I don't know how to study.

Going into my first semester of Univeristy, I realised I had no idea how to study. In JC, A levels was a 2-year long war. My approach towards learning content was geared towards long-term retention. I had learnt that simply re-reading notes is a horrible way to remember information, and I realised that learning, then forgetting and having to re-learn seemed like a pretty stupid strategy.

I used Anki flashcards for vritually everything I could. As long as I thought I would need to remember it in the exams, I made a flashcard for it. And while doing so, I really did treat myself like a regurgitation machine, evident in the horrible flashcards I made. Especially in Biology, some flashcards were essentially verbiage from lecture notes splatted onto a flashcard.

Do or die

I'm ignorant of the situation in other JCs, but in Hwa Chong where the population is generally more academically inclined, my mindset and what I believe many of my peers' mindset was, was to do absolutely everything in one's power to get the absolute best results possible. After all, whether a student had already decided on what they wanted to pursue in university or not, it wouldn't hurt to get better grades than what is required.

Because the putative next step is university, it seemed like there was a direct consequence to one's grades, vis a vis a lower chance of getting into the course of study one desired. So everyone was jockeying for the best grades possible.

Gaming the system

In Singapore, students don't learn math, they learn to take math exams. Students don't learn how to do experiments in the laboratory, they learn to take practical assessments. Woe betide a student who wants to learn multivariable calculus instead of reading news articles. He is punished, because while his understanding of multivariable calculus will not show up in his transcript, his D grade in General Paper will. But if students could get extra credit in exams for singing the national anthem backwards, you will sure as hell see most students suddenly become excellent backwards singers.

My A level exam year had the benefit of the removal of the Common Last Topic for most subjects. I think you can guess whether these topics were completely ignored by students or not.

Funny enough, I realised the same pattern while getting my driver's license. Parking is one of the components of the driving test, and the way I was taught to park is ridiculously, through MEMORISATION. After getting my license, I did not know how to park, because the spots I needed to park in did not have the exact same kind of kerb with the exact same kind of marking with the exact same crack on the road. Again, I didn't learn how to park, I learnt how to pass the parking component of the driving test.

To us, tests are just a game we want to win. If a student onerously gains proper understanding of a concept, chances are that understanding the concept just happens to coincide with getting more marks in the exam. That is why there is still some semblance of actually learning the subject. But the truth is that students are almost exclusively learning, and being taught, to take exams.

University is different

This essay is not about studying for A levels. But the point I've been trying to make is that I was trained to go all out and game the system the best I can.

To me, exams in university are not do or die. Firstly, the grade for one's entire university is divided into individual years, which are divided into 2 semesters, which are divided into the individual course assessment components. So no one exam a university student sits for is all or nothing. This is a stark contrast to A levels, where that one exam would determine the fruits of the entire 2 years (You could even see it as 12, from secondary to JC.) of education.

In addition, the consequences of one's grades becomes more unclear now that there is no specific predetermined next step. You could Zuckerberg out of college into a billionaire or graduate with honours and lead a miserable life with a job you hate or graduate with the bare minimum and live a idyllic life as a rice farmer in Vietnam.

And so, without going into the details of my career aspirations, grades are not my utmost concern, and so univeristy exams are not really a system I am interested in gaming.

Even though I had some inkling of this notion at the back of my mind, once my first semester started, I honestly became inundated with workload, and unfortunately reverted to the default mindset: do or die, game the system, optimise grades.

One example of this was how I opted to study for my Molecular Genetics course. The 60% of the course grade was split across 3 CAs, all of which were open-book. "Game the system, optimise grades", so I didn't bother committing any of it to memory, or making myself understand the content in a way that I could recall more easily. I just fouced on making notes on my laptop so I could use them in the CA.

Ironically, the final exam was revealed to be closed book after the second CA. So actually what I thought was optimising grades actually came back to bite me.

How I want to study

I want to study things that are either interesting to me, important to me, or have applications to matters that interest or importance to me. How do I want to study these things? I want to study these things without giving a single care to my grade at the end of the semester. How do I achieve that? I don't know. I don't know how to study.