The rule of thumb I use is: if the word was in use before WWII, it is very unlikely to derive from an acronym, and if it was in use before WWI, it is almost certainly not derived from an acronym, with the sole exception of “ok”.
Not these days, at least not for the family medicine board exam, unless one wants to hypothesize that the board simply wants everyone to pass regardless of their abilities. I’m currently in the process of renewing my board certification, and while the exam is multiple choice, it’s not something where relying on brute force memorization would help. In fact it’s open book and open internet, with the only rule being you can’t have a colleague sitting next to you helping you out. You get 25 questions every quarter for 3 years. Those who don’t pass get the option of taking it the old fashioned way (on a single day over several hours at a testing center). The questions, IMHO, do a good job in testing one’s medical decision making rather than testing the amount of information one has at one’s fingertips.
Speaking of multiple choice tests that check one’s mastery of the information instead of what one has memorized, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the multiple choice tests a professor would give when I was still an undergrad. This was for a human physiology class. Instead of A through E, they were A through J, with F typically being A&C, G being B&D, H being A,B,&C, I being all of the above, and J being none of the above. Those were brutal. The highest score in the class was typically in the 50s or occasionally the 60s, even though there were about 50 students, all of who wanted to be there (as opposed to students taking it because it’s a degree requirement).
If there were any, modern technology has eliminated them. I’d like to think that the time we save digging up information and the time we save by doing things by hand has given us more time to understand concepts in depth, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. We seem to have a crisis in critical thinking and reasoning.
Within two minutes, I can bring up a list of every World Cup winning team in history, but that doesn’t mean I understand the first thing about the game. I can make kids memorize the ten commandments from the time they are little, but that doesn’t mean they understand ethics or will live a life free of those crimes.
I taught anatomy for years. There certainly is a place for rote memory, but that would be a very restricted view of what happened in my classes. As an example students might learn all of the muscles of the forearm - what they are and how they function and interact, but then the real learning takes place when they are asked to describe all of the muscles involved in one complete stride, including all of the muscles from the iliac crest downward. ((Yes, you can use the book listing all of the muscles with attachments, functions, opposing muscles etc.) The trick is to get them in the correct sequence. Work in teams, and discover what muscles do what in sequence…yes, videotape each other to see the actions of the leg, foot, buttocks, etc.
This would count for a lot more than memorizing the muscles of the arm when grades were given.
Students really gained an appreciation for their own bodies with this sort of appoach.
Similar activities were used for various systems…can you plot the density of touch receptors on the body and correlate that with the size of the sensory areas of the brain? Prove it with your result! Hint: many two pin sets of various degrees of separation are applied to different body surfaces…can the subject distinguish between a one and two pin touch? Do your results/data match the known sensory areas of the brain?
Students actually enjoyed my torture methods of making anatomy real to them. And yes, they still had to know a lot of facts. Both informational facts and actual application are needed to understand the subject.
I was once able to regurgitate all of these reactions for my biochemistry final in med school.
Gripes about physicians not “thinking outside the box” are what we commonly hear from altie practitioners selling unproven and useless supplements and treatments.
At least they think out of the box. “Drink this distilled water with maybe 1 atom of armadillo and it will cure your leprosy.”
Too late to edit. My issue with medical doctors is that most of their solutions are either “Eat less or exercise more.” or “Take this medicine that I get the biggest kickback on.”
Mrs Cad has a hormonal imbalance that causes her to gain weight (I know everyone says that) and I could back it up with empirical evidence related to hormone changes, her diet and her exercise. It took over 10 years to find a doctors whose advice wasn’t a diet and exercise plan.
Stay at it long enough, and you can find a doctor (or practitioner of some sort) who will tell you what you want to hear and sell you the products that allegedly will provide a solution. You can generally tell identify these practitioners by the presence of an online store on their websites.
Not sure about their aptitude for rote memorization, but they all tend to regurgitate the same jargon about “root causes”, “thinking outside the box”, “holistic care”, “natural remedies” etc.
Art history. You must identify paintings by;
Painter
Year produced
Name of painting
School of style.
Lots of paintings. Like LOTS!
Enology. Of course, to be a sommelier, you need to couple that memorization with an extraordinary sense of taste/smell.
“OK” is an acronym? Of what, “oll korrect”? That’s debatable.
Not by etymologists.
Cecil was all korrect in citing Allen Read’s research, which is accepted by everyone knowledgeable today. Like the dictionary.
The definitive text on the subject is by professor Allan Metcalf, whose OK: The Improbable Story of America’s Greatest Word, based on the research of historian Allen Walker Read, was published in 2010. Metcalf traces the word’s birth to a bit of jocular text in an 1839 article in the Boston Morning Post—a little jab from one newspaper editor to another, suggesting that his cohort in Providence, Rhode Island, should sponsor a party for some boisterous Boston lads who might be stopping by his town:
… he of the [Providence] Journal, and his train-band, would have the ‘contributions box,’ et ceteras, o.k.—all correct—and cause the corks to fly…"
This goes way back to my earlyish days as a prof. Things have changed a lot since then.
I would talk to Math profs (I was CS so we mingled). Their attitude towards Engineering students was dismal. The students relied a ton on rote memorization of formulas.
Take Ohm’s law as an overly simple example. (I just don’t want to type anything complicated.) They would be taught I = V / R. On an Engineering test they’d be give V and R and told to find I.
In Math class they might be ask a question that would be like given I and V and find R. Only the Engineering students would object. “You only told us the given V and R find I form. You didn’t teach us another version.” The Math profs would of course point out that simple Algebra could be used to find the answer. The Engineering students still complained.
Rote and then some.
This was also the beginning of the era where computers were being introduced into the class work. (One of the Engineering depts. temporarily lost it’s accreditation because it wasn’t switching over fast enough. That was a huge embarrassment.) I suspect many things have changed. They probably still rote learn formulas, but rely on computers to do most of the real Math.
Bullshit. Intellectual snobbery at its worst. There is no way in hell you could get an engineering degree with just rote memorization.
I hated teaching engineering students. Not over rote memorization, but they would never shut up or listen in class. I never understood why they even came to class since they ruined it for the real students.
In my experience (teaching them in physics classes), there are two kinds of engineering students. Both kinds know everything. A few of them are right.
The first category, sure, I can definitely see them not knowing how to solve V = IR for I. The second category, of course they can. One of the functions of an engineering department at a university is to filter out the incompetent ones (which is most of them).
In other words, you can’t be an engineer through rote memorization. But you can be a dropout engineering student through rote memorization.
In Math class they might be ask a question that would be like given I and V and find R. Only the Engineering students would object. “You only told us the given V and R find I form. You didn’t teach us another version.” The Math profs would of course point out that simple Algebra could be used to find the answer. The Engineering students still complained.
Well, I don’t know what sort of Engineering students you’ve been exposed to, but I find that quite bizarre. They couldn’t do even such a trivial bit of algebra? At my university (Cambridge) you wouldn’t be let near an engineering course without A-level maths. I’m not sure what the equivalent qualification is in the USA, but you couldn’t get it without being pretty nifty at algebra.
As to the OP, there was no rote-learning of any kind on my course. Comprehensive books of equations were provided at the exams.
My only criticism of my course was that we wasted a good bit of time solving problems with graphical methods because computers were not a thing. The Engineering department had one (IBM1130) and it took up the whole of the basement. Four-function calculators were just becoming available but were very very expensive, and we wouldn’t be allowed to use them in exams anyway. All calculations were done by slide-rule.
Except by me, who saved time on processing experimental data by sneaking into the Maths Dept across the road and hacking into their PDP8.
Pretty much the minimum requirement to get into my daughter’s school engineering program is having taken and passed AP Calculus BC.
There are kids from under resourced schools who are admitted without it, but they go to the summer session immediately after HS graduation to catch up on any deficiencies.
Most students have taken Multivariable Calculus and/or Linear Algebra as dual-enrollment classes in high school. Many also Discrete Math, but that’s more for Computer Science majors specifically.
Now this is a top-10, possibly top-5 engineering school, probably the 95th ranked school has lower standards.
I should also mention that the engineering students I was teaching were mostly freshmen, maybe sophomores, so I was seeing them before the incompetent ones had been culled out. In an upper-level engineering class, you probably would get mostly the competent ones.