Do exams take away crucial knowledge needed....

[cookderosa]

My favorite quote ever from True Blood Tara Thornton: "School is just for white people looking for other white people to read to 'em. I figured I save my money and read to myself."
Beautiful.

Now that's funny.

I'll piggy back on what Ms.B said, I'm a crappy test taker. I don't remember details. My CLEP scores were always in the 50's. If they changed to a letter grade system, I would have taken the CLASSES instead to preserve my GPA. For people who are good test takers and terrible writers or time managers, CLEP is the way to preserve your GPA.
I swear to you, I can watch an entire season of a show on Netflix or read an entire novel and there's a 50/50 chance that I even know the name of the main character. I just don't process details like that. I don't remember phone numbers or birthdays either. I'm a very good concept person- and I can expand or synthesize ideas well, but it took me YEARS to learn this about myself. Knowing what you're good and (and bad at) is part of finding your groove in school. I didn't know it as a kid, that's for sure. If I had to go back and sit in a bio101 class, take a closed-book exam diagramming a cell, I wouldn't get out alive. Does that mean I have not learned biology? Is biology more than cell ID? If I had TIME to marinate in the field, a few semesters of taking classes in the subject, then I'd learn it eventually, but if it wasn't my major would I even care? Would I have less of an education? So, i'm not saying Sanantone doesn't get what I mean, but format doesn't measure learning. Please understand I'm not to saying knowing how to format a letter isn't important. I'm just saying it doesn't measure learning of a subject. Ex. how I format a paper about bone marrow doesn't give you insight into my knowledge of bone marrow- see?

FWIW my my memory from childhood is pretty damn good. I can name all the federal reserve banks. :patriot: