We can thank the academic system and Goodhart's Law for that.

We measure students with tests, but all we get are people good at taking tests and rote memorization.

Maybe if we had a better way to access actual learning but are teachers even paid enough to truly care?

Tests have their place though. The more rigorous maths exams I took in school were some of the most intellectually challenging things I did in school. If written correctly, they require you to apply the things you've learned in novel ways, or to combine the topics you've studied in new ways. Problem is, IME there's very few professors/teachers qualified and devoted enough to develop those sorts of exams, and as soon as you try to 'scale' it by centralizing the test creation, you run into the same issue of students simply learning for the test.

I think math is somewhat special in that it isn’t about solving specific problems, but about learning to recognize patterns, and that the tests don’t check whether they know the patterns, but whether they can apply those patterns to problems that they need not even have ever seen.

In many other disciplines applying what students learned to things they’ve never seen before isn’t really possible.

For example, you can teach students what factors were needed to start the Industrial Revolution and why, but then, to answer “why didn’t the Industrial Revolution start in the 1750s in South America?” students would have to know about South America in the 1750s. If they don’t, all they can answer is “it must be because not all of the prerequisites foo, bar, baz, … were available, but I wouldn’t know which one(s)”.

Because of that, that question isn’t better than the dull “why did the Industrial Revolution start where and when it started?”, the answer to which can be learned by rote learning.

I would say that studying history is almost defined by rote memorization. Once a pattern emerges, you're not studying pure history but rather historical economics or sociology or something else. Things don't usually fit neatly into pure categories but I can imagine well written tests for pretty much any subject that require extrapolation or speculation of some kind, except "pure history".

You make a good point. I believe that there are ways to get students outside of maths to apply what they've learned to things they haven't seen before, though it won't be as novel or challenging as a maths exam. In history for example, you could have students analyze primary sources they've never encountered, which would require them to apply their knowledge of the context to something novel. Definitely more challenging than in STEM though.

Writing a hard/challenging exam is not difficult. The problem is most bad or even average students will fail. The tricky part is striking a balance such that the good students feel pushed, and the weaker students still have a chance to demonstrate they at least engaged and understand the basics.

This was exactly my experience in college. I repeatedly had professors who apologized for making the test "too hard" -- i.e. all but 0-1 students failed because passing the test required a novel approach that no one (or only 1-2 brilliant students) was able to find during the time allotted.

>Maybe if we had a better way to access actual learning but are teachers even paid enough to truly care?

There's no incentive to pay teachers more; system is working as designed. Those students aren't giving short-term quarterly gains.

Tis a shame the system doesn't account for the massive, long-term returns quality education provides, both to student and society.

> its frightening how many people go through 16+ years of formal schooling where they mostly do rote memorization and regurgitation.

That's how most education is structure, though. Unless your point is simply that, though it reads as if you're blaming the student.

Students do share some of the blame, at least once you get to high school and university level. No one forces (university) students to take easy courses that don't require rigor. As long as people are willing to shell out full-price tuition for a degree that doesn't require you to do more than rote memorization and regurgitation, schools will continue to facilitate it.

I think it’s mainly that STEM majors are smarter, and thinking is hard slash unmotivating.

Of course any non-STEM field has geniuses, but our impressions—like the parent’s—are formed from averages, and STEM majors are smarter on avg.