Bossa Nova

In grading quizzes from her Honors Introduction to Philosophy class, Professor Sarah Chant, at the University of Missouri at Columbia, realized a pattern: many of the students hadn't approached the essay questions. Instead they had scribbled down everything they knew about a topic, like Descartes, for instance, instead of actually answering the question. This wasn't Chant's fault, nor was it fully the students'. Overtime they had learned that in some classes, a substantial number of points were lost by simply responding to a test question, those points are gained only by regurgitating everything the teacher mentioned in class. Professor Mashoon Bahrain's Concepts in Cosmology (also at Missouri) class works exactly like that. The students gain more points and higher grades if they read the word "Black Hole" and then write down everything they learned about Black Holes even if the question is "what kind of star becomes a Black Hole"?
The fact that Chant's Intro class is almost exclusively second semester students suggests that this information vomit spewed by students isn't the University of Missouri's fault. They must have learned it in high school or at lower educational levels. How does this exactly happen? Tests are meant to judge whether a student is accurately understanding a subject. Writing down everything the teacher professed does imply that a student placed some value on the knowledge but not necessarily that the student understands it. There's a good chance that Missouri isn't alone in breeding this type of learning. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania described teachers who reward these answers as ubiquitous. What it suggests is that the student repeats what the teacher says without actually utilizing the lessons. Students may be learning the teaching but a far more basic one is in jeopardy if teachers (at the collegiate level and under) award this simple recitation. Sometimes new ideas and innovations are born from the foundations of older ones. These revelations don't exist if students are just working for the grade but not the information.