Exams were my undoing at uni - can AS explain it?

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I majored in zoology at university - dropped out during my masters. As an undergratuate, my exam results were terrible. These exams were always based on essay-type questions - simply put, you get 3-4 hours and a choice of maybe 8 essay questions,and you need to answer 5-6 of them. I always scraped through. This puzzled me and my teachers, because I was acknowledged as one of the better students in my class. I did extremely well in course and project work, often needing almost no effort to get first-class results. Compare that to me working my butt off to prepare for exams and then barely passing.

My examiner's evaluation was almost always the same : I would misinterpret the question and write irrelevant stuff. Essay exams were not based on creative answers. The examiner sits with a standard essay when marking the paper - this contains a series of points which the student's essay must also contain. List all the points, and you get full marks. In other words, you're expected to give a scripted answer. I despised this form of examining because for me it felt like a real shot in the dark - an essay question will typically be something like "Discuss the importance of some group X in some ecosystem Y, taking into account some phenomenon Z", which logically leaves a _lot_ of room for interpretation. We were expected to regurgitate lecture notes pretty much verbatim ... which I can't do. I can give a specific answer to a specific question, but I just can't give "contextual" answers where I sling together related information based on something arbitrary context like how the data was taught in a series of lectures. After all, science is about facts, not the way the facts are presented, right? A fact is a fact, and any one logical answer is as good as any other logical answer, right? Not according to my examiners ....

So, to wrap this up, I was wondering if anyone else here has had similar experiences to this? If so, how did you cope, if at all? My undergraduate results crushed me, and even though that was almost 10 years ago, I still haven't gotten over how badly it went.

Several teachers/professors have told me that my "test scores don't reflect my knowledge of the material." There are also things that I just simply cannot learn, but teachers don't understand this. They don't get that when I say I "can't" learn it, that I'm not just being pessimistic- I literally cannot learn it. The reason I've come so far (I'm a college sophomore) is because of my extraordinary memory. It helps me get by the stuff that I'm incompetent with. I strongly, strongly suspect that I have Nonverbal Learning Disorder, especially after my recent IQ results, so most of the things that I can't learn deal with problem solving and transforming one thing into another. I suck so badly at any type of word problem. This is also why I'm horrible at organic chemistry this semester- I can't physically see how one molecule becomes another, or worse, how you get something from a starting material. I stopped going for help because it didn't do any good. Somebody can't teach me things that my brain is simply not capable of doing. For a lot of subjects like that (mostly math), it's been my memory that has saved me. I just memorize how to do something, like memorizing which steps go with which words in a certain word problem. It IS very Aspie-ish because I have no comprehension of what I'm doing. It LOOKS like I do sometimes because it's just parroting it back, but I don't have a clue. And when people ask me to connect material into "big picture" ideas- forget it! It's just not going to happen!
-OddDuckNash99-

Especially with essay-type exams, I usually did quite poorly or at best mediocre on them, and yes, the biggest problem was that I "misunderstood" the question and just wrote on and on about something that the graders really weren't looking for. Unfortunately, it's not something that I was able to cope with, so I just settled with mediocre grades in those classes. Fortunately, majoring in Chemistry and Genetics I did not have to do many essay-based exams, but it did take me a very long time to figure out what exactly they wanted from my lab reports. It was just something that I managed to improve, but over a very long period of time. There was no way in hell that I would have been able to force myself to improve my writing, it took a lot of patience and a lot of pain. Probably it was one of many reasons that I did not go to graduate school right after finishing up my bachelor's: I didn't feel ready for it.

YES.