Every fall semester, hundreds of freshmen are shocked and disappointed by their first experience with university tests. Most students who enroll at the University have been good students in high school and are accustomed to performing well on tests. In college, they will attend their classes, read their textbooks, and study their notes. Yet, in spite of doing these things, many beginning students still do not perform as well as they would like on their tests.
One of the reasons that many beginning university students find tests difficult is that college instructors expect their students to really understand the material. Tests in high school often require only simple recognition or memorization. College tests, on the other hand, require thorough understanding. There is a difference between memorizing a definition and thoroughly understanding a concept. Oftentimes in high school, a student could memorize a bit of information, and then that piece of information would show up exactly the same way on the test. In high school, it might have been possible to merely recognize the correct answer because the other answers seemed obviously wrong.
High school students tend to develop test-taking skills that work well for high school tests but may be inadequate for university-level tests. High school students become good listeners, they become proficient at memorizing definitions, and they learn to recognize terms that their teachers have stressed. They also become good at eliminating obviously wrong answers. Unfortunately, these skills that were developed over many years do not work nearly as well at The University of Alabama and do not substitute for a thorough understanding of the course material. In general, most beginning UA students find that they need to devote much more time and mental effort to the learning process than they did in high school.
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