This post glosses over something important, which is that many college classes don't assign most of your grade based on tests. In Stanford's CS 229 Machine Lear

This post glosses over something important, which is that many college classes don't assign most of your grade based on tests. In Stanford's CS 229 Machine Learning class (which I am TAing right now), 20% of the grade is the midterm, 40% is HW, and 40% is a big project that students do throughout the quarter (and for which they get to decide the problem, approach, and most anything with just feedback and guidance from TAs). In my experience, "In practice, the phrase "studying for a test" was almost redundant, because that was when one really studied." is absolutely false, because studying also happened when doing assignments and projects. Of course one could cheat if they just cared about the grade, but I did not because I don't think most smart people really only care about grades, it feels bad to cheat. So TLDR is, I dont think the situation is so bad, because grades are not only a function of tests but also assignments and projects. I think the deeper issue is that people learn to be told how to learn (which assignments or projects to do), and not taught how to learn by themselves. There are exceptions (at Stanford a ton of CS classes have projects where the students map out the problem and solution themselves), but I think this is pretty important too.