[6gvONxR4sf7o]

Seems like college fails to live up to being “the great educator” in too many cases too. For those of you who interview new grads, what percent of the time do you interview someone with a degree in the field who can’t do the most basic things in the field? In my experience, it’s pretty high.

Even at the college level, education doesn’t seem to extend past “teaching to the test” horrifyingly often (horrifying, given the amount of time and money our society is spending on it).

[SL61]

I took a few English classes as electives, and it was astonishing to see the number of English students (in a third-year class) who struggled with basic grammar and composition. The majority of the students wrote at what I'd consider early high school level. I don't know why. Maybe the professors were all afraid of giving bad grades, or the freshman-level intro classes weren't filling the role they were supposed to. But those students were going into a lot of debt to coast through easy classes that don't teach them the fundamentals of their degree.

I saw signs of that academic dysfunction from other departments too. This was at a very non-prestigious state school, but that's the type of school that most students attend. There must be millions of people in the US walking around with degrees in subjects they don't know much about.

[ip26]

Some of my classmates were in nature just not cut out for engineering. Several would even tell you as much. But there's an implied contract- work hard, make the grade, get the degree. It might ultimately be more merciful if students with no aptitude could be ejected from the program- but how do you make this selection?

My alma mater didn't really push internships, but in retrospect perhaps a strong internship program would help students self select against employers.

[watwut]

Given that schools are judged by tests results and students are judged by test results, it is surprising that both focus on the tests?

[xyzzyz]

What is the alternative, though? Even if schools taught actual skills and knowledge, and didn’t focus on teaching to the test, we’d still want and need some method to verify that they are doing so, and that the students actually mastered the material being taught. This means at least some kind of tests.

In my opinion, the problem is not with the testing regime, or even “teaching to the test”. It’s the tests themselves that suck. The top priorities for tests designed and used today are ease and efficiency at mass administration, ease of grading, and reduction of subjective in favor of objective measures. Is it any wonder that multiple choice questions are king?

When I went to university in Eastern Europe (majored in Mathematics), in many courses we had a final oral exam. The professor would drill into you, and would not get distracted by regurgitation of irrelevant memorized stanzas, he wanted a clear explanation of everything he asked about. This approach to testing is not perfect — for one, time limitations only allow to cover rather small part of the topic, and you might get lucky to get something you actually know. At the same time, there is really no way to teach and study to an oral exam other than actual understanding of the subject matter. However, this is insanely inefficient for the grader: this makes testing a full week’s worth of constant work, as opposed to few hours of just sitting on an exam, and then few more hours grading (even shorter if it’s mostly multiple choice problems). No wonder teachers prefer the latter.