The funny thing about anything I seem to learn at university is that it all seems too ephemeral, or at least when compared to anything I learnt in school, a lot of which I seem to be able to recall till this day. Anything which I've done at the start of first semester seems to trickle away into nothingness by the end of second semester - and that's quite peculiar.
I don't think there has been a fundamental shift in the actual nature of what is being taught at uni. Yet, I do get the feeling that perhaps the style of teaching encourages (well, in my unique case at least) that one not necessarily retain a fair bit of the material. The problem being that a lot of stuff is "studied" in the following way:
- Listen to lecturer talk about it in one lecture
- Work on questions in tutorial
- Forget about it until the exams
- Work on questions again before exam
The difference here, between high school, being the short period of time you get to actually work on the ideas that are introduced. In most subjects you tend to finish a topic a week - just not enough time for consolidation. That's why step 3 comes into play - my brain just doesn't bother retaining the information, because it hasn't received sufficient exposure to it.
Perhaps the onus is now on the student to be the sole motivator of this exposure - perhaps it is expected that we spend how much ever time that is necessary acquainting ourselves with material, not using the amount of time spent formally in university on a particular topic as any sort of yardstick as to how much time is required. I suppose that if this is the case, that's one change in rationale that I haven't quite managed to keep up with.
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