Hello everybody and welcome to justPlaudern. Today’s topic will be about studying, motivation, and my Bachelors’s and Masters’s program. After finishing my Bachelor’s degree in January this year I’m back at university after half a year of full-time working & so far I love it.
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General critique and thoughts
I always was quite critical regarding my Bachelor’s program in business administration and the continuation of the school concept. Under “the school concept“ I refer to studying just to pass exams and at the end my degree. I always thought that I was the problem for not going the „extra mile“ and showing more interest regarding the different topics and accepted the fact that our school system is built around multiple choice exams that just require you to study 500 pages of literature by heart three days before the exam.
The lectures themselves were highly based on noticing what’s important for the exam and getting all the stuff and topics together in order to pass the final test, which most of the time decided the end grade with a percentage of 80-90. The general interest is built around passing the exam, not actually caring or showing interest in the topic itself. It was more important to fill out 20 multiple choice questions than actually getting time and space to discuss the topics and build multi-perspective opinions. You might wonder where I’m going with all of that or why I just didn’t change my attitude going into the subjects.
Structural problem
While questioning my education path, the system of multiple choice exams, and my general capacity to learn new stuff I just now realized that the big problem was not based on my side or in my hands. While the Bachelor’s program was everything described above, my Master’s is a 180 degrees turnaround. Although we had a big and pretty hard multiple-choice entrance exam (~50% of the attendees passed that step) there are no exams, no pressure to focus your mind on writing down and collecting data for a final test while sitting in class.
The lessons are built around interest, an interest that is there because all the pressure preventing me from actually being focused on the topic is gone, eliminated by the choice to not have heavy-end exams. You might question to what degree people actually learn stuff within that program, when not having the pressure to prove that knowledge at the end. I was one of you at that point when starting the program, but got proved completely wrong.
We are at a point of our educational career where the focus should no longer be to get a degree just to have it, but having actual interest in the subjects and topics of the program. I find myself being fully focused in class and even preparing literature before. I sat down and read a 20 pages document just for the cause of preparing for the class and write a small exercise. I‘m for the first time actually interested in what I‘m doing and in the topics the professors share and bring up. That for me is a result in a mind shift. I no longer feel like having to be part of the lectures in order to pass an exam, there’s no such thing, which concludes in me being there because of pure interest. It feels like nobody cares if you’re there at all but that makes it even more interesting, you want to be there, I want to sit in class and share/hear opinions and build new perspectives.
Limitations
My field is economy and with that a subject that is not based around knowing everything by hard. I fully agree with everyone saying that a medicine or law university wouldn’t work like that. They can’t do surgeries without knowing exactly how to do the procedure and learning that by heart, discussing won’t help/won’t substitute them in doing so.
Conclusion
I highly am the opinion that the change away from exams and the pressure of passing enabled me to fully focus on the topics and freeing my mind in a direction of having an actual learning process. With an active involvement in class and not being focused on taking notes and/or having pressure filling half of my thinking capacity I am for the first time taking home topics and thoughts and reflect on them. I try to learn from different people in class and have the goal of understanding perspectives that get shared while discussing. I would even go that far that I would love to have additional space and time the exchange opinions and thoughts with my colleges.
My mindset shifted from learning by heart days before an exam and not taking anything out of it to being fully motivated and having actual learning outputs every lecture. All of that just by eliminating exams.
Thanks for reading,
Alex