How far is analytical thinking useful in exams?

[BurnedOut]

What do you think?

Could you recite your experiences wherein analytical thinking put you in peril while scoring marks or helped you?

Do your professors encourage or discourage creative thinking?

Does the education system in your country needs an overhaul in the education system?

Do you feel that the competitive exams or entrance tests are based more on rote memory?

Can you reflect on the general importance of analytical reasoning?

 

[Black Rose]

When thinking on something I first orient myself to the problem. I then look at it from different angles probing and prodding until something fits. Dissecting the problem.

Convergent and divergent.

The most important part is seeing what needs to come next, backtracking is necessary.

 

[BurnedOut]

...backtracking is necessary.

Oh. So you are PCRE. I have PCRE style thinking too if you know what I mean ;-)

 

[scorpiomover]

Could you recite your experiences wherein analytical thinking put you in peril while scoring marks or helped you?

Depends on what you mean by "analytical thinking". I gather that Americans think of it as being practical, while as traditionally, it means logic.

Being practical helps for easy questions, but messes up difficult questions. Logic helps with difficult questions, but over-complicates easy questions.

Do your professors encourage or discourage creative thinking?

In most STEM subjects, creative thinking is discouraged, except in mathematics, which is all about logic.

Does the education system in your country needs an overhaul in the education system?

Yes. But that's nothing to do with analytical thinking.

Do you feel that the competitive exams or entrance tests are based more on rote memory?

Multiple choice tests tend to be based on rote memory.

Can you reflect on the general importance of analytical reasoning?

Being practical helps with easy problems, but messes up difficult problems. Logic helps with difficult problems, but over-complicates easy problems.

 

[Hadoblado]

I think this question is a really good one but it's complex. Exams reward rote memory over not knowing, but they reward analytical understanding over rote memory.

A proof of this is that rote memory is worse for remembering things than the elaborated rehearsal that is necessary for an analytical understanding. Also, analytical understanding will help with questions of simple recall, but also for questions that require manipulation of information.

So real comprehension works better on average, but requires higher investment.

The way learning is structured, rote learning is sometimes required. So when trying to figure out how best to study for exams, rote learning is often a necessary fill-gap for stuff that is unlikely to require elaboration. You can also use mnemonics for rote memorisation of principles to ensure that your answers are not missing any angles. e.g. I like to rote learn mindmaps that structure the domains of a topic spatially and numerically. This doesn't improve my understanding at all, but it does ensure I know if I've missed something when answering a question.

They're both tools that are useful but you need to figure out how and why and that's contextual. Really, what you rote learn in school won't be useful when you leave school. It's a short term strategy to address short-term challenges but it can enhance other more useful learnings.

 

[Daddy]

I kind of see it as the difference between getting an A or not. You can use analytical thinking to understand the material and get a B, but usually tests ask detailed questions that analytics won't be able to solve and you will also have to memorize lots of data, even though you will forget it in a couple days and it won't matter anyway, since we can look shit up online in a matter of seconds for that kind of stuff.

P.S. This is one reason why I don't like school.

 

[BurnedOut]

I should cite an example, I feel.

My college projects are on. One of the components of these 'internal marks' are presentations.

Here's the rules for our presentation -
1. Your sentences should not greatly match the ones you put in the slides.
2. You cannot use a piece of paper (You can but some professors term it as 'cheating')
3. Your slides cannot be too empty.

These are the precepts on which my whole class functions. The problems that arise from this are clear - You got to memorize a good amount. And given that I am doing my majors, there are two options available to excel at presentations - 1. Rote Memory 2. Thorough understanding.

The first one really fails if one pays attention to the words of the speaker. My current group also faces this problem. They sound like Wikipedia with a poor Text-To-Speech (TTS). Many of them resort to some or the other kind of cheating. The most common type being presenting one window and opening another window which is not being shared. One girl even said this - 'As shown in the table' when there was no table in the slide.

I go with 2. and as Hadoblado and Daddy rightly said - It is extremely time consuming. It is indeed very time consuming.

My current project is on 'Dynamics of State-Center relationship of USA' and my topic is New Federalism. I got 8 minutes to present it. One may think that 8 minutes worth of content can be easily obtained. Yes, it can be easily obtained but in my opinion, what is the point of doing the whole goddamn presentation when you, being from another country, does not even have a proper idea of how federalism functions in USA? I researched for 6 days and finally gathered information and the ability to not have a piece of paper while speaking, that is, speaking contemporaneously.

I also believe that the more you push yourself to understand a topic deeper and better, it pays off in something else. Intelligence is after all honed by learning how to make your pattern-finding and understanding subject-agnostic. That's general intelligence for you but how shall you develop it when you don't learn how to spot the boilerplate patterns in the first place? You may be scoring tons on Raven's test but a well-read person will always triumph an ignoramus who keeps choosing the easy way out. After all, functioning on rote memory while during major at things which can be understood is a shameful thing. We can now see how dumb the population is turning, willfully by shunning the basic muscles of the brain - thinking, analyzing, understanding.

 

[Black Rose]

If analytical thinking helps you understand rather than memorize then it is useful in that way for exams.

 

[sushi]

not really, exams are good for guessing true or false, closeness to standardized asnswers, but analytical thinking is more than that. In exams, you are not allowed to choose the wrong answer and guessing.

for me, Analytical thinking is having assumptions and test them whether they are true or false. its more flexible than true or false.

 

[Ex-User (9086)]

I have found no evidence to contradict the view that no creative/abstract thinking is required in academia up to the point and including master's degree. All exams and tests in the universities can be passed by memorizing textbooks and formulas and require minimal discernment in their application.

That said it takes less time and is more efficient to understand and learn how to apply a concept than it takes to memorize it and keep refreshing all possible applications and variations of it for the rest of your life.

Whenever I struggled with understanding a technical concept this usually meant that I had gaps in knowledge that this concept was based on. If there were no gaps the process of understanding and learning the concept was generally much faster and more reliable than memorizing.

Basically getting master's isn't an intelligence test as much as it's a health and conscientiousness test. If you don't have your physical and mental health in balance and modicum of work ethic you'll probably fail. If you graduate you can show proof to your employer that you are a responsible and healthy individual.