By Mecayela Monroe
It’s your senior year and you have one last final to take before you say goodbye to those high school halls and hello to a brand new school, town, and group of people. It is the toughest one yet; 100 multiple choice questions! You studied those flashcards last night and looked over them one more time at lunch. There is an overwhelming feeling of confidence. The test finally gets over and you happily acknowledge you had almost every answer memorized. Now that that’s over, it’s time to throw those flashcards away and enjoy summer.
I have bad news though. That method of memorization solely for the test won’t get you far in college. College curriculums are based on retention, not regurgitation. It is education for your career so short-term memorization isn’t going to cut it. High school provides students with a lot of skills but, generally speaking, high-level analytical thinking is not one of them. In order to succeed, college students must understand, retain, and apply information which requires more than just flashcards with definitions. My hope with this post, from one college student to another, is to provide you with the awareness necessary to recognize and overcome the interference problem that occurs when new education is presented.
I can imagine that we all have had this conversation at least once, maybe in high school or college. Maybe it was for a different subject, but the need to cram is the same. We have busy lives as future and current undergraduates.