Is This (Topic) on the Exam?

I am sure this question has been asked often by high school and university students, so that students only need to study the minimal amount of material for them to get the highest grades on exams. I have never liked this question. I can imagine educators have voiced their views on this matter, and I will provide a perspective as a tech professional and parent, to convince our kids to not ask this question. In this post, I restate my thoughts on this matter to my high school son, as well as restate my thoughts when I gave a talk at a local college.

Relevance to the High School Student

My son indicated that he was very nervous going into high school because the grades matter. My response back to him was: “when I look back at my generation, there was little correlation between our high school grades and how our careers turned out in life.” Though grades are important to increase our chances to get into university, I emphasized that grades should not be the end goal for him as a high school student. Rather, think of high school as a training ground (for university and beyond) to work hard, build good habits, explore and gain knowledge as much as possible. The last point is when I said to my son that he should never ask the question of “is this on the exam”.

You will be glad to know that, despite my opinion on grades, my son has been on the Principal’s List every term in high school. Recently, when he showed us his report card, my wife said “son, you are a genius.” I immediately re-emphasized my points: “son, you are no genius. :-) But I am very proud of you because: 1) You worked hard; 2) You found some of the material difficult, but you figured out ways to understand the material, and you never fell behind; 3) You found ways of exploring and connecting the dots between the knowledge (you gained) with recent events, and you never asked “is this on the exam?”; These are skills and habits that will be useful when you get older.”

Relevance to the University Student

The message to my son if he enters university, would be very similar to the above. I would add another thought for the university student, which I highlighted when I gave a talk at a local college. Based on my own experience, a few of my published papers did not receive much attention until much later, when other technologies evolved (e.g. advancements in GPU and extreme parallelism) to make those papers’ ideas feasible. If the university student had the “is this on the exam” mentality, then those papers would be forgotten, and need to be (wastefully) re-invented once those evolving technologies took shape. One key ingredient for a successful tech professional is to connect the dots between different disciplines, in different times (when they might not originally be feasible), from unexpected sources, etc.

What’s the Point?

As you have probably noticed, the common theme between the high school student and university student is the importance and ability to “connect the dots”. However, in order to connect the dots, the flow of knowledge needs to be there, which again stresses the anti-“is this on the exam” mentality. So, get your kids to build good habits early on, in not asking this question.