Why Cramming Feels Like Learning (and Why It Betrays JEE/NEET Students)

If you have ever walked out of a coaching class feeling productive, you know the high.

The teacher solved 20 problems at lightning speed. You copied every step. You even nodded at the “trick”.

And then you went home, opened a fresh sheet, and froze.

This isn’t because you are lazy or “not made for JEE”. It’s because coaching has trained you to confuse fluency with learning.

Fluency is when something looks smooth while someone else is doing it. Learning is when you can do it yourself, tomorrow, under pressure, with a new twist.

Cram culture maximizes fluency. It minimizes learning.

The dirty secret: your brain loves the wrong feedback

The human brain is a miser. It likes cheap signals that feel like progress.

• Re-reading notes feels safe.
• Watching solved examples feels efficient.
• Highlighting feels like studying.

Education researchers have been yelling about this for years. One of the best known papers in this area is by Dunlosky and colleagues, who reviewed study techniques and found that many popular methods are low utility, while a few are reliably high utility across conditions (practice testing and distributed practice in particular) (Dunlosky et al., 2013).

The uncomfortable implication: most students are not failing because they are not working hard. They are failing because they are working hard on methods that give comforting signals but weak memory.

What coaching sells: performance today

Coaching institutes are not evil. They are optimized.

They are optimized for:

• Coverage: finish the syllabus.
• Compliance: keep the batch moving.
• Visible speed: show you “advanced” shortcuts.
• Weekly tests: keep the pressure on.

These things look like rigor. But they reward performance in the moment.

In cognitive psychology, there is a name for the gap between performance during learning and long-term retention: the illusion of competence. When students study in ways that make the material feel easy, they often predict they will remember it, and they are wrong.

Bjork called this the difference between “storage strength” and “retrieval strength”. Retrieval can be high today while storage remains weak. Real learning increases storage strength, often by forcing effortful retrieval (Bjork, 1994).

Coaching culture keeps retrieval strength artificially high by staying in the comfort zone:

• Same problem types repeated in the same order.
• Same teacher voice.
• Same “template” steps.

That is not what JEE/NEET does.

The principle coaching hates: desirable difficulty

“Desirable difficulties” is a phrase coined by Robert Bjork. It describes learning conditions that feel harder, slower, and more frustrating, but produce stronger and longer-lasting learning (Bjork, 1994; Bjork & Bjork, 2011).

Desirable difficulty includes:

• Spaced practice: revisiting material over time instead of massing it in one sitting.
• Interleaving: mixing problem types instead of blocking the same type together.
• Retrieval practice: attempting recall and solving before looking at the solution.
• Generation: trying to produce an answer, even if you might be wrong.

Coaching hates these because they make students feel uncertain. Uncertainty causes complaints. Complaints cause churn.

So coaching sells certainty. The student pays later.

Why “tricks” are addictive and useless

Shortcuts work when the exam is predictable. But competitive exams punish predictability.

A “trick” usually teaches you one of two things:

1. A pattern you can memorize.
2. A way to avoid understanding.

This is why students who collect tricks often collapse when the question changes slightly.

It is also why students believe they “know” a chapter because they can recognize solutions. Recognition is not recall. Watching is not doing.

There is strong evidence that practice testing (retrieval practice) improves learning and retention far more than re-study, across many settings (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006). The best part is that it works even when you get some questions wrong. In fact, the struggle is part of the mechanism.

The coaching schedule creates a memory disaster

Most coaching schedules are built like this:

• New topic on Monday.
• Homework Tuesday.
• Test Sunday.
• Then move on.

This is a memory trap.

It forces students into massed practice, the kind that boosts short-term performance and kills long-term retention.

Spaced practice is one of the most consistent findings in cognitive science. When you distribute learning over time, you remember more. Period. A classic review by Cepeda and colleagues summarized the “spacing effect” across a huge body of research and found robust benefits of spacing for long-term retention (Cepeda et al., 2006).

The cruel part is that spaced practice feels worse. You forget a bit between sessions, so it feels like you are “back to zero”. But that forgetting is exactly what makes retrieval effortful, and effortful retrieval strengthens memory.

What high performers secretly do

Ask the students who consistently score high, especially the ones who are not “naturally gifted”. They do boring things that coaching rarely teaches explicitly:

• They solve from scratch.
• They keep an error log.
• They revisit old topics.
• They practice under varied conditions.

They are not always calmer. They are just practicing in a way that converts time into skill.

The tragedy is that coaching often takes credit for these students, while the students succeeded by building a parallel system outside coaching.

A better model: a system that forces retrieval

If you want one mental model for JEE/NEET preparation, use this:

Your goal is to build a brain that can retrieve the right idea under pressure.

Not to finish notes. Not to attend all lectures. Not to “cover”.

Retrieve.

That means your daily routine should contain:

1) Retrieval before review

Before you open the solution, try.

• Write the formula from memory.
• Sketch the diagram.
• List the assumptions.
• Start the derivation.

Even 90 seconds of honest struggle changes what happens next. When you then look at the solution, you will actually learn, not just copy.

2) Spacing on purpose

Make spacing a default, not an accident.

A simple schedule:

• Day 0: Learn concept.
• Day 1: 15 minute recall + 5 problems.
• Day 3: mixed set.
• Day 7: timed mini-test.
• Day 21: revisit weakest subtopic.

This is not “extra”. This is the thing.

3) Interleaving, not blocking

Blocked practice feels smooth: you do 10 questions of the same type. Interleaving feels messy: the next question could be anything.

Messy is closer to the exam.

Interleaving has been shown to improve discrimination between problem types and improve performance in many domains, even though students often dislike it (see Rohrer, 2012 for a review and discussion).

4) Feedback that teaches, not punishes

Most students use tests as judgment. High performers use tests as diagnosis.

After every test, do this:

• Classify each mistake: concept gap, calculation error, misread, time management.
• For concept gaps, write a one-paragraph explanation in your own words.
• For misreads, write a “trap checklist” for next time.

The exam does not care about your intentions. It cares about your behavior. So fix behavior.

Where AI tutoring can help (if used correctly)

AI is not magic. It is a mirror and a coach.

Used badly, AI becomes another source of fluency: you read explanations and feel smart.

Used well, it becomes a retrieval machine:

• It can generate mixed practice sets.
• It can quiz you with increasing difficulty.
• It can force you to explain your reasoning.
• It can detect recurring misconceptions.

The key is how you interact with it.

A good AI tutor does not dump solutions. It asks you questions. It makes you commit to an answer. It helps you debug your thinking.

That is what students actually need.

What I would tell a tired student in January

If you are exhausted right now, you are not weak. You are running an inefficient algorithm.

Stop measuring your day by hours. Measure it by retrieval.

• How many times did you try before looking?
• How many old topics did you revisit?
• How many errors did you convert into rules?

You do not need more motivation. You need a system that makes the right behavior unavoidable.

Coaching sells the fantasy that someone else can do the thinking for you. JEE/NEET punishes that fantasy.

The good news is simple. When you start practicing retrieval, your confidence will drop for a week or two. Then something weird happens.

You stop needing the teacher.

And that is the whole point.

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References (academic)

• Bjork, R. A. (1994). Memory and metamemory considerations in the training of human beings. In J. Metcalfe & A. Shimamura (Eds.), Metacognition: Knowing about knowing (pp. 185–205). MIT Press.
• Bjork, R. A., & Bjork, E. L. (2011). Making things hard on yourself, but in a good way: Creating desirable difficulties to enhance learning. In M. A. Gernsbacher et al. (Eds.), Psychology and the real world: Essays illustrating fundamental contributions to society.
• Cepeda, N. J., Pashler, H., Vul, E., Wixted, J. T., & Rohrer, D. (2006). Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: A review and quantitative synthesis. Psychological Bulletin, 132(3), 354–380. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.132.3.354
• Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving students’ learning with effective learning techniques: Promising directions from cognitive and educational psychology. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4–58. https://doi.org/10.1177/1529100612453266
• Roediger, H. L., & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-enhanced learning: Taking memory tests improves long-term retention. Psychological Science, 17(3), 249–255. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01693.x
• Rohrer, D. (2012). Interleaving helps students distinguish among similar concepts. Educational Psychology Review, 24, 355–367. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-012-9201-3