[econjack]

Exactly. I'm a retired professor (Purdue) and always asked my freshman students: "What is the purpose of studying?" Almost without exception, their answer was "to learn the material". My position was that the first step to studying was to identify what you don't know and spend your time shoring that up. I told how, when I was in undergrad school, about six of us had a study group. Each of us was required to make up 10 questions we thought would be on the exam, and be prepared to defend our answers to the rest of us. We usually did this a week before the exam. After that (6-10 hour) session, we knew where our weak points were and spent the rest of our time working individually on those areas. It worked pretty well.

[Hieronymus]

What do you think of the practice of handing out study questions? (I teach theology at a small liberal arts college). I think that it is garbage, but endemic, which puts me in a quandary.

(My undergrad was at Cornell in Econ with a focus on Economic History-—I don’t recall ever receiving study questions).