Here’s How to Tell

Here’s a scenario that trips up a lot of parents: your child is scoring reasonably well in math tests. Not struggling, not failing. And yet, something feels off — homework feels like a battle, a slightly-reworded question throws them completely, and their confidence around math seems lower than the marks would suggest.

This is one of the more common and more invisible problems in Class 9 and Class 10 math: a student can genuinely be memorising their way to decent marks, without anyone (including the child) quite realising it. Marks alone don’t catch it. Here’s how to actually check.

Five quick questions to ask

You don’t need to be a math teacher to do this. Just ask your child to explain, out loud, in their own words — not solve, explain. Genuine understanding and memorised procedure sound very different when you listen for it.

1. “Why does that formula work?” Not “what is the formula,” but why. A student who understands the distance formula can explain it comes from the Pythagorean theorem applied to the horizontal and vertical gaps between two points. A student who’s memorised it usually just repeats the formula, maybe louder, when asked why.

2. “Can you make up your own example?” Ask them to invent a similar problem themselves, not copy one from the textbook. This is often the single most revealing test. Real understanding transfers to a new example easily. Memorisation usually can’t generate one at all.

3. “What would happen if this number were negative instead?” A small twist on a familiar problem. Understanding adapts. Memorisation breaks, because the “if X then do Y” script no longer matches what’s in front of them.

4. “Which part of this problem is actually the hard part?” Students with real understanding can usually identify where the difficulty in a problem actually lies. Students working from memorised steps tend to treat every problem as equally opaque, because they don’t have a mental model of what’s easy versus hard within it.

5. Watch what happens when they get it wrong. A student with understanding, when corrected, usually says something like “oh, I see what I missed” — and can point to it. A student running on memorisation more often says “oh, I forgot the formula” — because for them, the mistake wasn’t a reasoning error, it was a missing script.

Why this matters more than the marks

Rote-memorised math has a shelf life. It survives a test taken shortly after the topic was covered, especially if the questions closely resemble the practice set. It does not survive: a slightly reworded board exam question, a cumulative test six months later, or critically the next chapter that assumes this one is solid.

This is exactly why some students who did fine through Class 9 suddenly hit a wall in Class 10, or in competitive exams later: the marks were real, but the understanding underneath them wasn’t, and eventually the gap catches up.

What to do if the answer is “mostly memorised”

The good news: this is very fixable, and it doesn’t require starting over. It usually just means going back to a handful of foundational topics and rebuilding them the right way — letting the student arrive at the idea themselves, rather than being handed the formula and told to practice it.

It’s a slower process for a chapter or two. But once a student has experienced what real understanding of a math idea feels like, “oh, that’s why” moment. Then, they tend to start looking for that feeling on their own, instead of settling for “I remembered the formula.”

That shift is worth far more than any single test score.

Our Class 9 course is built activity-first, specifically so students discover each idea before they’re given the formula for it — the difference shows up exactly in the kind of questions above. Try a free activity →