Why do we study so much for exams?
I had 5 exams in the past 9 days and as I finished up my last one today, it hit me that there is this culture in college, at least where I go to school, that we need to study A LOT for our exams.
It seems to me that this creates a big inefficiency because:
- For a lot of people, their grades matter very little
2. For the people where grades who do matter, they often study past the point where marginal benefit of more time studying equals the marginal cost of studying.
Grades matter very little?
There are so many different professions after school that students pursue where grades matter quite little. Early-stage companies are rarely looking at GPA, software engineering managers are looking at projects, and there are a big handful of companies that hire grads from WashU purely because of the name of the college.
If you’re trying to go to med school or grad school, that’s one thing. If you want to be a consultant at one of the top firms, that might fall in the same boat. BUT, there are many situations in which, objectively, having good grades is relatively insignificant.
What if you don’t know yet?
This is a reasonable argument. As a freshman going into college, you might not know what you want to do post-graduation, so you’ll want to set yourself up to succeed in anything by having good grades.
From an economic perspective, though, let’s say when you get to college that there’s a 50% chance you end up in a job where grades don’t matter and a 50% chance you end up in a job where grades do.
Over the course of college, let’s say that it would take you ~1000 hours per year to get ‘good’ grades (250 days @ 4 hours a day), but it would take ~500 hours per year to get ‘decent’ grades.
That means that throughout college, to get good grades, it would take 4000 hours and to get decent grades it would take 2000 hours.
Assuming you have 8000 hours during college to do what you wish, we can basically look at how much overall value you are getting in each situation.
In the 4000 hour case: your total value = 4000 hours*50% chance grades matter so you get a good job + value of 4000 hours of leisure.
In the 2000 hour case: your total value = 2000 hours*50% chance grades matter and you get a decent job + value of 6000 hours of leisure.
This is a super fundamental example, but it paints a picture that likely indicates that time value isn’t even close to maximized for many college students. There are so many students that I see that end up stressing out over work and pour hours and hours into studying when there are other things that would add much more value.
I agree that one goal of college is to learn things that will prepare you for the real world, but I am talking, right now, purely in terms of studying. This has nothing to do with pure learning.
I’d argue that there are classes where you can learn all that you need in the 2000 hours total. Plus, there are classes where students only study for the test and forget the material after anyways.
Not to mention that, although it’s been my subjective experience, most of what I have learned since I have come to college has been from my peers, from the extracurricular activities and from small pieces and ideas that came out of my classes.
It’s a cultural thing
It’s such a cultural thing! We feel like if we have tests coming up, we have an obligation to study our tails off because everyone else is doing the same thing. This can either be from a specific class, like me knowing all my friends are studying at this moment for my Calculus exam, so I should be too, or it can be more broad. “I have an exam and I’ve only studied for an hour, so even though I feel ready, I don’t think an hour should be enough so I will study more.”
It makes me sad to see people wasting their time in ways that are insignificant, especially when there are so many amazing experiences to be had while at school.
It also begs the question of what the 4000 hours of studying and infinite amount of money even give you and how even going to college is super cultural.
Note: This is of course very generalized and there are infinite edge cases, but I’d bet a lot of people fall in this boat.
