A reasonable question, if you’re a parent weighing how your child should spend limited study time: does understanding mathematics deeply actually help with exam scores — or is memorizing formulas simply the faster, more efficient way to get marks?

It’s a fair question. Understanding takes longer to build than memorizing a formula. If the exam only rewards the right final answer, why pay that cost?

Here’s the honest answer: memorization wins in the short term. Understanding wins everywhere else — and in Class 9 and 10 specifically, “everywhere else” arrives sooner than most families expect.

Where memorization actually works

To be fair to it: memorizing a formula and a fixed procedure works fine for a question that looks exactly like the one practiced. A student who has drilled “distance formula, plug in the numbers” fifty times will get that exact question type right, reliably, under time pressure. For a narrow, predictable test, this is a genuinely efficient strategy.

Where it quietly stops working

The trouble is that board exams — and especially the way Class 9 and 10 papers are increasingly framed — don’t stay narrow and predictable. A question rarely repeats the textbook example verbatim. It rephrases the scenario, combines two concepts from different chapters, or asks the student to explain why something is true rather than just calculate it.

This is exactly where a memorized-but-not-understood formula fails. The student recognizes none of the surface details as matching what they practiced, so the “if this, do that” script simply doesn’t fire — even though the underlying concept, if understood, would have been enough to solve it.

A concrete comparison

Take the midpoint formula. A student who memorized it can solve: “Find the midpoint of A(2, 4) and B(6, 8).” Plug in, average, done.

A student who understands it — who has actually worked out for themselves that the midpoint is just “the average position” — can also solve: “A point M(3, 5) is the midpoint of segment PQ. If P is (1, 2), find Q.” This is the same underlying idea, worked backwards. It’s a completely standard question type. But it doesn’t match the memorized script at all, because there’s no formula to “plug into” directly — it requires reasoning about what a midpoint actually means.

This second question is not a rare trick. It’s the normal shape of a board exam question once you move past the most basic level.

The compounding cost in Class 9/10 specifically

This matters more in Class 9 or Class 10 than it did in earlier years, for a structural reason: Class 9/10 chapters build on each other far more tightly than Class 8’s did. Coordinate geometry reappears inside linear equations. Linear equations reappear inside geometry proofs. A formula memorized without understanding in Chapter 3 doesn’t just risk failing a Chapter 3 question later — it risks quietly undermining every later chapter that assumes that idea is solid.

This is the real cost of memorization that doesn’t show up on the report card until it’s already compounded: not one bad question, but a slow accumulation of shaky foundations that eventually catches up, often around exactly the time boards start to matter.

So which should a student prioritize?

In practice, it’s not really “memorization versus understanding” as a binary choice — it’s a question of what a student’s practice time is actually building. Practice that starts with genuinely working through why something is true, before locking in the procedure, builds both: real understanding, and because the procedure was learned properly the first time, it’s reliable recall too. Practice that skips straight to the procedure builds speed on familiar questions, at the cost of anything unfamiliar.

Given how Class 9 and 10 board exams are actually structured now, “anything unfamiliar” is not a rare edge case. It’s most of the paper.

This is exactly the gap our Class 9 and 10 courses are built to close — every chapter starts with an activity that builds real understanding, so the formula that follows is something a student can actually reason with, not just recall. Try a free activity from Chapter 1 →