Education is changing.

The percentage of graduating high school students who move on to attend college has risen above 50 percent. The value of an associate degree is declining, and graduate school is becoming more and more popular.

The fact that more students are hungry for more education means competition for higher education is intensifying.

Students have to go out of their way to make themselves stand out to colleges and grad schools. They either have to stay in line with the rest of the crowd, or go above and beyond to make their applications stand out.

Not only do students have to put forth more effort, but board members have to have some method of weeding through the thousands of applications that they receive. One of the methods board members use is tossing the applications that do not meet a certain GPA requirement.

If you have ever sat in a college classroom, you know what it is all about from day one. The first day of class the syllabus is read. The breakdown of your grade is defined. It is no surprise to anyone that the test and quizzes portion of the course makes up a giant percentage of your final grade. In fact, in some classes, the only impactful assignment to your grade is a test and/or a quiz.

This puts huge pressure on students to perform above-average on their tests and quizzes. The pressure resulting from this is bad.

I am not saying that the desire to excel and perform highly on final exams is a negative quality, but the desire for an A in every class is preventing students from really learning the material.

I was sitting in my political science class this spring around finals time. A student raised her hand and asked the professor a pretty good question about political science – a question with an answer that would do wonders for many people.

Before answering the question, the professor stated that this information would not be present on the final exam. The girl who asked the question immediately crossed her notes out of her notebook, and lost interest for the rest of what the professor had to say.

It was as if because this piece of information wasn’t going to be on the final exam, its purpose in her life was irrelevant.

What kind of knowledge is a student gaining from ONLY caring about information that is going to be present on a test that will only be given and taken once in their life? The minute that test is over, the information stored and studied for hours will instantly be erased from the student’s mind. This isn’t learning.

A study discussed in the Huffington Post states that, “research of more than 2,300 undergraduates found 45 percent of students show no significant improvement in the key measures of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing by the end of their sophomore years.”

Students are not making progress and they don’t want to. The only thing students care about is their GPA. A student will do anything to maintain that 4.0. Cheating is another result of this “must maintain high grade point average” fad.

Why should we care about the fact that students aren’t really learning anything in college, or really interested in taking away knowledge after that final exam? Probably because we spend an obscene amount of money for this education. We should be doing everything possible to make it last. We should cherish almost every word that our professors speak. We should take advantage of the opportunities given to us. Most importantly, we need to realize that getting a good grade on an exam is important and beneficial, but memorizing only information that will be present on the test is not the way to do it. If a student really understands the information covered in class, and really learns it, they should be able to excel on that final exam and take away what they learned from class to apply it elsewhere.

Education systems need to help students do this. It is not completely the students’ fault that education is going this way. Perhaps professors need to change the way the percentages of final grades work – maybe lowering the weight of the final exam on the overall grade. Or perhaps professors need to change the format of exams to actually reflect that a student is learning something from the course, and not just memorizing random facts.

Either way, something needs to be done.

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