Why the brain loves shortcuts

The human brain did not evolve to be slow and exhaustive.
It evolved to be efficient. To manage overwhelming information, the brain relies on cognitive shortcuts, known as heuristics. These shortcuts allow rapid judgments with minimal effort. Most of the time, they work remarkably well. But efficiency comes at a cost. Heuristics trade accuracy for speed. In everyday life, this is adaptive. In exams, however, these shortcuts can quietly sabotage performance. For example, when a familiar study name appears in a question, the brain immediately reaches for it—even if it’s only partially relevant. This is the availability heuristic in action. The brain prefers what is easy to retrieve over what is most appropriate. Exams exploit this tendency. IB questions are deliberately designed to look familiar while requiring selective restraint. They reward students who pause, inhibit automatic responses, and evaluate relevance. This is cognitively demanding because it goes against the brain’s natural preference for shortcuts. Neuroscientifically, resisting shortcuts requires strong prefrontal cortex control, which manages inhibition and flexible thinking. Under stress, this control weakens, and the brain falls back on habitual responses. This is why students often overuse “safe” studies or repeat rehearsed arguments—even when they don’t fully answer the question. The solution is not to eliminate shortcuts, but to train awareness of them. When students practise identifying why a shortcut feels tempting and deliberately choosing otherwise, they strengthen executive control. Over time, better decisions become faster—and the shortcut itself is refined. Exams don’t punish shortcuts.
They punish unexamined shortcuts. Students who understand this stop fighting their brains and start training them—turning efficiency into precision.

Before and during examinations, the brain naturally shifts toward shortcuts because it is operating under heightened cognitive load and time pressure. Working memory has a limited capacity, and when students attempt to retrieve content, structure responses, monitor time, and manage anxiety simultaneously, this capacity is quickly overwhelmed. To cope, the brain relies on faster, automated pathways that require less effort, such as recalling memorised phrases, familiar evaluation points, or rehearsed sentence structures. These shortcuts reduce immediate mental strain, allowing the brain to conserve energy, but they also narrow thinking, leading students to repeat generic lines or apply the same evaluation regardless of the question.

During the exam itself, stress hormones further accelerate this shortcut-seeking behaviour by pushing cognition toward efficiency rather than depth. Under pressure, the brain prioritises speed and survival over precision and integration, favouring recognition over recall and fluency over reasoning. This is why students often default to template responses, overused criticisms, or surface-level explanations even when they understand the topic well. Shortcuts feel safe because they are familiar and quick, but they limit flexibility and critical thinking, which are exactly what higher-mark responses require. Effective exam preparation works with this reality by automating foundations early, so that the brain’s “shortcuts” become accurate reasoning patterns rather than shallow habits.

References:Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases.
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow.