[javajosh]

School gives some a useful fiction, which is primary motivational. E.g. campus, classrooms, professors make you feel better about spending your time on some esoterica.

The other benefit is subject gate keeping. Departments at least in STEM, don't offer pointless classes.

An autodidact might not know what's valuable and might not always muster the energy to get through. They also might not have the integrity to give themselves a fair test.

So yeah, school is useful beyond addressing the scarcity of books.

[mjburgess]

School is useful insofar as its guiding and motivating, yes.

This is tutoring.

Everything else it does is a waste of time. That's where you'll find most of the actual time spent though, and it is certainly not an educational aim. The aim is to grade on recall. It is not to motivate, or guide.

[javajosh]

>The aim is to grade on recall.

No. At best this means you had a terrible experience, and are generalizing in ignorance. At worst you are dug into a position and are willing to defend it without integrity (a sadly popular and often successful approach).

Many (most?) of my tests were open book and they were hard because they were puzzles requiring you to have absorbed the book to the extent that you could reason beyond it. The tests would probe our understanding of an idea by asserting a small change in the initial assumptions, and have us complete the derivation with that new assumption. Test questions were novel complications of the problems in the book.

That was my experience, and it was a good one. I'm sorry you didn't get that.

[SimbaOnSteroids]

This is my current experience as well, open book open notes means be familiar enough with the concepts at play that when I ask you to do something fairly specific, you can reason out a series of commands/functions to get the job done.