Cramming...or: do you have summary XYZ?!

What does studying at a pakistani university look like?

You have courses that are supposed to be like seminars. You get texts. You read. You discuss. You write exams and express the learned. You write homeworks/essays, give talks and presentations about topics and conduct small field works.

So far the theory.

One of the most frequently asked questions when turning up at my institute was: „do you have the summary of text XYZ?“

I was surprised and asked back if we were supposed to hand in summaries of the texts we had written to the professors. Maybe this was an expected task that I hadn't done, because I didn't know about it. „Nonono! Not for the professors! For me!“ was the answer.

Silence on my side.

Every person learns different. When reading a text, I underline important aspects and if I feel like it, I make remarks at the side of the text. If I want to discuss the text or if I have to give a talk about it, I will structure the text and extract the important information on an extra sheed of paper.

This is what I was offering to them then. 'You can have my notes, if you like', I said. They didn't seem satisfied.

One of the girls with very poor english, who had ensured me as a 'friend' straight away in the first days of uni, instructed me: „You will write summaries about the texts and give them to me.“

I asked why.

„My english isn't good enough. I cannot understand the texts. I need your help.“

What this really meant just got more clear to me a day or two after, before I met her in preparation for an exam which should take part the day after. She sat over a summary of several university texts and learned them: by heart. Word by word.

What might explain it further, might be the fact that Pakistan is a country with a lot of different languages. Urdu is together with English the official language. But the students speak a lot of different languages at home with their families: Sindhi, Punjabi, Pathan,....

In university they are forced to express themselves in foreign language, which was introduced by the British in colonial times: english. It is the language in which they are measured and in which their exams will be marked. But a lot of students face mayor problems expressing themselves in this language and even in the courses, heated discussions are rather held in Urdu than in English.

Before the exams, a lot of students run before the exams to the copy shops to copy summaries about texts and cram them: learning them word by word so that they can express themselves in a scientific language, which ensures them points in the tests, although they might have no clue what they are actually writing about.

So far the praxis.