses I’ve been shocked by how much of it seems to be rote memorization. The best example I can think of is the admittedly entry-level anatomy & physiology course many people take. I’ve spent hours helping people study for it and as far as I can tell it consists almost entirely of remembering a bunch of stuff.
I’m certainly not suggesting one could get by with just rote memorization, but it does seem surprisingly different than my own education in engineering, in which I memorized next to nothing. I can’t think of anything that would’ve even been helpful to memorize.
I’d say it happens frequently IME, defining rote learning as memorising material for exams with a shakey grasp of the fundamentals - isn’t this the definition of a 2:2?
If you’re talking about a more rigorous definition of rote learning where there really is no background understanding whatsoever, just re-gurgitation of hieroglyphs on a page, then that would be rare. Even then I think I’ve seen some singular examples.
It’s possible I have a different interpretation of ‘rote-learning’ than others, as it seems fundamentally important to me - it’s the quantity component of academic training that needs to support the quality component of structured learning. A bit like a runner or a cyclist will define their performance by the quality miles they put in during training - intervals, fartlek, structured stuff; but they still need to stick some mindless base miles in to be a success.
I thought about this when I phrased my question: I didn’t want to go as far as picturing the student as an idiot savant, a Rain Man type of person who memorizes material that makes absolutely no sense to him. My student is no intellectual and not an original thinker, but he is able to randomly access a plethora of facts he has committed to memory and thus is able to appear smart. This implies that he has a basic understanding of the matter.
Rote memorization will get you pretty far in undergraduate biology and chemistry. Most introductory courses and a fair number of intermediate courses can be boiled down to “learn a bunch of facts”. Some involve more problem solving, especially when well-taught, but even then students with strong recollection can still get decent grades. The pre-med sorts of courses in particular seem to be geared towards factual recall*. I’d guess that the hypothetical student in the OP could get A’s in most of the standard intro pre-med courses, B’s in some of the more challenging or problem-solving courses, and C’s in the handful of advanced classes they need to finish a degree, averaging B or B+ overall.
*I say as a biology TA whose heart sings with joy whenever an undergrad shows true interest and curiosity in the subject. It doesn’t happen very often in “memorize every goddamn metabolic pathway 200” – hell, I didn’t care much for biochemistry until “actually nobody really knows the answers 400”.
Sure, you memorise a few hundred formulae, then apply them as required. The exercise is knowing which formulae to apply.
Rote memorization comes in really handy for History classes, but I’ll agree with others – even there it only gets you so far when you get an exam with one question “explain why such and such happened”.
I found undergrad to have a lot of rote memorization overall, with, as mentioned before, some subjects having more of it than others, but there was still enough emphasis on independent thought that you couldn’t have passed all your classes just memorizing and not learning to think or reason. Grad school is a different world where there is almost no memorization at all. It’s not that knowing stuff isn’t important, but you find yourself repeatedly in the situation where “dammit, I know this material, but I’ve been searching for three hours looking for a good peer reviewed cite to establish it for my paper”.
Surely law school?
At a university level, I think that mathematics is one of the least appropriate subjects for rote memorization.
I think that’s more of a ‘learn the language of the field’, which is going to be pretty much memorization in any subject.
In my engineering degree, pretty much the first half of our Organic Chemistry (I) was memorization. The 2nd half and Organic Chemistry (II) was of course completely different, but assumed ‘fluency’ in the language of OC. Pretty much any other class I took I could use the ‘learn the first principles and you can always derive anything you can’t remember for the exam’ strategy.
If what you’re doing is applying memorized formulae, then you’re not doing math. Math is what you do to derive formulae. Even in the occasion that a pre-existing formula will be of use, I’ve never yet seen a math class that didn’t provide the formula on a formula sheet or the like.
The answer will depend a lot on location, and even on the specific teacher. In Spain, several subjects in the humanities and social sciences heavily favor rote learning (you have to be able to regurgitate the book or the classnotes exactly) - you will not be good at that profession if you just crammed and parroted back, but you will be able to get the degree and may get a government job more easily than someone who focused on understanding (government exams favor rote study, again); while this is definitely not the case for the physical sciences or engineering, I had two teachers who required that kind of regurgitation. Neither one understood his own course very well, so they couldn’t judge whether others did.
Back when I was TA-ing first/second year students, most *engineering *students treated math like that, up to the point of “Here is the formula for the solution to first order linear differential equation” and their entire math strategy was “identify the case being presented, and remember the formula for that case”. And that was explicitly accepted from them – a solution that said “and here is the formula” was to be given full marks.
The *math *students were nothing like that, or were at least were a step above that in that they were expected to remember a solution procedure (i.e. multiply by an integrating factor/reduce to the separable case) rather than just a formula. A solution that relied on memorizing the formula like the engineers were allowed would not be given full marks (or even very many part marks).
I could see how someone taught in the engineering style would perceive mathematics as a succession of memorized formulae, with “learning more advanced mathematics” being “memorize more formulae”. Although I wonder where such people imagine the formulae come from originally.
From the textbook, duh!
I don’t know if this qualifies as “academic” but the higher level actuarial exams are mostly based on an enormous amount of rote memory. Trying to pass these exams by understanding the concepts would be a huge mistake.
That’s the difference between a class and a discipline. Anatomy maybe heavy on memorization, but physiology is often applied and other aspects of biology (even limiting to medical biology) are very applied, like human genetics.