Picture this: Itâs Sunday night- the night before the start of your new placement block. You have just returned from a very productive winter break, which consisted mostly of hours of doomscrolling on TikTok and having cereal for dinner. You ask around and discover that the consultants on this particular team are pimping connoisseurs – the type of pimping where they ask you a series of difficult questions, not the other type, who eat medical students for breakfast. In a panic, you open ChatGPT and enter the following prompt: âWhat are some common questions the consultants may ask me during rounds?â
 Itâs Monday, and the morning rounds are in full motion. You have been standing for three hours, have already had four curtains closed in your face, and have stepped on a suspicious-looking bodily fluid. You have stopped paying attention somewhere after the 15th patient. The consultant – smelling an opportunity to exert dominance over a poor 23-year-old student – turns around and asks you a question in front of the entire team crammed around the patientâs bed. Success! You remember the answer from frantic late-night googling, and you feel a rush of serotonin that could move mountains. Except you forgot to account for what happens next. The dreaded aftermath of answering a question correctly.Â
âAnd why does that happen?â he asks.Â
You blank. How does it happen? You canât remember, or maybe you never actually bothered to learn the why. The registrar is staring at you in pity, the SHO is furiously scribbling in the chart and the intern is avoiding eye contact (they are probably experiencing medical school PTSD). You can feel a bead of sweat running down the back of your neck. The silence stretches on for what feels like hours. Finally, he takes mercy on your soul, tells you to Google it and moves on.
For many students, studying has become an act of survival. We study to pass this exam, to pass this module, to pass this year, to answer the consultantsâ ridiculously niche questions. The objective is no longer to retain and apply, but to achieve what is necessary to reach the next hurdle. Such a shift in objective will have profound consequences not only for students but also for the professions they eventually enter.
One of the main problems with todayâs education framework is exam-oriented learning. Instead of learning, building knowledge and eventually testing your application in an examination, we start backwards. We start with the exam. What are the âhigh yieldâ topics? What is examinable? What has appeared before and is likely to appear again? What buzzwords do the examiners love to hear? The safest way to study is to study the assessment system, which comprises a deeper understanding of the material.
While this may be a strategic way of learning, it generally produces surface learning that only produces short-term results. Once the examination is passed, a large proportion of the information decays. That is not the student’s fault, but a consequence of an education system that favours immediate output over durable learning. In disciplines such as medicine, which rely on understanding as much as memorisation, this can create a dangerous gap between certification and competence. Therefore, the effects do not end with graduation. Students who are trained to optimise learning for exams will often struggle with clinical uncertainty or ambiguous situations that fall outside the realm of neatly defined guidelines.Â
Education must reclaim its purpose, which is to provide knowledge and understanding that lasts longer after we exit the educational system. To construct curricula and assessments in a way that tests reasoning and explanation over rapid recall. When students study to survive the exam period, learning becomes collateral damage. We find ourselves stuck in education systems that produce graduates but fail to cultivate thinking.
As students, we should ask ourselves an imperative question. Are we here to graduate, or to gain knowledge? Because in our current education system, a certificate does not always equate to competence.