I would say that organic chemistry used to be more like that than it is today. There are, after all, several hundred named reactions as well as the more general cases. I would still expect memorization by students of common and useful name reactions like the Wittig or the Claisen. Probably some of the really common metal-catalyzed reactions as well these days like Suzuki and Sonogashira. Not so much some of the more obscure ones or all the named variations of a named reaction. And of course there’s a great discussion online.
I agree that the answer is No (and especially so with mathematics), but I wonder if it might be different if you go far enough back into the past, before the widespread availability of computers or even printing. If you don’t have instant access otherwise to lots of information, there would be some value to being essentially a human database (kind of like how people used to be employed as human calculators).
Rote memorization isn’t going to be particularly helpful when writing a university level paper. Heck, even in high school we were expected to come up with a thesis statement and form a coherent argument in support of it, not just say “This happened, and then this happened.”
A student who’s used to simply regurgitating a bunch of material they’ve memorized also seems likely to wind up committing plagiarism. Even if the student tries to be diligent about citing their sources it would be tedious to go back and look everything up again. I doubt it’s easy to keep straight in your head which memorized information came from which source, or whether what you’ve memorized is an exact quote or not.
If a person is very skilled at memorization, and not much more, my advice is to become a pharmacist.
So, if we’re talking about the undergraduate classes, then I did quite well in two semesters of organic chemistry by understanding the core concepts. Anecdotally, most students who tried rote memorization did worse than students who understood the core concepts and semi-derived certain things during tests. I have no experience with higher level organic chemistry.
I teach Physical Science 101 to students who are not pursuing degrees in math or science. I get the impression many of them are good at memorizing things, but not understanding things. This is understandable, as most of the classes they take require the student to simply regurgitate stuff they have read, or have been taught by their instructor.
On the first day of class, I inform the students that it’s impossible to pass the class by simply memorizing the material and the problems. And they look at me in horror. For most of the students, my class is the first they’ve taken where they’re required to use their brains to solve problems using tools (physical laws, mathematics, etc.).
Sadly, their prior classes have never required them to use reason, logic, and tools to solve problems – only to regurgitate stuff.
That’s not true. Pharm D programs are heavy on applied chemistry, biology, biochemistry and math. It is anything but rote memorization.
I think medicine is likely the best answer amongst the professional disciplines. It really does seem that you could likely get an MD and probably even pass boards simply by memorizing lots and lots of stuff.
Wouldn’t be a good doctor, of course, but could get the degree I think.
My guess is that the increased reliance on standardized testing to evaluate both teaching and student learning has produced a culture of “teaching the test” which values rote memorization and regurgitation a lot more than other forms of learning.
I saw something similar in graduate business school actually. We had a lot of Indian and Chinese students, and I’m guessing their previous educational systems were really big on rote memorization of facts and figures, because at first, they were woefully unprepared for exercises not possessing a single “right” answer.
We’d get an assignment to write a paper, and they’d ask the prof something along the lines of “Where should we look to find the answer?” and he’d say that it was all in the books, lecture and classroom discussion.
Then they’d ask classmates, and we’d say that there wasn’t any one right answer- the point was more in how you reached your particular answer- you had to exhibit good problem solving and application of concepts learned in class.
They’d then come back with a different way of asking “What’s the answer/where to we find the answer?” until one side or the other got tired of answering or asking.
I suspect something similar is what you’re describing happening in your classes, Crafter_Man.
You will never survive hands on patient care and diagnosis. Medical work is like math in the sense that the memorization is the toolkit not the procedure. Being a doctor is more puzzle solving than pure facts. There are alot of interrelated systems in the human body and interpreting the effects those systems have on each other is a large part of proper diagnosis. One of my EMT classes had a quiz where the answer to each of the 5 questions was the same, we not only had to come up with the diagnosis but we had to explain WHY. That instructor could be brutal but man we learned stuff.
I’m being a little facetious but not much, the OP made me think about what I liked about my own major - art history. I should add the caveat that the department at my college was extremely conservative. Much more than in any other college class I took, there was a huge amount of rote memorization in undergrad, with the aim that this was to build an enormous visual vocabulary that you would then have at your disposal to support or refute various theses. I am pretty confident that not once in my four years did any professor ask my opinion on anything as part of an evaluation process (of course, they were awesome people and we had great conversations about art that moved us or inspired us or whatever, but that’s not what we were graded on).
The problem with art history is that moving on the field, to graduate school and careers beyond, requires that you take your amazing storehouse of knowledge and then employ it in the service of creative and conceptual thinking. I’m wondering if conservation/restoration (not the track I was on) might be an area where the ability to work with a data set is a greater strength than creative vision.
The other problem is that to succeed at most colleges, you have to meet requirements outside of your major.
The most successful examination system known to man, the great Chinese Imperial Examination for the Civil Service relied to a large extent on rote memorization.
Only partially for the Six Arts — helpful for Knowledge of the Ceremonies, not so much for Horsemanship — but essential for the Five Studies; particularly for the Works of Confucius ( the same as say, vast knowledge of the Scriptures would help in a Bible College — whilst skilful opinionating on Higher Criticism might not get you far ), so much so that smuggling texts within your clothes and copying them exactly would do even more than memorising them with variations caused by boredom.
On the other hand, whilst it brilliantly fossilised a vast and dangerous society for over a thousand years, it also caused the largest riots ever known to man in the Taiping Rebellion.
Define “successful examination system”.
It lasted 1300 years and achieved most of the goals of those who ran it.
I certainly can’t claim to be a mathematician. But my understanding is the high end of it requires a lot of creativity. Knowing the stuff that’s already been discovered (and is therefore subject to memorization) is just a foundation. The real work of mathematics is finding new relationships between these already known facts. So you’re essentially expected to imagine new things that didn’t exist before you thought of them. It’s the equivalent of writing a novel except you then have to turn around and rigorously prove your novel is telling a true story.
I may not know math but I do know a good bit of history. And rote memorization has very little to do with it. Yes, you have to know facts about what happened. But history is all about explaining why it happened and you can’t get that kind of understanding through memorization.
During my engineering degree I recall a student asking one of my lecturers what formulas needed to be memorised for the course. I had written them all out and there were in excess of 200 separate formulas that had been presented to us in a single semester paper. (And probably a similar number in the other papers I was doing at the time.)
The lecturer responded that no formulas would be given to us in the exam. Any formulas that contained three or fewer variables we would need to memorise. Any others we would need to be able to derive from first principles.
On reflection, that seemed to be a good mix. A good chunk of rote learning to get to know the lay of the land. And then on top of that, the analytical skills necessary to apply that knowledge in clever ways to solve practical problems.
When I was a student, mathematics was the subject I studied least and learned virtually no “facts”. What I learned–and learned well–was how to approach problems. Oddly enough, I actually did learn a lot of facts along the way, not by memorizing them but by using them repeatedly.
Curiously, and I’ve never met anyone who had the same experience, I was never required to memorize the multiplication table. My third and fourth grade classrooms had large multiplication tables along a side wall and we were given multiplication problems during those years. Somewhere along the way, I realized I no longer had to look at the side wall. Perhaps this experience prepared me to learn mathematics in that way.
Needless to say, students always do want formulas to memorize and get annoyed when asked to think during a test. One of my most thrilling experiences was to have a student come up with a completely novel approach to a question on an examination. The question (prove that a regular pentagon is ruler and compass constructible) could have been memorized. I was very disappointed when she eventually asked me to write a recommendation for law school. Incidentally, what was wanted in that question wasn’t a description of the construction, but an algebraic proof that nothing more than square roots were required, in addition to rational operations.
Foreign languages come to mind, especially the “old school” style where the focus is on rote memorization of vocabulary and grammatical paradigms for the purpose of written translation rather than conversational fluency. (And even if you add in a focus on conversational fluency, no “deep thinking” or tough concepts figure in; it’s just a matter of practice.)
With the caveat that I’m not a Chinese Culture buff, I understand that the Chinese tradition is sort of based on “building on the shoulders of giants” so to speak. Where learning the arts is based on, almost literally, being able to repeat the words of the masters who invented and refined the art verbatim. You can ask Chinese students to define the Newton-Raphson method and they’ll give you essentially a verbal photocopy of the page in the book.
I understand that a lot of Chinese students get in trouble for plagiarism because in China, it’s not just okay, it’s correct to just copy somebody’s words verbatim when writing a paper. Because even if you’re adding to it, you’re building upon their work – why bother rewording it? And why think you can do it better than the great thinking who came up with it?
In some ways this is noble; people shouldn’t reinvent the wheel. It doesn’t mean they’re dumb, or incapable of critical thinking. Obviously Chinese people invent new and exciting things too, it’s just that their education seems to value that as a step to take after you’ve learned the entire body of knowledge of your field verbatim. It seems like a hell of a context switch though (not that are own education system doesn’t have holes that cause similar pains).
Lower (high-school and below) mathematics has this heavily, heavily depend on your teacher. In my high school we had trigonometry tests that gave us 10 minutes to solve 100 problems using only trig identities that we had to memorize. I still don’t know trig identities off the top of my head, but you know what? Most of my math professors didn’t either.
I’ve always found the best classes to be not ones that give you a formula sheet, but allow you to take in a two-sided index card (or sheet of notebook paper or whatever) with whatever you want written on it. Sure, it’ll probably come out a lot like an equation sheet, but in the process of looking up all the stuff to write on it you tend to accidentally memorize everything anyway.