I'm finding myself agreeing with you about this. It seems that a lot
of folks are "memorizing" the test questions and not mastering the
material. There are a lot of places where one can go take "practice"
testing that uses the exact question pool for any test you want to
take. Given the number of questions in the pool, it's not impossible to
memorize just the questions and not know the concepts.

I'd argue that this is very short sighted so one wonders what the
solution here is... I suppose we could increase the question pool by 10
fold or so and make it easier to learn the material than memorize the
questions?

-= bob =-


space.The difference is that in today's environment the student learns how to
pass the test, rather than learning the actual material. Instead of
learning E=IR, today's student memorizes the specific questions/answers
on Ohm's law that are in the question pool. They might be able to tell
you that the voltage drop across a 2 ohm resistor with 2 amps of current
was 4 volts, but if you asked them why that was the case or what it
meant, they wouldn't have a clue. Or care.

How bad this is depends on how you perceive the goal of the exam, and
what you expect a newly-licensed amateur radio operator to be able to do.

If you perceive the exam as a barrier to entry, it continues to
accomplish that goal. It serves as an indication that the individual
was willing to dedicate enough effort to memorize the questions so that
they could pass the test. Oddly enough, this is exactly the same thing
that the code requirement did, with about the same amount of useful
remaining knowledge for most people.