Mature Learning: It Is You!

You’ve studied for hours on end. You’ve checked every learning objective, done every practice problem. After spending days on Anki or Quizlet, you’ve even resorted to going back through class handouts and rewatching lectures. 

Test day comes and goes. When your score comes back, it’s nothing near what you thought it would be. You consider your options. You did everything you were supposed to. You used all the resources at your disposal. What’s worse? You’ve aced every instapoll question and homework before this. So. . . it’s not you, right? It’s the exam. One stupid exam. 

It’s astoundingly easy to come to this conclusion. I know because I’ve come to the same one more times than I can count. Especially when preparing for standardized exams, it’s easy for me to dismiss a low score on a passage or section as a one-off. After all, I’ve done well on every other passage and question. It’s not me, it’s the exam! 

Yet, as I’ve painstakingly come to realize, this sort of thinking — which we’ll label immature learning — isn’t constructive. It doesn’t give rise to growth, the kind that’s necessary to become a better student, and above all, a better learner! In fact, immature learning promises that we end up in the exact same place we began, and we’ve essentially ensured another low score before setting pen to paper yet again. 

The right thing to do might seem obvious to many of you, and it should be! We’ve been taught to study and analyze our mistakes, to guarantee that we never make the same ones again. And this is what we do most of the time, but there’s a perfect storm that convinces us to skip internal reflection. Now, our goal is to defy the storm, but to do so, we must first acknowledge and understand the factors that contribute to it. 

The most overt factor is external: the “proof” we’re not to blame. It’s the positive feedback, grades, and scores leading up to our exam. We’ve already proven ourselves capable, so this incident must be a fluke of some sort. The second contributing aspect is both internal and constantly reinforced by the first factor: our sense of our own capability. With our grades, instructors, and achievements to register, it’s almost unthinkable that we would doubt ourselves. We know we’re smart and we know we’re qualified — why would that change after one bad score? 

The last contributing factor to immature learning stands apart from the rest because of its allure. It has to do with where we place our locus of control. Through interaction and conversation, I’ve found that some immature learners possess an external locus of control. We believe our role in our success is minimal, that events — notably bad — simply happen to us. A bad exam score can’t be our fault; some other entity, a strict professor for example, has done this to us. 

If you’re expecting me to dismantle these factors one-by-one, I’m sorry to disappoint. Some of the elements leading to immature learning are valid! I can’t warn you against an idea that I myself still sometimes believe. With that said, there’s one blatant truth that overrules every possible excuse: the exam isn’t going to change. Whether this “exam” is class-specific, major-specific, standardized, or just representative of a greater hurdle, it’s more than likely that our qualms with it won’t be resolved overnight. 

The exam isn’t going to change, and so we have to. In order to succeed, we must adapt to the exam. We have to study and analyze our mistakes, just like we’ve been taught to. For the moment, we have to blame ourselves and our thought processes, because we won’t grow otherwise. For the sake of our future exam scores and career options, we have to ensure we never make the same mistakes again. This is mature learning. 

Now, don’t get me wrong. You can still hate the exam! You can still believe in all the factors that foster immature learning. You can still blame the exam or your professor or any other external circumstance, but you have to believe in the exam’s jurisdiction more than anything else. Because as all immature learners have probably noticed by now, in a fight between you and the exam. . . 

the exam wins every time.

Thumbnail image credit to Siora Photography, courtesy of Unsplash.