Cramming is rational

Teachers often excoriate students for using cramming as a strategy lamenting the students laziness to use a method that prioritizes extreme short-term retention over long term retention. Psychological science has long confirmed that cramming is inefficient as a strategy for long term learning but the fact is that cramming is a rational choice in today's school world.

The modern school system uses a unit based system where every exam is generally on solely new material often classes use similar exam time periods so students have in a week 5-6 exams. Students rationally wish to optimize solely for exam performance with the least time investment so why would not the rational student cram? It provides the short-term retention needed to preform well on the test, and long-term retention of the material is not much required of the previous material for the next unit.

Moreover, since many students understand little about the relevancy, importance and do not have much choice over their learning material (they aren't allowed to freely explore within the topic and forced into set curricula), they do not have any real mental attachment to the material. Therefore, the material is very low on their importance hierarchy and it is rational to cram and dump.

To be entirely honest with my own experiences in the school system I cannot honestly say that much "learning" takes place. Since tests are often not practical, students end up with "fragile" knowledge. I can say that in many of my classes I cannot recall even a single unit of knowledge I "learned" and much of the knowledge I learned I can apply solely in limited contexts--- such as in a particular manner of phrasing problems. An example would be the following, I know what a convolution in differential equations is and I can in fact apply it to certain problems but if you asked me where the formula came from? Why certain statements had to be true. I know that I would stay silent and blank.

It is not all that dark though. It just applies the responsibility for learning on the student. He must engage and wrestle with taught and untaught material on his own. He must fight for every piece of learning because the school will not help him fight.