Think! by Edward de Bono

Author:Edward de Bono [Bono, Edward de]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Non-Fiction, Self Help, Psychology, Azizex666
ISBN: 9781407028699
Google: 9IG9j7DFxGoC
Amazon: B0031RDUTW
Barnesnoble: B0031RDUTW
Goodreads: 16052967
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2009-07-28T04:00:00+00:00

I used to examine for the medical finals at Cambridge University. About 10 per cent of the candidates were so poor you wondered how they had ever got so far and whether they could ever become doctors. Eighty-five per cent were competent and grey. They had the right answers but nothing more. Only about 5 per cent showed some spark of originality or even thinking. Perhaps that is the nature of medicine as a subject – competence is all.

Examinations are good for testing whether someone knows what he or she is supposed to know. They are even more useful for getting people to study.

I asked students where they picked up their knowledge. They told me that seeing patients in a hospital ward was motivating but that very little could be learned because the variety of different cases was necessarily limited. They said they went to lectures to know the 'bandwidth' of the knowledge they were expected to have. They said they got almost all the required knowledge from books. So maybe the role of the university was just to recommend the right books.

Possibly, instead of formal exams there could be random micro-exams. A computer screen would ask for a particular student, who would be given simple questions to answer there and then. The results of these micro-exams would then be put together to create a final mark. This would test thinking and knowledge in a different way.

The game

Over time, and for good reasons, an academic 'game' has developed. You are supposed to play that game. A very eminent scientist once asked me why I did not have lists of references in my books. I replied that it was because the ideas were mine and not obtained through scholarly research into other people's work. He told me that nevertheless I should 'fake' a reference list, whether or not I had read the works, because this was what was expected – this was 'the academic game'.

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