Grades don’t make a person good, their morals do. So why does society set so much stress on today’s students to always get honors or to keep that GPA above a certain point. Now, I’m not writing this to justify grades that are low, because I’m actually an A student. I’m writing this to point out the fact that education is no longer how well you understand, but more how well you do on exams. I understand however that there is a correlation to knowledge and grades, however not always.

You could be a master on the subject, but the wording of question #5 on the test was just too confusing. You could even be one of the many people who suffer from test anxiety. Those horrible butterflies in your stomach, that feel more like needles that do not go away throughout and even after the exam. Or the violent shaking and inability to recall any of the information you know is stored somewheres in your mess of a brain. The frustration that comes from remembering, that in the end, leaves the answer to question #16 blank. Some say that people just need to learn how to take tests, I say that people need to learn that my tests do not define my intelligence.

For anatomy classes, I sit there and look at a 2 dimensional paper with all the names of the bones listed with lines that point to the corresponding bone. This is how I study, sitting there at my desk, memorizing not the bones themselves but the picture, why? Because this is the stuff I know that will be on the test. Many people will get these right on the test but have they truly absorbed this information? More than half of them will forget everything within a month. We should be more focused on the presence of knowledge verses the presence of memories. Anyone can memorize something, but it takes real skill to be knowledgeable of it.

So people struggle with just regular in classes tests, so it makes sense to make all high school juniors and seniors to take the SATs; a test that no matter how much you study or how many words you get through in the dictionary, you can still fail. Sections that include knowing the definitions of words that you will probably never hear again in your life, and math questions that make you figure how the hard to throw a ball from of a building to a bucket across the street. When am I ever going to stand on the top of a building, for the reason of throwing a ball into a hoop. I’m afraid of heights.

What ever happened to understanding information being more valuable than memorizing? Wouldn’t you want you surgeon to understand how your heart works, rather then knowing, “Yes…this is the heart”? Wouldn’t you want them to know how to fix a problem if something were to go wrong?

Until society starts to realize what really is the definition to knowledge, I’ll just sit here with the fact that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of cell forever memorized.