With only a week until Spring Break, it's difficult to remain focused on the reason why most of us are here: alcohol... I mean classes, learning, and the pursuit of intellectual accomplishment. However, a key step in the academic process happens to be the most-dreaded step besides final exams: mid-term exams. It's easy to understand the reasons why they're feared and generally not pleasant: they are the same reasons why we're here in the first place. Studying, writing, memorization, and hard work make up the majority of the week for those students who recognize that every movie about college life should be classified as "fantasy." Those who don't notice this may be confused that their GPA never rises higher than their BAC.
In actuality, mid-terms and finals should be no more difficult than the simple "just making sure you read the assigned pages" quizzes that are given in many classes on a daily basis. If you read it, the quizzes are instant A's. However, with the exception of a few students that most people openly envy and secretly resent, everybody needs to study for exams—unless you want to fail. The simple fact of the matter is that almost everything that you've "learned" is only stored in your short (or medium-short) term memory. If you actually learned everything you read, heard, or took notes on over the course of the semester, why would you need to study?
It sounds pathetic, but think about it for a minute. Think back to a class you had two years ago (especially one in which you did well) and try to remember the explanation, definition, or importance of some major concept in relation to the rest of the topics in the class. It's not as easy as it sounds. Sure, it's easy to pull the name of a concept or two, but how much did you really learn? Think you could give a (coherent) five-minute speech on the concept without researching it a bit? Probably not, but I bet you could do it when you took the final for the class.
Now think about something that was important in your life a few years ago, but doesn't hold much value to you today; it can be your ex, a sport you used to play, a former house/dorm/apartment, an old video game, or any topic in which you invested a significant portion of your time. How do you feel about a five-minute speech? No big deal, right? You "learned" something about whatever you just thought of that stuck with you. Yes, it may have been more interesting to "learn" about your ex's personality, life history, or whatever... Nevertheless, it still took time to learn, perhaps even a lot of time.
I think the length of time spent on one subject is the key to the problems that many students have with learning. There just isn't enough time to "learn" everything that we are presented with in a class. It is often the case that students will focus only on what we will be tested on later, rather than try to commit an entire course to memory. I can only guess that many students feel the way I do when it comes to mid-term preparations: I want to know what I need to know. It's frustrating to be told, "Everything we covered so far may be on the exam," as it does not help me really learn the important concepts. Studying "everything" only causes me to commit large amounts of information to my short-term memory—information that will be largely forgotten by the time I graduate.
I think that a better approach would be the major concept approach, embraced by my favorite professors. In these cases, you know what will be on the exam as the test questions are handed out beforehand. In this way, students can focus on the most important ideas of the course, rather than wallow in trivial details. After all, isn't it better to send graduates of the University into the world with a solid grasp of Big Ideas, rather than a textbook education full of facts, figures, dates, and statistics? It's easy to fill in the details when you understand the major concepts in life, but if we're buried under a mountain of minor points, how will we ever know what's really important?