Absolutely!

Do I need to take an exam to learn linear algebra, if I am wanting to learn it because I actually want to use the techniques? How I wish that I could have taken a course on linear algebra when it came to be that I did want to use it. Instead, I had to pour through books and teach most of it to myself again.

I think andreas is right.
-> severe lack of resources.
-> disciplining effect.
-> make students learn some arcane stuff as a shared ritual of passage into the community. The more arcane the better.
-> did I mention resources?

But aren’t 2 and 3 connected in an unsettling way?

your thoughts remind me a lot of a classic column called the professor fails the test by Roger Schank who went from AI to education. The final part below the questions is spot-on, I think, as well as hilarious – he is not able to correctly answer a textbook question about his own work ;-)

While we never administered testing procedures in our seminars (opting for project work and reflections), after having spent some time “on the other side of the lectern” I am not sure we can get rid of testing anytime soon for a variety of reasons having to do with the very culture of academia:

-> severe lack of resources.
-> disciplining effect.
-> make students learn some arcane stuff as a shared ritual of passage into the community. The more arcane the better.
-> did I mention resources?

btw the (“completely voluntary”) 10 minutes talks to beginners are overly politicized at the moment here in Austria as they seem to be the conservatives’ favored strategy for getting a foot into the door to get rid of the open admission policy altogether…

Also there are structural problems even beyond those mentioned by Sebastian. It turns out that interviews are perhaps the most culture-laden ways of selecting for people in that they are most highly skewed in favor of people coming from well-of and academic families.

While I like the idea of mentoring in principle, here it might just give the people with the (“wrong”) dialect and habitus the impression that they are not wanted…

Your basic points about science resonate a lot with me… In curriculum development for our master program we seriously talked about how to acomplish “unlearning”/”deprogramming” of the kind of “skills” (e.g. regurgitation) that creep into the character of students during their bachelor… ;-)

Karen Kastenhofer, whose original background is in biology and who is now doing social studies of biology, has done a study tracking how the first semester of biology in Vienna changes students’ expectations and values. In an interview with a professor he tells her that in a working group of four students for him the optimal number of students who think for themselves is 1 (at most) since this is quite enough… the others should simply do as they are told and there would be unproductive discussions as soon as there are two of them…

not that I agree with this person at all, but we should recognize that a lot of science is about rote-work and that there may be more method to the testing madness than we are giving credit for…

(a point made recently by Jeffrey Schmidt in his Disciplined Minds)

on that happy note
cheers,
andreas

Also, in ethnonolgy and many other social sciences that relate to human behaviour in any way, people have come to the opinion that trying to produce an artificial surrounding as in an experiment is ‘fighting against windmills’. It’s an ancient technique. From quantitive analysis to qualitative analyses. I guess we will just have to wait a few decades until the system has come to the point when it can use its achievements.

Elaye, you are right when you state that, in modern society, people cannot escape from tests and grades and they do rely on the importance of numbers a lot, because it can be useful. But still, in a competition at university it definitely is preventing people who are really good in there subject but who shit their pants before exams from doing what they are good in. So why not establish a different and more valid system which measures the variables that should be measured?

Sure it takes time, but you have to start somewhere.

Those are fair points. But to (a): term papers and other types of tests, not to mention degree theses, provide a better picture of one’s knowledge. And to (b): I suggested conversations for filtering out the students who chose the wrong program, not for grading. Even if exams are resistant to lecturer bias, they’re still very far from being good indications of ability. Test-taking is itself a skill and there’s no real good reason for it to be considered so important across all fields of study when it is utterly irrelevant to the professional life that follows.

This way it allows them to know you have atleast a passing level of knowledge (and thus not entitled for the big bad boot) but there is no chase of “if I don’t get this test high i’m not going to get a good enough diploma to get a job/valedictorian/magna cum lauda”.

In a society run by statistics, there is no escape from tests and grades but we still need to shift the focus towards personal interaction between a student and a professor.