Comprehension vs. Memorization

It wasn't until now, a week away from finals, that I finally realized exactly what makes my psych tests soo frickn hard.

Its not just the usual problems of not getting everything the professor says written down. Its not just the problems of not making sense of what he says (how good of a professor someone is is based on how they lecture).

But what makes his tests so hard is that they aren't about memorization as much as they are about comprehension.

Some of his questions are not exactly in the way he phrased things in lectures, they derive from it, meaning, you had to process and comprehend the mechanisms of the topic in order to correctly answer the question.

We all come from the high school way of testing, meaning just memorizing.

Some and myself included have always though memorizing included comprehension, but I just realized that it doesn't.

Comprehending and processing something is taking memorization a step further. With memorizing, you are just touching the surface of things.

But when you process and try to comprehend it, not only do you memorize the surface but you go deeper and find fuller understanding of how something works or is.

For instance, when it comes to classical conditioning, memorizing would be just to memorize what each part of classical conditioning is, and what each of those functions do.

But someone who wants to process, understand, and comprehend it will try to make sense of how it works, why it works, and try to understand its whole process.

I am realizing this is what makes college tests so hard, you have to process this stuff, actually try to understand it, not just memorize it.