alt Hacker Newswell most university exams are designed to measure how much you study. so we didn't really need a study to tell us, "Exams continue to measure what they are designed to measure."
they're not designed to measure general aptitude, or function as admissions criteria, or screen for job applications, or any other numerous things they are used for.
there can be many questions of pedagogy. one of them is, what do our exams measure and how do we use them? professors who say, "My exam is designed to measure who studies, not be used for all these other purposes that they are actually used for" - I don't buy it. It's the same as late night comedians saying they are not responsible for solutions, even when spending 90% of their air time making political jokes.
THIS is the pedagogical issue, that pedagogy has NEVER caught up with the scope of responsibilities. This is acute in STEM - I mean, the humanities departments are generally pretty well run, all things considered, in this regard. Generative AI is accelerating that pre-existing crisis.
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I never studied in university and yet I acheived good exam scores. If you understand a topic and ave a reasonable memory and ability to apply my our understanding not much studying is required in my experience. If you don't understand the big picture then you got to laboriously keep track of and manipulate a bunch of disparate pieces.
> well most university exams are designed to measure how much you study.
Huh? They're designed to measure how much you know. They can't see how much you study, nor would they have reason to be interested.
The fact that exam scores are correlated with how much you study is not the same as exams only reflect how much you study. Two students who study the same amount could have very different exam scores. The reason that there still is a strong correlation between exam score and time of study is because if all other things being equal, students who studies more have higher exam scores.