Only then, and most courses are not straight progressions.
In high school and particularly AP, those courses are blatant cycles of 1) cram, 2) test, and 3) forget all but the core of what that section was about.
(If you want to say, "You should learn it all for the final" keep in mind nobody does, nor are final exams built around remembering everything from the whole course.)
Good AP courses are completely the opposite, and I had several in high school. We had regular reviews to make sure we refreshed and retained the material until the end of the year.
The great thing about AP classes was that the teachers could really teach, and they could justify themselves by pointing to the AP test if anyone complained about the rigor of the work. The students were game, too, at least the ones who didn't drop the classes. Everybody sincerely tried to understand what they were doing instead of just trying to make the right pencil marks on the test paper, since understanding was the most efficient way to retain something for months at a time. The test looming at the end of the year rendered cramming pointless -- you could cram for one test, but you would have to eventually learn the material anyway in order to take the AP exam, so cramming for a test actually felt like the failure that it was.
By "cramming" most people mean the kind of studying that enables you to remember information for one or two days, which would not result in good AP scores. Are you sure by "cramming" you don't just mean "intense studying?" If you and your classmates got good AP scores, then you must have understood most of the material well enough to retain it, since you would only have had time to cram a small amount before the test.
You misunderstand. Please note that from the start, I've allowed that people do retain some knowledge from cramming-based classes. (For that matter, someone writing notes to sneak into a test probably gained some small benefit from the act of writing the notes.)
But no, there's no mistake, here. Much like other high school classes, the AP classes I took were sequences of sections followed by intense "reviews" the day prior to each test. They were the very model of how schools encourage cram-and-forget education.
I really don't understand how it could be "cram-and-forget" unless the students failed the AP tests. If they did well on the AP tests -- covering an entire year's worth of material in one day -- it was more like "cram-and-remember" and it was apparently a good way to learn the material.
I'm not sure what your difficulty is in understanding this. They cram before the tests in the class, then they cram before the final exam (or AP exam). The "forget" is after the AP test.
This naturally made students who crammed have a tougher time in later classes in college. I wasn't one of them, but I refuse to look down on the people who were behaving exactly as the teachers were training them to behave.
I've taken 5 APs and none of them were cram/test/dump. There's one large test at the end of the season. It would be counterproductive to forget each chapter as you go.
In high school and particularly AP, those courses are blatant cycles of 1) cram, 2) test, and 3) forget all but the core of what that section was about.
(If you want to say, "You should learn it all for the final" keep in mind nobody does, nor are final exams built around remembering everything from the whole course.)